by Ben Rawlence
‘Okay,’ she said finally. ‘It is all right.’
Often, talking to me was uncomfortable for people, their mind forced to go to places they would rather avoid. Eating in the restaurant, I hoped, would be a kind of treat, a more relaxed setting outside the camp, without the clamour of families and neighbours and the dangers of gossip. But the experience of a modicum of plenty caused only contradiction and confusion and showed how much, even after four years, I still had to learn.
Guled, too, refused to eat. ‘My family has not eaten today, how can I eat without them?’ He sat and listened distractedly to me reading to him aloud. But without food, malnourished as he was, he struggled to stay awake and called a halt before the end. ‘I need to get back,’ he said. The last I saw of him, he was walking down the dusty road of Dadaab, the watchtowers of the UN compound looming behind barbed wire, a plastic bag with two roast chicken legs clutched in one hand.
Until the end of my research I had been reluctant to intervene in the lives of the refugees. Now, finally, I asked what I could do to help. For the ones who were settled, like Nisho and Isha, there was little an outsider had to offer apart from money. This too was Kheyro’s need, so her mother could be looked after while she went in search of education, although her options are more limited after the gruesome al-Shabaab massacre of the students at Garissa University College at the beginning of April. White Eyes had his good job now and his resettlement hope, Tawane and Fish had their organization. But for Monday and Muna, and for Guled, a more urgent, bureaucratic solution was needed.
Monday and Muna’s case I followed up with UNHCR and that was how it came to the attention of the head of Protection, Leonard Zulu. He made enquiries and demanded to know how many other so-called ‘emergency’ resettlement cases were pending and Monday and Muna’s file was rapidly reactivated. And six months later, in June 2015, the family finally boarded a flight to Melbourne, Australia.
When I sat with Guled and debated over and over the relative merits of tahrib and the other options available to him, it emerged that when he had originally arrived in the camp, he had told no one in the UN of his past with al-Shabaab. If he had, he would likely have been prioritized for child protection and possible resettlement abroad, but he hadn’t known at the time. Despite his mistrust of the UN and his cynicism that anything would come of it, he humoured me and returned to the UN to explain to them his whole story.
He is no longer a child, but he is at risk in the camp if his story becomes known and, as such, he should be a priority for the UN to try and find him a resettlement slot in another country. However, six months after I left him in floods of tears vowing to walk to the Mediterranean, he is still in Ifo, waiting to hear about the chance of being transferred to Europe or the United States. If this UN effort failed, he warned me repeatedly, he would still be going north. I said I understood.
Notes
I first went to Dadaab in 2010 as a researcher for Human Rights Watch. In 2011, I returned for the first of what would become a series of seven extended visits to the camp to document the lives recounted here. In total I spent around five months in the camp for the project and interviewed hundreds of residents. In addition, the intensive interviews of thousands of people I conducted for Human Rights Watch between 2006 and 2012 in Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia educated me in the intricate politics of the Horn of Africa and the tough situations facing those forced to flee their homes across the region.
The material for this book was collected in several ways. In some cases, I witnessed the events described first hand. In others, I have reconstructed what happened through interviews with the subjects themselves and attempted to cross-check the accounts with witnesses or with reports in the public domain. Interviews were conducted in Swahili and English where possible, or in Somali with the aid of translators where necessary. Two of the characters’ names have been changed where security concerns made it impossible to use real ones; all the other names are real. I also drew on photographs, videos, personal interviews with, and reports from, the media, NGOs, the UN and national governments. A selection of other sources is listed in the ‘Further Reading’ section. Where there are sources referred to in the text I have added a note below.
Please note that some of the links referenced in this work are no longer active.
PART ONE
1. The Horn of Africa
There has not been a census in Somalia since 1975. Estimates since put the population at anywhere from 7 to 9 million. A new population estimation survey for Somalia is under way by the UN Population Fund: see www.unfpa.org/somalia
2. Guled
Al-Shabaab’s Swahili language newsletter Gaidi Mtaani is available online. The quotes from it appear in issue 2. All issues are available at: http://jihadology.net/category/gaidi-mtaani/
The recruitment of children by al-Shabaab is described in detail in Human Rights Watch, No Place for Children: Child Recruitment, Forced Marriage and Attacks on Schools in Somalia (2012). ‘A whole generation,’ a teacher lamented, ‘join the armed groups because of hunger,’ is a quote from that report (here). So is the story of the boy whose head was left on the step as a warning (here), and the account of the bodies of the fathers who refused to sign the agreement allowing al-Shabaab to recruit in Shabelle primary school (here).
Casualty figures for the Battle of Mogadishu are from an organization in the city called ‘Lifeline Africa Ambulance Service’, and reported in the UN news wire: ‘SOMALIA: Accusations Traded over Casualties at Mogadishu Market,’ Integrated Regional Information Network (IRIN), 2 December 2010.
The number of 870,000 displaced in the city since the Ethiopian invasion of 2006 is according to ‘Statement of 52 NGOs on the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian crisis in Somalia’, 6 October. See also BBC Online, ‘Somali “Ghost City” Wracked by War’, 6 October 2008.
The data for primary school enrolment is taken from UNICEF quoted in No Place for Children. The figure of 2,000 children kidnapped during 2010 comes from UN General Assembly, ‘Report of the Secretary-General on Children and Armed Conflict’, 23 April 2011.
3. Maryam
That 45 per cent of girls are married before 18 is according to UNICEF. See www.data.unicef.org
Guled was one of 2,000 sneaking across the closed border in November 2010. The exploding numbers, and all other UNHCR figures cited in later chapters, are recorded in UNHCR arrivals and population statistics: see www.data.unhcr.org/
4. Ifo
The story of the founding of Dadaab in 1954 by the British was told to me by one of the elders of the town and matches the account of the British Army Engineers’ drilling operations in Northern Kenya recorded in a 1977 USAID report, ‘The Geohydrology of Northeastern Kenya’.
The idea that al-Shabaab was dormant in the camp prior to 2011 is derived from conversations with refugees living there at the time and with security analysts in the region. Divining the motives of a secretive militant group is difficult but despite several years of threats against Kenya, before 2011 al-Shabaab had not attacked the country and their public pronouncements suggested that they finally attacked only in retaliation against Kenyan support for Ethiopian forces and other militias inside Somalia.
5. Nisho
The economy of Dadaab is hard to measure but a 2010 study suggested that the camps contributed at least $14 million to the regional economy and turned over at least $25 million annually. See ‘In Search of Protection and Livelihoods’, Danish, Kenyan and Norwegian governments, September 2010.
6. Isha
Statistics on rainfall and crop prices come from the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. There is an archive of assessments and warnings at www.fews.net. The 80 per cent jump in the prices of staples in southern Somalia was reported in the Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit, Somalia ‘Special Brief: Post Deyr 2010/11 Analysis’, 15 February 2011.
The allegations of collusion between WFP staff and food traders with links to al-Shabaab diverting over
50 per cent of food aid in 2009/10 caused a major scandal and prompted an internal probe as well as a US suspension of funding. See Channel 4 News, ‘UN Probe after Aid Stolen from Somalia Refugees’, 15 June 2009 and the UN response: ‘Report of the External Auditor on WFP Operations in Somalia’, 14 February 2011.
7. Hawa Jube
The situation in N Zero and Bulo Bacte and the numbers living there was reported by Médecins Sans Frontières in several updates in early 2011. See www.somalia.msf.org and Médecins Sans Frontières, ‘Dadaab, Back to Square One’, February 2012.
The information about WFP’s operations: the shipping of 8,000 tonnes of food to the camp of which one fifth is locally sourced comes from an interview with Hans Vikoler, then head of WFP in Dadaab, August 2013.
8. A Friday in Nairobi
It was the 15 March alert from FEWS which said: ‘substantial assistance programs should be implemented’.
The quotes from aid workers, ‘The map of Somalia turns red every year’, and ‘all we can do is hope for the best’, as well as the response from the donor official that the warning ‘was not useful to unlock resources’, are taken from Rob Bailey, ‘Famine Early Warning and Early Action: The Cost of Delay’, Chatham House, July 2012. The later quotes: ‘It’s because of the US Patriot Act and the OFAC sanctions that criminalize us for paying fees to al-Shabaab’, ‘It’s because of Haiti – the world can’t cope with more than one disaster at a time’; and ‘It’s because the industry is geared around disasters, a famine averted doesn’t generate profile’ are my attempt to paraphrase conversations I had with aid officials in Nairobi at the time.
Aid workers in Nairobi told me that some agencies were fundraising in the UK while aware that they could not spend the money with confidence inside Somalia.
9. Maiden Voyage
The land on which the camps sit has never been officially gazetted by the government. It is still, technically, what in Kenya is called ‘trust land’ held by the government on behalf of the community, and customary land tenure in Kenya is a source of bitter political struggle. What is described here is the picture that has emerged after three years of conversations with business owners and residents. I was told that the local ethnic Somali chiefs have been known to issue ‘title deeds’ handwritten, for a fee; that these then change hands to signify ownership and that Kenyan government tax collectors extract tolls from shop owners on this basis.
The descriptions of Mogadishu are from a visit I made a year after Nisho in October 2012. The 2011 market rates for weapons and the sources of resold weapons is reported in Hamza Mohamed, ‘Illicit Gun Trade Barrels Ahead in Mogadishu’, Al-Jazeera, 12 February 2013.
10. The Silent March
The estimates of the numbers of children dying per month were arrived at after the famine was over and are contained in the UN’s Food Security and Nutrition Analysis Unit technical report: ‘Study Suggests 258,000 Somalis died due to severe food insecurity and famine: Half of deaths were children under 5’, FSNAU, 2 May 2013. In total 10 per cent of the population of children under five in southern Somalia died during the famine.
11. Muna and Monday
Several different refugee incentive staff who worked at the registration centre during the famine told me of alleged bribes being paid to G4S guards for access and the system of recycling old refugees for a fee.
13. Billai
The figure of 70,000 outside the bounds of the camps is based on MSF’s estimates for Dagahaley camp in July of 25,000 in ‘Humanitarian Crisis in the Outskirts of the Overcrowded Dadaab Camp’, and extrapolated from the numbers being relocated from the outskirts to the new camp of Ifo 2: 63,000 in the first instance, according to the UNHCR data archive and news reports.
The information about the real reasons behind the delay in the opening of Ifo 2 camp emerged from discussions with UN officials, journalists and Kenyan officials and politicians at the time.
The account of the Interlocking Stabilized Soil Blocks (ISSBs) and the Kenyans calling a halt to the building programme came from an interview with the former head of shelter at UNHCR Dadaab, Ahmed Elgoni, in November 2013.
The results of the August 2011 UN malnutrition survey are summarized in FEWS, ‘Rapid Assessment, Garissa district /Dadaab refugee camps’, 12 October 2011.
PART TWO
15. The Jubaland Initiative
The revelation from WikiLeaks that the US and UK had urged Kenya not to invade Somalia was reported by Alan Boswell, ‘WikiLeaks: US warned Kenya against invading Somalia’, McClatchydc.com, 18 November 2011. The cables include the admission that this was the third time Kenya had asked the US for support.
Human Rights Watch first reported the recruitment of young men by Kenya to fight in Somalia in 2009, see HRW ‘Kenya: Stop Recruitment of Somalis in Refugee Camps’, 22 October 2009.
18. Kheyro
The figures on enrolment of trained and untrained teachers in 2011 come from, ‘Kenya-Somalia: Hungry for Learning in Dadaab Camps’, IRIN, 22 March 2011.
The exam results for the 2011 KCSE and an analysis of them, including the allegations of bribery, are available at: http://blog.theonlinekenyan.com/kcse-2011-results-analysis
19. Police! Police!
The tweets from Major ChirChir warning residents of ten towns across Somalia to expect airstrikes, and that ‘large movements of donkeys would be considered al-Shabaab activity’, have been deleted. They were, however, reported in the media. See Mariya Karimjee, ‘Kenya’s military tweets: don’t sell donkeys to militants’, GlobalPost.com, 3 November 2011.
The number of 100 people arrested following the 5 December explosion was reported on the Kenyan radio station Capital FM, by Bernard Momanyi, ‘100 suspects arrested after Dadaab attack’, 6 December 2011.
The story of the rape of Fartuun and the estimates of people injured and money looted is taken from the report by Human Rights Watch, Criminal Reprisals: Kenya Police and Military Abuses Against Ethnic Somalis, 4 May 2012.
On the airstrike on Hosingow see ‘Kenya Jets Kill 10 in South Somalia Air Raid’, Agence-France Press, 21 December 2011. See also Human Rights Watch, ‘Kenya: Investigate Bombing of Somali Village’, 21 December 2011.
20. Nomads in the City
The new reliance on refugees was presented as an innovation in a UNHCR news story, ‘UNHCR employs alternative strategies in managing Dadaab camps’, UNHCR, 27 January 2012. That report gives a sense of the sheer scale of work being tackled by Tawane and his volunteers:
The new measures include stronger and deeper involvement of the refugee communities in the day-to-day running of the camps, by reaching out to different groups within the refugee population, such as elders, the business community, and youth … Refugees have always had a role in making camps work. However at Dadaab that role is being expanded … health posts are managed by refugee staff who have been trained over the years to provide basic medical services and refer more serious cases to the camp hospitals. Refugee staff are also getting refresher courses on management of sensitive cases of sexual or gender based violence … In addition, refugee leaders and refugees working for partner agencies are being trained to identify individuals and families who require immediate protection or life-saving assistance … In the area of water and sanitation, refugees are building new latrines on sandy and rocky ground and are collecting and transporting solid waste by donkey carts to allocated waste disposal sites … More than 30 camp schools remain open and are run by refugee teachers. Despite insecurity, the Kenyan National Exams took place in the camps at the end of last year … The exams were made possible because the community patrolled the schools and guarded the gates.
The figures of 30 per cent of Nairobi’s tax revenue and 100,000 shoppers a day come from Hamza Mohamed, ‘Somali Businesses Feel the Heat in Nairobi’, Al-Jazeera, 18 May 2014. The $100m estimated drug money laundered through Kenya each year comes from Peter Gastrow, Termites at Work: A Report on Transnational Organized Crime and State Erosion in Kenya (Internation
al Peace Institute, 2011).
21. We Are not Here to Impose Solutions from Afar
The private admission that Ethiopia and Kenya were pursuing their own agenda in Somalia, and the associated quote, was made to me in a meeting with officials from the UK Foreign Office in London, December 2011.
The two wars referred to are the 1963 so-called ‘Shifta War’ when Somalia declared war against Kenya and the 1977 ‘Ogaden War’ in which Somalia fought Ethiopia for control of the land ceded by the British.
The Report of the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, July 2013, alleged that 80 per cent of withdrawals from the Somali central bank were for private purposes. It is available at: http://www.un.org/sc/committees/751/mongroup.shtml
On the UK admission of the diversion of its aid to al-Shabaab, see Andrew Gilligan, ‘Britain’s foreign aid has fallen into the hands of al-Qaeda, DfID admits’, Telegraph, 10 August 2013.
The US officials speaking about the drone strike the day after the London conference were quoted in ‘US Drone Strike Kills 4 in Somalia’, Associated Press, 24 February 2012. The later revelations about the British identity of the ‘international’ militant were reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, ‘Parents of British Man Killed by US Drone Blame UK Government’, thebureauinvestigates.com, 15 March 2013.
22. Y = al-Shabaab
The feelings of men being emasculated in the camp and unable to perform their traditional roles were the subject of a round table I attended, organized by the Rift Valley Institute in Nairobi. See the report of the meeting: ‘A War on Men?’, RVI, Nairobi, 26 July 2013.
23. Buufis
The quote ‘Real men are those who go to the USA’, is from a book by Cindy Horst, Transnational Nomads: How Somalis cope with refugee life in the Dadaab camps of Kenya (Berghahn Books, 2005).