suggests you probably see just
that — that “rock’n’roll”
behaviour has become almost
mundanely mainstream.
Winwood’s own road to excess
ended when, in a final
hospitalisation, he decided it
was all “getting silly”.
Really, though, it all got silly
a long time ago. For a younger
generation of artists who came
of age during the #MeToo era,
and who were shocked and
distressed that Winehouse
seemed to fall without a safety
net, much about the world
Winwood vibrantly describes
must appear wildly old-
fashioned, like the Rat Pack’s
bourbon and cigars seemed to
pot-smoking flower children.
Hope you die before you get
old? It just doesn’t seem that
rock’n’roll any more. c
The refugees we refuse
Why are we helping Ukrainians but paying to keep Africans in ‘concentration camps’?
CURRENT AFFAIRS
Oliver Moody
My Fourth Time, We Drowned
Seeking Refuge on the World’s
Deadliest Migration Route
by Sally Hayden
4th Estate £20 pp496“Are all humans human?”
Roméo Dallaire, who
commanded the UN
peacekeeping force during the
1994 Rwandan genocide, asked
in a lecture some years later.
“Or are some more human
than others?” At the time of
writing nearly four million
people have left Ukraine since
the Russian invasion. The
overwhelming majority
have been welcomed with
enormous kindness and care.
Yet the leaders of the
European Union are already
bickering about how to deal
with an anticipated wave of
secondary immigration as
grain prices elevated by the
war are predicted to drive
hundreds of thousands more
to flee Africa, south Asia and
the Middle East.
There are some plausible
reasons to argue that these
migrants should be treated
differently to the Ukrainians:
not all have been displaced
by bullets and missiles and
the presumption must be
that most do not wish to go
back to their homelands in the
end. But fundamentally it’s
hard to shake off the feeling
that white Europeans tend to
see their fellow white
Europeans as more human
than other humans.
My Fourth Time, We
Drowned, the Irish journalist
Sally Hayden’s investigation
into the appalling horrors
of the migrant detention
facilities in Libya, could
scarcely have appeared at
a more jarring time for
Europe. While we pat
ourselves on the back for
our generosity towards the
refugees from Ukraine, the
EU is paying Tripoli to haul
thousands of people a year
out of the Mediterranean
and pack them into
verminous prisons where
rape, starvation, child abuse,medical neglect, shootings
and torture are routine
instruments of control.
A few months ago Pope
Francis described these places
as “concentration camps”.
He was absolutely right.
Reading Hayden’s book is
like descending through the
middle bolgias of the Inferno,
except that Dante’s hell does
not hide behind a gauzy screen
of humanitarian concern.
She came across the story
by chance, when an inmate at
the Ain Zara camp in Tripoli
messaged her as a civil war
raged around his ears in the
summer of 2018. She pursues
it with the tenacity and
righteous anger of a crusading
19th-century muckraker.
In the mid-2010s, as more
than 150,000 people a year
began to cross the sea from
Libya to Italy alone, the EU
established a deal to keep them
out. Europe would fund the
Libyan coastguard to scoop up
the migrants from its coastal
waters, sometimes ramming
or gunning their ships in the
process, and return them to
north Africa. By the end of
2017 more than 17,000 were
held in two dozen camps
dotted around Libya.
The scheme worked, for
one definition of “worked”.
The number of people
completing the journey fell
more than 90 per cent by- Yet Hayden’s hundreds
of conversations with the
inmates of these detention
centres reveal the price that
has been paid.
Typically men are
separated from women and
children, while the women
are frequently raped by the
guards. Punishments for
dissent range from withholding
food and water to beatings,
electric shocks and shootings.
The centres are often rife with
untreated disease, especially
tuberculosis, while pictures
of the abuse are often sent
to family back home in an
attempt to extract “ransoms”
of up to $40,000 per person.
Many of the prisoners lose
their minds and an untold
number — certainly hundreds
— have died, including by
their own hand.
It’s ferocious stuff. Hardly
anyone comes out of this story
with any meaningful moral
credit except the charity
Médecins Sans Frontières and
many of the victims. The most
obvious villains are the peopleInhumanity
Refugees are
facing
appalling
conditionssmugglers, militia warlords
and agents of the Libyan
government — sometimes
all the same person — who
compete to squeeze every
drop of profit out of their
human cargo.
Yet hypocrisy makes as
tempting a target as
unapologetic vice, and the EU
and UN agencies sponsoring
the whole business come in
for a great deal of opprobrium.
Hayden records officials
taking bribes, covering up
repeated failures with bland
press releases and lounging in
hammocks in their luxury
compounds while turning a
blind eye to the torments
under their noses. “I wish they
would get locked inside with
us,” one prisoner tells Hayden
after a carefully sanitised visit
from Filippo Grandi, the UN
high commissioner for
refugees. “People want to die
in the sea rather than the
detention centres.”
Despite all their mammoth
salaries, grubby compromises
and PR gimmickry, though,
I felt a little sorry for the
foreign organisations trying to
operate within the parameters
they have been set. Those
parameters were ultimately
laid down by us: it was
European leaders, responding
to acute electoral pressures,
who decided that rather than
rescue migrants from the sea
they would throw money at
the problem until it receded
from the headlines, rather
than bothering about the why
and the how. Our hands are
collectively dipped in the
blood too.
Hayden argues that it is her
job as a reporter to document
these atrocities, not to
prescribe ways of fixing them.
Fair enough. But the result of
this choice is a sense of
futility, an impression that
this suffering is almost an
inevitable corollary of the vast
material difference between
Europe and the third world in
an age of ubiquitous access to
information, and of the
seemingly implacable
indifference of those who find
themselves on the more
comfortable end of this
arrangement towards those
who don’t. I hope it isn’t. cBy the end of
2017, 17,000
refugees were
held in Libya
ALAMY
3 April 2022 23