City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  The day after the conference, after the black cars had whispered up the grey asphalt and swept the drowsy politicians on to another banquet and Hillary Clinton on to Tunis for another conference, this time about Syria, there was a footnote to the meeting: a US drone strike hit an al-Shabaab convoy thirty-five miles south of Mogadishu. US officials told reporters four people had been killed including one ‘international militant’. It later emerged that they were referring to a British man whom the Home Secretary had stripped of his citizenship two years earlier.

  To the residents of southern Somalia this was what the London conference was really about. For the next few months, clashes escalated in Lower Jubba near the Kenyan border, and al-Shabaab would gradually retreat from Mogadishu, leaving the ruins to AMISOM. It was the picture David Cameron had prophesied in his speech of a fragile city coming back to life. But in the rest of the country, skirmishes between al-Shabaab and Ethiopia and various other allied militias would intensify. The place to which Kenya’s President Kibaki wanted to return the refugees was still a war zone, but a war zone too risky for Western journalists to enter.

  22

  Y = al-Shabaab

  A few days after the London conference, on 29 February, when the secondary school exam results were due to be announced, Kheyro woke dreaming of Canada. It was a feeling, she said, of ‘bitter sweet’. She stared at the dead tree thatched around with thorns that separated her compound from the one next door. It would be difficult to leave. She knew everything about her neighbours in A2, their characters, how they walked, laughed, snored even. She had seen the children crawl, totter, walk and marry and give birth to their own. She would be sad to say goodbye. She didn’t dare allow her thoughts to dwell on her own family from whom she had never spent a night apart, who were as familiar as her own skin. No. She drew herself up and went through the little gate in the thorns to her neighbours and asked to borrow fifty shillings.

  The exam results were not yet pasted on the noticeboard at school but someone had come running saying they were online and, for fifty shillings, a man at the internet cafe would tell you the score. In Bosnia she waited in line outside the cyber shop. On its tin walls, the word ‘CYBER’ was painted in two-foot-high red letters underlined with a yellow stripe and, above the welded-steel door, also in red, ‘BOSNIA INTER’ but the ‘INTER’ was so crammed together it was nearly illegible. ‘NET’ had been added later, on an adjoining wall. The anxious chatter of the students filled the alley. They talked about the harsh grading of the Kenyan exam board. Hardly anyone ever got an ‘A’, but many failed, a ‘Y’. Afterwards, some of the students in the camp would stage a demonstration against what they saw as unfair grading, holding signs that read ‘Y= al-Shabaab’. They meant that those who failed to graduate high school would have no option but to seek an income working for the extremists. Kheyro thought it was a foolish threat. No one she knew had joined the group and she doubted whether any of her fellow students would even know where to find al-Shabaab in the camp. It was here, somewhere, that much was certain, but no one seemed to know any more than that.

  As each student came out of the cyber shop, they discussed, they shouted, they tried not to cry. Kheyro nodded her head and flexed her knees and looked around from side to side, her long face unsmiling. She was terrified.

  Inside the cafe, it was roasting hot. The walls were hung with a grey UNHCR tent. A shelf held the precious internet box garlanded with wires high up near the ceiling and on a narrow wooden bench divided with timber screens were five PCs scavenged from somewhere. Above them on the wall was a paper calendar with an image of a waterfall sparkling in a forest and a dusty printer sat on the table. Kheyro took the vacant seat next to the shop owner and gave him her name, her admission number and her school. He looked up the information and wrote her results on a piece of paper and folded it in half. Kheyro took it without looking.

  Outside, she walked a distance away from the line and unfolded the paper. She breathed out. It was okay. She knew she wouldn’t cry. D+. Not enough for Canada but okay. She headed for home light as air, empty. The stress, the uncertainty, the panic was over. But as she walked she returned to herself, inhabited her limbs again and resolved to go back to school to sit the exam a second time. In the compound, her mother Rukia looked up at her from where she was squatting on her heels. Kheyro told her the score and then explained her plan to return to school to increase her score and go to Canada.

  ‘No,’ said Rukia. ‘You’ve spent eleven years in school. Now it’s time to get money. It’s time to work.’ She had had enough of carrying wood. Kheyro didn’t argue.

  After the KCSE results, the competition for incentive jobs in the camp gets tough. The week after the announcement, a position with the Lutheran World Federation received so much interest, application forms were being auctioned. There was less competition to work as a case worker at Handicap International in the new camp, Ifo 2. Only twenty-seven people applied: eight women and nineteen men. Kheyro got the job.

  In the compound, they held a party to celebrate. The incentive salary was 6,500 shillings a month ($75). Kheyro bought Coke and Fanta. Rukia cooked rice, spaghetti, bananas and camel meat. It was the first time the family had ever cooked camel meat for themselves. It tasted ‘sweet!’ Kheyro said. In Somalia they would have had milk and meat every day, Rukia grumbled, and Kheyro would have been married with children by now. But on the other hand, education would transform her life, she would choose her own husband and she would escape the brutality of circumcision that had caused Rukia to lose so many children in childbirth. She was happy for her daughter, for the life ahead of her.

  With her first salary, Kheyro bought new clothes for herself, shoes and lotion. She gave her mum 5,000 shillings. Having money was a new experience. Joining the ranks of female breadwinners gave Kheyro confidence and postponed her relatives’ unkind chattering about marriage. With all the men killed or idle or overlooked through the agencies’ policies of gender balance, working women were the norm in the camp. The men felt emasculated, but Kheyro with her real job was happy. The concerns of men, she had learned, were not to be entertained. At least, not until she had studied all she wanted.

  Each day, she rose at five, prayed, made breakfast, released the goats and walked through Bosnia out across no-man’s-land. It was an hour’s walk through the scorching heat and choking dust across the barren plain to the Handicap office in Ifo 2, but if she took the bus every day she’d have no money left at all. She took to wearing a niqab veil to protect her face from the dust – at least that was the public reason she gave. It was also a display of status. The poor farmers and pastoralists of southern Somalia didn’t veil their faces. Niqabs were an urban thing; favoured by the prosperous, and those with an illicit mission. It made Kheyro feel sophisticated.

  Handicap International was a concrete building next to the larger compound of Save the Children on a long wide street that stretched away into the ochre horizon until it simply blurred with the sky. Outside was a square of desert fenced off with rusting equipment: swings, a roundabout and a sign on the fence that said, ‘CHILD-FRIENDLY SPACE’.

  Kheyro’s office was a clean white room with a bench and a steel cupboard. She wore overalls and plastic gloves and massaged patients with impaired mobility. Some were missing hands – the al-Shabaab punishment for stealing – and others had lost legs as a result of shrapnel, gunshots, IEDs, landmines. Many of the disabled had recently come from the war – that was why the clinic was in the new camp, Ifo 2. And then there were the Down’s syndrome babies, a surprising number, with a talisman from the Koran sewn around their necks. The ones who were unable to crawl Kheyro stretched over a prickly plastic ball and rolled them in opposite circles, the massage oil dripping from her gloved fingers. The babies usually screamed and went rigid, their eyes adult and wide. Kheyro did about ten cases a day.

  Kheyro was giving most of her income to her mum and life in the compound had already changed: her brother’s and sisters’ diet
improved; three months of saving yielded a radio and so, in the mornings when she swept the kitchen and set the kettle to boil, she listened in the dark to the clipped burr of the BBC Somali Service. Kheyro was transformed from virtuous student to commanding professional in hot pink hijab with a matching pink mobile phone; when she spoke now, people in the block listened. And Rukia no longer went to the Horseed Hotel to ask those who could read to see if her name was on the resettlement list. Kheyro, though, still had plans to further her education. She had heard that there were scholarships for teachers to go to college, but first she had to become a teacher. Each month, she was keeping back a little of her salary for what she referred to as her ‘ends-meets’.

  23

  Buufis

  Kheyro was not the only one dreaming of Canada. That same February, Tawane heard that his sister and her children had finally been selected for resettlement to Canada. Although he had pushed the idea of resettlement out of his mind to focus on the crisis, the news flooded him like a sickness and he struggled to function. His friends recognized the problem immediately; they smiled at each other and rolled their eyes. ‘Buufis!’ they said. It was a common affliction in the camp, but, as Professor White Eyes said, ‘Buufis is like HIV, it has no cure!’

  Buufis is a word coined in Dadaab; the name given to the longing for resettlement out of the refugee camps. It is a kind of depression rooted in an inextinguishable hope for a life elsewhere that simultaneously casts the present into shadow. There had been thirty-two in Tawane’s class at primary school. He was nearly the only one left in Dadaab. Twenty years of waiting and hoping can curdle the spirit. It is hard not to see the process as personal criticism. ‘I don’t know what kind of mistake I have done,’ Tawane lamented. ‘Maybe I didn’t get picked because UNHCR is very pleased with my leadership system. I have a right to go, I have overstayed here.’

  Tawane did not in fact have a right to go, but he did have a right to what the UN calls a ‘durable solution’ to his displacement. This is supposed to involve return, integration in the host country or resettlement. Since neither integration nor return is possible for the inhabitants of Dadaab, everyone waits for resettlement. But the slots offered by the receiving countries are few, and the criteria, at least on paper, strict. The proper criteria for resettlement abroad for protection purposes under UN rules are a specific threat to life, not a generalized fear of war. Thus, those refugees with stories that involve the targeted killing of a family member or discrimination on the basis of ethnicity are more likely to be selected. This led to what the anthropologist Cindy Horst calls ‘identity reconstruction’, rewriting a different history for yourself. Before things recently changed, a whole industry had sprung up to help: advising on cases and brokering resettlement slots, which traded at up to $10,000 dollars. The mukhalis (brokers) told the refugees what to say, helping them with the paperwork and even buying and selling identities.

  The photos on ration cards are often grainy. You assumed the name and the story of someone who looks like you – to the busy officials, just another woman in a hijab – and swapped ration cards. When the embassy folk came to take your particulars, it was the fingerprints of a new person instead. People often take the children of relatives abroad, tearing families apart. And new families are made in a hurry, as marriages are rushed just before resettlement flights since to go abroad is, naturally, to become rich and to become the family’s representative (and breadwinner) overseas. Even the UN recognizes the informal benefits of resettlement to the extended family.

  ‘If I can get one person resettled, I have helped five hundred,’ said the head of protection for UNHCR in Dadaab, an imposing former Zimbabwean divorce lawyer called Leonard Zulu. For precisely this reason, in the past some refugees had had their resettlement slots traded without their knowledge by a corrupt cartel within the UN and, having had their ration cards cancelled, the refugees were left hungry and abandoned. But since 2001, when UNHCR investigated and sacked dozens of its own staff, that wasn’t supposed to happen any more. What remains is simply mistrust: the UN mistrusts every refugee story and the refugees are convinced that the UN is secretly planning to sell their only shot at freedom.

  Resettlement is a long process, usually taking years: phase one, interview, phase two, then medical exams and security checks. It is also flawed. Those who have committed human rights abuses are not supposed to be eligible, but that didn’t stop Rambo, Tawane’s father’s old foe, from going to the US ten years ago. Hundreds of minor, and even some major, war criminals are walking freely around Western streets, carrying new passports. But since the UN has never done a comprehensive mapping of abuses committed during the twenty-five years of war, these crimes are recorded only in the trauma of the victims and the oral histories of opposing clans. In any case, since the suspension of services, staff from the embassies were refusing to come to the camps and most of the resettlement cases were on hold. The drawbridge was being pulled up.

  Professor White Eyes and his grandmother had been listed to go to the US two years before, but they had heard nothing since then. ‘My mind is infected with resettlement,’ he said. ‘Sometimes I cannot even remember my name. I have to go to the market and do research and ask people who am I?’ For those slated to go, life is paused: they cannot plan or dream, they are only waiting. But the numbers leaving are fewer than two thousand a year, while the birthrate for the camps is around one thousand a month. Many young men and women commit suicide when their cases fall through, or simply out of frustration at the waiting.

  Still, some people forlornly checked the lists on the noticeboard in Hagadera or the wall of the Horseed Hotel in Bosnia market each week. Tawane did. Nisho did. Guled didn’t bother. He had told no one of the circumstances that caused him to flee and so there was little chance his case would even be considered for the lottery. Mahat didn’t bother either. ‘It’s not even in my mind to check,’ he said. And in some ways he and Guled were better off not thinking about it. ‘The UN is unfair!’ Nisho fumed.

  Every time one of Tawane’s friends left to go abroad he wouldn’t sleep the whole night. ‘You will be very much stressed and ask why has God left me like this?’ When a friend goes away, ‘the tears are dripping, actually,’ said Fish. They are tears of self-pity as well as loss. In a culture centred on leaving, to remain in Dadaab is seen as a kind of failure. ‘Real men are those who go to the USA,’ said one young boy. The young people in the camps grow up discussing the relative merits of the few countries that accept Somali refugees – the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden and Norway – as if they too will soon be going there, as if they know all about it.

  ‘Child benefit is good in the UK,’ one young man had heard. ‘But there is a problem of wives there. They are too westernized. They can take you to court and redeem all the money in your bank account.’

  The pain of buufis was bad before Facebook. Now the youth of Dadaab are tormented by it every time they look at their phones. Some cope by inventing parallel lives online, imagining that they are already there; listing their hometowns as ‘Cleveland, OH’, or ‘Minneapolis, MN’, posting photos of cars and urban skylines that they have never seen.

  By March 2012, conditions in the camp were sliding back towards emergency levels. The month before, MSF had launched a report titled ‘Dadaab: Back to Square One’. The suspension in services was having a serious effect, they said. Health posts were being staffed by volunteers for weeks on end. Malnourished children were filling the outpatients’ ward again, joining those who had been saved in the famine who still needed up to a year of supplementary feeding. If services didn’t resume soon, MSF warned, ‘the health of the refugees will continue to deteriorate with life-threatening consequences, with aid organizations helplessly witnessing the situation.’

  Several schools had not opened since January as teachers failed to show up for work. Emptying latrines was among the services not classified as ‘life-saving activities’ and they were overflowing. The rats, a
nd cholera, had moved in. Hagadera was the worst affected and in some parts of the camp a sweet haze hung motionless in the dry-season heat. People defecated in the bush at the edge of the camp among the snakes and the scorpions beyond A1 and A2 block where the bandits often visited. But when the police cars did their rounds there in the outer reaches, the men in long beards gripped their sticks in annoyance and looked down, avoiding the gaze of the Kenya police.

  Putting aside his frustration about the lottery, Tawane tried to focus on the urgent practical matters at hand. ‘Things are moving well,’ Tawane told his friends, but it was more wish than fact. He was, in truth, operating beyond his emotional and physical limit. But instead of quitting or running like the others, he began to perceive the turn of events as a challenge to his sense of duty. He talked to Fish, lost in the flare of the city lights, but Nairobi held no magic for him. Tawane’s family was here.

  Then, at the beginning of March, there was an attack in Nairobi in which grenades were hurled at a bus station killing ten and injuring sixty. A few days later, Tawane got the text message that he had been expecting. From an unknown Somali number came a promise: ‘We know the bad work you have been doing with the infidels. God willing, Islam will catch up with you, wherever you are.’