by Ben Rawlence
Grufor had become an informal refuge for victims of rape and domestic violence, which flourished in a place where men are stripped of their traditional power. The democratic UN camp elections robbed the male-dominated clan of its organizing role in social life. The agencies tried to give the few incentive positions they had to women to encourage what they called ‘gender balance’ and, apart from those who chose to hustle in the market for a pittance, the remainder of the male population had no ability to provide for their families. They felt emasculated and camouflaged their injured pride in khat and idleness. There was little in their world that they controlled and so the one thing they sought to master, above all else, was their women.
Muna and Sweetee were introduced to Grufor by its chief survivor, Zim Zim, a slender and bewitching Somali girl who, twelve years ago, had fallen for an Ethiopian neighbour, a proprietor of a tin-can TV cinema. Her family had resisted the match and ever since had refused to acknowledge her existence. In an effort to try and change her mind about the Ethiopian, Zim Zim’s sisters had kidnapped her and doused her with boiling water, but the rubbery scar on one shoulder simply became a promise that she could not betray. She saw her family every day but said nothing, and they would not cross the threshold of the unkempt compound that she shared with other disgraced single women where Sweetee and Muna now came to chew khat in the afternoons.
‘Somali culture should change,’ Zim Zim said. ‘They are too close-minded.’ Something Muna could appreciate. ‘Refugee life has opened up new worlds to us,’ Zim Zim said in her steady monotone voice, devoid of hope or feeling, as a long-haired, light-skinned child the colour of a hazelnut rolled in the dust at her feet.
As well as Zim Zim, there was Hamdi – a large plump woman with beady black eyes, an enormous muscle of a tongue and a beauty spot in the middle of her uncommonly fair cheek – and many others. There were the sisters whose father had disowned them for their bad habits of drinking and shouting and taking off their clothes in public. And the girl who had grown up in E1 and went about unveiled, her breasts hanging barely concealed beneath a filthy T-shirt, hair uncombed and her two children by different fathers feral in the block. Muna became part of their world.
And so, for Muna and Monday, there began a destructive triangular dance between Grufor, the police post and Transit. Monday would return home to find an empty tent in Transit and the children lodged with the neighbours and lose his cool. ‘The lady was driving me crazy!’ he said later in guilty explanation. ‘There are people who are running Muna, pushing her to a bad life.’ When she came back later, drunk, he hit her. And when Sweetee intervened, he hit her too.
Muna would go then to the police post to report the incident. And there, in the little tin-roofed building behind the limp Kenyan flag, she would find Corporal Wanyama (‘animals’ in Swahili) or his deputy Felix. Wanyama’s official title in the Kenyan system was ‘Officer Commanding Station’, or OCS, but everyone simply referred to him as ‘the in-charge’. He was a kindly middle-aged man with a gruff manner and a wide girth who struggled inside standard-issue trousers that were patently too small. Felix was a more slippery individual. In the camp the police enjoy a privileged position among the hordes of the vulnerable. They had long become accustomed to never doing their duty for free. ‘I will happily assist you,’ Felix reportedly told Muna, ‘if you will assist me.’ Muna claims she resisted the man and his advances, that she told him ‘no’. But over time, alleged Monday, ‘That “no” became “yes”.’
The police had money. They had khat. And they had the only legal bar in Ifo: a small wooden shack with wooden benches beneath some twisted thorn bushes where off-duty officers soaked in the shade. The mangled carcass of the police Land Cruiser destroyed by the bomb on the road to Dagahaley lay nearby. Sweetee liked to go there and drink and Muna learned to go with her. Both swore that they never did what most of the E1 girls did in return for beer. But there are many people in E1 who’ll swear otherwise.
Whenever Muna came back from E1, Monday was usually even more enraged than before. Sweetee was philosophical about their fights, and put the blame firmly on the elemental corruption of violence; she had, after all, had ample experience: ‘You know how when someone has started to beat you, he starts enjoying it …’
And so the whole cycle would begin again. Monday would take the unattended children to S3 block to stay with the Sudanese and Muna would lodge another complaint in the police station and get to talking with Felix. Muna denied any relationship but she warned Monday that if he continued to abuse her, Felix would put him away for ‘a good ten years’. Twice Felix arrested him on suspicion of domestic violence, simply because, Monday thought, he wanted to spend the night with Muna while Monday slept in the single stinking concrete cell in the police compound. Wanyama would hear no criticism of his deputy and dismissed Monday’s complaints. ‘That man cannot control his woman,’ he said of Monday. ‘That is the problem with that man.’ And he advised Muna to stay in Transit and Monday to go back to S3 with visiting rights for the children only. To avoid trouble, Monday agreed.
Monday longed for their resettlement case to proceed swiftly. When we get to Australia, he told himself, ‘everyone has a right; they cannot put you in jail for no reason. Things will be different there.’ He planned on staying apart from Muna, but close enough to see the kids. Muna had different ideas: ‘If he drinks, he always comes to me, wanting to force me. In Australia I need to be far from him, at least an airport away.’
This made Monday sad. He could not abandon Christine. He drank in the compound of CARE next to the Red Cross where he worked, in the bar the aid workers called ‘the Grease Pit’ furnished with concrete benches beneath neem trees on ground studded with decades of beer caps. Monday liked to sit there, mix a glass of Guinness with half a bottle of vodka and reminisce.
‘The memories of my childhood connect with the present,’ he said. ‘I cannot allow Christine to be an orphan like me. Something you have witnessed as a child you cannot forget. I grew up swimming and fishing in the Nile. Christine won’t have that; here it is dry. The crocodiles are there, in the Nile. You can see them walking outside. There is a small boat made of wood with a paddle. You go, there are very big fish. You take them with a boat. You swim within the water but the crocodile usually comes out in the evening. You take a stick and beat the water and then they run away. But don’t dive deeply to their mouth! We usually eat fish. You can’t get that here. Unless you have money and then you request it from Nairobi and it comes on the bus. Once I requested fish of 1,000 shillings from Nairobi. It was strange for Muna. She was happy. She liked it. We mixed it with groundnut and okra, like at home.’
Monday struggled with the waiting to go to Australia. He drank, he got depressed, but he tried to be practical and he put his faith in God. ‘We are all refugees in this world, and God will decide when it is your time to go.’ Muna had a more proactive strategy. She lost patience with the UN process. By September 2012 it had been over a year of waiting, so she took Christine and went to the UNHCR compound in Ifo camp. Behind its big red-steel doors, there is a sandy fenced-off cage, with narrow benches like a makeshift bus shelter where the supplicants wait to petition their masters. The relationship with the UN was medieval. Every day there were hysterics as desperate women hurled themselves against the fence or onto the baking sand. But always to little effect. The men just sat, sullen and angry, as if plotting revenge.
Muna dumped the baby Christine on the desk of Ifo camp’s Field Officer, a lightly bearded Egyptian man in a freshly laundered UNHCR T-shirt. Behind his gold-plated Ray-Bans, the Egyptian was unmoved. Indeed, that was his job: like all the well-heeled international staff, he was paid nearly nine thousand dollars a month, tax free, to allow the wheels of bureaucracy to turn at their own pace and to keep the cases of desperate refugees such as Muna from arriving on the desks of his superiors. The camp was full of impatient refugees and, in spite of Muna’s desperation, nobody thought to check with the Australians
and hurry the case along.
Another time Muna put the two children in the sand in front of the Egyptian’s car as he tried to leave the compound. She refused to move. ‘I have so many problems and you don’t want to assist me!’ she screamed. ‘You take them!’
And once, she handed the children over to the G4S security guards outside the gate and told them to keep the kids for her while she committed suicide. They called Monday and he came to collect them; by now their case was famous. Muna meanwhile was back at her tent in Transit, busy preparing rat poison in a cup. Sweetee arrived just in time, smelled the cup, and threw it away.
In only a year, Muna’s appearance had completely changed. After Christine’s birth, she was high on her own audacity, the daring. She had been still full of curves, her skin shone, her gait retained its sassy lilt. But now her cheeks had sunk, her skin was the colour of ash, her eyes had lost their mischievous gleam, and her winning smile rarely surfaced. There was no more swell of a proud bosom, only the careless walk of despair as she flung her body from one day into the next.
Monday desperately tried to hold himself together for the future. Despite the bad luck life had dealt him, he still had faith that tomorrow could indeed bring into being a new world. But for Muna that hopeful future seemed to be still too far away to be worth waiting for. She knew she was powerless to determine her own fate and had lost even the dream that escape might be possible. In that, Muna was perhaps the ultimate child of her generation. Raised in the limbo of the camp, the true daughter of Dadaab, Muna had relinquished responsibility for herself entirely to the testing mercy of events. It had become a way of life.
25
In Bed with the Enemy
Along the hostile road to the coastal city of Kismayo, the Kenyan army slowly, painfully, advanced: 250 miles had taken them twelve months. From the outset, Kenya had claimed that al-Shabaab was its target in Somalia, not any particular city or territory. To admit otherwise would have been to confess that the establishment of the buffer-state, Jubaland, had been the goal all along. But everybody knew that Kismayo – the intended headquarters of Jubaland and the stronghold of al-Shabaab – was the prize Kenya had in its sights, and by the end of September 2012 they were poised to take it.
For weeks, a warship had rained shells on the city sending hundreds of refugees scurrying along the road to Dadaab. There they met the advancing Kenyans, who treated the fleeing civilians as though they were members of al-Shabaab. Traumatized refugees limped into the camps with desperate stories of being stripped, robbed and gang-raped by their supposed liberators, to whom they had come seeking protection.
The shelling was horrendous. The refugees spoke of ‘fire that rained from the sky’. One man had shards of orange-coloured shrapnel still lodged in his head: he was the lucky member of the family. He had spent hours collecting the shreds of his two-year-old girl, his wife and their newborn daughter from the rubble of their home in order to give them a proper burial. Another returned home to find a metre-wide crater in the living room and burned corpses scattered all over the house. ‘Shells from Kenya,’ said one.
‘No, French,’ said another. Intelligence sources would later confirm that both were correct.
‘They say the ships were American, firing at us, but it is all the same to me,’ one man ruminated slowly when he arrived in Dadaab. A journey that had taken the Kenyan military one year he had walked in two weeks, barely sleeping. His sandals were wafer thin.
Another of the new arrivals was a lone boy. He had gone to the shops in Kismayo one day only to return and find his home and his entire family turned to rubble. When asked what happened, he said, simply: ‘Death came from above.’ On his wrist was a beaded bracelet arranged in the word ‘Kenya’, worn, perhaps, for protection rather than pride. He had buck teeth and dark skin and his head jerked to one side as he talked, as though caught on a fishing line: the tremors of shell-shock. His eyes were bottomless; they were difficult to look into for long. The BBC Somali Service interviewed survivors on the radio, but journalists were too afraid of al-Shabaab to go and verify their claims. If the French and the Kenyan Defence Forces were guilty of war crimes in Kismayo, nobody could say.
Just before dawn on 29 September, a woman in a village near Kismayo was cooking breakfast with her mother and grandmother. Outside, she heard shots. It was a moment before she realized that a bullet had passed through the mud wall of her hut, and through the body of her grandmother before lodging itself in her mother’s leg. She peered out. She saw ‘an airplane, hovering’ and troops pouring out of ‘black ships’. Later that day, as she buried her grandmother, Kenyan troops preceded by US and European special forces advanced unopposed into the port of Kismayo. The Kenyan army spokesman Major ChirChir was beside himself, tweeting the successful completion of ‘Operation Sledgehammer’ and declaring ‘mission accomplished’.
In Dadaab, Tawane and many of the youth from the Ogadeen clan who hailed from the areas around Kismayo allowed themselves to be transported by the excitement. They dared to believe that the birth of a new state – Jubaland – was at hand. Even if doing so involved ignoring the inconvenient reality that al-Shabaab had merely retreated into the surrounding countryside. Supporting Jubaland – in effect, a breakaway state – was also at odds with a loyalty to Somalia as a whole.
The principal casualty of Somalia’s civil war is the very idea of the nation of Somalia. Since the beginning of the fighting in 1991, areas with a settled clan majority have declared themselves states and distanced themselves from the carnage of ‘south central’, as the rest of the country is called. To inspire loyalty, to call young men to fight for it, the nation must hold some meaning. In the chaos of this fundamentally divided nation, it is no surprise that people have held more fiercely to the solid constants of Somali life: Islam and the clan. And these are the competing political visions for the country now: one based on a patchwork of splintered ‘federal’ clan-based states like Somaliland, Puntland and Jubaland, and the other the totalizing, unifying religion of al-Shabaab.
Jubaland’s supporters overestimated their Kenyan saviours, though. Instead of simply installing a new regime in Kismayo and returning home, the Kenyan Defence Forces caught the scent of profit. An earlier UN report had already highlighted what it called a ‘pax commercial’ between Kenyan criminal business interests and al-Shabaab over the smuggling routes. Now KDF entered the same arena. Although it was only their first war, the Kenyan military learned fast the game of modern conflict in lawless places. Peace afforded only a generalized prosperity for all. The real money lay in disorder: in the gaps, the margins, the illegal rackets, the opportunities for gaining an edge. Al-Shabaab’s main source of revenue in southern Somalia had been charcoal exported through Kismayo to the Middle East. The UN had tried to ban the trade in a bid to cut off funding for al-Shabaab but the charcoal was too lucrative for the Kenyan army to leave alone and the steady burning of Jubaland’s once beautiful acacia forests continued, even, in fact, picking up speed; a million bags a month arriving in Kismayo. With the KDF and a local militia called Ras Kamboni controlling the port, soon exports of charcoal were running at 140 per cent of the level under al-Shabaab, jumping in value from $25m to $38m per year. Al-Shabaab still controlled the forested countryside all around Kismayo but logging was only part of the illicit networks that found new life under KDF.
All the sectors in which al-Shabaab had been active in trafficking – charcoal, cars, sugar, drugs, weapons and humans – now boomed, confirming supicisons for some that capturing the Kismayo trade had been the goal of the invasion from the start. A Western intelligence agency estimated that 60–70 per cent of the illegal sugar that makes up a third of the Kenyan market comes through Kismayo. Their information suggested that under the new deal, Ras Kamboni and the KDF each took 30 per cent of port duties and al-Shabaab 40 per cent. The Kenyan army was in bed with the enemy.
Criminal networks on such a scale do not pass outside the purview of the state, they usually pass
through it – a fact that was demonstrated by the listing of a number of senior Kenyan politicians on US watch lists for drug trafficking and other criminal activity. In June 2011 the former assistant minister and current Member of Parliament, John Harun Mwau, was one of two Kenyans flagged by the US government under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. But it made no difference to business as usual.
Instead, the politicians in Nairobi eyed the Kismayo trade greedily. In February 2013 elections were coming. They needed cash. Five years earlier, President Mwai Kibaki had fixed the election amid nationwide violence. His godson, Deputy President Uhuru Kenyatta, now stood accused by the International Criminal Court of mobilizing thugs to attack civilians. His political rival and co-accused was former agriculture minister William Ruto, indicted for mobilizing violence against Kenyatta’s Kikuyu supporters. This time around, the two erstwhile opponents had decided that their best strategy of avoiding prosecution was to team up and seek election on the same ticket, what they called the ‘Jubilee’ coalition. Kenyatta was Kenya’s richest man. Ruto wasn’t far behind him. Both had a reputation for grand corruption. They were running for President and Vice-President respectively and they were willing to spend whatever it took. The kingpins and their illicit flows from Kismayo became more influential than ever. Criminal business – and the price of sugar – rocketed.