Then, shortly after midnight a month before Christmas of 2009, according to Liban, police stopped four minibuses carrying one hundred Somali migrants as they approached the Zambezi River from the north. Liban, who had been “spotting,” was a few minutes ahead. “My cars, ne?” Liban said. He soon noticed that something was wrong, and he pulled off the road before he crossed the bridge. In the morning, he learned that his passengers would be sent to Marratane, the refugee camp outside Nampula, and that his cars had been impounded at the police department in the town of Mocuba, nearby. After only a night in jail, the Mozambican drivers Liban had hired were allowed to walk free. But Osman Sheik Mohammed, a Kenyan associate of Liban’s, called to tell him that his cars would soon be needed in Mocímboa da Praia once again: more migrants were already on their way. Liban could even get a bonus if he managed to find a solution. So rather than wait things out, Liban decided to travel to Mocuba and negotiate his vehicles’ release.
As Liban saw it, this negotiation was not all that different from the less ambitious efforts he’d undertaken in the past at hundreds and hundreds of checkpoints throughout the country: it just required a larger payoff. Liban had been given a limit of $10,000 to secure the vehicles’ release. But when he arrived in Mocuba, he attempted to bargain with the wrong cop. “It was one new guy,” Liban recalled, his voice still full of surprise. He was arrested and promptly thrown in jail. “I’ll show you what—I go prison, three months, to beat me, my whole body, I find the problem.” Again, Liban rose to show off scars on his arms and back.
Within a month, Osman, too, was arrested on trafficking charges. He’d been stopped not far from Mocuba while shepherding a cohort of seventy-two Somali migrants through the district of Nacarôa.13 Upon arrest, Osman tried with no more success than Liban to bribe a police commander with about $4,100 and the promise of a car.14 It now seemed to Liban that the “new guy” he’d tried to bribe was more than an anomaly; police were facing pressure from the government to crack down on smugglers. Still, Osman continued to lobby for his freedom even while he was in jail. By February, he had brokered a deal that allowed both him and Liban to walk free without standing trial. Liban decided to leave the trade all the same: “I’m tired, that job, you know?”
In January 2010, while Liban and Osman were both in prison, dhows continued to glide onto the sand near Mocímboa da Praia, and farther north, on the banks of the Rovuma. Yet there was no one on hand to load the men into cars. Suddenly, the region was home to scores of bewildered Somalis and Ethiopians wandering in bands along the coast. In a single month, the police in Cabo Delgado Province, where Liban was accustomed to loading passengers, detained more than five hundred undocumented migrants from the Horn of Africa. All were young men aged thirteen to thirty-five who presented themselves as asylum seekers. But the police were not convinced: “Don’t the women and the older people flee from wars too?” a police spokesman wondered at a press conference.15
Liban has a simple explanation for the skewed demographic among Somalis who hire smugglers. He says they are “running from Al-Shabaab,” which forcibly recruits young men. “They want twenty, under twenty. Twenty-five—Al-Shabaab when they come to you they say, ‘Let’s go to jihad.’ If you say, ‘No,’ they kill you. That’s the problem. That’s why all they are running out the country.” Yet the demographic is largely the same with Ethiopians, who are seldom seen as political refugees. The prevailing opinion on the Mozambican police force was that the men were “in search of life,” as Mozambicans usually put it, or a procura de vida. Families undertake the sacrifice of hiring a smuggler, they argued, so that their sons, brothers, and husbands can go abroad, make a living, and one day begin to send money back home.
Responding to the influx of migrants in early 2010, the police attempted to repatriate Somalis and Ethiopians by sending them back north across the Rovuma. But Tanzania responded by closing its border and reinforcing patrols on the frontier. So the migrants slept in the courtyard of the nearest police station on the Mozambican side, in Palma, a backwater coastal town set amid coconut groves and dry veldt.
Until recently, Palma was known mainly for its beaches. José Raimundo de Palma Velho, the first Portuguese governor of the area, for whom the town is named, conquered it from the sultan of Zanzibar in the late nineteenth century.16 Afterward, he wrote that it sits on “perhaps the best bay on the East coast of Africa,” with deep, uncommonly clear water, and a long beach of “fine, white, hard sand.”17 In 2006, a subsidiary of the Texas oil company Anadarko began drilling off the coast of Palma, and it has since become the base of operations for exploratory wells in an undersea basin thought to hold 65 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, enough to supply the planet for twenty years.18 Now Palma is known as the place that will make Mozambique rich. To Somalis in Nampula, it is known as a sort of purgatory.
At the police station, dozens of men lounged, listless, in scraps of noonday shade, and they slept on rice sacks and bits of cardboard. A few followed mimed instructions from the officers and swept or scrubbed the station floor. But there were far too many of them to stay there, even when the UNHCR brought emergency shelters and rations to create a temporary transit center. “Our budget didn’t include this situation,” the police spokesman said.19
The mukalas farther north, in Mogadishu and Mombasa, didn’t immediately react to the new status quo in Mozambique. Though there was no one to pick the men up in Palma or Mocímboa da Praia, dhows filled to the brim continued to ply the coast of Tanzania.
UNHCR and Mozambique’s refugee agency, INAR, were obliged to charter buses to bring the stranded migrants to the refugee camp at Marratane. When the buses were delayed, some men walked the three hundred miles from the border to the camp, surviving on mangos and whatever else they were given by the perplexed locals they encountered along the way. When they arrived, many men were in desperate shape, malnourished and severely dehydrated from a week or more at sea, with swollen feet and slack skin.
The impounded cars were released on the same day as Liban and Osman, in the middle of February. “When I come out, cars come out, same day,” Liban recalled, grinning. Returning to Nampula, he promptly spread the word of his retirement and sold his cars to his former competitor. He bought a large truck and found work for a commodities company hauling cotton to port. Liban said Osman took up the old business again.
But for whatever reason—perhaps because of the fierce government attention now focused on Mocímboa da Praia and Palma, or perhaps because hundreds of paying customers had already been relocated to Marratane—Osman no longer loaded his men from the same spot. Instead, smugglers began using the refugee camp at Marratane as a staging ground.
Set back about a half mile from the main road, Marratane covers a broad patch of shady savannah surrounded by dome-shaped granite peaks and small fields of cassava. The bulk of the camp is composed not of tents, but of small mud and cement houses much like the homes of the Mozambican farmers who live nearby. The camp is funded by UNHCR and administered jointly by the Mozambican government and the UN. Except for the policemen at the gate, and a handful of buildings painted with UN and government logos, it looks nothing like what I imagined a refugee camp to be. Instead, it seems strikingly permanent, with shops and an elementary school, like a sprawling Mozambican village.
Marratane was created in 2001 primarily to house families of refugees from the Great Lakes region—the DRC, Burundi, and Rwanda. They arrived throughout the year in small groups of anywhere from one to ten people, traveling slowly on foot, on public transport, or, often, escorted by police who intercepted them near the Tanzanian border. The Great Lakes refugees made it as far as Mozambique largely because they were afraid that camps closer to home, which already held their compatriots in large numbers, might succumb to the same ethnic violence they were fleeing in the first place. Many had already lived in camps in Uganda and fled, or they’d attempted to settle in Tanzania, where they encountered hostility from the local government.
&n
bsp; By the time migrants from the Horn of Africa began pouring into Marratane in large numbers, in early 2010, many of the people living there had been in the camp for most of a decade. Over time, the refugees from the Great Lakes managed to work out a basic means of making a living. They subsisted on meager rations from the World Food Programme and farmed small plots on the camp’s periphery, though growing conditions were poor. A Burundian man I met in Marratane told me with dismay that “the soil here produces nothing but peanuts and cassava.” Those who could started small businesses, and if they obtained permission from INAR, they moved into Nampula, where Congolese refugees have carved out a niche with barbershops and small hair salons.
People in Marratane complained of mismanagement and routine corruption: bribes at the elementary school, shortages at the medical clinic, delays in processing IDs and other important paperwork. Their gripes were not too different from those of Mozambicans themselves in rural areas across the country. In fact, several of the camp’s amenities compared favorably with the isolation of much of the countryside. It is accessible by road; some buildings are connected to the electrical grid; and though they are few, there are bore wells with cement coverings and hand pumps. One difficulty of supporting refugees in a place like Mozambique is that almost any level of public services they are provided runs the risk of alienating locals accustomed to receiving next to nothing from their government. In the years after the camp was built, some Mozambicans even moved onto adjacent lots to gain access to water and electricity. “Marratane is a real city!” one Mozambican farmer would tell me later, sitting outside his newly built house on the edge of the refugee camp.
* * *
Marratane’s transformation into a smuggling hub threw the ordinarily sleepy camp into turmoil. The core of the problem was that the Somalis and Ethiopians arrived and disappeared in unpredictable waves. The camp’s population ballooned to more than ten thousand in July 2010, then quickly plummeted to four thousand, only to see seven hundred new migrants from the Horn of Africa appear in a single two-week period in December.20 Even with funding and technical assistance from UNHCR, government officials at INAR struggled to keep pace, hastily expanding their facilities and appealing for more supplies only to find that the intended beneficiaries had gone missing. Out of nearly ten thousand Somalis and Ethiopians registered at Marratane over the course of 2010, more than 80 percent vanished before the year was out, escorted out of the camp by Liban’s old associates.21
According to camp administrators, the new residents from the Horn of Africa didn’t fit in with the refugees who were already living there: they were unruly at food distributions and they didn’t wait in line at the well. Crowded into a camp built for half as many people without the necessary infrastructure for so many new arrivals, they defecated in the surrounding fields and threw sticks and rocks during disputes. They spoke no Portuguese, no English, no French, and for the most part no Swahili, which made it nearly impossible to communicate with the other residents, and even with the camp’s staff. INAR was able to hire translators to work with the Somalis, but to conduct intake interviews with the Ethiopians, they had to rely on two separate interpreters—from Amharic to Swahili, and from Swahili to Portuguese.
More arrived every day. The October rains in the Horn of Africa had failed for three years straight, since 2007, and dhows continued to deposit legions of exhausted migrants on the beaches of Cabo Delgado or the banks of the Rovuma. The boat traffic reached its peak in February 2011, when, UNHCR estimates, Palma and Mocímboa da Praia held more than three thousand asylum seekers without any infrastructure to support them. Many of the men had been robbed of the meager belongings they had kept through the sea voyage—cell phones, small amounts of foreign currency, and clothing—and they’d been beaten by the police before being led to the station. UNHCR lobbied the government to set up a transit center where INAR would conduct prescreening interviews to determine who might be eligible for asylum. But the transit center was never set up. The government argued that a transit center was unjustified because of the lack of new arrivals—hundreds and hundreds of “asylum seekers” had already disappeared, and there was no telling when the next group would come. Jesus Sanchez, a Spaniard who worked for UNHCR in Maputo, recalled this period as a sort of catch-22: “You found yourself in the position of lobbying for asylum on behalf of people who aren’t interested in seeking asylum in Mozambique,” he told me.
Meanwhile, Mozambican government officials were under pressure to tamp down on irregular migration by any means necessary. The police made highway busts as routinely as they could: inside of a month in November 2010, police detained a total of 346 Somalis and Ethiopians at checkpoints in Nampula and one neighboring province.22 In December, there was a high-speed car chase in which cops followed two trucks carrying a total of 108 migrants until one of the drivers lost control and the truck rolled off the road. Miraculously, only one migrant died. The man at the wheel of the spotter’s car was Liban’s old associate Osman—less than a year after he’d been let out of jail.23 In January, busts followed at a crossroads in the highland province of Manica and at the scene of a car accident in Tete.24 Yet there were no trials and no convictions on charges of smuggling or human trafficking. Liban’s old associate Osman was even arrested once more.
Throughout the first half of 2011, Mozambican newspapers were filled with reports of migrants from the Horn of Africa dying in inhuman circumstances as they made their way through the country: in January, off the coast of Mocímboa da Praia, some of the men in a group of 8 Ethiopians and 3 Somalis drowned after being thrown off a dhow by the boat’s owner.25 In February, 8 Somalis suffocated in a shipping container carrying 16 of their countrymen and 4,000 gallons of cooking oil.26 Less than two weeks later, another boat carrying 129 Somalis and Ethiopians capsized off the coast, killing 51.27
Then, in April, and again in July, groups of four Somalis were shot dead by Mozambican border guards who were trying to force them to cross into Tanzania.28 After the second incident, the owner of the restaurant in Bombeiros told me that Somalis in the neighborhood had known for days about a group of more than a hundred migrants stranded on a spit of sand in the Rovuma River, but that there was little to be done for them. They were caught between Mozambique and Tanzania; government patrols prevented the migrants from entering either country.29 Witnesses said it was only once several of them drowned after being beaten by Mozambican border guards that the men were allowed back into Tanzania, where they were herded into a small prison near the border.30
Without fail, the migrants who survived these gruesome incidents or had their trips interrupted for any other reason ended up in Marratane. By May 2011, the camp was once again home to roughly five thousand migrants from the Horn of Africa. At times, the authorities found themselves locked in an absurd cycle with the smugglers, repeatedly trading custody of the same groups of people—from Marratane to police interception en route to the border and back to Marratane again. On the one hand, it seemed smugglers and migrants seldom gave up the quest to reach Johannesburg even after being caught by the police several times over. On the other, Mozambican police had no way of sending migrants home or preventing them from making serial attempts to get to South Africa.
“Your money is still working until you reach Joburg,” Liban assured me. Whether it takes one attempt or five, and whether you are in prison or in a refugee camp, a smuggler will continue to “push you” to South Africa as long as you are alive, he said. Liban also said that the men who hire smugglers and die en route never lose their money either—that the offices in Nairobi and Mogadishu contact their families and return the original fee: “When they die these people, the family who they give you in Mogadishu agency, you have to call them,” Liban said. He mimed a cell phone once again: “‘Family, hello, yeah, how are you?’ ‘Fine, yeah, that guy, he got problem, he’s sick, he’s hospital, he’s died.’ . . . Understand, ne? Example like that, when they die, the guy in Mogadishu, he have to confirm the fam
ily. . . . Understand, ne?” Liban asked again. “Return back that money. Why you take the money? Which way you take the money?”
I found all this hard to believe. Migrants arrived in Mozambique already at wit’s end, ground down by hunger and fatigue. Many had recounted violence and abuse at the hands of smugglers like Liban. It was hard to fathom much compassion in the business model. But Liban’s version did offer some explanation for migrants’ cycling in and out of police custody in central Mozambique. Without smugglers’ help, the migrants who came to Marratane wouldn’t have been able to leave again and again.
The other part of the problem was that although the law calls for repatriation, it has never been a practical option: it was unthinkable to send Somalis back to Mogadishu, into the midst of an ongoing civil war, and the Mozambican government was unwilling to bear the costs and responsibility for sending hundreds of undocumented Ethiopians back to Ethiopia. In the first six months of 2011, more than 3,000 people were admitted to Marratane, while only 102 foreigners were sent back to their countries of origin.31 More than half of those repatriated were Bangladeshis who had reached Mozambique via Ethiopian Airlines, hoping to start businesses. The government was able to convince the company to fly them home.32 Of the remainder, 5 were Ethiopians, and none were Somali.
Even when migrants fled Marratane several times over, there was no provision (beyond repatriation) to penalize them for claiming asylum under false pretenses or for repeatedly abandoning the process of legal recognition. So, while the police often boasted of the “arrest” of Somali and Ethiopian “illegals” and kept them for a time in crowded holding cells, there was nothing to prosecute them for, and nowhere to put them other than the transit center, a ramshackle grid of tarp tents and small wood fires on the edge of Marratane.
Go Tell the Crocodiles Page 15