by Ben Rawlence
There were many people crowded around, staring, come from all over the camp. The police meanwhile were pursuing vengeance, sweeping the new blocks of Ifo 2 from Istanbool north, towards where Isha was hurrying to her new home in block M2 with her husband, Gab.
She saw the police come like a wave down the street chasing someone she knew. It was Bishar, her neighbour from the block. He had been part of their group that had walked out of Somalia the year before. Isha said to Gab ‘run!’ and he did.
Bishar, too, instinctively (and hopelessly) tried to hide in one of the toilet huts. The police got him. As they beat him he cried for mercy, ‘La’illah! La’illah!’ but, methodical in their rage, the police carried on. Isha and some other women moved towards the police, to beg on the victim’s behalf. But they raised their sticks to the women and screamed, wild with fear, ‘Toka!’ – ‘go’, in Swahili.
Bishar’s face was torn and his skin was coming off. The officers dragged his mutilated body into their vehicle and drove away, then, after a few metres, threw it out of the back and roared off. Isha and the other women ran to Bishar and wrapped him a cloth. They carried him back to his house in Isha’s block where they revived him with water and milk. One hundred people were indiscriminately arrested following the explosion. No one knows how many more were simply beaten and left for dead. Bishar had a broken rib but it would heal. The damage done to the idea of security in the camp would not.
The police now feared the refugees: just as Tawane predicted, to them, every refugee was a suspected terrorist or, at the very least, complicit in harbouring al-Shabaab. And the people, in turn, shrank from the police. Mistrust festered on both sides. For the agencies it was an impossible bind; they didn’t know which way to turn. Travelling with police escorts was a liability, yet moving unprotected in the camps was unthinkable. In rapid succession, two more bombs made the suspension in services permanent. Violence became the new normal and the volunteer model pioneered by Tawane and his youth umbrella began to harden from a temporary solution into a new status quo.
On the morning of 20 December, Guled was complaining about the price of sugar in a shop near Bosnia’s Sufi mosque. In explanation, the shopkeeper simply said ‘security’ and rolled his eyes towards the moody sky. There had been another explosion the day before in Hagadera camp, at the same spot as before. In a row outside women were selling vegetables on the ground. Beyond, another group sat – backs straight, ankles crossed – surrounded by soft pillows of hay: fodder for the goats of the camp.
The shopkeeper poured the sugar into a plastic bag, tied a knot in the top, and placed it on the counter. Guled reached into his pocket to count out the precious notes, too many of which he now laid on the wooden board and then – ‘Gow!’ The noise. It was a massive sound. New to Guled. He had heard explosions in Mogadishu but never anything so close and so obliterating as this. Leaving the sugar on the counter, he bolted. A huge cloud of smoke mushroomed into the sky above him and sand showered down. The vegetable-sellers were hurtling in all directions. It was chaos.
The IED appeared to have missed its target. The police car that had so narrowly escaped turned sideways in the road and officers fell to the ground, in shock, already shooting. Guled slipped into an alley towards Lagdera livestock market and cowered there with dozens of others, eyes wide and white as the bullets whistled nearby and more police came running.
Down the street, at the junction where the road goes south to the C blocks or west past the ice factory, Nisho was crouched in a truck among sacks of potatoes. He had been standing on top of a truck in the sun, sweat streaming down his back, unloading bananas and potatoes when he heard the blast.
In the bed of the truck, Nisho was visible. He could hear the police approaching. The thwack of their sticks. The yelp of their victims. He slithered over the tailgate and began to crawl underneath the truck. If he could just get behind the wheels, he thought. Then a hand gripped his foot and he was sliding backwards along the ground. Out into the glare of the sunlight. A shadow loomed above him. Crack! Crack! Crack! The stick came down on his back and legs. And then the hand released him and the shadow moved on down the street.
As Nisho limped home bloody, the police surged on through the narrow alleyways of the market, a tide of nervous violence. Eight of them burst into the restaurant at the end of the street. The manager knew their faces; they were the regular police from the camp: they ate here sometimes. But now they were thrashing people left and right and sending the customers scurrying. The cashier didn’t run. He was beaten for a solid three minutes until he lay still on the dirty sand floor. Then the officers took the strong box from under the table next to him, smashed it open and removed the 75,000 shillings ($950) that was inside. When the cashier went, later, to the police station to file a complaint, he came face to face with one of the men who had beaten him. The cashier said nothing and went home, disconsolate.
That morning, the police had broken into one shop after another. Kasim, the bookshop owner, had locked his store and turned away only to watch as several policemen smashed the door of the shop, tossing books into the street. When he returned later in the afternoon, 30,000 shillings was gone.
Guled waited among the goats until the commotion was further off. Then he made a break for it and ran. Out the back of Lagdera, down the alleys behind the mechanics’ shops and along the road to Hawa Jube, home. When he got there, Maryam and her mother had been terrified for him: ‘Are you okay?’ they asked. ‘We were calling you, why didn’t you answer?’ His phone had been on silent, in his pocket. It was hot with missed calls.
‘I left the sugar,’ was all he could say.
‘We don’t care about that, just that you are okay,’ Maryam said. She had been at the food distribution centre, closer to home. She had just exited the warehouses and two weeks of rations were sitting on the ground as she looked for a porter to carry them for her. When the blast tore open the sky, she thought to herself, ‘It’s going to be another Mogadishu here!’ People were running everywhere, spilling rations on the sand. Maryam left the food and ran. For the next two weeks, the family would have to depend on their neighbours. Soon after she got home, the police had passed through the blocks looking for the men. Mercifully, Guled had missed them.
That evening, Maryam’s mother got a call from her brother in the UK. He had heard the news. ‘Where you come from there are bombs,’ he said. ‘And now here there are bombs too. Better the place you know.’ Her desire to go home was stronger than ever. She began to make preparations.
The next day the police tore through the camp again. In Hagadera they targeted the newer blocks, where the recent arrivals were concentrated: L, M and N where the huts clung to the end of a gully that had been transformed into a small cliff with the rains. In Ifo they had no plan. Around nine a.m., seven officers charged into a hotel on the edge of Bosnia. ‘Go back to Somalia,’ they shouted as they beat the watchman to a pulp and loaded him into their truck, along with the hotel’s cash box. A worker in a mechanic’s shop in Lagdera remembers fifteen officers swarming into the garage, every one of whom put a boot in his belly, he claimed.
Tawane rushed to the UN compound to report the assault to the UN protection team, but they could offer no help. Because of the shutdown, they said, the team was unable to come to ‘the field’, the phrase they used for the world outside of their secure compounds. ‘You must do what we used to do,’ they told Tawane. So Tawane’s youth umbrella, with no experience of human rights work, went house to house collecting testimonies of rape, beatings and looting. In Hagadera, they compiled a list of 126 victims and passed on the particulars to the UN. The volunteers in Ifo did the same. One of the women they met in the hospital was Fartuun.
Fartuun was outside in her compound when three officers came in, shouting in Swahili, ‘Wapi mzee?’ – Where is your husband? – and ‘Lete pesa!’ – Bring money. She told them she was a teacher and that her husband was away. Then two of them lifted her into the house. One locked the d
oor from the inside while another gripped her neck with his right hand and unzipped his trousers with his left. She struggled, in vain. ‘After a while, I felt sperm rolling over my thighs,’ she said. In total, at least seven women were raped and over $300,000 dollars was missing across the camps. No one, of course, was ever held to account.
That same morning that the refugees came under attack, Kenyan F-16s bombed the Somali town of Hosingow, eighty miles over the border. Major ChirChir claimed they had struck an al-Shabaab camp, killing seventeen militants but eyewitnesses in the high street of Hosingow told a different story. ‘They dropped bombs and went away without knowing who they have killed,’ one told a journalist. In the camp, the Somali radio bulletins spat the news like fat in a pan. To the refugees, it all seemed a crude sort of revenge.
Later in the afternoon, when the F-16s had crossed back into Kenyan airspace and the police were back in their base, drinking beer, Guled returned to the shop in the market. Outside was a huge crater. Soon it would fill with water, deep enough for a man to drown. The shopkeeper had kept the sugar for him. Nisho too had come to the market, looking for his due. But the truck had departed without paying him. With the looting and the destruction, many shops were closed, vehicles stopped coming, and people stayed huddled inside. The economy was hit hard.
Initially, Professor White Eyes considered himself lucky. His vegetable stall was a little further inside the warren of alleys of Bosnia, too narrow for police cars and generally avoided by officers scared of patrolling on foot. As soon as he heard the blast, White Eyes hurriedly closed up and slipped out the other side of the market, towards the section where he lived, opposite Transit, the Ethiopian block, E2. When his grandmother had been billeted to E2 all those years ago, she didn’t know the hidden benefits that living in a predominantly Ethiopian neighbourhood would bring. For many years she was offended by the alcohol and the loose goings on among their women. But by 2011 her sinful neighbours were increasingly an asset. The minorities like the Sudanese and the Ethiopians maintained gates at either end of the block to control entry and exit – and when the police cracked down on the refugees, they tended to be safe. It was always the Somalis they were after.
When White Eyes got back, E2 was quiet. There was a new hut in his grandmother’s compound – freshly mudded and roofed and equipped with a bed and furniture. It had a new inhabitant too: the illiterate girl Habibo. Although he had done well from the influx, the 50,000 shillings he had saved, while a fortune for him, was not an impressive dowry in the Somali wedding stakes. Fortunately Habibo’s family were very poor. White Eyes was frank. He told her he could afford no gold, no camel, no vehicles to escort her from her house to his during the wedding. ‘I am a refugee,’ he said. But with a downpayment of 25,000 shillings, she had accepted. It was still their official honeymoon and coming home to the new house with the beautiful wife made White Eyes happy and proud. ‘I loved her and she loved me so much.’ Habibo had never been to school, she was a modest woman, he thought. But for the invasion and the bombs, things might have been so different. The ripples of the war, however, carried far – into homes, upsetting lives, turning everything upside down.
Before the honeymoon period was over, the supplier of White Eyes’ vegetables in Garissa called to say he would no longer be sending any to Dadaab. With the insecurity on the roads, he was getting out of the vegetable business. While White Eyes looked for another supplier, he still had to pay the rent on the shop, and, in debt from the wedding, his cash flow was critical; within a week he was bankrupt.
‘Togetherness we can do more,’ was what marriage meant for White Eyes, the values he had intended to instil in the illiterate girl. But it was not the life Habibo had imagined. ‘Bring, bring!’ she commanded. She needed money. She needed things. She seemed contemptuous that her poor husband couldn’t provide. And so, as he had done so many times before, White Eyes dragged himself back to Bosnia, to start all over again.
In the aftermath of the bombing spree, there was a flurry of meetings. The UN was frantic. The whole existence of the aid operation was under threat. Refugees were still arriving from Somalia, outriders of the famine, but the registration centres were closed. No one knew the full effect of the suspension of services, but anyone could see that the slums that had been emptied were starting to fill up again, as those without friends or relatives in the blocks found shelter in Bulo Bacte and N Zero. With the rain, measles had licked through the camp, then cholera; with nearly 300 cases by the end of November, MSF set up a separate ward. At a loss, the security heads summoned the refugee leaders to the UN compound.
Tawane and the other refugee representatives in their dusty shoes sat in rows in the big white hall with the air-conditioning and the bougainvillaea framing the windows and the UN staff in their sparkling white T-shirts. Tawane was in the middle, his face pinched and serious. Because of his superior English he had been nominated as interpreter.
‘The youth,’ the UN security officer said, would need to choose ‘which side they were on’. He was an ex-military man and had the military tendency of always looking for targets, of always seeing the faceless enemy dressed in civilian clothing. Tawane was dismayed at the implication that their loyalties might be with al-Shabaab, at the lumping together of the educated older refugees with the troublesome newcomers. He had worked hand in hand with the UN during the famine and now with other UN offices – and still they didn’t trust him?
Nonetheless, he saw what was needed. In the early morning mist a few days after the bomb, figures had been seen digging on the road from Hagadera to Dadaab. When approached they had fled into the bush. That main road to Dadaab carried everything – food, fuel, medicine, police – and it needed to be safe. The camps that orbited Dadaab town were only five miles of flooded desert away from the UNHCR compound, but they were at risk of being cut off. And so, when the UN staff in the big white hall asked for ideas from the youth about how to improve security, Tawane was full of contributions. He suggested gating the blocks, tarmacking the roads to the camps, and patrols. Tarmacking was expensive, there was no budget for that. But patrols cost no money, as long as they were carried out by volunteers. The meeting actioned it. Meanwhile, the UN found the money to invest in two miles of blast walls, new steel gates and another line of razor wire around their own compound. The new walls were so high that the agency people could not see out. The separation of helper and victim was complete.
Beyond the walls and wires of the compound, the refugee leaders organised five men and five women per block and took turns patrolling the main roads of the camp. In Hagadera camp that made 675 people altogether, one group from six p.m. to two a.m., another from two a.m. until dawn. Every night, torches traced figures of eight along the roads, one metre at a time, looking for IEDs in the sand. It was dangerous work. The police wouldn’t do it. The UN was, in effect, placing the refugees in the firing line. It was an enormous gesture on behalf of Tawane and the youth and one that al-Shabaab would not appreciate.
20
Nomads in the City
The pressure was making Tawane ill. Every day he had meetings with the UN, the police and the agencies in Dadaab, and every night he coordinated fuel, water, food in the blocks. He had bought another phone since the old one was ringing all the time, no one could ever get through, but now the new one rang constantly too. He was not sleeping enough and Apshira was worried about his health: he had gone down with malaria. And she complained that he was endangering the family. Idris, his father, wore a permanent look of ‘I told you so.’
The police and the UN security team were pressing the refugees for information about the bombers. Dadaab is a tight knit place, they argued, positively teeming. It is not possible for people to lay bombs without anyone seeing. But none of the refugees talked. They knew that talking didn’t pay. When officials arrived, faces drained of all expression and questions bounced off the crowd’s silence like water off a leaf. The police were losing patience. A big meeting was called in what
people thought was the safest place in Hagadera: the mosque. The host community, the sheikhs, the refugee leaders and the police all came together. It was, Tawane recalled, ‘a very serious meeting’. He was taking anti-malarial drugs and sat in the back of the large tin hall carpeted in plastic mats along with his good friend Fish. He wasn’t feeling well. The government asked the refugees to be frank. Only one of them spoke up.
Ahmed Mahamoud Mohammed, whom everyone called ‘Sanyare’ – small nose – was on characteristically outspoken form. Middle-aged with short grey hair, he was the leader of the Community Peace and Security Team (CPST) which was composed of volunteers who liaised between the UN, the police and the refugees; one for every block. A prominent businessman with a taxi business, a small shop and a family of seven, Sanyare was well liked.
‘We know who is doing this,’ he said. And he located the nub of the problem. ‘If we point fingers at those involved, who will protect us? If that man is arrested, his relatives can react and kill us.’
The only recourse for the authorities was another threat. The refugees faced a Catch-22 – even if they did know who was behind the attacks and they spoke out, they were at risk from al-Shabaab reprisals; if they didn’t, the government would lose patience and force them back to Somalia. This is our home, Sanyare said, and he urged people to cooperate with the authorities: ‘If you have any information about the perpetrators, please share it with the police or the CPST.’
That evening, just as it was getting dark, Sanyare was outside his mud and tin house in block C1 when a man with a covered face shot him in the head. Three days later, in a restaurant in Bosnia market, the CPST leader for Ifo camp was assassinated in similar fashion.
