This is the first episode of New Lines magazine’s Wider Angle podcast.

Riada Asimovic Akyol speaks with the award-winning journalist and photographer Sally Hayden about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and across North Africa. Hayden is the author of “My Fourth Time, We Drowned: Seeking Refuge on the World’s Deadliest Migration Route,” the winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2022 and the Michel Déon Prize in 2022.

They discuss Hayden’s observations about “systemic issues destroying lives” and the findings of her investigation, based on interviews with hundreds of refugees and migrants inside Libyan detention centers. These refugees from different parts of Africa — who are seeking safety and are trying to get protection in Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea — have faced horrendous challenges and abuses of human rights while stuck in Libya, after the European Union started funding interceptions to stem  migration in 2017. From trafficking to enslavement and sexual abuse, Hayden elaborates on the EU’s “ethnical culpability” for forcibly turning away the refugees, the corruption of the United Nations, the effect and place of technology as “both a blessing and a curse” for the migrants and the disastrous consequences on mental health due to forced migration, exploitation and the dehumanization of mostly poverty-stricken, traumatized migrants.

In her book, Hayden writes:

”History is written by the victors. Victims who survive often do not have the strength to stand up and rewrite the narrative, or the power to make sure their voices are counted. Will there ever be a museum commemorating those who died in the Mediterranean Sea or in Libya? And where will it be — in Europe? In Africa?”

 Listen to the conversation to hear the wider angle of facts and stories that we are told about the migration, which Hayden asserts is “one of the greatest challenges to humanity in the 21st century.”  “Wider Angle” is produced and hosted by Riada Asimovic Akyol.