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There is a general dearth of information, data and statistics on migrant fatalities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Red Crescent Societies, coast guards and international actors have made impressive improvements in the documentation of migration-related deaths along the Mediterranean coast and large-scale incidents on land. However, a few ongoing qualitative studies and surveys of migrants have indicated gaps in knowledge on smaller incidents. These studies and surveys are typically not focused on collection of information on abuse and death; however, such information is revealed by survey participants as they describe their migration journeys.
One such study is a recent joint pilot project conducted by the Mixed Migration Hub (MHub),3 IOM’s Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM)4 and the Harvard François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights.5 The study was launched in Nigeria in July 2018 to examine and better understand the experiences of children and youth who had recently returned from Libya with the help of IOM’s Voluntary Humanitarian Return (VHR) programme. The survey team interviewed a total of 121 children and youth between the ages of 17 and 28 in the states of Edo, Lagos, Delta and Ondo. The main purpose of the pilot project, as well as the larger study, is to investigate the participants’ experiences post-return and societal, familial and governmental readiness to support their reintegration. To collect a complete picture of migratory and return experiences, the team asked the children and youth about their main reasons for migrating, as well as their travel arrangements, experiences en route and in Libya, and reasons for return. The findings of the pilot survey will inform the design of a larger study to be conducted in five countries in West and Central Africa and the Horn of Africa.
John was interviewed in Edo state in southern Nigeria. Nineteen years old at the time of interview, he had left Nigeria in search of a better life a year-and-a-half earlier, just before his 18th birthday. He had trouble finding a job and earning enough to live in Nigeria and hoped he could change that by moving to Germany. Despite John independently making the decision to migrate, his parents expected him to send money back home. John set off on his own, travelling through, and stopping briefly, in Niger. En route to Libya, he was captured by a gang, which detained and regularly beat him in an effort to extort money from him or his family back in Nigeria. Describing his experience, John said: “No rest of mind in Libya. The Arab men used to come to kill us for fun. They would use you to work in their farm, in exchange of cigarettes. If you refuse they would beat or kill you. It was a horrible experience.”
The questionnaire did not ask participants about any fatalities they may have witnessed on their way to Libya or in Libya itself; however, 27 separate instances involving the death of migrant(s) were mentioned, unprompted, during the interviews. The characteristics of the deaths described by the participants seem to be the kind that regularly goes unreported and undocumented: killings of one or two people at a time, at the hands of smugglers and traffickers, or in transportation accidents. It is very unlikely that these reports would have been reported to local authorities and/or drawn media and/or NGO attention.6
Rene was 20 years old at the time of his interview in Delta state (Nigeria). He left the country in November 2016, when he was 18 years old, with the aim of reaching Europe and earning enough money there to help support his family back in Nigeria. It took Rene two months to travel through Niger and into Libya, where he became stranded. He recounted being beaten and abused along the way and confessed that he felt like returning home even before setting foot in Libya because “the suffering was becoming too much.” About his experience in Libya, Rene described waking up “to see dead bodies around us at certain points.”
The fact that such deaths go unrecorded is deeply troubling for two reasons. First, it means that the number of migrant fatalities is drastically underestimated in the MENA region. Second, with recent and successful political efforts to deter onward migration from Libya across the Mediterranean Sea towards Europe, many more refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants are becoming trapped in the country, and policy decisions are being made without an accurate understanding of the level of risk to migrants in Libya.
Jane was 22 years old when she was interviewed in Edo state (Nigeria). She left the country in January 2016, a few weeks before she turned 20, because she could not find work and hoped to find better living conditions elsewhere. As is the case with many other migrants, Jane was expected to help her family financially. It took Jane a week to reach Libya; along the way, somewhere after Kano state (Nigeria), smugglers stopped the truck and threatened to abandon her and the other migrants unless they each paid an additional amount. Speaking about her experience in Libya, Jane said, “While in Libya, I was only eating leftover food. I couldn't get enough sleep. I was cleaning all rooms in a five-storey building alone every day. I was malnourished and had severe back pains. I saw people dying and could not help them.”
The reports of fatalities that punctuate the interviews conducted for the pilot study raise crucial ethical questions about how best to approach this type of information. The need to improve research ability to capture and document fatalities, in order to better grasp the true level of risk to migrants, must be weighed against the possible harm to the survey respondents.7 The excerpts included here demonstrate how these young people reported killings and fatalities in their interviews; for the most part, they made general references that cannot be linked to specific incidents or provide enough context for such fatalities to be entered into IOM’s Missing Migrants Project database. Moving forward, there needs to be further discussion about ethical and methodological questions and best approaches to situations in which people volunteer some information without details about specific incidents.
This text is an excerpt from IOM’s Fatal Journeys 4 report, available for download from https://publications.iom.int/books/fatal-journeys-volume-4-missing-migrant-children.
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