City of Thorns

by Ben Rawlence

  Even before the ink was dry on the agreement, donors had begun revising their programmes and NGOs rushed to draw up projects supporting returns. Budgets were cut, then cut again. Red lines on protected services were redrawn, revised downwards. The World Food Programme had switched the rations to cheaper sorghum. Resettlement quotas shrank. Core UN positions were abolished and the health budget raided; the lines at the UN field offices and the hospitals got longer.

  Kenya had succeeded in constructing an official narrative about the camp, one that had an ending. And even though it was a fantasy, that narrative arc cast a cruel shadow. Daily life simply got harder.

  ∗

  There was a palpable shift in the mood outside the camp too, as blame for the violence erupting onto the streets of Kenya’s cities was placed squarely at the refugees’ door. As Albert sweated in the shade that day, two terror suspects were shot dead by police in Mombasa. They were said to be behind the attack the previous Sunday, 23 March, on the ‘Joy in Jesus’ church in Likoni, Mombasa, in which six worshippers had been gunned down and twenty wounded, including several children. Although the two dead suspects were neither Somalis nor refugees, the government was happy to blame the Somali refugees. Angered perhaps by the delay in repatriation, or maybe moved by some darker motive, flailing officials reached for what they could control, in the only terms that they understood: force.

  The Monday after the church shooting, 24 March, ignoring the High Court decision that had ruled it illegal the previous year, the Minister Ole Lenku reissued the government’s relocation order for urban refugees. It was as if since Westgate a circuit had been established and the Kenyan security apparatus hard wired. Like a switch, when a bomb went off or a shooting happened, a radical cleric was invariably sacrificed and refugees hunted.

  The following week, three bombs ripped through Eastleigh killing six and injuring twenty-five. The next day, 1 April, another controversial preacher, Abubakar Sherrif, was shot dead by government assassins, his bullet-riddled face all over the newspapers. His nickname had been makaburi, ‘graveyard’, in Swahili; he had foreseen the manner of his own death and told anyone that would listen, including Al-Jazeera, that he was a dead man walking. Indeed, the government had made a habit of eliminating troublesome clerics. Predictably, riots followed his killing and the government announced another crackdown against illegal aliens in the cities, this time called ‘Operation Usalama Watch’. ‘Usalama’ means security in Swahili.

  ∗

  Fish had gone back to Nairobi at the beginning of the year to enrol for the new semester. Although Nairobi carried risks, at least it offered a glimmer of progress, a future, while the view from Dadaab led nowhere. With Usalama Watch, though, the risk : reward ratio of staying in the city was rapidly diminishing.

  A police truck appeared on the corner of 11th street in Eastleigh, next to the Nomad Hotel, where, daily, officers stopped those passing and demanded papers and money. Fish was forced to turn again to tapping his friends in the diaspora for caution money but the costs were becoming unsustainable. And not having money was unthinkable: those who couldn’t afford the petty bribes were taken to Kasarani football stadium in the city. Four thousand were rounded up and detained there in the first weeks of April. At least two people died: a pregnant woman who was beaten up, and a six-month-old who starved to death after being left in an apartment when her mother was suddenly taken, just one of the three hundred children separated from their parents in the operation. In the stadium that activists had christened ‘Kasarani Concentration Camp’, the detainees were supposed to be ‘screened’, whatever that meant. In theory perhaps an interrogation about one’s Kenyan ancestry, in practice most likely simply a question of cash. Journalists and human rights workers were forbidden from entering. A smuggled photo showed hundreds of men incarcerated in enormous cages in the stadium like battery chickens.

  Public support for the pogrom against Somalis was high; the atmosphere in the capital was vicious. In the tall Nation media building in downtown Nairobi, the managing editor admitted his shock: ‘I’ve never seen a public mood like it,’ he said.

  One day when Fish had only 2,000 shillings for the police instead of the usual 3,000, they shouted at him ‘Panda Gari!’ – get in the van! But after some special pleading they took his money and let him go. Soon after, one day in May, the apartment block was raided again at three a.m. He listened as officers rattled through the building thumping on doors with truncheons. ‘You have to believe that God will protect you,’ he said. ‘It’s so frightening.’ He fled to Dadaab again.

  Back in Hagadera he hung out with Tawane and dozens of other friends who had disappeared for years into the urban sprawl and now suddenly reappeared at home to escape the punitive taxation and the beating in Eastleigh. ‘If someone doesn’t pick [up] the phone twice, you know they are in Kasarani,’ said Tawane. The ’92 group started a self-help fund to bail out people they knew.

  Any supposed terrorist with 3,000 shillings could buy his freedom. The fact that it was all about a show of force – and extorting money – seemed apparent from the shambolic nature of the screening process that was unable to identify even Kenyan citizens, some of whom were mistakenly deported to Mogadishu and Dadaab. In the end, only several hundred, mostly Congolese who had never been to Dadaab, were deported to the camp. And those, after being installed in a tent on a scorching square of sand, didn’t stay long. Within two months they had all melted away, back to the city once more.

  If the actual implementation of the round-ups was a sorry, and brutal, failure, the diplomatic consequence was a stunning success. When they were sworn in a year before, President Uhuru Kenyatta and Vice President William Ruto had been awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court. Western governments had warned of ‘consequences’ for Kenya if it elected the two leaders suspected of inciting the previous violence in 2007 and claimed to be preparing for a diplomatic relationship limited to ‘essential contacts’. A year on, the front page of the weekend Nation carried a photo of a smiling Kenyatta relaxing in State House receiving the envoys of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia in a joint visit to pledge moral and material support for Kenya’s war on terrorism. It was a fantastic turnaround.

  The final irony was that Usalama Watch, although responsible for a temporary exodus from Eastleigh, had little effect on the size of Dadaab. AMISOM’s dry season surge complicated the plans for returns as southern Somalia was instead gripped by fierce fighting. Trade routes were disrupted, aid remained warehoused in Mogadishu and food prices spiked again. Across the south people struggled towards the roads to raise weak hands to passing convoys that roared by, spitting gravel into a cloudless sky. One hundred thousand were freshly displaced within Somalia in 2014, some of whom made their way across the militarized border to Dadaab. To the Kenyan government’s chagrin, instead of shrinking, Dadaab was growing once again.

  40

  A Better Place

  On Monday 8 December 2014, with great fanfare and after several false starts, a light-blue bus with the words ‘Sabrin Bus Service’ painted on the side above yellow, green and red waves, departed Dadaab camp for Kismayo in Somalia with ninety-one people on board. They were no longer refugees. They were, over a year since the signing of the agreement, the first convoy of ‘spontaneous, voluntary returns’: they were going home.

  The 450-kilometre journey through the barren border country would be completed in two phases with Kenyan and Somali police providing security escorts. Although the Kenyan army was in control of Kismayo, al-Shabaab moved as it liked in the surrounding countryside and inside Kenya too. The previous week, in two shocking attacks, al-Shabaab had massacred twenty-eight bus passengers and then thirty-six miners, all Kenyan Christians, near the border town of Mandera. The refugees’ return was not due to the fact that war was over; on the contrary, war was everywhere. ‘Peace’ had been redefined. Heavily armed peacekeepers still feared to venture outside their bases, while civilians wer
e expected to carry on with daily life. And, bravely, they did.

  The return package that had taken nearly a year to approve was as follows: when they left Kenya they would be given a jerrycan, a mosquito net, a sleeping mat, one blanket, one solar lantern and phone charger, and sanitary kits for the women. Upon arrival in Kismayo they would receive plastic sheeting, nails and fifty metres of rope, a kitchen set, three months of food rations and $150 per person up to a maximum of $600. All of which, the UN hoped, would be enough to get the returnees established in their new life.

  It was a hard time to be starting over. On the same day as the convoy made its way towards the border, in a press conference in Mogadishu the UN Humanitarian Coordinator appealed for $863 million to meet urgent needs in Somalia in 2015: ‘Over 3 million Somalis are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance,’ he warned. ‘Of these, an estimated 1 million are unable to meet their minimum food requirements – a 20 per cent increase compared to the same time last year.’

  And this time the camps offered no relief. There was hunger on both sides of the border. Dadaab was stricken with another, more severe, cut in rations. It was becoming an annual event. WFP was facing a global funding crisis and in November 2014, while they launched a glossy campaign to raise money for their Syrian operation, the organization slashed rations in Kenya again, this time by an unprecedented 50 per cent. They hoped to resume full feeding in the new year, but for the mothers in Ifo 2 that laid their children at the gate of the WFP food warehouses in protest, the prospect of several more weeks without food was impossible. ‘What do you want us to do?’ they asked.

  ‘We are preparing for deaths,’ a UN health worker confessed. Not among the healthy adults – an adult could get by on two months of starvation rations – but newborns, sick children and the elderly. It was the vulnerable that would pay the price for the world’s indifference. There was a crime here on an industrial scale: confining people to a camp, forbidding them to work, and then starving them; people who had come to Dadaab fleeing famine in the first place.

  The weak and hungry mothers of Ifo 2 saw the ration cut as a deliberate attempt to starve them into returning. Whatever the WFP asserted, it began to have that effect. In Isha’s block, M2, populated by many of the poorer refugees, she claimed that ‘Not 20 out of 180 families in the block want to stay.’ When the rains stopped and the roads north cleared, they’d be gone. ‘A person who has eaten sorghum porridge for breakfast only, it cannot sustain him the whole day, and after nine days he has not even that? Such people cannot stay here. There is no point even waiting for the UN,’ she said.

  It was the poorer newcomers who would become the poster children for the UN’s return programme. Those who had failed to establish themselves in Dadaab, for whom leaving the camp was a gamble worth taking. Food was the only thing keeping them here and when that ended, so did the reason for staying. As the biometric proved, many had already left. People like Hawo, Isha’s neighbour and fellow would-be solar engineer, who had given up waiting for the Indians. But, where Kenya wanted to see a flood of returnees, there was only a trickle, and at less than a thousand a month it would not outstrip the birth rate.

  Ranged against the Kenyan desire to see Dadaab levelled was not just the law, but all the forces of human ingenuity and determination that had raised a city in this most hostile desert. Dadaab worked. It served a need, for the miracle of schools and hospitals and a safety net of food, and for respite from the exhaustion of the war. It had become a fact. Through the accumulated energy of the generations that had lived there it had acquired the weight and drama of place. It was a landmark around which hundreds of thousands oriented their lives. In the imagination of Somalis, even if not on the official cartography, Dadaab was now on the map.

  The food manifest was only one measure of population, there was no official census. The nearest approximation of a head count was a polio vaccination campaign concluded the previous year. The result was an explosive, closely guarded secret. Marking each person’s thumb with indelible ink so as not to treat them twice, the health workers had immunized over 600,000 people, aid workers, the host community, as well as refugees. It raised the possibility that Dadaab was in fact bigger than anyone knew, attracting migrants from across the region with its industry of aid, commerce and services; an urban mecca on the arid red plain, the biggest city for 500 miles around. The city made of thorns now had a life of its own, beyond the refugees: it would not be so easily destroyed.

  Despite Isha’s struggles, she was not planning on going anywhere for the time being. The dream of India had died a slow death. It was well over a year since she had filled in the forms for the UN passport in the UN compound with Sam, and she had heard nothing. Having placed her faith in Bunker and the Barefoot College, resigned her position at the school and abandoned her business, she had been forced to take credit from the neighbours to supplement their diet until her husband, Gab, found work washing dishes in the school where she had once been a governor. ‘I had never dreamed of working in such a dirty place,’ he said, but if he stopped the family would go hungry. He looked old, his hair had gone white in the camp, but he took his descent in status with forbearance. Isha vowed to sue the Indians and the UN for compensation whenever they showed their face again: ‘I will fight them!’ she said. In fact, after Westgate, the government had fired the head of immigration and fifteen other officials for selling passports and visas to Somalis and suspended the issuing of all passports, refugee travel documents included. But no one had told Isha and Hawo, or even Bunker himself.

  She and Gab still dreamed of their old life in Rebay, and they planned to return there eventually. For now, though, Isha’s commitment to her children’s education was such that she was ready for her family to endure the hunger of the ration cut in exchange for school. This was the prize for which Isha had marched her children across the baking desert three years before. They knew it, and they would not let their mother down. With their newly minted English, the boys had written all over the tin door to their hut the proud declaration: ‘PEOPLE WHO LIVE THIS HOUSE HAVE EDUCATION.’ In case, even for a moment, they ever doubted that the journey had been worth it.

  ‘It has made me to think a lot. It is worrying me. How to feed my family,’ said Nisho of the drop in food. In the last days of Ramadan, Billai had successfully given birth. They called the boy Abdishafee. He was a plump, light-skinned child with Billai’s delicate features. But the price of his health was Nisho’s hunger: he made sure Billai had enough to eat, but for himself, he could not remember the last time he had been full. He was thinner, malnourished. The tables had turned. Billai was settled now, she had stopped her nagging and looked after the baby. It was Nisho’s turn to worry: ‘Fatherhood has changed me,’ he said. ‘It has made me more frightened.’

  When he went to work in the market, he worried about Abdishafee falling off the bed, or crawling into the fire. And he worried about his own strength; he could not work as hard. There had been a huge fire in Bosnia; among the victims was his wheelbarrow. The impact on the market in general and on his business in particular was big. ‘If I get 100 shillings in the market, I must decide, shall I give it to Billai and the baby or shall I eat lunch?’

  The middle class with incentive jobs, or the wealthy with their businesses, were insulated against the ration cut. For the lower classes, it was simply another Kenyan tryanny that they were forced to endure. But Kenya was a familiar tyrant. After twenty-five years, Somalia was a foreign country.

  ‘If I go back, what will happen to me there – I don’t know anyone, I don’t know the market, how will I survive? If you leave your home, where you grew up, you will become a nomad!’ said Nisho. And he did not use the word in a good way. ‘If they say “go” I will think about it then, if I must.’ As long as there was Ifo camp, in the little mud house in block B, there would be Nisho.

  He thought instead about trying to find work on the trucks again, driving to Mogadishu. It was the only real alternative to lift
ing sacks. When he and Mahat talked about it, Mahat, in his lackadaisical way, wanted to come too. ‘Maybe I’ll get a job in Mogadishu,’ he wondered, vaguely.

  ‘Yes, sure,’ said Nisho, preoccupied. Mahat was young, he was aimless, the world that was available to him held little promise and he was content to go with the flow. Nisho though, had responsibilities. And so the next morning, after a thin breakfast of sorghum porridge, he rubbed his red eyes and itched the skin around his mouth that had begun to crack and go white from a lack of vitamins and dragged his heavy limbs to the market to begin once more the long day’s hustle for a precious dollar, or, if he was lucky, maybe two.

  Not everyone’s luck was poor. Tawane had navigated the tangled politics of return with skill. One day in November, he went with several other members of his NGO United Youth for Peace and Development (UNYPAD) for a meeting in a mock-castle amid tall hardwood trees on James Gichuru road in Nairobi. Built as some colonial folly by a white man with a sense of humour, the castle now housed the Department for Refugee Affairs, and the new commissioner, Mr Komon. Tawane had an appointment to discuss modalities for cooperation between the Kenyan government and UNYPAD. He stood ready to assist with the returns, eager to take the Kenyan government’s money, and help out other members of the ’92 group where he could.

  Fish was one of UNYPAD’s first employees. He was back in Nairobi now, building relationships with aid agencies at their headquarters, while he tried to complete his studies. He had also found a job on the quiet. It required him to sneak around though, and he still hoped for bigger things. UNYPAD carried a weighty cargo of dreams. It was the last chance for a generation who felt they had been left behind: ‘No resettlement, no integration in Kenya, no life in the camp, no nothing … it’s disturbing you know,’ said Fish. ‘If UNYPAD fails, I think the earth doesn’t want to hold us any more.’