by Ben Rawlence
Six days after Westgate, Guled met her at the bus stage in Hawa Jube. It was two p.m. She came down from the vehicle wearing the Mogadishu uniform of hijab and thick dress. Guled thought she’d changed: her skin was shining and she was fatter. The baby boy was in her arms, but the girl, Sadr, Guled was distraught to find, she had left behind with his sister. In the taxi that Guled had hired to carry them home, they greeted each other.
‘How do you feel?’ asked Guled.
‘I am happy,’ she replied. And he thought she sounded genuine.
But her mood didn’t last. Although she told Guled that she had returned because she had forgiven him and decided to reconcile, they both knew that was not the whole truth. Before they were married, she had been taking a shower, outside as many washrooms are, in the concrete compound of her mother’s house in Mogadishu. When a mortar exploded terrifyingly close her hands had instinctively shot up to cover her head and ripped an earring from her lobe. Instead of healing, the scar had grown and grown becoming a tumour that she had had removed once before in Mogadishu. During her first stay in Dadaab it had come back and the doctors at the hospital had promised to send her to Nairobi for surgery. But when her appointed day came and she had assembled with the others at the DRA offices clutching her movement pass and patient notes, she was among those pulled out of the line and told that they would be following in a second bus. The second bus never came. She didn’t know it, but it was a regular ruse: medical appointments in Nairobi were hard to come by and those with money often purchased the slots of those without. Back in Mogadishu again, the tumour continued growing, resembling now a gristly second ear grafted onto the first, and it had started throbbing. She couldn’t sleep. She had come back to Dadaab now in search of health care. But although the hospital was still there, it was crowded with visitors taking advantage of the services while they verified their cards for the biometric. She couldn’t get in the gate some days, an appointment was out of the question. She had come back for nothing.
Maryam’s timing was unlucky. The camp was more tense than ever, braced for Kenya’s retribution. Another shoot-out had rocked Hawa Jube the week after when gunmen fired on the compound of the agency Islamic Relief and the teachers who slept there were evacuated to Dadaab town. Although the rains had come, they were fitful. In a world over which they had little control, the superstitious refugees took the weather for a portent. The curse fell too upon Nisho and Billai.
Just after Westgate, Billai miscarried her baby. Neither she nor Nisho understood the reason; she had had plenty of food and milk, what Nisho could provide, but one day the neighbour called him in the market and told him to come. The hospital sent her away with painkillers and after forty-eight hours, the couple’s hope for progeny slipped away into the pit latrine. Later, her aunt took her to a traditional healer who burned her with sticks – Nisho didn’t know where, she didn’t show him. They told each other it was God’s plan. But, depressed and angry, Billai’s grief found alternative targets.
Nisho still needed money to furnish the new house, to buy what he called ‘equipments’: a bed, cooking pots, sheets, all of which had been borrowed. The house was finished but they were still sleeping in their old rented one and the owner wanted it back. It made for a stormy time. Every night when he wanted to sleep, Billai started ‘on and on’ about the bed. ‘Shall I cut out my organs and sell them?’ he shouted at her. A wooden bed was 6,500 shillings, a month of an incentive worker’s salary, nearly $80. Without one, they would be sleeping on a mattress on the sand, or trying to.
‘I don’t sleep,’ Nisho complained. ‘I am told the nagging is normal for women … The house was the main thing, but that is done so now it is the bed: Woo, Woo, Woo, Woo, she is like that, all night.’
With Westgate, the baarwaqo, literally ‘God’s raindrops’, the season of prosperity that had miraculously appeared since Ramadan, had truly come to an end.
‘Dadaab is a nursery for terrorists,’ the newly appointed Cabinet Secretary for the Interior, the Honourable Minister Joseph Ole Lenku, repeated on national television. The newspapers printed every rumour with abandon: that the Westgate attackers had lived in the camps, that they had trained in Dadaab and then travelled to Nairobi via helicopter. One Dadaab policeman even claimed to have seen the helicopter although, in a crowded refugee camp with 360-degree visibility of the plain all around, it was odd that no one else had.
In his cramped office in the government compound, Mr Lukingi of the Department for Refugee Affairs laughed at the suggestion: ‘A helicopter …? Nonsense! We would have known if Westgate had been planned here. The government should mind immigration and the customs at the airport, not refugees in Dadaab!’ The former military man in the UN security office held a similar view. ‘Dadaab is one of the most closely monitored places on the planet,’ he said. ‘In a sweaty place with a shit internet connection? It’s hard to do anything sophisticated here.’ And yet, both could not quite rid themselves of the habit of mistrusting the refugees, of the impulsive move towards violence in response to violence. ‘What we need is a good crackdown!’ Lukingi said, the whites of his eyes showing. ‘If we had a good crackdown, I could sleep in the street outside my office, here,’ he added, jerking a thumb towards the dusty, rubbish-strewn main street of Dadaab town. But the crackdown that everyone anticipated didn’t come. The attack, when it happened, arrived from an unexpected quarter.
Sometimes, in the cinema, when there was no football, the boys would show movies instead. Hollywood things, Indian romances. On 17 October at about half past eight, Guled left three of his friends outside the cinema chatting and sending music to each other’s phones through Bluetooth. Auntie had called him and told him to come back; she didn’t like him being there and now that his wife had returned she thought he should be at home. He lay down on a mat outside in the fresh air of the compound, next to his sleeping son. In the hot season it is normal to sleep outside in the breeze. But he had been asleep for only twenty minutes before gunshots woke him. He gathered up the baby and ran inside the house. When the shooting stopped the screaming started: Guled recognized the voice of his friend and moved to run towards the noise, but Auntie put her hand on him.
‘No.’
‘The bullets have stopped,’ said Guled; ‘they need help!’
After a brief argument, she allowed him to leave the compound. The back door of the cinema opened directly onto the road behind Guled’s house and he saw two people come crawling out, shouting for help.
Some moments to nine p.m., three men had approached his friends, one carrying a knife and two with guns. They had ordered the boys to go back inside the cinema, followed them into the packed hut and immediately started shooting. One fired from the waist, aiming at the legs of the boys watching the Indian film, the other above their heads. Everyone scrambled towards the end of the hall near the screens, fighting to get out of the back door. The police later counted seventeen spent rounds inside the building and the walls and roof resembled a collander. Several of the boys inside the hall could not walk, bullets had shattered their thighs. Two were lying on the ground on the road outside Guled’s house, their trousers heavy with blood. He called the mother of one of them on the phone and she came with a donkey cart on which they took him to the hospital, the other boy Guled pushed in a wheelbarrow. Seven were injured in total, not the sixty-seven killed in the real Westgate, but the terrorizing effect was similar enough for the refugees to call the cinema attack ‘Westgate Two’.
In Nairobi, people now avoided shopping malls. In the camp, no one went any more to the cinemas at night and, if they went in the day, they locked the halls from the inside and let no one in or out. There were no more Indian movies either; people said the boys had been watching porn, which was why the extremists had targeted them. Some of the boys in the cinema even confessed, ‘We know them, who did this’ – it was the work of al-Shabaab copycats, homegrown jihadis from the camp, but no names were spilled. ‘That is the problem of Ifo,’ compla
ined Guled, ‘you will tell the police, they will be arrested, then they will pay some money and walk free, and then how will you sleep at night?’ He had never seen anyone he recognized from his time with the group, but that didn’t stop him worrying.
For days afterwards Maryam wailed, ‘Why have I come?’ She felt her life was cursed. Since the cool, blessed, weather of Eid had given way to unpredictable rains and unseasonal heat, the mood in the camp turned darker. First Westgate, then the cinema attack, and then, on 1 November, the worst news of all: the World Food Programme began cutting food rations by 20 per cent. No one believed the official pronouncements that it was due to a shortage of funds; they saw it as a form of collective punishment for Westgate and as an encouragement to go back to Somalia. On 3 November there was a rare solar eclipse. Teachers showed primary school children how to construct little cardboard boxes to view it, but when the ethereal shadow passed over the plain that afternoon most people in the camp shuddered at the bad omen, taking it for yet another unlucky sign.
The following week, the bad news that the eclipse seemed to portend duly came to pass. On 10 November the governments of Kenya and Somalia and the UN Refugee Agency finally signed the ‘Tripartite’ agreement to support the ‘voluntary and spontaneous’ return of those refugees who wanted to go back to Somalia. The timing, though, clearly had nothing to do with conditions on the ground in Somalia and everything to do with Westgate.
Two weeks later, a senior representative of the government finally showed his face in Dadaab to spell out the meaning of the agreement to the refugees. On the morning of 23 November the Cabinet Secretary for the Interior, Joseph Ole Lenku, a former hotelier, and his entourage stepped out of a government jet simmering on the Dadaab airstrip into the hot whirling dust of the border country. The welcoming committee included the head of the UN operation, local elders and Albert, the corpulent District Commisioner for Dadaab, the President’s representative in the town. The VIPs travelled the 500 metres to the UN compound in an armoured convoy through the chaos of Dadaab town scattering donkeys and pedestrians. Once safely inside the blast walls, in the ‘Ban Ki-moon Meeting Hall’ surrounded by delicate, whitewashed paths and pretty pink bougainvillaea, the Minister addressed his audience of refugee leaders, members of the host community, UN staff and journalists. Ole Lenku was a young man, tall, with fleshy cheeks and black eyes and his attire was casual: a blue-and-white-striped shirt, with no tie, and a jacket he took off before standing to speak. The UNHCR press release about the agreement had underlined the word ‘voluntary’ in the title. As the cameras rolled, Ole Lenku prepared to disregard it. In precise English, he told the audience that his government wanted the refugees gone.
‘There is no turning back,’ he said. ‘It is time to say goodbye and wish you the best as you go back home. Go and help your country rebuild.’ His finger pointed the way from the Ban Ki-moon hall, out across the orange scrub towards the border.
When it was their turn to speak, the refugee leaders reported the views of the four hundred thousand registered refugees. They said conditions for return were not favourable yet and that Somalia was still at war. Ole Lenku repeated the fiction that Somalia was safe for return but remained silent on the facts: no mention of the ongoing clashes between Kenyan forces and al-Shabaab in southern Somalia, of the suicide bombings that continued to rock Mogadishu, or of the food shortages caused by the fighting. The Honourable Minister, however, was no longer in the hospitality industry: he had not come to listen. ‘Dadaab Camp Officially Closed’ was the headline on the evening news.
39
A Lap Dance with the UN
Four months later, Albert, the District Commissioner, set down his newspaper in the shade of the Indian almond tree behind his office. Ten feet away, in the entrance, his secretary sat pretending to type and airily telling visitors, ‘Mr Albert has not come into the office today.’ The whole of Dadaab town was glistening and sticky, uncomfortable in the heat. Albert shifted in his chair and plucked his shirt from his shoulders where it had pasted itself like wallpaper. It was March 2014, the short Deyr rains had been poor and the Jilaal had been harsh. The long Gu rains were due any day now.
‘The UN are stalling,’ he said, irritably. ‘Dadaab is the buttered side of their bread.’
Ever since he had accompanied the Honourable Minister to the UN, Albert had been waiting for orders to implement the return agreement. None had arrived. In hindsight, the Minister’s grand speech about going home now seemed like a joke. Albert was frustrated.
At the end of the year, tens of thousands had been stripped from the food manifest for not showing up to collect their rations for two successive distributions. The official count was down from over 400,000 to 342,835. ‘This biometric is really working, huh!’ Hans, the tall, tanned head of the World Food Programme, had trilled. He had saved WFP $2.9m and shrunk the official size of Dadaab by nearly 20 per cent simply by cleaning up the list. But the Kenyans were not satisfied. Many of those struck off were new arrivals who had trickled back over the past two years, only finally, now, accounted for. Nobody had, officially, gone back to Somalia.
‘We are having a lap dance with the UN,’ Albert snapped. To an extent, he was right.
On the shores of Lake Geneva, a few blocks from the shining water, an ugly angular white building painted with odd yellow stripes houses the headquarters of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Established in 1950, with a three-year mandate to help resettle the displaced in Europe after the Second World War, UNHCR quickly became a permanent part of the UN constellation, kept in business by emerging crises ever since. Inside the ugly building, the tripartite agreement and the Minister’s reckless speech had caused a storm: the UN stalled.
International refugee law and UNHCR procedures governing protection and repatriation of refugees are strict. In Somalia it is unlikely that all the criteria for the declaration of peace and thus the benchmark ‘conditions conducive for return’ will ever be met. The tripartite agreement was a messy, hasty compromise the details of which were far from clear.
The lawyers in UNHCR’s protection department thought it was irresponsible to be talking about return to a war zone, a sentiment shared by human rights organizations who cautioned against refoulement. Their more pliant colleagues in Nairobi had been bounced by a forceful Kenya into a process of voluntary return that might encourage people to go back to a place where they still stood a good chance of being raped or killed. In practice, the agreement had been less about peace in Somalia than about Kenyan politics.
In Dadaab a senior official was forgiving: ‘Return is always political, sometimes they need a little push, eh?’ The most compelling argument, though, came from the Somali head of the Dadaab operation, Ahmed Warsame: ‘Who are we to say when they should or should not go back?’ The point, he said, was to help them if they desired it. But doing that in a humane and orderly way was complicated and officials in Geneva fretted about how to square Kenya’s demands with their responsibilities under the UN Charter. They had to come up with a ‘returns package’ and a plan for the repatriation. It was a tall order.
One cynical diplomat put it like this: ‘If you give someone $200 to go home are you helping him or making him a target? He has no papers, no ID, no transport, he has to travel through al-Shabaab territory even to reach Kismayo. The UN is becoming an official smuggler!’ Moreover, if the UN could be seen to be supporting returns to Somalia, it would help European governments with their domestic legal battles to deport Somalis too. Precisely what the scrupulous officials in Geneva feared.
‘If we wanted the refugees gone at eight a.m. tomorrow morning they would be gone!’ Albert said, implying that the formalities of UN procedure were simply a matter of politesse. But things were not so simple. Reclining in the shade and running his hand reflexively over his convex middle, he acknowledged that politicians, the military and the police were all in business together in Dadaab and in Somalia, that the weak Kenyan government did not have c
ontrol of its different institutions, and that there were powerful forces in favour of the status quo: keeping the camps exactly as they were. ‘It makes my life difficult,’ he said. ‘There are warlords, whose campaigns for office are even paid for by the refugees.’
His sodden shirt stuck to the plastic chair as he leaned forward shouting orders into his mobile phone. Kosgey, a driver in a light-blue uniform, came with the news that some of the so-called warlords were waiting to see him, to complain about the decision of the National Security Agencies Committee (NSAC) the previous day not to allow any more shelters to be built or renovated in Dadaab. It was meant as an encouragement to the refugees to return but the contractors were worried about their contracts. ‘They can go to hell,’ said Albert, ‘they’ve been eating for so many years!’ Kosgey laughed. ‘Tell them, even if it rains, we don’t want to hear about it!’ said Albert. Kosgey in his uniform bowed and left.
This was the trap in which Dadaab was stuck: no improvements, no investments, but no movement either. The UN had set up ‘return desks’ in their field offices in all the five camps, but in the past four months only 2,422 people had expressed an interest in going back. But, although history may have turned the Honourable Minister’s speech into an embarrassment, it had succeeded in one respect. It had changed the tone. With the tripartite agreement, Kenya had managed to confirm Dadaab’s official temporariness by assuming a direction of travel: towards a peaceful Somalia, towards full-scale repatriation. Henceforth it would be impossible to acknowledge Dadaab’s de facto permanence. Kenya had set the clock ticking.