S2 E1: A war on migration, funded by the EU (Libya Pt. 1)

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Does he have have a ballpark sense of how many shots he heard fired during the whole incident?

Minimum five, more than five.

And was the shooting did it occur over the course of one minute, ten minutes?

No, more than ten.

More than ten.

In 2021, over 30,000 migrants arrived in Italy after crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Many of these migrants came from Sub-Saharan Africa, and when they try to head to Europe, they often go to Libya.

Libya is a popular place for them to launch across the Mediterranean because the trip is relatively short, and the traffickers there in Libya simply charge less than they do in places like Morocco or Tunisia.

But this crossing is also one of the most dangerous, and that number, 30,000 people, doesn't take into account those who don't make it.

Mohamed David is one of those migrants who never landed in Italy.

I'm talking to him through Pierre Qatar, a photographer and translator from my team.

Mohamed David and about about 130 others tried to make the crossing in a small inflatable boat called a Zodiac.

One of the others in the boat was a man from Guinea-Bissau named Aliu Khande.

And he remembers seeing Aliu in the boat and did he talk to him.

In May of 2021, I traveled to Libya.

I wanted to learn why so many migrants were trying to make this incredibly dangerous journey from Libya to Italy and to investigate the human rights abuses that were happening on the Mediterranean?

I also wanted to know the EU's role in orchestrating these abuses and how that was connected to the thousands of migrants being held in Libyan prisons.

Alright, so then how long did it take between the bullet in his neck and he's dead?

How long was that?

About an hour.

An hour?

Around an hour.

Close to an hour.

So he was bleeding out for an hour.

Aliu Khande died from a bullet wound to the neck inside a secret Libyan prison called Al-Mabani.

His death is just one of many.

Every year, tens of thousands of migrants take the same risks and face the same profound dangers in their quest to reach a better life in Europe.

Those that die are casualties in a proxy war that's being funded by the European Union and carried out by Libyan forces.

My team and I spent months tracing Aliu's path from a small village in sub-Saharan Africa to his death in Tripoli.

I've been covering stories like this for decades, and that reporting has taken me all over the planet.

This investigation turned out to be one of the most dangerous of my career.

I'm Ian Urbina, and this is the Outlaw Ocean.

Aliu Kande's story starts in a small village in Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in Africa.

Aliu's mother told us he was born on a Monday.

He lived in the village in a small clay house with his wife Hava and two children.

His father told us that he worked the fields and herded cattle on the family farm where they grew cassava, mangoes, and cashews.

Over the past few years, weather patterns had started to shift.

The dry seasons were too hot, hot, the rainy seasons were too wet, and the yields from their crops were getting steadily smaller.

Their four skinny cows were hardly able to produce milk.

Life on the farm was hard, and every season it seemed to be getting harder.

Aliu's wife, Hava, said that he was tired of living in poverty.

Hava was eight months pregnant with their third child at the time, and Aliu was worried that he was failing before God to provide for his family.

Aliu had two older brothers who had left Guinea-Bissau for Europe and had been sending money back home.

He decided it was his turn to leave the village.

Hava and the rest of his family supported the decision.

Aliu's father told him

whoever goes abroad brings fortune at home.

Before leaving his village, Aliu called his brother, Denbus, and asked for advice.

Denbus had left Guinea-Bissau and made it to Italy, where he still lives.

We asked Denbus about that phone call.

He warned Aliu against trying to follow him there.

Getting to Italy would mean crossing the Mediterranean from Libya.

Denbus said the trip was much too dangerous.

He told Aliu that the safest route to Europe would be from Morocco to Spain, where their other brother lived.

The trip would be more expensive, but at only 14 kilometers, it would also be the fastest way.

In September 2019, Aliu Kande decided that the risk was worth taking and he began his journey.

He carried a Quran, a leather diary, two pairs of pants, two T-shirts, and six hundred euros.

He was twenty-eight years old.

It took Aliu a month across Mali and Algeria before landing in Morocco.

When he arrived, he discovered that the price to get to Spain was triple what he could pay.

He called his family and asked for help.

There was no way they could afford it either.

Aliu's only option was Libya.

One of my overarching missions with the Atla Ocean project is to chronicle the weird and wild world that exists offshore in all its different forms.

And if that's our goal, then you have to cover the Mediterranean crisis, specifically the tens of thousands of people that are trying desperately to cross the Mediterranean and get to Europe.

I think it's important to point out that in some places at least, the criminalization of migration is a pretty new phenomenon.

If you go back even 10 years, there are plenty of places, including in Africa, where it used to be normal, legal, and sometimes even encouraged for people to migrate between countries.

That might be for seasonal work or for permanent moves by folks like Aliyu who hope to improve a family's fortunes.

And now that kind of movement across borders is illegal.

Okay, so couple the illegality of migration with the reality of climate change, which is a massive driver of migration, and you have a very scary situation.

Academics estimate that over the next 50 years, 150 million people are likely to migrate, and that movement will largely be driven by climate change.

And most of this climate migration will involve folks from poorer nations moving to richer nations.

If you look to the Mediterranean, you can already see this happening, right?

A lot of these migrants are headed for Italy in particular.

According to the UN, 31,600 migrants crossed from North Africa to Italy in 2021.

In 2022, that number was about 105,000.

The most recent figures for 2023 put the number at around 153,000.

Those are massive numbers of people coming from places like Bangladesh, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Gambia, Sudan.

They're migrating north to countries like Libya and trying to find their way across the Mediterranean to Europe from there.

The Italian government has said that it believes there are upwards of 700,000 migrants currently in Libya hoping to make the trip.

So how has the EU and Italy responded?

Well, what they've done has been to try their best to prevent these migrants from ever touching European soil.

And one of the ways that they've done this is to outsource border enforcement to places like Libya.

Nearly 200 migrants were brought to the Italian port of Pozalo early Monday aboard an Italian Coast Guard ship sailing under the Frontex.

Frontex, the European Border Agency, has described its concern about what it calls a steady increase in irregular migration across to pay more money to have the EU's external border safeguarded, meaning more money for Frontier.

Frontex accused donor-funded charity rescue ships of colluding with traffickers.

Frontex is the EU Coast Guard and Border Agency, and its mission is to defend the sovereignty of EU external borders.

That's Judith Sunderland.

She's the associate director in the Europe and Central Asia Division at Human Rights Watch.

She's been researching human rights abuses against migrants and refugees for more than a decade.

The whole point of the agency is to defend the sovereignty of EU external borders.

It now has a

much larger role in that than ever before.

Its budget has massively increased.

I can tell you that in 2015, for example, Frontex had a budget of around 143 million euros.

And in 2022, its budget was over 750 million euros.

It has massively expanded its powers, its mandate, and its budget.

While it uses at times a humanitarian rhetoric to justify its operations, it is also quite unabashedly clear

in its main mission,

which is really to detect what it calls illegal crossings of external borders and prevent and deter those crossings.

The blocking of other nationalities before they even reach EU soil is a bit of a reach.

And yet that's what Frontex is doing over the Mediterranean.

Frontex will often say that its aerial surveillance saves lives and that by alerting relevant authorities it is ensuring that people in distress at sea are rescued.

But

it's quite clear that the goal of this extensive network of aerial surveillance is not rescue, but rather interception.

When they see the migrant vessels, they call in the coordinates.

They know that they would get in legal trouble if the coordinates were called directly to the Libyans.

Instead, Frontex calls it into a national partner, typically the coastal nations, Malta, Spain, Italy, Greece, and those EU players on land then hand off the coordinates to the Libyans.

Then the Libyans dispatch the Libyan Coast Guard vessel to the coordinates and they arrive to the scene where the migrant vessel is.

On the other side, you have players like Doctors Without Borders, and they're coming at it from the exact opposite direction, literally, geographically, and politically, and in terms of their goal.

They're trying to rescue the migrants, get to the vessel, bring those migrants quickly on board, and then head further out into international waters where the Libyans have less jurisdiction.

Funtex has a very clear policy of not informing non-governmental organizations when they detect a boat of migrants and refugees.

Under international law, you are never allowed to return migrants or refugees to a place that has been deemed not a place of safety.

And Libya has been ruled not a place of safety.

It's a war zone.

So it is a crime for ships, whether they're merchant vessels or the Doctors Without Borders folks, to take those folks to Libya.

But Libya can bring them back there.

They get captured within 90 miles from Libyan shores and brought back to Libyan gulags.

It's worth thinking of the Libyan Coast Guard as a shadow immigration system for the EU.

It's a proxy force.

It's an outsourced force that the EU uses to do its dirty work when it comes to migration control.

Their interest is in intercepting the boats.

It's not in rescuing people.

It's not in ensuring that people are safe or treated humanely or with dignity.

They have threatened non-governmental rescue organizations who are out in the Mediterranean Sea.

There is ample evidence of collusion between various Libyan Coast Guard units and trafficking and smuggling networks.

So they have a very strong interest in intercepting people at sea and taking them back to almost certain detention in nightmarish detention centers in Libya where they are subjected to further extortion and forced labor and any,

you know, all manner of violence.

Let me remind, this is in international waters.

The Libyans actually do not have the jurisdiction to do this legally, and yet they do.

They've got the guns and they've got the power, and the EU is willfully looking the other way when they make these threats, or they open fire on vessels over which they have no jurisdiction to demand that those migrants climb on board their ship.

You know, we've seen the Libyan Coast Guard use live bullets on people while they're trying to perform an interception which they will try to cast as a rescue.

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When Aliu arrived arrived in Libya on December 10th, 2020, he found a cheap place to stay with some other migrants in a slum called Gargresh.

Gargresh is a kind of parallel universe in Tripoli that's home to tens of thousands of dark-skinned African migrants.

Most of them, like Aliu, are from sub-Saharan countries.

Aliu had a great uncle, Demba Balde, who had been living in Gargresh for years.

When Aliu arrived in Tripoli, Demba helped him find work.

My colleague, Pierre, spoke to him on the phone.

For the next few months, Aliu worked as a house painter, trying to save up the money he'd need to pay a trafficker to ferry him to Italy.

Just like his two older brothers, Aliu's uncle, Demba, discouraged him from making the trip across the Mediterranean.

Demba told him that's the route of death.

I wanted to see what was really going on in Libya and what the situation was like for Aliu Kande and all the other migrants forced to make these same life-or-death choices.

And that meant going to Tripoli.

My team landed in Tripoli in May 2021.

I was joined by Pierre Qatar, the translator you heard earlier, my editor Joe Sexton, and another filmmaker named Maya Doles.

We arrive at the airport and security is there to greet us and immediately things are a little shady.

Our passports are taken away.

We're not allowed to stay with them and see what's being discussed.

That already gave me pause.

We get in the car, we head to not the hotel that we had chosen, but this other hotel that they insist we stay at.

And, you know, the next week is a series of, you know, a dozen similar sort of surprises of that sort that just become this escalating situation where it's very obvious that the intention here is for us to not do our job, not to talk to people, not to report.

But

from my view, our mission remained.

You know, our job was to investigate this murder, investigate this wider problem.

And if we had to slalom around their hurdles, we were going to slalom around their hurdles.

But we were not going to stop, you know, and not do the job.

If we were, we were going to leave the country, but there was no reason to stay and sit in a hotel for two weeks.

Gargresh historically is a thriving section of the city with brick-and-mortar shops and the like, but in the last couple decades at least, it has become also this other thing, which is the shanty town that houses tens of thousands of migrants who end up there.

The sense I got from a dozen migrants, most of whom live in Gargresh, is that as dirty and

dark a place as it is, is actually the one place they feel safe because there are lots of them and they can disappear.

The larger experience when you talk to the migrants about Tripoli is

the

overwhelming sense of fear that at any moment, anywhere outside of Gargresh, especially, they can be be grabbed by anyone.

There's a lot of different motivations for

kidnapping, and if you're a migrant, you walk around the city knowing that can occur.

He wants to go closer to where he lives, so he doesn't feel comfortable around here.

Mohammed David is the migrant you heard at the beginning of this episode, and his story isn't much different from Aliyu's.

He's originally from the Ivory Coast.

After his wife gave birth to a son, it became harder and harder for Muhammad David to provide for his family.

So he made the same decision Aliu did, to leave home and try to find a better life in Europe.

He traveled through Burkina Faso and landed in Tripoli, where he saved up some money and paid a trafficker to bring him to Italy.

They were in the same boat.

They were in the same boat.

They were in the same boat when they were killed.

What kind of person was Aliu?

He said Aliu was someone who was calm and nice.

He was just like you.

Same thing.

And he was from Guinea-Bissau.

Yes, Bissau.

You speak Portugal.

Once we met Muhammad David, it didn't take long for us to realize that he was going to be an incredibly valuable source.

But he knew that talking to foreign journalists in public was a quick way of attracting the wrong kind of attention.

He knew that undercover security was everywhere and that migrants were always at risk.

My team had been assigned a security detail by the Libyan government, and Mohammed David didn't trust them.

He insisted that if we were going to talk with him, we needed to come to his home in Gargoresha.

So we set up one of the early meetings with him in Gargarash, and we brought food.

And one of his terms was, look, you've got to lose the security.

You can't come into Gargarash with your security detail and you certainly can't come near where I'm staying if you've got those guys in tow.

The security guys had said, you're not allowed to leave our line of sight.

So this put me in a bit of a bind.

Obviously, I was going to lean towards Mohammed David, but ultimately what I said to the security security guys was, look, you're going to take me to this location.

I'm going to meet someone, and then he's going to walk me in to where he's staying, and we're going to have dinner with him.

I will never be further than 500 meters from you, but you will not see where I am exactly, because that's the term I struck with the migrant.

And if you're not okay with that, then I'm sorry, but that's what I need to do so as to make him safe and make him feel safe.

And that's what we did.

We met Mohammed David on a street corner a couple blocks away from Gargresh.

We walked through some alleys, winding our way through the night into the depths of Gargresh.

The security detail was maybe a block away.

And then once we got into Gargresh, we did a couple of blind turns to shake them and then went with Mohammed David, sat down.

And they took us to the prison.

The more we talked to Muhammad David and other people who knew Aliyu, the more a really clear picture of him started to come together.

The impression I got of him was that he was quiet, kind of introverted and watchful, maybe a bit shy.

He was a gentle young man who was quick to smile.

He liked soccer and rap music.

Don't forget, he was a rural kid who'd lived most of his life on a farm in a remote village.

So he didn't have that kind of hardened street sensibility to him.

He was also less mature than, say, Muhammad David or some of the others who were trying to undertake a similar journey to Europe.

We'd been set up and filming for about 20 minutes, and that's when my phone started ringing, and things very quickly started going sideways.

Can you hear me?

So they kept beating me.

We will walk back in one hour.

And

they need to tell the police to leave us money.

The police just helped you.

Are you to leave us?

We are talking and we are having a kid.

I can't understand.

But I need you to.

Can you walk walk away a little bit?

The security detail had called the bosses of the security company.

The bosses had called local clothes and plainclothes police around Gargoresh who spy on these guys.

And there was this sort of growing fury around me and these Westerners who were in the depths of Gargresh talking to migrants.

And so over the next 20 minutes, you know, I got increasingly angry, screaming calls from various folks saying, where are you?

We're going to storm Gargresh to come get you.

You're not allowed to be talking with them without us present, et cetera, et cetera.

And I was saying, you know, we are only 500 meters away.

We know where you are.

If there's a problem, we will contact you.

We can get out easily.

Don't worry, we're fine.

And you need to just calm down and back off.

And after about 30 minutes, when the threats escalated to a pretty high degree, I told my crew, look, we got to pull out of here because this is going to make Mohammed David unsafe.

Pierre, for their sake, we got

And we pulled out.

And that's when I got scolded on the street and yelled at by the police chief.

And he said he was going to recommend having us thrown out of the country for talking to migrants.

And we went back to the hotel, and that's when I got calls from the head of the security company that had been put on us by the government and was further told that

we had broken their rules.

From there forward, we were officially put on house arrest.

We were not supposed to talk further with migrants without permission.

We were not supposed to talk with ambassadors or foreign officials.

We were not allowed to go to certain parts of the city, including Gargresh.

You know, we were not allowed to leave the hotel.

Bottom line, the very people that were supposed to protect us were now sort of incarcerating us, and the very people that were, meaning the government officials who were supposed to be welcoming us into the country and kind of facilitating our reporting were doing just the opposite.

They were throwing up every obstacle in our way.

So, it was really pretty clear that this was going to be a tough reporting trip from there forward.

Next time on the Outlaw Ocean, my team and I continue investigating the murder of Aliu Kande inside a migrant prison.

And that investigation puts us directly in the crosshairs of a Libyan militia.

This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Michael Catano.

Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson.

Mix sound design and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh.

Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler.

For CBC podcasts, our coordinating producers Fabiola Carletti, senior producer Damon Fairless.

The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Narani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Special thanks to Pierre Qatar, Joe Sexton, and Maya Doles.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.