by Ben Rawlence
With new forces in charge in Kismayo, the supply chain for goods in Bosnia on which Nisho relied, was changing. Al-Shabaab had run a democratic smuggling racket: anyone with money could participate as long as they paid their dues. The KDF, however, allied to one clan, was more partisan and fights over the trade began. In the camps, already expanded beyond the budget capacity of the UN to effectively police them, law and order began to unravel. The refugees who had prayed for the Kenyan army’s success, now began to regret it. Instead of making Kenya and the camps safer, the invasion of Somalia was having the opposite effect.
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The smuggling gangs preyed on the camps and the women began to live in fear. As in the war zone over the border, a breakdown in security is felt first by women: cases of rape rose now by a third. Rape is a violation of Somali custom but the war had long since shattered tradition. As many as one in three women in the camp was being attacked. It was epidemic. Everyone knew someone, many had even witnessed it. Kheyro saw a woman being dragged into the bush not far from her house. Nisho and Billai knew two Rahanweyn women who were raped in Ifo 2, near Billai’s family compound. ‘The rape of the torch’, they called it, because one of the gang of attackers had shone a light in the girls’ faces while others pinned them down. Billai had known one of the girls. She was called Selma. After the rape of the torch, Billai’s family held a big meeting of all the relatives from Salidley. When the rains came in the new year, they decided, they would go back. But Guled’s mother-in-law didn’t want to wait.
After the explosions earlier in the year, Maryam’s mother had stalled. Water on the roads and the shifting war had prevented her from travelling, and then the debts that the family had run up at the shops; she wanted to return to Mogadishu with a clean sheet. But the rape crisis was too much. Caught between the bullets back home and the probability of being attacked in the camp, she chose the bullets. ‘Better to die in dignity,’ she said before Guled and Maryam accompanied her to the truck stop in Lagdera market where she boarded a vehicle to Somalia.
The month after her departure, an unprecedented appeal from the NGOs serving the camp further vindicated her decision. ‘The current situation in Dadaab is untenable … Aid programs are failing to reach basic minimum humanitarian standards … A change in approach to Dadaab is urgently needed,’ warned the coalition of agencies. One year after the worst famine in a generation, the world had all but forgotten the victims of twelve months before. The camps were perilously short of money.
The incessant wind of the plain had torn the tents of last year’s emergency to shreds. 130,000 needed replacements, or at least permission to build more permanent structures. Many had done like Isha and simply taken the poles and used them for the rafters of a traditional hut and thatched it with grass. And Isha’s children were walking long distances to fetch water – they were among the 50,000 in the new camps still without nearby boreholes and tap stands. Health care was also in jeopardy. By year’s end, Maryam was worried. She was nearing her term and the hospital was under severe strain as all those without clinics from Ifo 2 crowded the wards in Hawa Jube. More agencies were packing up and leaving.
The absence of the agencies had put years on Tawane. His middle had filled out and a soft halo of grey had settled on his crown. He looked tired. He had plans to hand over power, for his job was becoming impossible. It was hard to see how things could go on as they were: the camps were desperately overcrowded, facing a $100m shortfall, literally overflowing with sewage and sinking into the mud. The situation was, as the NGOs said, untenable.
The approaching election raised the tension further. Although nominally full of aliens, the camp was in fact a key constituency: teeming with Kenyans and people with illegal Kenyan IDs, as well as large volumes of people who could be paid to ink their thumbs in favour of one candidate or another. In Kenyan elections poor people are a commodity and violence is an inexpensive campaign tool. When a woman was injured by an IED planted beneath a voter registration centre in Ifo camp, the camp took it as a sign of things to come. The 2007 elections had seen over 1,500 dead across the country and half a million homeless. At the end of 2012, over 450 had already been killed in political violence and the country seemed on a knife edge. November was the bloodiest month: grenades in Mombasa, Garissa, six dead in an exploded minibus in Eastleigh, forty-two police massacred in Baragoi. If Kenya imploded too, where would the refugees go?
The unseasonal weather was playing its part too. By the end of the year, temperatures were already hitting their dry-season high of 105 degrees Farenheit. There were downpours in December and then suddenly days cooler than anyone could remember. It led to a feeling of unease and the minds of the refugees darted off in strange directions. Maryam and Guled endlessly debated going back to Somalia, she pleading to return so that she could give birth at home in Mogadishu, he still paranoid about reprisals from al-Shabaab. He had kept a low profile, told no one about his past and had had no specific threats so far in the camp, but the memory of that time was vivid and fresh.
Feelings about going home were unrelated to facts on the ground from the war; they were more driven by emotions and the perilous situation in the camp. People were wildly optimistic about peace in Somalia one minute and entirely cynical the next. In the morning Guled bemoaned the bombs and the rape and wondered aloud about walking to Italy or committing suicide. Yet by evening he would be holding forth about how Dadaab was home. Tawane’s surreal denial captured the mood perfectly: ‘The security situation is exaggerated. We also pray God.’
Nisho’s wife Billai clamoured to join her family on their impending trip back to Salidley. Nisho told her to do what she liked. For him, such discussions were moot. Life always seemed to frustrate his best intentions, and experience had left him with a fatalistic outlook, as though his life really was written and there was little point in contesting the matter. Acceptance of fate in Dadaab is perhaps the hardest thing about the refugee existence. Nisho’s grace, under such pressure, was uncommon.
In truth, the inhabitants of the camp were trapped; there were no good options, they had nowhere to go. Somalia was racked with violence and the resettlement process remained stalled. In the heat, the fear and the uncertainty, a stable point of view was a rare and precious thing. The refugees’ conversation was the dialogue of the prisoner with his own walls.
PART THREE
Guri – Home
26
Crackdown!
In the city, in the one-room bedsit on 12th street, there came a knock on the door. It was not unexpected. For weeks, the whole population of Eastleigh had been living in fear of rape, torture or, if they were lucky, of only being robbed of all the money in their pockets. The three young men inside knew that, one day, it would be their turn for the police to raid their home but there was little they could do to prepare. They looked at each other now and hesitated: their fate would depend on the mood of the officers on the other side of the thin sheet of plywood.
‘Fungua!’ a voice shouted in Swahili. Open!
The men scrambled to their feet. Two police officers stepped through the doorway and, with a glance, took in the scene. Two unmade beds and one mattress on the floor. Three men, apparently ethnically Somali, clean shaven and nicely dressed. Piles of books, open, on the beds, on the floor. It looked as though they’d been disturbed in the middle of a study session.
‘Nyinyi wanafunzi?’ barked the shorter one of the two. You’re students?
‘Ndiyo.’ Yes, said Fish.
‘Vitambulisho!’ Identity cards!
Fish and one of the other young men pulled out their student ID cards, which were, thankfully, up to date. The other guy, sleeping on the floor, was a resident of Dadaab and not yet an official student, although he hoped to be. He had no card.
‘Sasa?’ What now? asked the taller officer, who seemed more sympathetic, smiling the cruel greedy smile that Fish had come to dread.
Fish was routinely stopped in Nairobi. The police there detain a
nd extort refugees for sport almost, or at least whenever they need a little extra for beer or school fees. He had learned that the best response was to joke around, pretend that you’re Kenyan like them, and to speak Swahili first of all. English aroused their suspicions. And if they asked for ID, Fish always gave them his student card. Police were known to simply tear up refugee alien certificates and say that they didn’t count. The transformation from legitimate, protected refugee, to undocumented immigrant at risk of instant deportation was often just as fast as that. It was an effective way of sending someone scuttling back to Dadaab. And containing all the refugees within the camps was exactly what the Kenyan government intended.
On 13 December 2012 the government’s Department for Refugee Affairs held a press conference to announce that all assistance for Nairobi’s urban refugees would end and that all registered refugees in the country should return to the camps in Dadaab and Kakuma. The acting director of the DRA, Badu Katelo, a shy, bookish man given to outbursts when questioned too closely, said the directive was in response to the recent terror attacks in the country, implying that the refugees were somehow to blame. Since the army had invaded Somalia, there had been over thirty attacks on Kenyan soil against security forces and civilians alike. Seventy-six were dead, and hundreds had been injured. And a few weeks earlier, on 18 November, the capital had suffered the most lethal attack yet. In Eastleigh’s section one, a grenade had been tossed inside a minibus – known in Nairobi as a ‘matatu’ – killing seven and injuring thirty. Riots broke out. A wave of abuses against the Somali population of Nairobi followed, focusing particularly on ‘little Mogadishu’, Eastleigh, during which officers shouted at their Somali prey to ‘Go back to the camp!’ That was why the officers were in Fish’s apartment now. The Kenyan police called it a ‘crackdown’. In practice what that meant was just another licensed opportunity for extortion and recreational rape. The city that had been kind to Fish was now baring its teeth.
Kenya has always feared the nomads. It was a fear inherited from the British with their ‘kipande’ system – metal dog tags imprinted with the wearer’s three names (those of his own, his father and grandfather), location of residence and the white man who was responsible for him. A metal box, like a locket, contained the ‘pass’ and official information about the individual’s rights of movement. Through the idea of lineage and circumscribed reserves, the British sought to tear the nomad from his wandering ways and ground him in a particular place. A 1989 screening exercise headed by Kenyan ethnic Somali government officials sought to do the same thing. Locating people by their genealogy, it tried to distinguish Kenyans from foreigners, ignoring entirely the fluid history of the northern half of the country. Nomadism was not something the southerners were able to understand or accept. Thousands of people from both countries were erroneously deported to a Somalia on the brink of war. Now the government was at it again, trying to keep the outsiders penned in.
Several times a week throughout December and January, Fish was stopped by police and asked to show his papers. He usually made sure to sit at the back of the bus where he stood more chance of the police picking on someone else before they got to him. But one time, returning from class, he had jumped into the front seat without thinking. When he saw the large policewoman flag the bus to a halt at the entrance to Eastleigh where the traffic bunches as it leaves the highway, his heart sank.
She laughed when he offered her his student ID, and told him to alight from the bus.
‘We are not in an examination room, I am not your teacher! Do you have any other document?’
Fish spluttered, and fumbled for his other papers. But before he could show them, the policewoman lost interest.
‘What do you have?’ she asked. Fish knew what she meant.
‘Two hundred and thirty shillings,’ he said. (It was true. ‘Sometimes the police will put their hands in your pockets, so you’d better tell the truth!’ he explained.) The woman was busy with another passenger by then and she took the money he pressed into her hand and waved him off.
Another time, stopped while walking down his own street, he handed over his money and walked on, only to be stopped again at the corner. Fearful of incriminating the man who had just shaken him down to his colleague, he made a run for it, back to the first policeman and begged him to come to the end of the street to explain to the second that he should be allowed to pass. Each time an officer lazily waved a truncheon in his general direction Fish stopped and sighed and reached into his pocket for the money that would allow him to get home: they usually didn’t like less than 2,000 shillings ($22). It was expensive. He took to studying in the bedsit and avoiding class, only venturing out for food and essentials; his world shrank.
Fish was lucky: he had friends willing to send him what the Somalis in Nairobi called ‘caution money’. Those without were locked up until relatives came to post what was called ‘bail’, but since the cases never went anywhere and the charges were fiction, it could only properly be described as ‘ransom’.
For ten weeks, the wave of round-ups continued, mostly at night. Thousands were arbitrarily detained and had to pay $100, $200, $300 or more for release. Hundreds were beaten up. And rape stories piled up on the desks of social workers, too many to enumerate. ‘This is Kenya, we can rape you if we want to,’ a policeman told one woman stopped on 2nd street and detained in a police truck. ‘You are all al-Shabaab and you are all terrorists,’ a female police officer told another Somali woman.
On top of the 55,000 refugees in Nairobi with UNHCR mandates – asylum, permission to stay – Kenya reckoned there were at least another 100,000 undocumented aliens, mostly Somalis, in Nairobi too. And it wanted them all in Dadaab. The urban relocation effort, Mr Katelo said at his government press conference, would be ‘closely followed by repatriation of Somali refugees back to Somalia’. The Kenyan government seemed to think that the arrival of the army in Kismayo signified that southern Somalia was now safe for refugees to return. But peace is not so easily built.
Kenya was flying into dangerous territory. Refoulement, the forcible return of asylum seekers and refugees, is illegal under Kenyan and international law. On such a scale it would be unprecedented in modern times. Keeping refugees in camps and restricting their freedom of movement is also illegal, but Kenya had been doing it for so long it was a way of life that was no longer questioned. By the end of 2012, UNHCR had no money even to look after the existing refugees, let alone 55,000 more. At the beginning of 2013, the budget was one third of what it had been in 2011 during the emergency. The needs were around $130m. The budget was $35m. All UNHCR’s spare funds were being eaten by the Syrian crisis.
The crackdown provoked an outcry from Somali ministers and human rights groups as well as a court case. On 23 January the Kenyan High Court ordered the government to suspend the relocation plan while the court considered its legality. It didn’t matter: the beatings and the extortion were already having an effect. The crackdown had shifted the odds. Faced with the inevitability of beatings, imprisonment and extortion, thousands of Somalis in Nairobi chose instead the random dangers of the war and headed across the border or on to aeroplanes. The Somali embassy in Nairobi reported issuing ‘go home’ permits – basically a temporary passport for people who had fled the country without one – at the rate of a hundred a day during December and January. The UN noted 8,000 crossing overland into Somalia during January and February, but that was just the official figure. The movements were clandestine, so no one knew the real total.
If the Kenyan government believed that the only way to get the refugees moving was with a kick, it worked with Fish. In the bedsit in Little Mogadishu, the tense back-and-forth with the officers was eventually resolved without bloodshed for the surrender of 500 shillings. As the door closed on the officers, Fish and his room-mates breathed a deep sigh of relief, but it was the last straw. Staying in Nairobi was getting too expensive. At least for a little while, he decided, it was time to go back to the camp.<
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27
The Stain of Sugar
After two seasons in Ifo 2, Billai’s family were recovered from the famine. The rape and the declared intentions of the government of Kenya to return the refugees had primed the air. When the rains arrived in February, it was their cue.
Along the lines of the blocks in Ifo 2, the bare patches on the sand and every second tent gone spoke of a mass movement. The established refugees estimated that 50–80,000 of those who had come to Dadaab in 2011 had gone back by April 2013. The UN though could only guess at the numbers, since almost no one ever handed in their ration card. The card was currency: entitling the bearer to food every two weeks. Departing refugees entrusted their cards to family members or, if they were confident that they wouldn’t be back, sold them in the market for a tidy sum: 10,000 shillings for a family size 10 ration card, 5,000 for a family size 7. Tents were selling for 1,500 or 1,000 if they were damaged and old. Billai’s family gave her their card of family size 8 and they agreed that Nisho would send cash back to Salidley every two weeks.
One damp afternoon in February, Billai and Nisho walked with the family across the scrub to the stage in Dagahaley camp where trucks departed for Somalia. Billai’s family climbed on top of the cargo of a rusty ten-wheeler and people passed the younger children and their belongings up. Perching on top were two parents, eight children and one large mattress that Nisho had bought for them at a cost, he reminded people, of 1,800 shillings. At five p.m., under a rain-cleansed sky, they began the long journey back to Salidley. With the rains it would take a while.
