City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  At Istanbool the Turks were getting ready for Eid-el-Fitr, the end of Ramadan. It is a time of feasting and of alms for the poor. The Muslim world had mobilized, sending food and money to Somalia and Dadaab. The Turks had an ambitious – and highly popular – plan to distribute camels for Eid and they had contracted Nisho’s friend, a trader from Bosnia called Hassan, to supply them. The livestock market always jumps in the run up to Eid. Now it was red hot. Hassan was buying camels from Dadaab, from Garissa, from as far away as Somalia. The Turks agreed to set aside fifteen camels to be given as dowries. The community was very concerned that a generation of refugees with no hope of raising a bride price would go unmarried. Among the older refugees there was even a marriage lottery to combat the problem, where interested singletons would toss a shoe into a special basket at the mosque and an Imam would match one shoe from the male entrance and one shoe from the female. Hundreds were married in that way. Nisho had not got that desperate yet. When news of the camel scheme spread, he went straight to Hassan. A camel for a wedding was undreamed of. No family could resist. He was determined to get on the list.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Hassan, over a cup of tea in Bosnia. ‘When the time comes, send your uncle to me so that I can tell him what to do.’ Suddenly, Nisho’s courting had a deadline. Eid was only three weeks away.

  For Nisho, the influx that had begun as a challenge to his prospects was now beginning to transform them. The market was booming. He had more work than he could handle and, if God willed it, he would soon have the most beautiful wife, acquired at a bargain price. In hindsight he was convinced that God had already made the match. ‘It was written,’ he claimed. At the time though, he was less assured. Every day he worried if Hassan would keep his word. When his uncle went to Ifo 2 to talk to Billai’s parents, Nisho bounced around their compound in block B, unable to focus. He needn’t have worried.

  Billai agreed to the match perfunctorily: it wasn’t clear if she felt joy as well as duty, or if indeed she felt she had a choice. Marriage is, in Somalia, a relationship between two families and the feelings of the individual, while a consideration, are not all-important. For Billai’s exhausted and impoverished family, there was nothing to discuss. Even when Nisho’s uncle pressed for the wedding to take place unnaturally fast – the camels were coming – they raised no objection.

  And so, when Eid came and the camels arrived, Nisho led one of them from the market across the no-man’s-land where so recently had stood the makeshift shelters of N Zero, past Istanbool and along the lines of tents of Ifo 2 to Billai’s compound. It had already been swept twice since dawn. There, a sheikh, the uncles of the two young people and about two hundred onlookers watched as the camel was slaughtered and Nisho bowed his head to the Imam reciting a verse from the holy book. The formal part of a traditional Somali wedding is a male affair. Billai was waiting in her elder sister’s tent nearby. The women’s role is to dance. Once the legalities were completed, while the smell of the roasting camel meat beckoned the new arrivals from nearby blocks, Billai’s relatives danced the traditional Rahanweyn dances of Salidley in the af-Maay dialect that few in the camp can speak:

  This is the wedding for our beautiful lady

  This is the wedding for our son

  Praying for the newborn fruit of the union

  Raised in the camp, Nisho had never heard the songs before. But he had been taught how to memorize and recite a verse and even though he heard it only once that day, he sang it frequently ever after.

  By the time the meat was ready, the compound in S1 was overflowing with onlookers, coming to stare at the dancing and watching the food with anxious eyes. Inside the compound, in circles on mats, dozens of eager hands dug into the mounds of rice and meat, and hundreds more crowded into the open space along the road where Billai’s family ferried platters of food. A guest was never turned away from a wedding feast; the Turks had known their camels would be shared.

  Nisho himself didn’t eat. He was happy, in his clean white clothes, his chest pushed out as far as it would go, drinking in his success. Some people made fun of him for marrying on charity, but most of his friends were full of admiration. ‘He has a sharp brain,’ they said, ‘he timed it well.’

  In the evening, a vehicle with its hazard lights flashing took Billai from her compound across the wasteland and through the scrub, past the grave site and the hospital, to the older camp, Ifo 1. Down the twisting narrow alleys banked by high, unruly thorns the car nodded slowly over the ruts while a gaggle of women circled it and danced, dust playing up into the beams of the headlights. Inside his small one-room hut, the walls freshly mudded by his friends and the ceiling adorned with the names of famous soccer players – in marker pen, ‘TEVEZ’ – Nisho sat on his bed and waited. He was happy. He was now a man. He used to like sleeping alone, but from that day on he never could again. Billai and he had both been advised about sex by their parents and about respecting each other. ‘If one needs it, then you do it, and if the other, the same,’ Nisho summarized. Someone else had told him that if he had sex on a day other than Friday he would die. But that year Eid had fallen on a Tuesday and Nisho was not inclined to listen to that advice.

  The noise of the singing and rhythmical clapping approached. Soon it filled the night and flooded the little house. At the tin door with the ‘USAID’ pattern came a timid knock. The crowd roared and danced. The dust rose in ribbons cut with torchlight. Despite the famine and the suffering and the death, life was continuing. Marriage was a bet on the future, on the next generation: maybe this one would be the one. The one that would make the change.

  PART TWO

  Rob – Rain

  14

  Kidnap

  Finally, at the beginning of October, it rained. For several days the heat swelled to an unbearable clamour. It hurt the head. The wind barrelling from the north hesitated and when it came again whispering then rolling and somersaulting it blew from the east, cooler and with a humid scent. The brown clouds thinned to grey and then darkened. The first drops kicked up spikes of sand and for a moment the air was fresh with the wet wooded smell of water on dust. Then out of a smoke-black sky came a muscular wind. A heavy threshing of the trees preceded a shot, thunder, and then the roar; the surround-sound blast of the equatorial deluge that set roofs rattling like machine guns and puddles bubbling red.

  In Somali culture one wishes others bash bash – the blessings of the rain – but no one does that in Dadaab any more. For the farmers and the nomads the rain was the rhythm and compass of life. But in a makeshift city, atop hard stone, with no drainage and no sewage, water brought new terrors: flooding and disease.

  The rain transformed Ifo 2 into a glistening sheet of wet clay that was treacherous to walk on. Isha, Gab and the children built small dams of mud to divert the water away from their tent and piled up mats along the edge to stop the water coming in. Isha was a tough woman: she laughed at the irony. For months, they waited for rain. And now, ‘We pray to God not to let the rain come!’ The roads turned to slurry and Ifo 1 became a bog. In Bosnia market donkey carts and wheelbarrows strained through pools of liquid mud. Nisho had hated working there in the rain.

  ‘You must push the wheelbarrow with heavy force,’ he complained. ‘It pains the chest.’ Another reason that, this year, he was glad of the Turkish.

  Most afternoons, around dusk, the falling water slowed. The birds would begin again, louder, hysterical almost. The last of the sunlight filtered through the tangled shadows of the scrub and out of the ground came the bugs. Fierce squadrons rose in clouds: mosquitoes, winged ants, beetles, moths and daddy-long-legs whirling and zipping into the thick and heavy air like static. After a day or two, the red sand acquired a green tint. Another day and it was a thin beard, and then a proper coat of grass. The thorn trees unfurled soft little fists of iridescent lime and within a week the desert was a riot of colour stippling with life. Lilac flowers showed along the hard plasticky bark of the camel thorn and on the acacia were lit
tle yellow flowers that smelled of paper.

  It seemed as if the lid had been lifted from a pressure cooker. People breathed easier. Instead of a suffocating blanket, the sky billowed soft clouds. The light came clearer; the haze was gone and at sunset the plain was bathed in a pale fire of crimson and pink. The night was windless and silent apart from the steady drip of trees.

  An old man in Dadaab town with a hennaed beard that he washed and stroked lovingly when performing ablutions, picked his way gingerly among the puddles beneath the wet neem trees near the government offices. ‘Al-Shabaab. They like the rain,’ he said, to no one in particular.

  In August, after over a year of intense fighting, AMISOM had successfully pushed al-Shabaab out of most of Mogadishu. And in the countryside, the drought had hit them hard. Some were in fact among the new arrivals, fighters posing as refugees who had come with their families. It was not lost on them that, as a result of the emergency, the camp was brimming with white people – the largest concentration of potential kidnap targets within easy reach of Somalia. For a battered rebel group in need of foreign currency, it was a tempting scenario.

  The rain did not signal the end of the famine though. Herds that had taken three years to die could not be replenished overnight. The abandoned farms in Somalia would not yield harvests straight away and besides, many had fled not only drought, but fighting too; and the war didn’t stop for the weather. The rain simply made the humanitarian operation harder. Vehicles got stuck. Latrines collapsed. Epidemics raged.

  By the end of September, 63,000 had been relocated to Ifo 2. The overnight city had tents, schools and taps, but no hospital. The sick and malnourished refugees trekked instead to Hawa Jube and to the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Dagahaley, to the north. MSF-Switzerland who ran the facility had already doubled their capacity since the beginning of the emergency, but it was not enough. Another section, MSF-Spain, arrived to help.

  Among the volunteers from Spain who heeded MSF’s call to come to Ifo 2 were two women, Blanca Thiebaut and Montserrat Serra. They had arrived in Dadaab in August. Serra, aged forty, had taken a leave of absence from her job as a schoolteacher in Girona. Thirty-year-old Thiebaut, an agricultural engineer from Barcelona, was beginning her second stint working in Africa. It didn’t take long to become known in the camp, and for the refugees to form an opinion of you: they knew each officer working for the agencies, and they discussed their characters. After two months, the women were popular. People remembered Thiebaut fondly because, when feeding the malnourished children in Ifo 2, she had been unconcerned about being covered in vomit as the babies struggled to hold down the enriched milk.

  Around noon on Thursday 13 October 2011, Thiebaut and Serra returned to the site of a health post on the outskirts of Ifo 2 in the no-man’s-land between the new camp and Hawa Jube. That morning they had unsuccessfully negotiated with an angry group of locals, several of whom all claimed title to the same plot of land, and thus a share of the meagre compensation MSF would pay for siting a health clinic there. As ever, the local community would not let an opportunity for squeezing some cash from the internationals pass them by. Just before lunch, the Spanish women got a phone call from one of the local leaders urging them back again; the community had resolved the dispute, they said.

  The details are hazy, but soon after the women’s car reached the site, four men carrying hand guns and satellite phones, shot their driver, Mohammed Hassan Barre, in the neck, pulled him from the vehicle, and sped off. Twenty miles beyond Dadaab, the car hit a depression and broke an axle. The kidnappers abandoned it, the engine still running, amid the endless scrub of the border country. Footsteps led away into the bush and then divided. At regular intervals shreds of white tissue paper dotted the red sand, like a game of paper-chase, until the footsteps disappeared into the freshly filled rain gullies of the desert and the tissue paper ran out.

  Almost the moment Mohammed was shot and the car driven off, the local people phoned the authorities, reporting what had happened. Information travels fast in Dadaab, faster than the police. The UN security team were alerted and the police informed within minutes of the kidnap, but it took them over an hour to get out the door and on the trail of the hijacked car. When journalists called, the police told them they had launched a manhunt and sealed the border when in fact the vehicles were still in the compound.

  That morning, Nisho, back at work after a week’s honeymoon with Billai in his own hut, was distributing Turkish food in Istanbool. The hijacked car would have raced nearby on the other side of the fence but he doesn’t recall seeing it. He was busy. The first he knew, about an hour later, was many police cars speeding across the no-man’s-land towards Ifo 2. The supervisors at Istanbool told them to pack up the food. The news crackled through the crowd and the hundred or so beneficiaries in the line didn’t wait for the distribution: they ran. It didn’t pay to be around when the police were under pressure. Nisho and his colleagues locked the supplies inside and discussed which way to flee. The only place he could think of was home and he started running. Thousands of others did the same – everyone wanted to be off the streets, expecting the police to come charging through the blocks in angry revenge.

  In the back of one of those police vehicles crashing through the sodden desert was Sergeant Barnabas, a rather large officer with a laconic air. His tour in Dadaab had been longer than most and he maintained the unruffled insouciance of the weary professional. When the police vehicle got stuck, his group steadily tracked the stolen car on foot in the rain, finding it eventually at three a.m. The patrol slept in the bush and in the morning turned for home. They didn’t bother with the paper trail because, Barnabas said, ‘It meant nothing, in the rain.’ In a lonely concrete house somewhere in southern Somalia, the two Spanish women spent the first of 644 nights in captivity.

  Al-Shabaab denied responsibility for the kidnapping, but it is unlikely that hostages would be held in their territory without their permission. Al-Shabaab needed money which it got from taxing business in its area, including the business of sub-contracted kidnapping. In recent weeks, one British and one French woman had been taken from the tourist hotspot of Lamu archipelago on the coast. It seemed to be simply the latest act of piracy by pirates who had had their maritime operations curtailed by EU warships.

  If the emergency had an end point, this was it. Within hours, the aid agencies had suspended their activities. Registration of new arrivals stopped. Vehicles were called in, staff evacuated. The very people who had come to help were running away in fear. And three days later, on Sunday 16 October, Kenya declared war, for the first time in its history as an independent country, on al-Shabaab.

  15

  The Jubaland Initiative

  The office of the Department for Refugee Affairs is located along with the other government buildings in Dadaab town inside a circular fortified enclosure called the ‘Administration Police camp’. In his narrow low-ceilinged office, crammed with oversize furniture – a large black conference table and a bank of grey filing cabinets – the deputy head, Mr Lukingi, was having a bad day.

  Like the rest of the town, he had been woken in the early hours of the morning of Monday 17 October, by a police siren tearing open the soft quilt of the desert night. Roaring through the dark came convoys of camouflaged green trucks, lights burning, their cargoes of three thousand soldiers swaying in the back. The whine of engines straining in the wet sand was the sound of a new front opening in the war on terror: Operation Linda Nchi (‘Defend the Nation’) was under way.

  Now journalists had started coming and asking difficult questions. Mr Lukingi was a tall, earnest civil servant with an open face and sparkling eyes who had served in other towns in Kenya’s troubled northern region. He had a kindly reputation among the refugees and in the beginning he had walked freely in the blocks without bodyguards. But in his view the kidnap was the last straw. He lamented the difficulties facing those helping the refugees, like the kidnapped women.

  ‘
Every time you try and build something, someone pops up and claims the plot. Money is everything to these Somalis,’ he said. Under pressure, Kenyan officialdom was quick to abandon the distinction between refugees and troublemakers. Lukingi had come round to the view that the best thing for Kenya was to invade Somalia and make it safe for the refugees to go home. ‘We’ve tried to have a good relationship with these Somalis,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work.’

  Lukingi was a teetotal family man with good intentions, but he was angry. He was, in fact, resuming the stance of official hostility towards Somalis that marked the very history of the building he inhabited. The Administration Police itself had been created by the British in 1929 to fight ‘tribal’ insurgencies in northern Kenya. These subsided when Somalia became independent in 1960 and the Somalis living inside Kenya’s Northern Frontier District voted in a referendum for the region to become part of the Somali Republic. But the British ignored the vote and when Kenya gained its independence three years later, the ‘Shifta War’ began. For nearly three decades, Kenyan forces waged another war against Somali insurgents, only lifting the state of emergency in the north in 1992 – the year that Ifo camp was built.

  As he was being called upon to justify his government’s actions, to Lukingi it seemed that apart from a brief hiatus the Kenyan government had never not been at war with its Somali population. He struggled to maintain the party line that the invasion was in response to the kidnapping even though the pace and scale of the mobilization belied the government of Kenya’s claim.

  Lukingi dismissed the journalist and tried to get on with his work. Outside his office, two policemen sat discussing the events of the previous night.

  ‘There’s always profit in chaos,’ said one.