by Ben Rawlence
After Damajale, the mutterings about Sharif were difficult to control. The police felt they were dying for the sake of his business deals. And the UN was unhappy with the impact on the refugees. People were supposed to go home because they felt safe to return to Somalia, not because they felt too unsafe to stay in Kenya. Something had to change.
Those who control things that really matter in Dadaab do not live there. Somewhere in a State House hallway or by a manicured pool in Nairobi, a conversation was had, orders were issued. And, within a month, a new Assistant Commissioner of Police for Dadaab was appointed and Sharif was transferred to Western Kenya. He left without a party and without a farewell. One day he simply called a meeting, introduced his successor, a local Somali man from the neighbouring Fafi district called Hassan, and left. A rumour went round that his bank account had been frozen with a balance of 38 million shillings ($500,000).
The central government in Nairobi has a habit of putting non-Somalis in charge in North East Province, perhaps a lingering doubt from the days of the irredentist Shifta wars. But whenever Somalis have been appointed to positions of power, to Provincial Commissioner or as now, Assistant Commissioner of Police, the improvements are immediate. Hassan knew the local leaders personally. He went to work. He walked around the camps without security guards and he spoke to the refugees as an equal. Very soon the sugar smuggling was almost entirely stopped and the fighting with it. A notorious gang was captured and their leader killed in a shoot-out with police. The refugees were happy.
But prices in the market stayed high. The restaurateur Dube from E1 explained the problem: ‘Smuggling contributes to insecurity – but the smuggling keeps the cost of living down for the refugees. People don’t see the link between the insecurity, police and smuggling, they just care about the prices in the market. Bribery is part of the problem, but it is the culture of Kenya and you can’t go against the culture of the country.’
Nisho still grumbled about the cost of living. In the poorer parts of the camp, people stopped drinking tea, since tea without sugar was unthinkable for Somalis. They ate boiled kidney beans in the morning instead. Sugar became a luxury item, nearly doubling in price since the election. The situation was unsustainable for the refugees and, it turned out, for the government too. The problem was a curious one: Hassan was too efficient. The smugglers were complaining to the higher-ups. Two weeks into his new post, rumours circulated that the new police chief was a marked man. Somewhere in Nairobi more discreet conversations were had and, after a month in the job, Hassan too was sacked.
In July, during Ramadan, a new boss would arrive, Roba, a tough man from the Borana tribe, clearly under different instructions. He would pin a ‘Dadaab Command Crime Clock’ and a hand-drawn map of the border areas in biro to the wall above the huge black lacquered desk in the corner office where he hid from the sun with the curtains drawn most days. And slowly the trucks would start coming again and the price of sugar would fall back to historic levels, 90 or 100 shillings a kilo instead of 130 or 140. Nisho would be relieved; the tense state of the camp would ease. People would superstitiously attribute the change to the virtue of fasting during the holy month, to God. But Ahmed, the new Somali head of UNHCR, fresh from duty in Peshawar, Pakistan, knew better. ‘When things are quiet, the smugglers are happy,’ he said.
32
Italy, or Die Trying
On the Sunday morning after the Damajale attack, uncertainty flooded the camp. Fear that had been set aside for the UEFA Cup final returned, with interest; the concatenation of events was so rapid it seemed as if Dadaab would be swallowed whole by the war. People sought reassurance in numbers.
Around Guled’s khat stall, they congregated. The boys talked together while Auntie, her beady eyes dancing and her flesh shaking with laughter, anchored the scene, joking and doing business. Among the ten young men, all beneath the age of twenty-five, there were no unfamiliar faces, the atmosphere was intimate, as though among family; indeed for many of them it was the only family they had. Groups in the camp had code words to police their conversations and to warn against strangers whom they didn’t know. Some developed hand signals for use in crowded spaces like the tea-shops of the market. ‘Be quiet. Turn Around. Watch your back,’ or ‘He’s with me. It’s okay.’ Loose talk was dangerous. Informers from al-Shabaab, or the governments of Kenya or Ethiopia could be listening at any point. In other settings, with people he didn’t know, Guled was wary and said little, but here, sitting on mats behind the stall with his friends, he felt free. They were joking about khat.
One of them told the story of the goat in his block that cried out at dawn prayer, like a cockerel, an ungodly sound that woke him up when he had a khat hangover. The drug, like other narcotics, does not allow the chewer to sleep or have sex until the effects begin to wear off. Another boy told Auntie the price of her khat was too cheap.
‘I eat too much! It’s bringing problems. I haven’t been to the toilet for three days – only urine. And my wife is complaining that I haven’t slept with her for a month. She claims I have another woman, that’s why I don’t want her. Look at me now! I start chewing at ten a.m. and I continue to midnight every day!’ The other boys laughed and Auntie smiled. Then somebody’s phone rang.
It was one of the group, their friend, a boy that Guled had known when he had first arrived who had left the camp about a year ago. Now he was calling with news: he was in Italy. The boys couldn’t believe it. He had gone overland, through the smuggling routes from Kenya into Sudan, to Khartoum, across the Sahara desert through Darfur into Libya and over the Mediterranean sea to the island off southern Italy called Lampedusa. The phone was passed around and the boys took it in turns to feel envious and ashamed. To get to Europe was a success and they had failed to leave Dadaab.
When it was Guled’s turn the boy told him, ‘Life is cool here. I am working. I am happy. There are opportunities.’ He said he missed the friendship of his old team-mates but that you cannot compare the life of here and there. He was supporting his family in Somalia now, and he was ready to help his friends, he said, when his income improved. The boys in Hawa Jube felt helpless and diminished. There were other friends who called sometimes from Europe, taking about where they lived and what they ate. As always, these phone calls from another planet provoked fierce debate.
‘We have to go to Italy, immediately!’ said one. They were energized, caught with the idea. A boy who was awaiting resettlement, and who had been waiting for some time, said, ‘I am in a process, I have to wait for UNHCR.’ Another was dismissive: ‘We cannot wait for UNHCR, it takes too long!’ They shared their stories from the phone call.
To one of them, the boy in Italy had described his difficult journey through the Sahara to Libya and over the sea. When the listener had expressed doubt, he had been encouraging: ‘You are a man, you can manage.’ The boys knew it was dangerous and expensive. But they all wished they could afford to try; it was a dream for which they were only too willing to die.
‘It all depends on the traffickers. If you get a good one, you can reach quickly and safely,’ said one of the boys, keener than the others. A month later, having slipped out of the camp without a goodbye, he would find out for himself.
But there were plenty of stories of bad ones. Of kidnappings, of migrants held to ransom at each stage of the journey: in Sudan, in Libya. And of whole truckloads dying of dehydration. Survivors recounted begging their fellow travellers for their urine, and, on one occasion, resorting to drinking Benzene. A few months later, ninety-two would die in the desert from lack of water when their vehicle broke down. And police were only too happy to lock up migrating Africans until they phoned their families for a ransom delivered via Western Union or the Somali money wires. The ransoms were creeping up into the thousands of dollars with the flood of people taking advantage of the collapse of the Libyan government and the blocking of the eastern routes.
The cheapest way to prosperity, over the sea to Yemen and then up the b
aking Tihama coast of the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia, was closed. Around 100,000 people a year had been going that way, one quarter of them Somalis, the rest Ethiopians and Eritreans. But Saudi Arabia had built a fence and in 2013 had begun deporting thousands of Ethiopians and Somalis home.
The other way, to Europe up through Egypt and Sinai, to Israel and then through Turkey and Greece or the Caucasus and Ukraine had been shut by an Israeli fence, a disturbing succession of shoot-to-kill incidents and a 10,000-capacity detention facility in the Negev desert with a new law permitting indefinite detention. Bedouin and Rashaida tribes had made an industry out of kidnapping and harvesting the organs of stranded Eritreans using the Sinai route. Sometimes people paid as much as $30,000 to secure the release of relatives.
‘You need $2,500,’ someone in the group around the khat stall said, ‘to pay the police or the bribes along the way.’ Although Somalis interviewed in the Netherlands said on average that their journeys overland had cost them $11,000. Each migrant has a whole extended family who has invested in their trip and who expects a return on that investment.
‘If I had that money, I would either die or get to Italy,’ said Guled.
‘The biggest expense is the boat, another $1,000,’ said another.
In fact, often it was more. In the low season, during the winter, you could pay that, but in the summer, when the weather conditions were more favourable, berths on an overcrowded boat could go for as much as $2,000. The unscrupulous traffickers usually nominated a passenger to drive the vessel and left the migrants to navigate by the GPS of their mobile phones and what little they knew of the stars. Many people had to buy a place on the boats more than once. A pair of Somali girls famously tried nine times. 45,000 people crossed the sea in 2012. More in 2013. More still in 2014.
‘You are paying $1,000 to purchase death; they are death boats, that is what they are,’ said one man who made it after a terrifying ordeal at sea. Thousands died in the Mediterranean. It became a familiar story: survivors recounting the haunting screams of the drowned, being given babies to keep afloat and corpses, even pregnant ones, bobbing on the water.
‘Why are you still there?’ the boy had asked on the phone.
‘If we get money we can go today,’ the friends at the khat stall agreed.
Italy was not their preferred destination. But the young men chewing in the wind of Hawa Jube had little concept of Italy other than as a staging post, a gateway to riches and the good life. They had no idea of the overcrowded detention centres in which people were often held for months, nor of the cold reception they might face: in December 2013 a video appeared on Italian TV of male and female migrants being stripped naked together and hosed down upon arrival in Lampedusa.
This outlying island, Italy’s southern-most point, had a capacity to receive 850 migrants, but regularly holds double. Unable to process them all, and in violation of European standards, without a policy of providing for them, Italy often simply released the migrants to fend for themselves, sleeping in railways stations, camping in olive groves, surviving on stolen lemons and pizza dough cast out from the tourist restaurants. All along the ancient coast of southern Sicily, church soup kitchens and hostels in picturesque Roman squares lined with palm trees swelled with foreign visitors dressed in donated clothes who wandered the streets wary and wide-eyed. From Nigeria, Mali, Niger and Chad, they came; from Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Congo; from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia, and even from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. In the future, this period in the history of the Mediterranean will have a name of its own, ‘the great migration’ or some such. In the present, though, it is simply a crisis.
From Italy it is a long way to the gilded cities of northern Europe of which everyone dreamed: Paris, Amsterdam, London and the welfare state paradises of Scandinavia. The European Union has a rule, called the Dublin II Convention, that requires all refugees to claim asylum, and to stay, in their country of first arrival. The ambitions of many were cut short by police and border guards at the Euro Tunnel terminal in Calais or on the trains and buses through Germany and France who, after checking fingerprints, returned the asylum seekers again to Rome. Italy, though, thinks the Dublin rule is unfair and so doesn’t bother to fingerprint many of those it releases onto its streets. And the refugees too, often mutilate their fingers to avoid being returned to one of Europe’s more depressed economies. To work, above all, was what the young men wanted.
‘If I get money, I can make that difficult journey,’ Guled said quietly to himself. He felt impotent; he could not look after his family. It was the most common complaint of men in the camp. And a man who cannot look after his family has no voice in the collective decisions of the clan; he is not, in essence, a man at all. Even if, despite the insecurity, Guled went back to Somalia and he was unable to find work, if the kids asked him for things he would be embarrassed. It was thoughts of his children that made him ready to risk his life to escape Dadaab.
Twelve days later, there was another explosion in the night. The whole camp had heard the blast; Kheyro, Nisho, even Muna far away in Transit had woken up, but Guled had been closest. A grenade had been thrown into the base of the telecoms tower between Lagdera and Hawa Jube. There would be no phone network in Ifo camp for ten days. People said it was part of the Kenyan plan again: to make life harder, to encourage the refugees back to Somalia. In those days the government’s campaign was never far from the conversations in the camp; it was a latent threat, suspended in the air like electricity in a storm waiting to be conducted. In the terror and confusion of such attacks, the brain involuntarily reached for dots to join together.
Guled’s friends sat again on the mats behind the khat stall, huddled out of the unrelenting wind, to discuss the bomb. One wore a Barcelona strip and one a new design: a black tracksuit emblazoned with the brand name ‘Al-Shabaab’. Guled’s face was drawn with worry. The boys talked about a ‘deep fear’ that was now leeching through the camp: Somalia was unsafe and so was Dadaab. The explosion had chased everyone back inside their houses; waiting to see what would happen. All across the thorny compounds on that windy Sunday morning, urgent conversations were taking pace, turning over events.
‘The drama started again,’ said Ilyas. The boys nodded wearily.
‘Where can we run to, if we fled Somalia because of war and here the problem is still the same?’ asked Guled.
‘We better fly to the sky,’ said Yusuf.
‘No,’ Ilyas warned. ‘In the sky is also trouble, because I hear people are claiming the sky.’
Without any prospect of riches on the horizon, and to protect himself from the apparent march of war towards the camps, Guled decided to fast. Ramadan was coming. Devout people in need of a little extra of God’s love had a habit of fasting on Monday and Thursday before the holy month. It saved money, enabling him to send the little he got from Auntie to Maryam, and it made him feel good.
33
Waiting for the Moon
The fasting seemed to work. And as the rest of the camp joined in for the holy month, blessings multiplied. When a strange unseasonal breeze brought a cool spell in the middle of the Hagar, the refugees praised God. They didn’t believe in climate change. There was a breakthrough for the hostages too. Ramadan is traditionally the season of suicide bombings by al-Shabaab but this year brought good news from Mogadishu. The kidnapped Spanish women working for MSF were finally freed on 19 July, after long negotiations and strenuous denials in the media about any ransom being paid. Their release presaged no change in security procedures for the agencies; the damage, in that respect, had been done. But for the refugees, a circle had been closed, a wrong had been righted. MSF was popular in Dadaab and people had felt bad for the women and the organization.
At the beginning of August, as Ramadan drew to a close, Guled felt able to say: ‘Life is becoming normal again now.’ His Leopards FC team had even managed a friendly football match against a team from Ethiopia in Ifo 2. They had impressed Gul
ed with their organization: contributing money for nets behind the goalposts and lining up to shake the hands of the visiting team. He still missed Maryam and the kids and his fantasies of escape remained, but they had been subordinated to the quotidian demands of pushing khat that was, contrary to expectation and custom, selling especially well during the holy month.
‘When there is peace,’ said Nisho, ‘the first thing you notice is people building things.’ It was true: along the wide roads of Ifo 2 women stood on chairs binding branches together, erecting huts to replace the shredded tents. Carts loaded with grass for roofs creaked across the no-man’s-land from Ifo 1. At Billai’s request, Nisho was constructing a new house next to the old one that they had been renting. He had even been able to afford to take his mother to see the witchdoctor again.
Like everyone else, Guled and Nisho attributed the improvements in the situation to the miraculous power of fasting and the devotions of Ramadan. They thought He was rewarding them for their virtue, giving them a break after an exceptionally hard year. They were happy to ignore the economic link with the resumption of the smuggling and the departure of the corrupt police chief, and the effect of the other main event that season: the new UN biometric procedures for the food distribution.
Although the official population in July 2013 was 402,455, tens of thousands of those on the food distribution list did not live in Dadaab. They were the people who preferred the city life, dodging the police in Nairobi and Garissa, but who were unwilling to relinquish what they saw as their ‘right’ to free UN food. Then there were the ones who had returned to Somalia and left their cards with relatives like the family of Billai and Maryam. Together with the habit of not reporting deaths in the camp, the general distribution manifest was hardly ever adjusted downwards. And so every few years the UN conducted what it called a ‘verification’ of cards – every holder had to appear and match a face to a card. With the suspensions in services, it had not been done for five years. Now the camps were teeming with people come in a rush to ‘verify’ their ration cards.