Ransom Smuggling of Somali Migrants in Northern Africa

By Tabea Scharrer

At the end of the 2000s, a new form of human smuggling which I call ‘ransom smuggling’ appeared in Northern Africa. In it hostage taking and extortion play a critical role. Both smugglers and hostage takers—actors of mobility and actors of immobility, respectively—are part of the system. The appearance of ransom smuggling was linked directly to European policies aimed at restricting and criminalizing irregular migration.

In North Africa, the practice of ransom smuggling was described first in the Sinai region (Egypt) in 2009. The activity of FRONTEX in Libya from 2007 onwards as well as parallel bilateral agreements between Italy and Libya and Italy’s anti-immigration policies led to a shift of migration routes from Libya to the Sinai–Israel route. There, mainly Eritrean migrants became the targets of ransom smuggling. The inclusion 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 trying to cross the fortified border to Saudi Arabia. After Israel finalized its border fence to Egypt in 2012, ransom smuggling reappeared in Libya, which had by then disintegrated after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. Interestingly, ransom smuggling emerged as a phenomenon almost simultaneously along various migration corridors in South America, Southeast Asia, and North Africa in the second half of the 2000s; in all cases, its emergence was linked to increasing restrictions (and hence criminalization) of migration. In addition, ransom smuggling is connected to the emergence of new information technologies, especially the wide availability of mobile phones which enable both communication and, crucially, payment of ransom.

In the context of Somali migration via North Africa, ransom smuggling 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 Libya. By threatening to kill the migrants and using psychological and physical violence, including torture and rape, the kidnappers extort money from their captives’ relatives. Only after ransom is paid are migrants released and able to continue their journey across the Mediterranean to Europe. In contrast to other forms of smuggling, the “service” on ransom-smuggling routes is not (fully) paid upfront but collected later, often through kidnapping.

Based on 79 interviews with Somali migrants gathered during anthropological fieldwork in Germany and Kenya in 2017 and 2018, the route via Libya is described in the article. About half (39) of the interviewees had travelled via this route on which ransom smuggling was prevalent. While those interviewees who moved to Europe before 1990 did not mention the service of mobility facilitators, this changed after the disintegration of the Somali state in 1991. For Somalis who came to Germany from 2010 onward, smuggler networks became almost indispensable, as European policies increasingly restricted irregular migration routes to Europe.

I argue that despite the risks involved, Somali migrants make use of this form of smuggling, as it is often cheaper, easier to organize and better known than other routes. This is especially true for less affluent migrants and for younger people who often leave without the knowledge of their parents on travel-first-pay-later schemes. Somali migrants refer to migrating on these dangerous, irregular routes as tahriib (which means smuggling in general, but refers mostly to migration journeys), a term implying its criminalization.

Somali migrants often found it difficult to differentiate between the various actors they encountered. To make sense of ambiguous and risky situations and to navigate the dangers of irregular migration Somali migrants distinguished between mukhalas and magafe as two discrete smuggler figures. The term mukhalas (from Arabic, “trustworthy, sincere”) refers to brokers in general and the services they offer, such as organizing documents, transport, housing, and food. Meanwhile, the term magafe (literally, “the one who does not miss”) emerged in reference to kidnapper networks around the Sahara Desert, especially in Libya. While mukhalas are mostly described as nonviolent actors operating in a legal and moral grey zone, magafe are specifically linked to the dangerous routes of tahriib and to violent, often traumatizing, and criminal practices considered morally wrong by the interviewees.

Based on the article one can argue that further policies of preventing and criminalizing migration will not stop potential migrants but will only make their journey riskier and more traumatic. In addition, it shows that the knowledge of the dangers does not decrease the willingness to use routes along which ransom smuggling takes place, which suggests that information campaigns about these routes will not have major deterrent effects.