Tabea Scharrer, social anthropologist, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity [1]
In the late 2000s, following the implementation of European policies to prevent irregular migration, a new form of human smuggling – ransom smuggling – emerged in North Africa. Ransom smuggling is dangerous and complex, involving both human smugglers and hostage-takers. This blog post traces the history of ransom smuggling, as it emerged almost simultaneously in different regions of the world at a time of increasing restrictions on migration, making migration more dangerous. It also outlines the results of research with Somalis in Germany – despite the risks involved, the majority of respondents who had arrived in Germany between 2011 and 2017 had used the route via Libya because it was cheaper, easier to organise, and better known than other routes.
Introduction
“It’s sort of an agency. They would kidnap you and call your parents. And your parents would either pay money for your life or they won’t. It depends on if you are important for them.”
– Khadija, who decided against going through Libya, interviewed in München 2017[2]
At the end of the 2000s, following the implementation of European policies to prevent and criminalise irregular migration, a new form of human smuggling developed in Northern Africa,. In this form of human smuggling, which I call ‘ransom smuggling’, hostage-taking and extortion play a crucial role. Both smugglers and hostage-takers – actors of mobility and actors of immobility, respectively – are part of the system, the use of which has become a necessity for many migrants trying to reach Europe.
Despite the risks involved, the majority of the interviewees who had arrived in Germany between 2011 and 2017 had used the route via Libya, because it was cheaper, easier to organise, and better known than other routes. Migrants using this route were on average younger than those taking other routes, and their on average lower level of education suggests a lower socio-economic class background compared to those using non-Libyan routes.[3] Routes where this form of smuggling was prevalent were particularly used by young people, often leaving without informing their parents on travel-first-pay-later schemes.[4] Choosing these dangerous routes allows them to be mobile, both spatially and socially. Somali migrants refer to migration by ransom smuggling as tahriib (which means smuggling in general, but in the Somali case mostly refers to dangerous irregular migration journeys), a term that implies the dangers of the route as well as its criminalisation.
Ransom smuggling
Ransom smuggling in the context of Somali migration via North Africa means that migrants are first smuggled from the Horn of Africa or Kenya along clandestine routes by locally embedded actors and then taken hostage by local kidnappers in the Sahara and/or northern Libya. By threatening to kill the migrants and using psychological and physical violence, including torture and rape, the kidnappers extort money from the relatives of their captives. Only after the ransom has been paid are the migrants released and able to continue their journey, again with the help of smugglers who are often, but not always, different from the kidnappers. In contrast to other forms of smuggling, the ‘service’ provided by the ransom-smuggling system is not, or not fully, paid up front, but is collected later, in most cases through kidnapping.
In North Africa, the practice of ransom smuggling was first described in the Sinai region (Egypt) in 2009.[5] Its emergence in Sinai was directly linked to European policies to restrict and criminalise irregular migration. Since the early 2000s, the EU has established policies – such as the European Neighbourhood Policy of 2003 (targeting mainly Eastern Europe) and the EU Strategy for Africa of 2005 – that aim to securitise and manage the borders adjacent to the EU, effectively turning neighbouring states into buffer zones to prevent irregular migration.[6] One element of this policy was the creation of FRONTEX, the EU’s external borders agency, in 2005. FRONTEX became active in Libya in 2007, just three years after the lifting of sanctions against Libya. In addition, Italy and Libya signed several bilateral agreements on migration control in 2007 and 2008, which included joint patrols on the Libyan coast and the provision of surveillance equipment for Libya’s land and sea borders. Italy’s anti-immigration policies under Berlusconi furthermore made irregular immigration illegal and authorised the direct deportation of migrants under the pretext of preventing terrorism, organised crime, and smuggling, without assessing their rights to asylum.[7] While migration from Libya to Italy declined as a result of these policies, the decline was not due to a reduction in overall migration, but to a shift in movement from Libya to the Sinai-Israel route.[8]
Initially, Eritrean migrants attempting to enter Israel via this route were the main targets of ransom smuggling.[9] The incorporation of hostage-taking into smuggling practices was not an entirely new phenomenon; it had already been reported from Yemen in 2006, concerning migrants from the Horn of Africa on their way to cross the fortified border to Saudi Arabia.[10] These practices probably built on older instances of hostage-taking in the region, such as the ransoming of hostages by Somali pirates from 2005 onwards.[11] The Sinai remained a major site of ransom smuggling until 2012, when Israel completed its border fence with Egypt.[12] The practice then appeared in Libya, which had disintegrated into several autonomous regions since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[13]
Interestingly, ransom smuggling emerged as a phenomenon almost simultaneously in the second half of the 2000s along several migration corridors in South America, Southeast Asia, and North Africa; in all cases, this emergence was directly or indirectly linked to increasing restrictions on migration. In Mexico, ransom smuggling appeared around 2006, as kidnappings and extortion intensified in the context of the government’s war on drugs and the country’s economy decline.[14] In Southeast Asia, a similar practice of ransom smuggling has been reported since 2007, when Rohingya were abducted in Thailand en route to Malaysia.[15]
The usage of smuggling routes by Somali forced migrants
As Somalia disintegrated – due to the Ogaden war in 1977-78, the attack of the Somali army on the northern regions in 1988 and the fall of then-President Siad Barre in 1991– many people were internally displaced or fled to neighbouring Kenya, Ethiopia and Yemen. While most Somali forced migrants have remained in East Africa, some have moved to Europe, North America, but also to other countries in closer vicinity, such as on the Arabian peninsula.[16] Recurrent violence (including bomb attacks), an often-changing political situation, a weakened economy, and recurrent droughts have led to persistent insecurity in southern Somalia, which has so far prevented people from moving back on a larger scale.
Looking at the migratory journeys of our interviewees, there are visible changes in the use of ‘migration facilitators’ over time. The four interviewees who arrived before 1990 travelled to Germany by plane and entered the country legally, either on a work, student or visitor visa. Therefore, they did not need to use the services of ‘mobility facilitators’. This situation changed in the 1990s, when it became more difficult for Somalis to obtain visas. In narrations about this period, ‘mobility facilitators’ are often mentioned, but their services were usually used only at one point of the journey. Their role was mainly to provide false documents and to organise parts of the journey, so that migrants reached their intended destination relatively quickly and with few stops. Of the ten interviewees who arrived in the 1990s and 2000s, seven were able to take flights to an EU destination, two took flights to Turkey and Russia respectively, and only one travelled via Libya, which was also an important destination for labour migrants at that time. Thus, in the interviews about migration in the 1990s and 2000s, specific networks of smugglers did not play a major role, nor did overt violence – or the threat of violence – by facilitators.
For Somalis arriving in Germany after 2010, smuggling networks and the dangerous routes of tahriib have become almost indispensable (with the exception of family reunification), as European policies have increasingly restricted migration routes to Europe. Of the 64 interviewees who arrived in Germany between 2010 and 2017, 39 (61 %) used the route via Libya.
Our respondents’ journey to Europe via Libya lasted from a few months to several years. And they had to pay between USD 1,200 and USD 9,000, with an average cost of USD 4,100 for the whole journey to Europe. This was cheaper than other routes. The difference in costs can be attributed to two interrelated factors: the professionalisation of smuggling networks prompted by migration control policies[17] and the breakup of the Libyan state. In combination, these factors allowed the establishment of a relatively stable ransom-smuggling system via Libya, whose economy was based on a high number of ransom payments.
Among young Somalis, the notion of buufis, the intense urge to migrate abroad, emically described as a kind of mental illness, still plays an important rule.[18] The interviews also revealed that although a third of those having migrated via Libya were well educated (at least 12 years of schooling prior to migration, a high percentage compared to the overall Somali population), they did not have sufficient resources to study in East Africa. The public educational system as well as socio-economic structures were still devastated by the civil war, resulting in a lack of opportunities at home, which further fuelled their dreams of a better life elsewhere. Hassan, whom I met in Kenya several years ago, faced a similar situation. He had grown up in a refugee camp in Kenya but was a very good student and had managed to work his way up to university in Somalia. As one of the top ten medical students, he had received a scholarship from Somalia to study in Nairobi, but the scholarship only covered tuition fees, not living expenses. In Nairobi, he stayed with fellow students, because he could not afford to rent a place of his own, but he soon felt like an unwanted guest. When some Somali friends told him they were going on tahriib, he joined them, hoping to build a new life like his younger brother who arrived in Europe in 2014 and now supports the whole family in East Africa financially. Later, after being caught in Sudan, detained by the police for six months, deported to Somalia and after having returned to Kenya, Hassan told me that he went on the journey because he “did not want to live like a cockroach anymore”.[19]
Tahriib already begins when migrants are smuggled through Ethiopia and Sudan, where anti-smuggling policies have been strengthened. In both countries, migrants can be detained for long periods by the police before being deported to their country of origin, as Hassan’s example above shows. When travelling further within Sudan, migrants eventually entered the Sahara, the next stage on their journey. While European discourses on dangerous migration routes focus mainly on crossing the Mediterranean, interviewees described passing through the Sahara as also very difficult. Extreme weather conditions made the journey dangerous and sandstorms could bury people in the desert. More importantly, the actual ransom-smuggling system begins in the Sahara. The smugglers, on whom the migrants were totally dependent, handed them over to hostage takers, who held them captive and threatened them with violence and death until the ransom was paid by their relatives. Interviewees who had been held in the Sahara reported cruel conditions: they were given very little food and water, and some migrants died as a result. Some witnessed people falling from the open trucks used for transport, or dying in other accidents. “The Sahara is the worst,” said one respondent, adding “I think the ocean is better. It is either death or life, but the Sahara … difficult.”[20]
The time spent in the Sahara and in Libya featured prominently in many of the narrative interviews. This can be explained by the length of time interviewees had spent in the region and their often traumatising experiences of detention, violence, and cruel treatment. Of the 39 interviewees who had migrated through the Sahara and Libya, the majority had been held for ransom by kidnappers; only five reported that they had not been detained at all. In some Libyan towns, entire housing compounds were used by kidnappers as places of detention. Interviewees spoke of inhumane treatment – being forced to undress, being locked up, beaten and starved:
“Like cattle, we were lined up: the men were lined up, the women were lined up. Everyone’s three-digit name [given name, father’s name, and grandfather’s name] was put on a list. After he wrote it down, you have to call there. He charges credit on it. […] If the person calls and uses up the money, then that’s seven days without food and the person is beaten. […] We went in to [see] people who were like a stick, with eyes and legs. We thought the people had been in here for five years; they were not. The one who had stayed there the longest had been in there for eight months.”[21]
There was no hygiene, no water for cleaning, just a bucket in the room for excrement – conditions ripe for the spread of vermin and disease.
Oliver Bakewell and Caitlin Sturridge (2021) have argued that migrants often know the risks of dangerous routes and deliberately use the ransom-smuggling system to coerce their families into paying for their migration.[22] Based on my own research, I would agree with these two authors that although the dangers of ransom smuggling have been well known since at least 2014, this knowledge has not reduced people’s willingness to use the Libyan route. Somali migrants, however, often had only a general idea of the dangers and were not always aware of what experiencing ransom smuggling actually entailed in practice. Young people, in particular, often overestimated their strength and underestimated the dangers they would face during the journey. Furthermore, the fact that knowledge of the dangers does not reduce the willingness to use routes along which ransom smuggling takes place suggests that information campaigns on these routes do not have a major deterrent effect. On the contrary, migration prevention polices, of which these information campaigns are part, will not lead to less migration, but only to migrants using more dangerous routes.
Footnotes
[1] This paper is a shortened version of an article that appeared in a special issue on ‘Migration and Crime in a Divided World’ (edited by Luigi Achilli, Antje Missbach and Soledad Álvarez Velasco): Scharrer, Tabea. 2023. Of Mukhalas and Magafe: Somali Migrants Navigating the Dangers of Ransom Smuggling in Northern Africa. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 709(1): 86–104. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162241246664
[2] All interviewee names are pseudonyms. The empirical data were collected during anthropological fieldwork with Somali migrants in Germany in 2017 and 2018. The research was conducted as part of the Max Planck Society’s project “The Multiplicities of Exclusion” at its Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle), in collaboration with Markus Hoehne from the Institute for Social Anthropology at Leipzig University (2017–2020). I would like to acknowledge the work of Samia Aden, Inga Albrecht, Malika Autorkhanova, Vittoria Fiore, Monika König, Julia Kühl, Najah Abdalla Osman, and Stephan Steuer, on whose fieldwork the empirical results are largely based.
[3] See Scharrer 2023.
[4] Ali, Nimo-Ilhan. 2016. Going on tahriib: The causes and consequences of Somali youth migration to Europe. London: Rift Valley Institute.
[5] van Reisen, Mirjam, and Conny Rijken. 2015. Sinai trafficking: Origin and definition of a new form of human trafficking. Social Inclusion 3 (1): 113–124. They show that the emergence of ransom smuggling is also linked to new information technologies, especially mobile phones.
[6] Bialasiewicz, Luiza. 2012. Off-shoring and out-sourcing the borders of Europe: Libya and EU border work in the Mediterranean. Geopolitics 17 (4): 843–866.
[7] Bialasiewicz 2012, 852–885, 858.
[8] For example, first-time asylum applications from Somalis in Italy dropped from 4,865 in 2008 to 85 in 2010 (Eurostat. 2023. Asylum applicants by type, citizenship, age and sex – annual aggregated data [migr_asyappctza], 2008-2023; https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/, accessed 02/06/2023. The same table also shows, that the number of Somali first-time asylum applicants in Europe have remained relatively stable since 2008, while the main destination countries have changed.
[9] Lorger, Eva, and Piet Gotlieb. 2023. Human trafficking for ransom: A literature-review. In Enslaved: Trapped and trafficked in digital black holes: Human trafficking trajectories to Libya, eds. Mirjam van Reisen, Munyaradzi Mawere, Klara Smits, and Morgane Wirtz, 121–153. Bamenda, Cameroon: Langaa RPCIG. There are also rumors of organ theft linked to ransom smuggling. Van Reisen and Rijken argue that, in the case of the Sinai, these rumors were based more on threats by the kidnappers than on actual cases (see van Reisen and Rijken 2015, 115–116).
[10] Human Rights Watch (HRW). 25 May 2014. Yemen’s torture camps: Abuse of migrants by human traffickers in a climate of impunity. New York, NY: Human Rights Watch. Available from www.hrw.org.
[11] World Bank. 2013. Pirate trails: Tracking the illicit financial flows from pirate activities off the Horn of Africa. Washington, DC: World Bank.
[12] van Reisen and Rijken 2015, 115
[13] Kuschminder, Katie, and Anna Triandafyllidou. 2020. Smuggling, trafficking, and extortion: New conceptual and policy challenges on the Libyan route to Europe. Antipode 52 (1): 206–226; Lorger and Gotlieb 2023
[14] Vogt, Wendy A. 2013. Crossing Mexico: Structural violence and the commodification of undocumented Central American migrants. American Ethnologist 40 (4): 764–780.
[15] Cohen, Erik, Scott A. Cohen, and Xiang R. Li. 2017. Subversive mobilities. Applied Mobilities 2 (2): 115–133; Lewa, Chris. 2008. Asia’s new boat people. Forced Migration Review 30: 40–42.
[16] On proximate countries of refuge see Scharrer, Tabea, and Magdalena Suerbaum. 2022. Negotiating class positions in proximate places of refuge: Syrians in Egypt and Somalians in Kenya. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48 (20): 4847–4864.
[17] Raineri, Luca. 2018. Human smuggling across Niger: State-sponsored protection rackets and contradictory security imperatives. The Journal of Modern African Studies 56 (1): 63–86.
[18] Horst, Cindy. 2006. Buufis amongst Somalis in Dadaab: The transnational and historical logics behind resettlement dreams. Journal of Refugee Studies 19 (2): 143–57.
[19] Interview with Hassan, Mombasa, 2017. In 2024, after completing his studies and his practical year in Somalia (during which he received death threats), he was living in Kenya again, but as a refugee he was not allowed to be formally employed as a doctor.
[20] Interview with Jiilaal, München, September 2017.
[21] Interview with Jamiila, Kassel, January 2018.
[22] Bakewell, Oliver, and Caitlin Sturridge. 2021. Extreme risk makes the journey feasible: Decision-making amongst migrants in the Horn of Africa. Social Inclusion 9 (1): 186–95.