City of Thorns Read online

  City of Thorns

  Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp

  BEN RAWLENCE

  PICADOR NEW YORK

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For the residents of Dadaab

  And for Louise

  I

  The Horn of Africa

  II

  Kenya-Somalia Border

  III

  Dadaab Refugee Complex

  [As of March 2012]

  IV

  Ifo Refugee Camp

  [As of January 2012]

  V

  Ifo 2 Refugee Camp

  [As of June 2013]

  VI

  Hagadera Refugee Camp

  [As of January 2012]

  The Residents of Dadaab Who Appear in the City of Thorns

  Ahmed (Gab) – husband of Isha, born around 1970 and came to Dadaab following the death of their livestock during the drought of 2011.

  Apshira –wife of Tawane, also his cousin, born in Kenya in 1985 and came to Dadaab voluntarily to live with Tawane in 2003.

  Billai – wife of Nisho, born in 1995 in southern Somalia, came to Dadaab with her family fleeing the famine in 2011.

  Christine – daughter of Muna and Monday, born in Dadaab in 2011.

  Fish – friend of Tawane and sports chairman in Hagadera camp, born near Kismayo in 1984 and came to Dadaab with his mother fleeing the civil war in 1992.

  Guled – husband of Maryam, born in Mogadishu in 1993, came to Dadaab fleeing al-Shabaab in 2010

  Idris – father of Tawane, born around 1950, came to Dadaab after losing two sons in the civil war in 1991.

  Isha – wife of Ahmed (Gab), born in Somalia around 1970, came to Dadaab with her five children escaping the famine of 2011.

  Kheyro – a student in the camp and later a teacher, came to the camp aged two, with her mother, Rukia, fleeing civil war in 1992.

  Mahat – casual labourer in the market and friend of Nisho, lost his father in the war and came to Dadaab with his mother in 2008, aged eight or nine.

  Maryam – wife of Guled, born in 1992, she followed him from Mogadishu to Dadaab in 2011.

  Monday – husband of Muna and former ‘Lost Boy’, born in Abyei, Sudan in 1981, arrived in Dadaab via several refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya in 2004.

  Muna – wife of Monday, born in Somalia in 1990, came to Dadaab aged six months with her parents in 1991 after most of her extended family were killed.

  Nisho – porter in Ifo market and husband of Billai, born en route to Dadaab in 1991 as his parents were fleeing the civil war in Baidoa, central Somalia.

  Professor Indha Dae (White Eyes) – born blind but later recovered his sight, a trader and then journalist, came to Dadaab aged four or five with his grandmother, fleeing the fighting in 1991.

  Tawane – husband of Apshira, businessman and youth leader, came to Dadaab aged seven with his family in 1991 after his brothers were killed in the civil war.

  Prologue

  The White House, Washington DC, 31 October 2014

  The members of the National Security Council were arranged around a grey table in a grey room without windows. On the walls, photographs depicted a sporty-looking President Obama on a recent trip to Wales for a NATO summit. The officials attending from the Africa desk were a middle-aged white man leaning back slightly in his chair; a younger one in a tight new suit who hunched forward and stared at a notepad; a short blonde woman who sat perfectly still throughout the whole meeting with her hands in her lap so that her impassive face appeared to float above the surface of the table; and the chief, a well-dressed woman in tweed skirt and matching tan shoes, expensive, who smiled and nodded and said little, just like the rest of them.

  I was there to brief the NSC about Dadaab, a refugee camp located in northern Kenya close to the border with Somalia. Since 2008, when al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida-linked militant group, assumed control of most of Somalia, the Horn of Africa has been at the fulcrum of what policymakers like to call the ‘arc of instability’ that reaches across Africa from Mali in the west, to Boko Haram in Nigeria, through Chad, Darfur, Sudan, southern Ethiopia, Somalia and on to Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east. Extremism in Africa has been rising up international agendas as terrorist attacks have mushroomed. Twelve months earlier, al-Shabaab had attacked Westgate shopping mall in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. And six months after our meeting, al-Shabaab would hit the headlines again with the slaughter of 148 students at Garissa University College in the north of the country. After both attacks, the Kenyan government claimed the gunmen came from Dadaab and vowed to close the refugee camp, branding it ‘a nursery for terrorists’. In essence, the NSC wanted to know, was this my experience? The US is the main funder of the camp.

  I had spent the previous three years researching the lives of the inhabitants of the camp and five years before that reporting on human rights there. How to describe to people who have never visited, the many faces of that city? The term ‘refugee camp’ is misleading. Dadaab was established in 1992 to hold 90,000 refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war. At the beginning of 2016 it is twenty-five years old and nearly half a million strong, an urban area the size of New Orleans, Bristol or Zurich unmarked on any official map. I tried to explain to the NSC officials my own wonder at this teeming ramshackle metropolis with cinemas, football leagues, hotels and hospitals, and to emphasize that, contrary to what they might expect, a large portion of the refugees are extremely pro-American. I said that the Kenyan security forces, underwritten by US and British money, weapons and training, were going about things in the wrong way: rounding up refugees, raping and extorting them, encouraging them to return to war-racked Somalia. But I sensed that the officials were not really listening. I was asking them to undo a lifetime of stereotyping and to ignore everything that they were hearing in their briefings and in the media.

  My friends, the refugees in the camp, had been so excited to hear that I was going to the White House! Here I was, at the pinnacle of the US policy-making machine, poised to exercise my influence, yet floundering. Raised on the meagre rations of the United Nations for their whole lives, schooled by NGOs and submitted to workshops on democracy, gender mainstreaming and campaigns against female genital mutilation, the refugees suffered from benign illusions about the largesse of the international community. They were forbidden from leaving and not allowed to work, but they believed that if only people came to know about their plight, then the world would be moved to help, to bring to an end the protracted situation that has seen them confined to camps for generations, their children and then grandchildren born in the open prison in the desert. But the officials in the grey room saw the world from only one angle.

  ‘If what you are saying is true,’ said the young man in the tight suit, ‘what accounts for the resilience of Dadaab for so long?’ He meant why had all the young men in the camp n
ot joined al-Shabaab? I had once asked that question myself. I thought of Nisho, the young man who works as a porter in the market, his face clouding into a scowl as he stormed out of an interview when I asked why he had not joined the militants: they paid well and he was poor. The very question was an insult. To him, and to all the refugees he knew, al-Shabaab were crazy, murderous criminals. I thought of the former child soldier Guled and the many like him, who had fled to the camp to escape the extremists, not to join them.

  But the young official persisted: ‘The picture you describe: a loss of identity, no work, hostile political environment, deteriorating conditions – these sound like the conditions for radicalization …’ The terms of the conversation seemed to allow for only two kinds of young people: terrorists and those at risk of becoming one.

  ‘Poverty does not necessarily lead to extremism,’ I said. In my head, images of the proud Imams defending their traditions against the murderous corruptions; of the determined youth leader Tawane, risking his life to provide services for the refugees when the aid agencies withdrew for fear of being kidnapped; of Kheyro, working to educate the children of the camp for a pittance; of Professor White Eyes broadcasting his reports on the camp radio. How could I convey their towering dignity, their courage and independence of spirit when they only featured in the official mind as potential terrorists?

  ‘Right, right,’ said the chief. There were no further questions and the meeting came to an early conclusion. I had fallen into the liberal lobbyist’s trap: if the youth were not at risk of being radicalized, then perhaps the NSC didn’t need to worry about Dadaab after all; the refugees could be safely forgotten. Such official attitudes have created a false debate: both those for and against the war on terror must make their arguments on the terrain of radicalization; as though young poor Muslims face only this choice.

  Outside, it was bitterly cold. At the rear of the White House, the balustrades of the twin white staircases were draped with black cloth and a giant inflatable pumpkin bobbed above the gently curving lawn. The First Lady was preparing for a party. Overhead, a helicopter carrying her husband buzzed the rooftops. I had once been a student of his, had sat across the table and shared Christmas dinner and stories. Looking up at his helicopter from the sidewalk of Pennsylvania Avenue, he was as far from me now as were the sands of the refugee camp. The refugees seeking sanctuary in his ancestral country saw themselves in his story and yet the most powerful man on the planet was no more able to help the most vulnerable than anyone else. His country would not accept the exiled Somalis, at least not in any meaningful numbers, and nor would any other.

  At a time when there are more refugees than ever, the rich world has turned its back on them. Our myths and religions are steeped in the lore of exile and yet we fail to treat the living examples of that condition as fully human. Instead, those fleeing the twenty-first century’s wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere are seen as a potential fifth column, a threat. Each year far too few are officially referred by the UN and given asylum in other countries. Thousands instead resort to the illegal route, paying traffickers for a spot on the boats or scrambling through holes cut in fences. I sympathized with the young NSC official struggling to make sense of the refugee experience. It is a wonder that so many die in the sea, reaching for another life, and not for a martyr’s ending. But they are the few. Millions more, the vast majority, remain in camps. And through our tax contributions to the UN, we all pay billions of dollars to keep them there. In Dadaab that means funding schools, hospitals and shipping 8,000 tonnes of food per month into the middle of the blistering desert to feed everyone.

  This book is a glimpse into the strange limbo of camp life through the eyes of those who allowed me into their world and shared their stories. No one wants to admit that the temporary camp of Dadaab has become permanent: not the Kenyan government who must host it, not the UN who must pay for it, and not the refugees who must live there. This paradox makes the ground unsteady. Caught between the ongoing war in Somalia and a world unwilling to welcome them, the refugees can only survive in the camp by imagining a life elsewhere. It is unsettling: neither the past, nor the present, nor the future is a safe place for a mind to linger for long. To live in this city of thorns is to be trapped mentally, as well as physically, your thoughts constantly flickering between impossible dreams and a nightmarish reality. In short, to come here you must be completely desperate.

  PART ONE

  Ma’a Lul – Famine

  1

  The Horn of Africa

  In the lands of the Somali, it had barely rained for two and a half years. From the dagger point of Cape Guardafui, the very Horn of Africa aimed at the belly of Yemen, to the hills of Ethiopia in the west and the plains of Kenya in the south, the year 2010 was dry. The nomads and the farmers saw the clouds scudding east from the Indian Ocean over the red plains and the yellow hills, but no rain fell. They saw their animals weaken and their crops struggle to stand with the weight of the dust, and they began to worry.

  There are three seasons here: the Hagar, Jiilaal and Gu. The Hagar is the windy season, from May to September, when the Indian Ocean monsoon blows clockwise taking the cool water from the southern seas up the coast of East Africa, around the curve of Arabia, Iran and Pakistan to Bombay, the ancient trade route of the Swahilis. Since at least 1000 BC, the dhows have sailed east in March returning in September, riding the anticlockwise currents that take the now warm water south again. With the monsoon, India is only three weeks from the coast of Somalia. Against it, the journey can take three months and is often fatal. Thousands of miles from the coastal ports of Bossaso, Mogadishu and Kismayo, trade in the interior of the Horn of Africa still keeps time with these natural rhythms.

  Once upon a time, when the climate was predictable, the Hagar would come to an end with the short rains, Deyr, in October that would give way to the steady accumulation of heat and dust that was the dry season, Jiilaal. If God willed it, the heat would build and build and turn humid, eventually breaking into the blessed rainy season from March to May: Gu. Then the thorn trees would spring immediately into a luminous green. Overnight, the sand would grow a light fuzz of grass. The camels and goats of the nomads would turn fat.

  Sometimes the Gu didn’t come. Then the heat that built and built had nowhere to go. When the Hagar arrived again, it swirled the desiccated sand into little twisters that had a life of their own, getting into everything. The skin on the animals shrank and the nomads watched the sky, full of fear of the abaar, drought. Sometimes the Gu failed for more than one year and that usually spelled trouble. In a part of the world where man’s struggle with nature for survival is so finely balanced, famine and war have always gone together. Now the Gu had failed for two years in a row and the short rains were perilously late.

  Under a hardening sky, the people grew uneasy. In the countryside, the land had nothing to give and so the inhabitants had nothing to offer their rulers in tithes or taxes. Across most of South-Central Somalia, the rulers were the Islamic extremist group al-Shabaab. It needed all the taxes it could get to fund its ‘massive war’ to drive what it saw as an infidel government backed by the United Nations out of Mogadishu and into the sea. Militias press-ganged truckloads of men away from the farms and forced them to the battlefield, and they took the meagre harvest as ‘Zakaht’ – a contribution to their holy war – and the people went hungry.

  To make matters worse, al-Shabaab had banned all food aid that bore the US logo and ejected the World Food Programme from its territory. At the same time, the US Office of Foreign Assets Control put sanctions on al-Shabaab: this meant jail sentences for aid agencies that paid the militants for humanitarian access which, after twenty years of war, was the norm for delivering aid in Somalia. And the few aid ships that did sail risked the infamous pirates. So, in what agencies had been calling a ‘perfect storm’ since the drought began two years earlier, the people of Somalia would face one of the most telegraphed emergencies the world
had ever seen largely without assistance.

  In the city, the ‘Battle of Mogadishu’, as al-Shabaab’s offensive was known, intensified street by street with trenches, snipers and indiscriminate shelling. The militants’ war effort drew all the men, resources and even children into the fight just as the twisters of the eternal Jiilaal sucked the dust of the hard-baked plain into the air and lent everything a brown tinge. The coming tragedy would be played out in sepia.

  After so much death, it was a wonder anyone remained in the country at all. No one really knows the population of Somalia but, during the past twenty years, somewhere between one third and one half of the six-to-eight million inhabitants had fled their homes. There were over one and a half million refugees abroad, many of them in the camps of Dadaab. The people who still lived in Somalia were the ones without the bus fare to flee, the ones with property to guard or money to make, or the ones who had simply lost their minds. Many were afraid to take the risk of running into the unknown and held to the adage, ‘better the devil you know’. Many more were so inured to the roulette of war, it had simply become the landscape of life. Guled was one of these.

  2

  Guled

  The last time the world had paid much attention to Somalia was in 1993 when two American military Black Hawk helicopters, part of Operation Restore Hope, were shot down among the tightly packed houses of Wardighley district of Mogadishu. Jubilant crowds had dragged the bodies of several US Special Forces Rangers through the streets. The US and UN withdrew and the world washed its hands of the country.