--:-- Shamita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On September 13, 2019, Aliyu Khande left his home in Guinea-Bissau. His farm yield wasn't what it used to be, affected by shifting weather patterns, likely because of climate change. He felt like he was failing to provide for his family. So Aliou set off on a dangerous journey to Europe, with 600 euros in his pocket, a couple pairs of pants and shirts, a koran and a leather diary.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Like so many migrants who came before him, he traveled to Libya, where he found a human trafficker who arranged for a boat to take him and others across the Mediterranean. The boat was just a rubber dinghy, 40 feet long, carrying 130 men, women, and children.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So imagine an intensely crowded boat, crowded so much that you couldn't straighten your legs. There's no official captain. There's no crew. There's just... One guy controls the outboard motor. Another guy is holding the compass and handles directions. Then there's a third guy whose job is arguably the most important on the boat. He is also responsible for protecting this one plug that if you pull, the whole boat will deflate.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The threat of danger is heavy and real. If too many people lean in the wrong direction, the whole boat could capsize. Women and children typically get put in the center of these boats, the thought being that's where they'll be the safest. But there's risk there too. It's also where the cesspool is deepest. And the worry there is that it's not only gross because there's feces and urine, because folks don't want to pee over the side because they may fall over, but there's also fuel, gasoline, in there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the petrol mixing with the water becomes acidic. So a lot of these women and children show up with third-degree burns, second-degree burns, all over their backside, up and down their legs, when they do get rescued and they only realize that that was because they were sitting in water that was burning them alive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: By their 20th hour at sea, the migrants on Alioukande's boat decide it's time to call for help. They're far enough from the shores of Libya, and they're hoping to be rescued by a bigger, more secure boat. They radio an NGO humanitarian group that tells them there's a merchant vessel nearby. They're cheering Bosa Bosa, which is a word in the native language of Guinea-Bissau, but it means freedom and it's a sort of show of excitement.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And everyone was happy and thinking they were about to be rescued by the good guys, you know, the humanitarians. But when the merchant vessel arrives, the captain says they can't help the migrants, and the boat turns away. Then they hear a plane overhead, circling them, but no help comes.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some time passes before another boat appears. And for a moment, there's some hope. And then... They recognize the Libyan flag, and one of the migrants says, oh shit, it's Libyan. And people start weeping. They realize what their fate is, which is to head back to Libya, which is not where anyone wants to go. Where no one wants to go.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Because for migrants, being detained in Libya means losing everything. It means you could be imprisoned for an indefinite amount of time, tortured, beaten, or, in the case of Aliou Kande, killed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ian Urbina is a journalist and the director of the Outlaw Ocean Project. He and his team typically cover stories about human rights, labor, and environmental abuses that take place at sea. He traveled to Libya to report his most recent story, published in collaboration with The New Yorker.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's about a shadow immigration system, funded in large part by the European Union, that captures migrants at sea and sends them to brutal detention centers in Libya. To understand how this system works, you have to start with the Libyan Coast Guard.
--:-- Shamita Basu: At least, that's what they want you to call them. So if you think conceptually about the history of coast guards on the most general level, they face outward right, their purpose is to protect coastlines from external threats, generally speaking.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And they are funded, trained, founded, and answerable to the country they represent. Libyan Coast Guard is none of those. The Libyan Coast Guard faces inward meaning toward Libya for the most part.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's funded, created, trained, outfitted by the EU and both the EU at large and EU member states. But the bottom line is it is a European proxy force.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Its purpose is not to protect Libya from external threats. Its purpose is to prevent migrants from reaching Europe. And it's ostensible stated, you know, advertised purpose is to rescue migrants from traffickers and prevent them from drowning and dying.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But if you actually look at that a little bit, you realize that's not what's going on. Most of the migrants that they pick up are not being rescued. They're being taken in this so-called rescue, which is actually an arrest, back to a place that the EU and the UN have all agreed is not a port of safety.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It is a war zone. So the notion of rescuing someone and taking them to a war zone goes against all humanitarian law. So in many ways, it's a real ruse.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the Libyan Coast Guard is a well-outfitted, you know, proxy force. And are these boats armed?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, the boats are heavily armed. They have mounted guns. And also the officers carry pistols, and some of them carry semi-automatics.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And it's not uncommon for the Libyan Coast Guard to force the migrant vessels to stop by opening fire on the vessels themselves or near the vessels.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Libyan Coast Guard also has a well-meaning filmed record of engaging in maneuvers that you would be hard-pressed to say are humanitarian or in the best interest of migrants.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In other words, they often do maneuvers that create wakes that capsize the vessels, so very unsafe maneuvers that would seem like they were more eager with stopping the vessel rather than saving the people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So just to be clear, it's not that the EU denies that it has sent funding toward refugee aid or migrant aid. But what does your reporting show about where that funding is being applied, how it's being used, and how aware they are of where the funding is ultimately ending up?
--:-- Shamita Basu: To really understand the situation, one wants to be very smart about understanding the sleight of hand, the rhetorical sleight of hand that's occurring here.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So EU money is going towards supporting this system. That is beyond denial, and the EU has never denied it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's largely going to the system of migration control in three fronts. If you think of this as a war on migration, imagine there being an army, a navy, and an air force.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the air force that gets funding from the EU is called Frontex, and that's the border agency for the EU.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the EU puts a lot of money into putting drones and airplanes over the Mediterranean with the goal of spotting migrant boats and reporting that information to member states who then hand it over to the Libyans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Navy is the Libyan Coast Guard. You know, the EU has never denied that they created and funded and still fund those boats and that operation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the army, if you will, is the on-land force of this system, of this war. And that's the prison system in Libya that holds these migrants and stops them at the invisible wall, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that army or that on-land system of prisons is where the EU often says, we do not have build those prisons. We do not fund the prisons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Okay, great. That's fine. They can say that, and it's not untrue. It's a little bit untrue, but it's not wholly untrue.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What they do fund is the very system that the sort of raison d'etre of the prisons. There would be no prisons if there weren't, you know, tens of thousands of migrants being turned back to land.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the EU also, and we found all the evidence in, you know, contracts and tenders, they fund all the infrastructure surrounding the prisons.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the buses that take the migrants from the port to the prisons, EU purchased. The SUVs that hunt the migrants in the deserts, EU purchased. The tablets that the UN organization that's at the port counting each head by head, you know, bought by the EU.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So all of the infrastructure for the migration control regime is EU, but they do not, and they are very quick to repeat, fund the prisons. And that's all the Libyan government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And bad stuff that happens in the prisons, look to the Libyan government. That's their line. But One needs to really be skeptical and put it in bigger context to really understand what they're doing there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So let's talk about these prisons, because I understand you traveled to Libya with a group of reporters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You managed to fly a drone, in fact, over one of the biggest prison complexes. Can you describe what it's like and what it's like to be in there, what you learned from people who've spent time there?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, so these detention centers or prisons are scattered throughout northern Libya, a lot of them in Tripoli and the surrounding area.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Al-Mabani, which in Arabic means the buildings, is the newest and biggest and most notoriously awful one. It is the focus of our reporting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I took a team that works for me at the Al-Ocean Project. Three other journalists and I went, aiming to look at Al-Mabani, aiming to look at a certain death, Al-Yu's murder, in Al-Mabani, and tell the story of how it came to be.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The conditions inside the prisons are horrific. Unlike, you know, I've reported in West Bank and Somalia and a bunch of places, I've not ever encountered a more brutal situation than is occurring in those facilities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They're so bad for many reasons. One, all of these facilities are militia-run. So various militias control everything in Libya and Tripoli in particular, including, you know, militias are part of the federal and UN-recognized government.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So Almabani is like all the others. It is a militia-run facility. The people who hold the guns are militia members. The neighborhood, you don't go in and out unless you have militia permission.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And when the migrants are captured at sea, they are routed to the facility that whoever in the federal agency who's on that day, who's sort of making key decisions, if that person is sort of an ally.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the case of Almabani, it's run by the Zintan tribe. If your cousin, you know, who's a Zintani, is working that day, then you're going to get a lot of the migrants at your facility because these are business opportunities and the migrants are extorted and there's good money to be made in the extortion process of when migrants are received, they're held there, they're provided access by a guard to a phone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: They say, call your loved ones, it's 500 bucks to get out. You know, and most of these folks are, you know, worse than poor, don't have family that can help them, so they stay for indefinite periods.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You said you've never seen or heard of such terribly brutal conditions inside prisons. Can you describe some of what you heard?
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, 13-year-old, 14-year-old boy committed suicide, jumping into a septic tank, rape of women younger than 16, torture on the order of hanging people upside down from ceiling beams and hitting them with electric charges and whipping them for days on end.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Murder. That's the acute violence. The really horrific stuff is the chronic slow motion, dull violence, the mental health harm of putting people in isolation cells for weeks and months.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The uncertainty you know there is no access to lawyers. So in Libya if you an undocumented foreigner in the country you can be arrested and held indefinitely under the law.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that what happens to these migrants. So they have no sense of, does anyone know they're still alive? Is anyone going to help them get out?
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, what is their fate? So the mental health violence is pretty severe as well. And to be clear, I mean, these are people who have not committed a crime, have not been accused of any crime.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Are migrants, perhaps some of them asylum seekers, right? And none of them have had access to a lawyer before being detained.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah. I mean, whether they've committed a crime by entering the country without permission, that's an interesting debate for lawyers to have because There is a legal status for that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And my father's a federal judge, and I've had many discussions about what that is. And in the U.S. and in most Western countries, that is not a criminal charge. It's a civil charge. And so it's quite different.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But if you put that aside, the more egregious point, I think, is that this whole capture and captivity and abuse is all framed under a system that supposedly is for their protection.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's rescuing them from traffickers and from the sea, and it's trying to help them get home. And I think the real egregious thing here is the disparity between the reality and the rhetoric.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is by no means a system that is helping migrants. It is one that is horrifically abusing them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So when people are in these detention centers, I mean, did you get a sense of how long people spend there on average? And how do people get out? Because eventually some people must leave.
--:-- Shamita Basu: There's not good data. From interviewing dozens of migrants, it seems that the typical stay can last from three months to nine months to a year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oh, wow. And then how do they get out? Well, it seems there are several scenarios. One is they escape.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Another is they've been squeezed long enough and they simply don't have anyone who can pay up. And so the militia or facility officers decide to either let them go in the city and they end up in this neighborhood called Gargrash or to sell them downstream to another facility that thinks they can somehow get something out of them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And so they get handed off to another awful ring of hell. And then the third way that they can get out is they can be what's called evacuated.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And evacuations are very rare, and they occur where a refugee or migrant needs to say, I don't want to try to go to Europe anymore, please send me back home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if they happen to be given the opportunity to tell a UN person who might visit once a month, then they get moved over to UN control, and then the UN supposedly organizes flights back home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Those flights haven't been occurring for years. In Mabani, there had not been a single flight that had taken any of the Mabani detainees out for over two years.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So one would want to be careful in overestimating the hypothetical scenario there. Most of the migrants do not want to be returned home. They just want to be released.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Those who do want to return home are told there's this method there, but the method is anemic if non-existent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So how long did Aliou spend in this prison? Aliou was there for a little bit over a month before a melee riot, if you can call it that, a fight broke out in his cell.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He was in cell number four. And late one night, some of the migrants, a cluster of Sudanese migrants, decided they were going to make an escape attempt, of which there had been many before and bad things had come of them.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Some had been successful, most had not, but beatings had always ensued afterwards. And some of the other migrants confronted them and said, don't do this, we're going to pay the price for your ill-thought-through plan.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And a fight broke out, a huge fight, and it lasted several hours. And the guards watched and cheered and filmed and handed water in to keep it going for several hours.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And then the guards, for reasons that aren't clear, lost patience and opened fire through a window on the migrants.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And what happened to Aliyu at that point? And I understand he was not in the main area of the cell, but he was still injured, right?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Oliu hid out. He had told other migrants around him he didn't want to be part of the fight, and he was the hope of his family, and he was just trying to survive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He didn't want to get involved in this, so he hid out in the showers. But the only light into the cell was in the shower area, so that was the onlooking window that ended up being used by the guards to open fire.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Aliou was struck in the neck. There were two other teenage boys who were struck in their legs. They survived. Aliou bled out and died.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Aliou Kande died within minutes of being shot. He was just 28 years old.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ian Urbina never was allowed access inside al-Mabani, but he did get to see the inside of a Libyan prison cell when he was put in one himself.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I was in my hotel room, got a knock on the door. I was on the phone with my wife, sort of debriefing on the day, and opened the door and 12 armed men came in screaming, gun muzzled to the head, told me to get on the floor.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The armed men put a hood over Urbina's head. They beat him, broke some of his ribs, damaged his kidney. They ransacked the room, took his belongings, and dragged him barefoot and blinded through the hotel lobby, into a car, and to a secret prison.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The other members of his reporting team were detained too. My teammates were similarly seized in the middle of an intersection in a very surgical, pretty impressive hit where several vehicle loads of these armed men hit their car pulled their armed guard out of the driver seat pistol whipped them pretty severely in the middle of an intersection people looking on hooded or blindfolded the three of them No beating there but put them in a car and drove them to the same prison secret sort of jail and put us in isolation cells and held us there for the rest of the time and during the day you know kind of intense interrogations
--:-- Shamita Basu: That sounds incredibly traumatic. What were you told was the reasoning for your detention there?
--:-- Shamita Basu: There are two reasons. One was I was a journalist. And the second reason was that I was a spy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, I was, you know, part of the CIA and this was actually a CIA team. And our agenda was to embarrass Libya. And, you know, we, after all, were the ones who killed George Floyd, you know, is what they kept saying.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And, you know, why were we so eager to make Libya look bad? That's fascinating. What do you think they were getting at there?
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think, you know, who was I as an American to be casting judgment on the poor treatment that Libya was meeting out to sub-Saharan migrants when indeed I came from a country that, you know, had police that killed George Floyd.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So, you know, get off your high horse. I think that was the gist.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Wow. How did you ultimately get out?
--:-- Shamita Basu: My wife was on the phone with me when I was taken. So that was a godsend in the sense that she heard some of the violence and immediately initiated an emergency plan we had, which involved many things.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But one of them was contacting the U.S. State Department. And U.S. State Department doesn't have an office in Libya. No country other than Italy has an embassy in Libya. No Western European country or U.S. embassies are there.
--:-- Shamita Basu: State got swung into high gear, applied pressure on the Libyan president, Libyan attorney general, and after six days in captivity, that pressure worked.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the Libyan intelligence service kicked us out of the country, put us on a plane.
--:-- Shamita Basu: How are you feeling today, Ian?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Um yeah I'm fine I'm mended you know physically I'm I'm fine um and I think actually and you as a journalist will I'm sure relate um you don't want to be part of the story and in this case it's even more urgent or it feels more important not to be part of the story because what's happening to the migrants is 10 times worse than what happened to me and so even talking about what was you know a truly horrific experience feels a bit sullying because alongside of what happened to Aliyu or so many other migrants it pales in comparison.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So I always feel a little bit reluctant to go into our captivity, but I think it's journalistically relevant, if only in the sense that it did for me allow a peek into the impunity, unpredictability, sheer violence of this detention system, you know, in Libya, to see it and experience it in a small way offered me just a more firsthand sense of what I was writing about.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Yeah, of course. Of course it did.
--:-- Shamita Basu: How is Aliou's family doing today? I mean, the way that he described himself as the hope of his family, what has his absence been like?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Brutal. You know, I talk with them through one brother who was previously in Spain, but is now back in the village almost daily since we began on this investigation.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And, you know, his wife is a wreck and they were already on the edge of survival. And now one of the main breadwinners or potential breadwinners is gone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the economic, not to mention emotional harm of that is severe. There are three kids under the age of five to deal with in this tiny farm that doesn't really produce enough yams and mangoes and cassava to even feed themselves, much less make any money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So they're struggling in a very quintessentially West African way on top of the emotional trauma.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I mean, this wasn't in your piece, but what are the solutions to this very big problem that don't involve funding and arming an ongoing humanitarian crisis?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Did anyone you speak to seem to offer something that they see as a clear path?
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a very fair and very tough and easily ducked question. You know, So I've grappled with it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The response I have is what definitely shouldn't be done is outsourcing the problem to those even less equipped to handle it. That's a definitely bad answer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What probably should be done instead is attempting to deal with the push factors at the root source.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Again, easy to say, tough to implement. But rather than the amount of funding, we're talking about a half a billion dollars in five years that has gone from the EU to EU migration control.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And the bulk of that migration control is on dealing with the symptoms, not the root causes, right? And so, yeah, climate change is a root cause. Poverty and war is a root cause.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Not easily solved. But thinking about diverting that investment towards where are most of these migrants leaving from and how can we try to prevent that by fostering more options for them there, you don't see a lot of this migration control money doing that.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's, I think, a big shift that has to happen in the thinking for this to redirect the policy into a less brutal, more humane direction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ian Urbina with the Outlaw Ocean Project, thank you so much for joining us to talk about your reporting.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I'm glad you're OK. Thanks. My pleasure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In the next three decades, experts predict an estimated 150 million people will leave their homes due to climate change in search of a more habitable place to live.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Ali Ucande's family farm is still not yielding enough crops. And despite what happened to him, his younger brother now says he too will attempt to make the journey to Europe.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He told Urbina, what else can I do?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Thank you.
--:-- Ian Urbina: This is by no means a system that is helping migrants. It is one that is horrifically abusing them.
--:-- Ian Urbina: So when people are in these detention centers, I mean, did you get a sense of how long people spend there on average? And how do people get out? Because eventually some people must leave.
--:-- Ian Urbina: There's not good data. From interviewing dozens of migrants, it seems that the typical stay can last from three months to nine months to a year.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Oh, wow. And then how do they get out? Well, it seems there are several scenarios. One is they escape.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Another is they've been squeezed long enough and they simply don't have anyone who can pay up. And so the militia or facility officers decide to either let them go in the city and they end up in this neighborhood called Gargrash or to sell them downstream to another facility that thinks they can somehow get something out of them.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And so they get handed off to another awful ring of hell. And then the third way that they can get out is they can be what's called evacuated.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And evacuations are very rare, and they occur where a refugee or migrant needs to say, I don't want to try to go to Europe anymore, please send me back home.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And if they happen to be given the opportunity to tell a UN person who might visit once a month, then they get moved over to UN control, and then the UN supposedly organizes flights back home.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Those flights haven't been occurring for years. In Mabani, there had not been a single flight that had taken any of the Mabani detainees out for over two years.
--:-- Ian Urbina: So one would want to be careful in overestimating the hypothetical scenario there. Most of the migrants do not want to be returned home. They just want to be released.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Those who do want to return home are told there's this method there, but the method is anemic if non-existent.
--:-- Ian Urbina: So how long did Aliou spend in this prison? Aliou was there for a little bit over a month before a melee riot, if you can call it that, a fight broke out in his cell.
--:-- Ian Urbina: He was in cell number four. And late one night, some of the migrants, a cluster of Sudanese migrants, decided they were going to make an escape attempt, of which there had been many before and bad things had come of them.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Some had been successful, most had not, but beatings had always ensued afterwards. And some of the other migrants confronted them and said, don't do this, we're going to pay the price for your ill-thought-through plan.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And a fight broke out, a huge fight, and it lasted several hours. And the guards watched and cheered and filmed and handed water in to keep it going for several hours.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And then the guards, for reasons that aren't clear, lost patience and opened fire through a window on the migrants.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And what happened to Aliyu at that point? And I understand he was not in the main area of the cell, but he was still injured, right?
--:-- Ian Urbina: Oliu hid out. He had told other migrants around him he didn't want to be part of the fight, and he was the hope of his family, and he was just trying to survive.
--:-- Ian Urbina: He didn't want to get involved in this, so he hid out in the showers. But the only light into the cell was in the shower area, so that was the onlooking window that ended up being used by the guards to open fire.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Aliou was struck in the neck. There were two other teenage boys who were struck in their legs. They survived. Aliou bled out and died.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Aliou Kande died within minutes of being shot. He was just 28 years old.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Ian Urbina never was allowed access inside al-Mabani, but he did get to see the inside of a Libyan prison cell when he was put in one himself.
--:-- Ian Urbina: I was in my hotel room, got a knock on the door. I was on the phone with my wife, sort of debriefing on the day, and opened the door and 12 armed men came in screaming, gun muzzled to the head, told me to get on the floor.
--:-- Ian Urbina: The armed men put a hood over Urbina's head. They beat him, broke some of his ribs, damaged his kidney. They ransacked the room, took his belongings, and dragged him barefoot and blinded through the hotel lobby, into a car, and to a secret prison.
--:-- Ian Urbina: The other members of his reporting team were detained too. My teammates were similarly seized in the middle of an intersection in a very surgical, pretty impressive hit where several vehicle loads of these armed men hit their car pulled their armed guard out of the driver seat pistol whipped them pretty severely in the middle of an intersection people looking on hooded or blindfolded the three of them No beating there but put them in a car and drove them to the same prison secret sort of jail and put us in isolation cells and held us there for the rest of the time and during the day you know kind of intense interrogations
--:-- Ian Urbina: That sounds incredibly traumatic. What were you told was the reasoning for your detention there?
--:-- Ian Urbina: There are two reasons. One was I was a journalist. And the second reason was that I was a spy.
--:-- Ian Urbina: You know, I was, you know, part of the CIA and this was actually a CIA team. And our agenda was to embarrass Libya. And, you know, we, after all, were the ones who killed George Floyd, you know, is what they kept saying.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And, you know, why were we so eager to make Libya look bad? That's fascinating. What do you think they were getting at there?
--:-- Ian Urbina: I think, you know, who was I as an American to be casting judgment on the poor treatment that Libya was meeting out to sub-Saharan migrants when indeed I came from a country that, you know, had police that killed George Floyd.
--:-- Ian Urbina: So, you know, get off your high horse. I think that was the gist.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Wow. How did you ultimately get out?
--:-- Ian Urbina: My wife was on the phone with me when I was taken. So that was a godsend in the sense that she heard some of the violence and immediately initiated an emergency plan we had, which involved many things.
--:-- Ian Urbina: But one of them was contacting the U.S. State Department. And U.S. State Department doesn't have an office in Libya. No country other than Italy has an embassy in Libya. No Western European country or U.S. embassies are there.
--:-- Ian Urbina: State got swung into high gear, applied pressure on the Libyan president, Libyan attorney general, and after six days in captivity, that pressure worked.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And the Libyan intelligence service kicked us out of the country, put us on a plane.
--:-- Ian Urbina: How are you feeling today, Ian?
--:-- Ian Urbina: Um yeah I'm fine I'm mended you know physically I'm I'm fine um and I think actually and you as a journalist will I'm sure relate um you don't want to be part of the story and in this case it's even more urgent or it feels more important not to be part of the story because what's happening to the migrants is 10 times worse than what happened to me and so even talking about what was you know a truly horrific experience feels a bit sullying because alongside of what happened to Aliyu or so many other migrants it pales in comparison.
--:-- Ian Urbina: So I always feel a little bit reluctant to go into our captivity, but I think it's journalistically relevant, if only in the sense that it did for me allow a peek into the impunity, unpredictability, sheer violence of this detention system, you know, in Libya, to see it and experience it in a small way offered me just a more firsthand sense of what I was writing about.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Yeah, of course. Of course it did.
--:-- Ian Urbina: How is Aliou's family doing today? I mean, the way that he described himself as the hope of his family, what has his absence been like?
--:-- Ian Urbina: Brutal. You know, I talk with them through one brother who was previously in Spain, but is now back in the village almost daily since we began on this investigation.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And, you know, his wife is a wreck and they were already on the edge of survival. And now one of the main breadwinners or potential breadwinners is gone.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And the economic, not to mention emotional harm of that is severe. There are three kids under the age of five to deal with in this tiny farm that doesn't really produce enough yams and mangoes and cassava to even feed themselves, much less make any money.
--:-- Ian Urbina: So they're struggling in a very quintessentially West African way on top of the emotional trauma.
--:-- Ian Urbina: I mean, this wasn't in your piece, but what are the solutions to this very big problem that don't involve funding and arming an ongoing humanitarian crisis?
--:-- Ian Urbina: Did anyone you speak to seem to offer something that they see as a clear path?
--:-- Ian Urbina: It's a very fair and very tough and easily ducked question. You know, So I've grappled with it.
--:-- Ian Urbina: The response I have is what definitely shouldn't be done is outsourcing the problem to those even less equipped to handle it. That's a definitely bad answer.
--:-- Ian Urbina: What probably should be done instead is attempting to deal with the push factors at the root source.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Again, easy to say, tough to implement. But rather than the amount of funding, we're talking about a half a billion dollars in five years that has gone from the EU to EU migration control.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And the bulk of that migration control is on dealing with the symptoms, not the root causes, right? And so, yeah, climate change is a root cause. Poverty and war is a root cause.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Not easily solved. But thinking about diverting that investment towards where are most of these migrants leaving from and how can we try to prevent that by fostering more options for them there, you don't see a lot of this migration control money doing that.
--:-- Ian Urbina: And that's, I think, a big shift that has to happen in the thinking for this to redirect the policy into a less brutal, more humane direction.
--:-- Ian Urbina: Ian Urbina with the Outlaw Ocean Project, thank you so much for joining us
