City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  Ero was a handsome man with white hair and a strong face built around clear steady eyes that sparkled as if with secrets. He had come to Dadaab from Ogaden three years previously. Rukia’s people had a history there. There are around forty thousand registered refugees from Ogaden in the camps. But leaders of the Ogaden community estimate that a similar number have registered as coming from Somalia because it’s easier. Despite a low-level insurgency in Ogaden and stories of the most brutal repression imaginable, Ethiopia is not classified as ‘at war’ like Somalia, and so its refugees do not enjoy the same prima facie recognition. Nationality in the camp is less a fact than a game.

  For twenty years Ethiopia has been fighting a brutal counter-insurgency campaign against a rebel group called the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) that wants to secede. Ero had been imprisoned in a military camp in a dusty desert town for collaborating with the ONLF before he escaped and walked five hundred miles to Dadaab. Now he ran a small stall in the market cooking cosmopolitan food for the traders in the morning – a mash of beans and maize that Kikuyus call githere, the Somalis call ambulo and the Swahilis know as mseto – and worked as a watchman at night.

  His clients were a group of twenty-five shopkeepers who contributed 300 shillings each a month for him to guard their shops in the poorer section of the market. The beat was a mixture of food and clothes outlets in a tinned alleyway behind the main sugar warehouses of Bosnia. When his son, Weli, came from Ethiopia seeking education he joined Ero in the guarding business in the evenings. Yesterday though, Ero had been worried. Some people he thought were linked to Ethiopian intelligence had come by his stall in the morning. He recognized their accents. ‘Why did you leave Ethiopia? How come you ended up here?’ they asked. He ignored them and they went away. But that evening, as a precaution, he told his son to stay in the mosquito net where he was sleeping on the ground in front of a lock-up shop while he did the rounds of the other shops himself. The alley was narrow and sloped into a gutter down the middle. Awnings were stretched overhead nearly touching in the centre with colourful scraps of cloth tied to the uprights.

  At about three a.m., as Ero came round the corner of the alley, he saw two men leaning over the mosquito net speaking to Weli.

  ‘Where is Ero?’ they asked him. ‘Where is your father?’ The boy was silent as far as Ero could make out. The moonless night was murky black. Pressing into the shadows, Ero moved towards them. As he was preparing to walk forward and say, ‘Here I am,’ the gun fired. He ran. More bullets followed him into the dark, loosed in the direction of the sound of his feet pounding on the sand. The third shot hit his shoulder, he fell down and crawled under some thorns. Footsteps hurried after him and he saw a torch, scouring the alley. Around another corner, as quietly as he could, he slid away on his belly. From a distance he heard the attackers retreating towards the junction of the alleyway with the main road of Bosnia where other watchmen had gathered together in numbers.

  ‘Where is Ero?’ the gunmen shouted.

  ‘We don’t know Ero,’ the watchmen responded.

  ‘You’re lying, where is he?’ But the men stayed quiet, a beat, then four of them bolted. That set the gunmen shooting. Three others were injured as they ran away, shot in the back. And two more died there. The last bullet, number ten that Kheyro counted, hit Atai – it was a nickname meaning thin. He was Nisho’s friend and skinny ‘like a branch’, he remembered. For six months Atai had worked in the market, calling Nisho when there was a deal to be had. They had unloaded a truck together three days before.

  Around the corner, Ero found people stirring from the noise and begged them to come and assist his son. Out of the warm patch of sand where the boy was soaking in his own blood, twenty people lifted him onto a donkey cart that took him to Ifo police station. They feared the killers were still on the loose in the market and so the caravan passed through Corporal Wanyama’s office before reaching Hawa Jube hospital, by which time Ero was also laid on the donkey cart, unconscious from his bleeding shoulder, and the boy was dead.

  The following day, Friday, the camp turned out in force for the funeral of Weli, Atai and the other man. They took the bodies to the sandy plain in Hawa Jube where the famine victims of N Zero had camped, where the MSF women had been kidnapped and where so many now lay beneath mounds of thorns, buried far from home. Nisho pushed his way to the front of the thousands of mourners and seized his turn with the spade to dig Atai’s grave. ‘He was my friend. I had an obligation,’ he said. Guled was there – it was near his home on the outskirts of the camp. He was amazed at the crowd. ‘They cannot all be related,’ he reasoned to himself, ‘they just felt the pain of humanity for the deaths of those innocent people.’ Professor White Eyes was there too. It felt like almost all the refugees had come. The killings were a shock and people felt a need to register solidarity and disapproval, sharing their fears and seeking comfort in rumours.

  Ero was not there to bury his son. He was in hospital in Garissa. That same day, while the mourners hid behind each other to shelter from a wind that snapped and pulled at the crowd, he got a phone call. ‘Are you still alive?’ someone asked before hanging up. During the two months it took for his shoulder to heal, Ero slept badly, in different houses, on the run. The threats on his phone continued. He wrote a letter to UNHCR and lined up in the hot sun for an interview in the UN field office, twice. A fat lady with short hair told him to change his SIM card to avoid the threats and referred him to the police. He laughed. No one in Dadaab had any confidence in the police to protect them, and especially not from the efficient and deadly Ethiopian intelligence services. But if the Ethiopian spooks really were that serious about targeting him, who was he? Either his story was an elaborate attempt at being fast-tracked to America or else there was more hidden behind Ero’s sparkling eyes than Kheyro would ever know.

  Later reports would confirm Ethiopian covert action inside Kenya including assassinations of ONLF leaders, but the only certain thing was there were many strands to the violence in the camps. Untangling fact from fiction was often impossible in Dadaab. And even then, people usually preferred a story based not on its relationship to truth but on its ability to make sense of the confusion of their own lives.

  Everyone had a different theory about the shootings. Nisho said it had been attempted robbery; the shops were full of sugar and clothes: this was the story he got from the loaders. They needed an explanation that was random; if it was a turf war then they too could be in the firing line. Professor White Eyes had heard a different version: it was a sugar clash, gangs had not been paid. A policeman claimed with authority that Mr Tall, the main smuggler in Ifo, had lost patience with the watchmen whom he had warned before not to leak information to the police about when his trucks were being offloaded at night. A UN official had it ‘from a reliable source’ that a new gang was trying to muscle in on Mr Tall’s patch. Meanwhile the Nairobi news media, without a single correspondent in Dadaab between them and without a second thought, were perfectly happy to attribute the killings to al-Shabaab. Further evidence, some journalists claimed, of the threat to Kenya, of the need to close the camps. So the prejudice against the refugees was built, one misconception at a time.

  31

  Sugar Daddy

  On Saturday 25 May, the day after the funeral, most of the young men of the camp sought distraction from their fears in the consolations of soccer. Boys without money were begging everyone they knew for the fifty-shilling entrance into one of the camp’s many cinemas. It was the UEFA Champions League final, and Bayern Munich were playing Borussia Dortmund at Wembley stadium in London. Nisho was disdainful: ‘I am not a fan of football, I don’t have time for that.’ But he was in a minority. Guled desperately wanted to watch, but Auntie warned him that she had heard there was going to be a police operation in the camps that night; crackdowns – the house-to house-looting and random beatings – usually followed security incidents as the moon followed the sun. It pained him to miss the match but he fol
lowed her advice and stayed inside, calling his friends for updates about the score.

  In fact, the police had no such plans. The chief of police in Dadaab was called Sharif, a tall, wide barrel of a man, with a clipped moustache and the habit of wearing both a pistol and an iPhone in his waist belt. That weekend he had other things on his mind. The sugar wars had exploded on his watch and he was deeply involved.

  As the sun approached the horizon, painting the plain with streaks of shimmering copper and bronze, the cinemas were packed for kick-off. In the police camp by the chicane road block at the entrance to the main street in Dadaab, the mess was noisy and full. A small television was perched on top of a double fridge covered in stickers advertising Guinness; the picture was bad and the jagged wire that poked out of the top had only a passing relationship with the nearby satellite dish corroding in the sand. The off-duty officers were more interested in their game of pool. Sitting on the wall, a collection of Kenyan women from Dadaab town – economic migrants from ‘down Kenya’ in jeans and tight T-shirts – monitored proceedings with a lazy eye. Tomorrow they’d be back again, dressed in their Sunday best for church. Both the weekend pastimes of the Bantu migrants from the real Kenya, drinking beer and church-going, of necessity took place within the protective cordon of the police camp.

  A little way off, under a very old, very twisted, thorn tree, the Muslim police officers distanced themselves from what they saw as the grubby goings-on of their Christian colleagues and concentrated instead on an enormous plastic bag of khat, several flasks of tea and half a dozen packets of cigarettes. Mohammed the CID, usually a staple of the khat table, was not there today. Perhaps something was going on.

  On a rough wooden table nearby, the Corporal took a commanding slug of his bottle of Tusker lager. He lifted his chin towards the sandy driveway that traced a wide circle in front of the entrance to the station itself. A Toyota Land Cruiser ‘Prado’ with blacked-out windows and Kenyan plates was parked before the faded-blue front door dusty with rot, its screen crammed full of desiccated insects. Sharif had visitors.

  ‘They’re even there now,’ he said to the Sergeant opposite him. The Sergeant, a thin man with small eyes beneath a pinched brow, narrow mouth and brown teeth turned his head to look.

  ‘Don’t stare!’ said the Corporal. Then, muttering under his breath, ‘Smugglers.’

  ‘We don’t need this man,’ said the Sergeant. And there were murmurings of drunken approval from around the table. The tit-for-tat killings had got out of hand and the rank-and-file had had enough. Around the table, the junior officers were discussing their favourite topic: how much the boss was making from the sugar trade and, by implication, how much they were missing out on.

  They reckoned that Sharif was collecting around 100,000 ($1,400) shillings per sugar truck that came into the country illegally. Now he was branching out to other sectors as well. Trucks full of flour stolen from the UN were heading back into Kenya with fake papers saying that they were imports that had been inspected. Some of the officers had been asked to draw up the papers. They thought something else was probably mixed in with the flour, but they had not been allowed to inspect the vehicle. They were angry. For months now, they’d been sent on patrol in one direction while trucks full of contraband passed by in the other. The bush surrounding Dadaab was full of unofficial tracks, but it was possible to predict which one the sugar trucks would take simply by going in the opposite direction to their orders. And their colleagues were getting killed.

  ‘Even the locals are pissed off,’ said the Corporal. At that time there were three to four trucks a day coming through, but it had been as high as twenty. Many weren’t even stopping off in Dadaab, but going straight to Nairobi, with the blessing of high-ups in the government: that was why Nisho had seen his income drop. Twice the Corporal had been sent in the wrong direction to avoid incoming trucks. And once, by accident, he had come across 200 bags of sugar hidden in the bush that were being transported by donkey cart to avoid the road. Several of those around the table had complained to headquarters in Nairobi about Sharif, but nothing had been done. For his staff, paid a pittance and risking their lives while he drove around Dadaab with a private escort of five armed men (not police officers), Sharif’s wealth was a terrible insult.

  His business was such an open secret that even the UN staff referred to him as ‘sugar daddy’. But he talked a good game and he cooperated with the US-funded community policing programme. And every morning his corpulent frame in its patent shoes and pressed uniform could be seen taking breakfast in the UN canteen. Perhaps it was a way of keeping the UN sweet, or maybe he just felt safer there than in the barracks. Not for him the rickety shack with ‘Hilton Hotel’ painted on it, surrounded by broken beer crates, bottles poking out of the sand and the wooden chicken hutch – a failed attempt to improve the policemen’s diet – slowly decomposing. The mess was also haunted by a terrible smell, as though somewhere a septic tank had gone horribly wrong.

  Darkness settled over the little tables under the thorn trees between the kitchen and the bar. The Corporal ordered some boiled goat and the talk moved on to other things: the Woolwich beheading in London. Three days earlier two British men of Nigerian descent had murdered a soldier outside an army barracks in south London. The weekend Kenyan newspapers carried a photo of one of the attackers, Michael Adebolajo, arraigned in a Kenyan court in 2010. Now the world wanted to know, what had he been up to in Kenya? Was he, the officers wondered, among the foreigners on their way to join al-Shabaab in Somalia that they had intercepted and arrested around that time? No, said one: ‘Those ones were Indian British, not Nigerian.’ And the paper said he had tried to enter Somalia by boat not by road.

  Adebolajo’s relatives claimed he had been tortured in Kenyan detention and then pressed by MI5 to work for them afterwards. It was probably not what Jonathan Evans, chief of MI5, had meant when he had said it was ‘only a matter of time’ before people trained in Somalia committed an atrocity on the streets of Britain, but it seems likely the three events were connected. As a later study found: more than half of recruits to al-Shabaab were motivated by police brutality. To the Kenyan police, the allegations were neither surprising nor avoidable and the conversation alighted on a more diverting topic: their women.

  Heavy, lubricated eyes slid along the wall to where the local women were by now draped over various officers younger and stronger than those nursing their beers under the tree. One girl danced alone on the sand, gyrating her behind to an imaginary tune. There were few female officers and they were in such demand they avoided the mess at weekends – it only caused trouble. The Sergeant passed round his phone glowing with photos of an overweight girl in her underpants, smiling shyly at the camera. The Corporal had married one of his colleagues posted to Dadaab but now she had been transferred to the other side of the country. Their children were at boarding school. He broke off from drinking to wish them good night on the phone.

  ‘Did you pray for me?’ he asked each one in turn, then he plugged his phone in to charge at the bar and returned with another round of drinks.

  Some minutes later, a flustered senior officer marched up to the table with a glare that brought the Corporal scrambling to his feet.

  ‘Didn’t you hear your phone? I’ve been calling you!’

  ‘It was charging inside …’ he began.

  ‘Are you sober?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the Corporal lied.

  ‘Come,’ said the senior officer turning on his heel in the soft sand.

  The table tried to resume its conversation but they had been disturbed. With the sixth sense of security men, they knew something was wrong. Soon, other officers were rising from their chairs, phones pressed to their ears, eyes suddenly alert, watchful, blinking back the booze. Then the Corporal was back, moving among the revellers lit by the weak yellow light of the bar, tapping people on the shoulder, speaking in their ear and dispatching them to the station. He was selecting the least intoxicated of
ficers to send into the night to go to the relief of Damajale police station forty miles away near the Somali border. It had been attacked by al-Shabaab. There was a shortage of drivers even on a weekday, and now they were nearly all drunk. The rapidly sobering-up policemen threw on guns and uniforms and climbed into the large police trucks waiting with their glassy-eyed drivers, engines running, lights blazing, and headed off towards the border, into the insurgent dark.

  The militants had picked their moment, a major soccer game on a Saturday night. They knew their enemy. In Damajale six were killed, including policemen, local government employees and a teacher beheaded. Two policemen were kidnapped and taken back inside Somalia. Forty-eight hours later, the assistant chief of the village appeared dazed and wounded after fleeing into the desert and wandering, lost. The al-Shabaab spokesman in Mogadishu gleefully accepted responsibility on the radio the next morning. But there was a sub-plot.

  ‘With al-Shabaab, we always get warnings,’ said a security officer at the United Nations. And the attack on Damajale, he said, had been no different. Disgruntled police later claimed that Sharif had been told by the NSIS, Kenya’s National Security and Intelligence Service, about an impending attack, but he had done nothing to reinforce Damajale. He was annoyed with the police there, the story went. They had stopped four sugar trucks on which he had given his word and for which he was expecting to be paid. The Corporal said by the time the relief party reached Damajale late in the night, the trucks had already been sprung.

  Of course, no one could say for sure. In his office in the Department for Refugee Affairs with its oversize conference table that left little room to squeeze around it, Mr Lukingi wouldn’t comment on the role of the police: ‘That’s a hot one!’ he said. Opposite, in the District Commissioner’s office, Albert, the DC, smiled and shook his head. ‘That man [Sharif] is operating on a very independent line.’ Whatever was going on, it didn’t look good.