ANDREW CONNELLY

One of the strangest stories I have covered, which I still feel has more to reveal. How an elaborate plot to lure a young man from the streets of Lagos to London resulted in the downfall of one of Nigeria’s most powerful political families.

Read it HERE

More coverage from outbreak fo war in Sudan. The sad death of respected doctor Dr. Bushra Sulieman.

Read HERE

Coverage of the first days of urban warfare in Sudan’s capital

Read HERE

Leicester is often held up as a model for successful integration among diverse ethnic groups but September saw street battles between Hindu and Muslim men. I travelled to the city to find out why.

Listen to my report HERE

For Foreign Policy I describe not only the immorality but the unworkability of the UK proposal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda. Read HERE

At the 2022 Edinburgh Festival I met Ukrainian circus and cabaret performers, some who received special permission to leave wartime Ukraine and spoke about the bittersweet experiences to be touring in Europe.

Listen to my report HERE

Despite the decriminalization of abortion in Northern Ireland several years ago after presiding over some of the harshest legislation in the world, access is far from straightforward. And campaigners on both sides of the issue are rallying after last month’s US Supreme Court leak that's suggested the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Listen to my report from Belfast HERE

Report from different corners of Belfast ahead of the May 2022 Northern Ireland assembly elections where shifting identities hint at a change in voting patterns, but echoes from the past remain.

Listen HERE

Before the invasion of Ukraine, Moldova was heavily dependent on Russia for gas imports. Now inflation is spiking in Europe’s poorest country and people are worrying. Also, I visited the excellent Asconi vineyard who were hosting dozens of Ukrainian families in their tourist holiday cottages.

Listen to my report HERE

When Russia invaded Ukraine, many Moldovans could hear the explosions next door. And some fled joining many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians heading westwards. In the unrecognised statelet of Transnistria, part of Moldova’s territory has been occupied by Russian forces ever since independence from the Soviet Union, so many were convinced that Putin intended to come for them next. I spoke to protesters and veterans from the 1991 Transnistrian conflict about their concerns.

Listen to my report HERE

From a pleasant Habsburgian town full of meandering tourists, Lviv has morphed into a jittery waystation of refugees, diplomats, journalists, fighters, aid workers and rumoured saboteurs in the midst. It is a Casablanca without a Rick’s café after the government decreed a ban on booze sales.

Read my dispatch from Lviv HERE

I spent a day at Lviv’s train station, a frenetic portal into a new for those passing through from refugees to foreign fighters to pianists.

Listen to my report HERE

Statues are swaddled in plastic, stained glass windows are boarded up and artefacts spirited away to basements. Restorers and historians race against time to protect the UNESCO World Heritage city of Lviv what potential cultural genocide by Russian forces.

Listen to my report HERE

“It won’t be enough to withstand shelling,” local historian Andriy Kozyckyj admitted, gazing up at the monument, “but we need to do something.”

In the early days of the war, the western city of Lviv began to fill up with displaced people with schools, offices and theatres opening up their doors for shelter. Women make camouflage nets for the troops on the frontline. Churches fill with worshippers while the mayor warns of a looming housing crisis.

Listen to my report HERE

“Everything has changed. Sometimes you feel normal. There are crowds everywhere almost like when we hold the city’s literature festival. But then the air raid sirens, the checkpoints, the curfew and the refugees.”

Mass exodus and disbelief: How Russia’s invasion caught Ukrainian civilians and the aid response off guard

‘I think most didn’t believe in the risk.’

An early days update on the humanitarian situation in Ukraine and on the borders.

Read my report HERE

I spoke to non-white refugees fleeing Ukraine from all over the world about the discrimination they faced when trying to escape into the EU

Listen to my report HERE

As I interviewed refugees fleeing Ukraine into Poland, I observed another queue of people waiting to head back in - hundreds of diaspora, Ukrainians living abroad or on holiday when the war started, and now on a mission of a lifetime to defend the homeland.

Listen to my report HERE

“I think only fools don’t feel fear. But we will try to laugh. Odessa is a very funny city. We will try to laugh,”

A few days after Putin invaded Ukraine, I flew to eastern Poland to speak with the countless refugees arriving at Przemysl train station

Listen to my report HERE

At the beginning of 2022 I travelled to Albania’s Adriatic coast to meet Afghan lawyers, activists and journalists who were evacuated after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Their stay was meant to be temporary but US and Canadian bureaucracy has meant they remain stranded in limbo in a seaside holiday resort.

Listen to my report HERE

“Most of the people are physically here,” Nawandish said, “but mentally, they are not here.”

My dispatch from the Polish-Belarusian border for Prospect

Read HERE

“It is a surreal sight: in the middle of the woods, hands and eyes poke out of thermal blankets to sign documents and give taped testimony that is then sent to the European Court of Human Rights. This, or to be spirited out of the country in a smuggler’s car, is now the only way to prevent a potential death.”

Speaking to the BBC World Service about European migration policy November 20, 2021

Listen HERE

In November 2021 I travelled to the Polish-Belarusian border to meet the activists helping asylum seekers Europe’s cross last remaining primeval forest.

Listen to my report HERE

“We have no place to escape, physically or mentally. We know somewhere in the woods, there are people.”

For many days I waited on the Greek island of Samos for a boat of refugees to arrive, and then observed the intense effort undertaken by NGOs to ensure that the passengers are not thrown back into the Aegean Sea by the Greek authorities.

Listen to my report HERE

“Villagers give them directions, water to drink and bread to eat. Then, the police arrive, they take the migrants away and say that nothing has happened,” he said, adding, “And then, the people disappear.”

Though largely unvisited during Europe’s refugee crisis six years ago, asylum claims are rising on the island of Cyprus and so too is the hostile treatment. I met a young Syrian mother separated from her family, and two Cameroonians stranded in the buffer zone.

Listen to my report HERE

“If we are serious about being a country based on the rule of law, they should accept all applications. If you don’t want a precedent, then you don’t allow asylum at all. Is this what we want?”

Despite the title, we definitely should blame Belarus for instigating a migrant crisis, but we should also examine how EU asylum and border policy has made it vulnerable to manipulation by hostile actors.

Read my piece for Foreign Policy HERE

“Although it is true that the Belarusian regime is in league with predatory smugglers who convince desperate Iraqi families to liquidate their assets and make the doomed journey to the forests of eastern Europe, the background of these people is seldom mentioned. Lukashenko does not care about their protection or the roots of their displacement, but Europe should. Instead, the EU’s obsessive focus on militarizing a humanitarian issue and eroding the concept of asylum is squandering the principles that are supposed to differentiate it from the bad guys.”

As well as Belarusian dissidents fleeing the regime, an increasing number of asylum seekers started appearing on Lithuania’s border but their treatment was noticeably different.

Listen to my report HERE

Belarusian President Lukashenko launched a savage crackdown after stealing the 2020 election, with mass arrests and torture, prompting dissidents to flee across the border. In neighbouring Vilnius I met some of them honouring political prisoners and arranging others’ escape routes.

Listen to my report HERE

“When I see a car here with Belarusian license plates,” he said, “first I open [the] Telegram [app],” a secure messaging service that activists use to share information. “There are lists [in the app] of policemen and KGB agents’ cars, and I am trying to find matching plates,” Zhukov continued. “If I don’t find any, then maybe he’s a friend, I don’t know.”

In response to the extinguishing of democracy in Hong Kong by Beijing, the UK government opened up a visa escape route. I met some of the beneficiaries in London, including at the lively Hackney Chinese Centre.

Listen to my report HERE

“The whole scenario felt like a kidnapping,” Cheng told The World. “They took me, blindfolded and shackled, to an unknown place that was deathly silent, except the sound of the air conditioning. Then, I heard some sounds of furniture being moved around, and I knew that torture would begin.”

In late 2020, the British government began putting asylum seekers in squalid former military barracks on the Kentish coast. I spoke to detainees through the barbed wire, as well as NGO workers, former refugees and analysts to explore what kind of post-Brexit asylum is emerging.

Listen to my report HERE

“No one wants to give up their dignity and respect to go through a journey like that, but you need to offer them legal ways of coming in. If the UK hadn’t welcomed us, we wouldn’t be where we are today, and I wouldn’t be so proud to contribute to British society,”

2020 in Northern Ireland saw youth unrest in Belfast, threats to port workers and goods supply issues. Is Brexit to blame? I took a boat from Scotland to Larne to talk to garden centre owners, politicians, psychologists and social workers on the frontline.

Listen to my report HERE

“If you speak to our kids, they will tell you: ‘We want something different. We don’t want your walls. We don’t want your hate.’ But what we’re seeing now with this Brexit debacle is that it’s being weaponized and used to divide our community. And trust me, there’s no benefit in dividing us. The consequences can be quite scary actually.”

In the 2020 lockdown, on the eve of Scottish parliamentary elections, I travelled up to sunny Coldstream where the River Tweed divides England and Scotland to ask people about identity and belonging.

Listen to my report HERE

“We’ve lived cheek by jowl for centuries, and intermarriage is commonplace, and yet this side of the border is fiercely Scottish in terms of its traditions and customs, as is the other side of the border fiercely English in its traditions and customs. Remember, we’re only a stone’s throw away, and despite the passage of centuries, that remains the same.”

Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian thriller Children of Men depicts a jingoistic government locking up migrants in crumbling internment camps along forlorn stretches of the English coast. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Home Secretary Priti Patel appear to have watched the film—and consider it worthy of emulation.

Read my full report for Foreign Policy HERE

Armenian winemakers hope to maintain ancient tradition following Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

THE WORLD. December 28, 2020

Armenia has one of the oldest wine industries in the world, with some unearthed fragments of amphora and presses dating back to over 6000 years. Despite this, it’s only in the last decade that Armenia has undergone a wine renaissance, with locals and repatriated diaspora starting to make and drink it, and wine bars popping up in Yerevan. Some of the best stuff is grown in and around Nagorno-Karabakh, and after the war some wineries are gone forever, and some narrowly avoided being bombed. It was my journalistic duty to taste a series of excellent wine and grappa from Nagorno-Karabakh for this report.

Listen to my radio dispatch for The World HERE

Nagorno-Karabakh refugees see little chance of returning home after peace deal

POLITICO. November 30th, 2020

In Soviet times the Nagorno-Karabakh town of Shusha (Shushi to the Armenians) had a mixed Azerbaijani-Armenian population before ethnic Armenians won control in 1992. Azerbaijan conquered it in November 2020. As well as holding religious and cultural significance for both sides, it occupies the highest strategic point in the enclave, looking straight down at the capital Stepanakert, and many displaced people from NK I met in Yerevan fear returning home to this vulnerable reality.

Read the full report in Politico HERE with photos by Anush Babajanyan

Nagorno-Karabakh refugees are beginning to return home, but many are still displaced

THE WORLD. December 7, 2020

During the war around 90,000 people fled fighting in and around Nagorno-Karabakh mainly going to the Armenian capital Yerevan. I met numerous families staying in shelters, hotels or family residences, some who were eager to return, some who think they never will and some from areas now under Azerbaijani control who cannot. I also visited heavily bombarded towns along the frontline including Martuni where cluster munitions and unexploded rocket shells still litter the town square but some of the fearless elderly residents are determined they aren’t going anywhere. One old man offered me some persimmons growing in his garden but first I had to wash off the coating of dust caused by a shell that landed outside his house.

Listen to my radio dispatch for The World HERE

Following loss in war, Armenians bid adieu to Kelbajar area given to Azerbaijan

THE WORLD. November 30, 2020

As part of the Moscow-brokered ceasefire deal, Armenia was forced to vacate and return to Azerbaijan all seven regions surrounding Nagorno-Karabakh that it captured during the last major conflict between the two countries in the 1990s. I visited the Kelbajar region in the days before it was returned to see some villagers setting fire to their property so that Azerbaijanis could not use it and anxious Armenians visiting Dadivank - one of the region’s oldest monasteries - where priests in camouflage jackets mingled with worshippers and Russian peacekeeping soldiers. Throughout the valley people scavenged for any kind of material they could use or sell: floor boards, roof tiles, electric cables and even trees. My memories of Kelbajar are soundtracked by a constant buzz of distant chainsaws.

Listen to my radio dispatch for The World HERE

Armenians mobilize to support troops in Karabakh war, as ceasefires fail

THE WORLD October 29, 2020

In the Armenian capital Yerevan, though a few hundred miles away from the Nagorno-Karabakh battlefields, the civilian war effort was visible everywhere. One afternoon I entered a downtown primary school to find women of all ages weaving camouflage nets in the classrooms next to blackboards with equations and children’s drawings. The nets would be used to disguise supply trucks and military hardware on the frontline of Armenia’s war against Azerbaijan.

Listen to the radio dispatch for The World HERE

Europe's Failed Migration Policy Caused Greece's Latest Refugee Crisis

FOREIGN POLICY, Sept 20, 2020

Europe’s largest refugee camp was the kind of place that one would claim asylum from, let alone a place of safety or dignity to host asylum seekers. On September 2020 it finally burnt to the ground. After years of visiting the site, I have come to the conclusion that it was deliberately maintained as a deadly ghetto in order to deter migrants from coming, and to perpetuate migration as a security issue and a crisis rather than a phenomenon to be managed humanely.

My dispatch for Foreign Policy with photos by Nicola Zolin

Cyprus pushes Syrian refugees back at sea due to coronavirus

AL JAZEERA. 30th March, 2020

Cyprus was not a destination chosen by many refugees during the crisis of 2015 but faced with increasingly fortified borders across Europe in recent years, a smuggler’s sea route from Turkey has emerged. Faced with this, authorities on the island began to use the growing spread of coronavirus to deny entry to a boat of around 200 Syrian refugees. I contacted some of the passengers who reported a harrowing standoff at sea with the Cypriot coastguard who eventually pushed them towards the Turkish-Cypriot run north of the island.

Read the full report on Al Jazeera English HERE

Croatia Is Abusing Migrants While the EU Turns a Blind Eye

FOREIGN POLICY. December 6th, 2020

In November 2019, I travelled to northern Bosnia to speak to migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan living in a squalid tented encampment nicknamed ‘The Jungle’ which served as a base camp for playing ‘The Game’ - trying to reach western Europe by crossing the treacherous Croatian border. Dozens of different people in different locations gave harrowing testimonies of merciless violence inflicted by Croatian border guards in the dead of night, being robbed of their possessions, stripped of their clothes and deported sometimes wearing only underwear in freezing temperatures.

These allegations have persisted since at least 2018 but Croatia continues to receive millions of in EU funding for border management and is a candidate to join the Schengen zone despite gross violations of the Schengen Border Code and the Geneva Convention.

Full report for Foreign Policy HERE

In 2018, Cyprus received the most asylum claims, per capita, than any other EU state. Among the rising numbers of Syrian and Anglophone Cameroonian refugees are Indian and Pakistani students using the country’s dysfunctional asylum system to extend their stay. The whole matter is doubly complicated by the island’s division - those entering from the northern Turkish ‘occupied territories’ cannot be sent back and a fence cannot be constructed. Meanwhile a tiny NGO presence, meagre government support and widespread racism risk a destitution crisis on the Nicosia streets.

Link HERE

JUNE 11, 2019

Conversations about politics in the Kashmir valley often include the dry refrain that ‘democracy stops at the tunnel’, referring to the passages bored through the Pir Panjal mountain range connecting India to its northernmost state. A seven-phase process across thirty-nine days with 900 million registered voters, India’s election is the biggest in the world and yet Jammu and Kashmir recorded the lowest turnout of any state in the country. 2018 was Kashmir’s deadliest year in a decade and mounting allegations of human rights abuses committed by Indian armed forces are making locals fear a new wave of militancy is imminent.

Read my report from Indian-administered Kashmir HERE

May 8, 2019

Hungary is facing renewed calls to end anti-immigration measures that critics say amount to starvation tactics, after the United Nations Human Rights Office expressed alarm last week over reports the country is denying food to detained asylum seekers on the Serbian border.

Read my report HERE

Jan 20, 2019

The complexities of Brexit are not limited to Western Europe, but affect Britain’s former colonial outposts scattered across the world, from mutineer beekeepers in the Pitcairn islands to penguins in the Falklands.

Read my report HERE

January 14, 2019

In late 2018, small flimsy boats carrying mainly Iranian migrants began to arrive on English beaches from France, navigating the world’s busiest shipping lane. Such voyages are not unprecedented, but in Britain’s current political climate, as Brexit looms, they provided for a sense of heightened panic.

Read my report HERE

SEPTEMBER 2018

Following the journeys of Venezuelan refugees over the mountains of northern Colombia with photographer Erika Pineros for the IFRC

Link here

In September 2018, I visited Belfast, Dublin and small communities along the Irish border who fear that the hard-won peace will be threatened by the prospect of a border on the island imposed by Brexit

Article for PRI here

OCTOBER 2018

Five-part radio series on the impact of a No Deal Brexit on various sectors:

Episode 1: Businesses in Ireland

Episode 2: Irish peace process

Episode 3: Food

Episode 4: Ports

Episode 5: EU citizens in the UK

JULY 2018

As borders slam shut around Europe, Bosnia emerges as a new branch line on the Balkan refugee route, giving some locals memories of the nineties conflict and posing risks for migrants along landmine-strewn frontiers

PRI link here

During World War II, Romania’s Jewish refugees, fleeing extermination in Europe, would pay to cram aboard flimsy boats crossing the Black Sea to the Middle East. In 2017, Romania’s shores have been the recipient of migrant boats traveling the journey in reverse, as a rarely-used smuggler’s passage is reactivated.

Link here

MARCH 2018

In early 2018 I attended the World Government Summit with photographer Yulia Grigoryants for Deutsche Welle. As the city tried to brandish its green credentials, it also struggles to secure water without gas-fueled desalination.

I also managed to elicit an approving look from Robert De Niro at a press conference

Article HERE

Radio report HERE

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In 2015, I followed refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond in the early days of Hungary building their barbed wire perimeter fence.

Report for VIce News here

Photos by Hugo Aymar

I went to the Greek-Macedonian border with Nicola Zolin in early 2016, the months leading up to the final closure of the Balkan Route.

Report for Vice News here:

Photos by Nicola Zolin

At the height of the continent’s refugee crisis in 2016, borders around Europe gradually slammed shut and Athens inevitably turned into a ‘warehouse of souls’.

Report for Vice News here:

Photos by Nicola Zolin