Human Cargo (28 page)

During the worst years of the civil war, between 1990 and 1997, Charles Taylor’s irregular forces, in weird and fantastic outfits and fueled by greed, revenge, ethnic rivalry, and drugs, went on frenzies of looting, Rambo style. They had developed a taste for Western possessions and they used drugged children to man checkpoints that became infamous for casual murder and theft. All Liberians in exile have a particular fear and horror of checkpoints; it was at a checkpoint, for instance, that Mohamed saw his godmother’s head hacked off and used as a football by the rebels. Headless corpses appeared in the streets of Monrovia. Not surprising, then, that Liberia’s people fled. In a single year, 700,000 left the country, for the most part taking
little or nothing with them. All through the 1990s, Liberians crossed into Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone, and into Guinea, where first hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands settled in Kuankan and similar camps along the forest, where they were poor but at least safe. And the longer the war went on, the more the splits and factions multiplied—to be manipulated and engineered by ECOMOG, which dealt in looted resources and teak and other valuable hardwood—and the more refugees fled.

The trouble was not, of course, just in Liberia. Though the
région forestière
of Guinea shelters mainly Liberians, there are many other Africans there, too. The 1990s were barely more peaceful in Sierra Leone, a largely Muslim former British colony that emerged from three decades of one-party rule only to descend into a ten-year civil war, triggered by an invasion of disaffected Sierra Leoneans from Liberia. Sierra Leone’s own war would see executions, abductions, rapes, and at least 100,000 people mutilated by having limbs amputated; whole neighborhoods of Freetown were set alight, often with their residents inside.

By 1997, when Charles Taylor brought his own kind of peace to Liberia, there were said to be 7 to 8 million firearms in West Africa, transferred from one area to another as conflicts developed. UN investigators have discovered a network of arms brokers and transport companies leading back to Slovakia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The heady mixture of greed, ethnic tensions, ruthless warlords, and the conviction that power has its roots in the invisible world and that man’s destiny can be revealed through marabouts, soothsayers, priests, and “heartsmen” (providers of human hearts) had effectively created a generation of refugees, driven to choose between starvation, life in a camp, or death at the hands of marauding soldiers dressed as women. “I identified with those crazy people,” a former government official and later employee of a foreign food agency told a journalist. “We all wear masks. Behind those masks is a mad, horrified people.”

When, on July 19, 1997, an exhausted people voted Charles Taylor, the most successful warlord of them all, into the presidency, the flow of Liberian refugees into neighboring countries briefly
stopped, and UNHGR and the international aid agencies turned their attention to the consequences of the fighting within Sierra Leone, where rebel forces against the government were now cutting off the arms and legs of their own citizens and driving abroad those who survived. These horrors fueled further speculation that what was now being seen was a taste of the future: desperate, deracinated youths driven into frenzied wars by environmental degradation, vast movements of the population from countryside to city, and high birthrates. Not everyone agreed; the critics of the “new barbarism” idea argued that, on the contrary, war was always war, whether fought with machetes or smart bombs, and that these West African wars were not different but only cheaper. For a while, in Liberia, it seemed as if peace might even be made to work. Taylor’s victory in the presidential elections, closely observed by international experts, was accepted as generally legitimate. But not for long. By the spring of 2002, Liberia’s fragile five-year peace was coming to an end and rebel forces were once again challenging Taylor’s rule; new men of war “with no contrite hearts” and no compassion were again looting, raping, and murdering. The insecurity was worsened still further by violent xenophobia in Côote d’Ivoire, where leading government officials were inciting ethnic and religious hatred, and security forces were targeting victims, mainly in the Muslim north. Liberian refugees from the looting, the abductions, and the burning of villages were again on the move, Fatima and her five children among them. As people fled north into Guinea, Liberian government soldiers and rebels were moving west into Sierra Leone, to abduct fighters and recruit mercenaries for the next stage in their war.

These, then, are the causes of Fatima’s flight, and the flight of Peter her neighbor, and that of the Liberians in Cairo: violence, loss, grief in comparison with which the uncertain waiting of the camp takes on a different aspect.

•   •   •

BENEDICT IS
FIFTEEN,
a lively, slender boy, watchful and old for his years. He is one of Kuankan’s large population of single, unaccompanied
children, the term by which the aid world designates children who have lost their families. When Benedict was thirteen, fighting broke out in Liberia’s Lofa County, which borders Guinea, and whose contours I had grown to know from the stories of the Liberians in Cairo. As soon as his family heard that both the rebels and the government forces were looking for boys to take as soldiers, they sent him into the bush to hide. All the other villagers, watchful of the approaching trouble, sent their young sons, too. In the bush, the boys quickly learned to survive. They found yams and plantains, and cooked them over a small open fire, cautiously so as not to attract attention with the smoke, and they added these to the food brought out from the village from time to time by their parents. Weeks passed, and still the rebels were known to be in the area. One of the boys fell ill from something he had eaten; after a few days he died. Messengers from the village came to tell them that it was still not safe to go home.

Then, very early one morning, Benedict woke to see smoke rising on the horizon, from the direction of his village. It was too far away to see more than wisps of white against the blue of the sky, and too far to hear any sounds, but later that day villagers appeared and told of a rebel attack. The smoke on the horizon grew thicker and new arrivals described their huts being set alight; many of the occupants, they reported, had been herded inside and burned to death. Next morning, a neighbor of Benedict’s arrived in the boys’ camp. He told Benedict that his parents, his younger brother, and his elder sister had all been burned to death inside their house.

It took Benedict and some of the other boys orphaned in the rebel attack four days to reach the border with Guinea; fortunately, they had no difficulty surviving on foraged roots and fruit. Like Fa-tima, Benedict was welcomed by UNHCR and eventually taken to Kuankan by truck. Offered the chance to live as a foster child with another refugee family, he asked to be allowed to live on his own, preferring the independence he had learned in the bush. Once a month, together with the others, he collects his dried rations from WFP, which he cooks for himself, together with a few onions, sweet
potatoes, and peppers that he has planted next to his hut. What he has left over, he sells, and buys dried fish and sugar. However much he saves, he is never able to afford a second set of clothes or a pair of shoes. When he arrived in Kuankan a year ago, the Guinean Red Cross gave him a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Since he owns nothing else, he cannot wash them and is now embarrassed when he goes to school in such ragged and dirty clothes, though nothing will keep him from class. He wants, he says, to become a scientist. Because of the school, if for no other reason, he believes that the camp life is better than the one he was leading in the bush, though he says that he is hungry at the end of every month, just before the rations arrive. He does not like to talk about his parents or the past.

It is not easy to care for all these lost and orphaned children, those who saw their parents hacked to death or watched their homes burn down, those who were separated from their families during flight and cannot find them again, or were abducted and forced to do things as child soldiers that they are now too ashamed to confront. In the spring of 2003, there were just over 1,500 of these separated children in Kuankan. Some of them are babies and children so small that they do not know their own names, so they cannot say where they came from. Other refugees found them abandoned along the route toward the border, picked them up and carried them, and later gave them to UNHCR to care for. Photographs of these children are posted throughout the camps of West Africa, in the hopes that someone will recognize and claim them. I wondered whether Izako’s son and daughter might be among them, and whether, not having seen them for so long, he would recognize them now. They made me think of the posters of small, nameless children separated from their parents in the European exoduses that followed World War II; their photos hung in post offices and stations throughout liberated Europe in 1946, as 40 million displaced Europeans wandered in search of what had been or could again be home.

Throughout Guinea, the task of caring for the separated children falls to one of the most impressive of the international aid organizations, the International Rescue Committee, which, as implementing
partner for UNHCR, runs the entire educational program of the camps. Christian, who is in charge of the separated children, has eighteen local offices and a staff of 127, who act as tracers and social workers; when parents are found, the children are driven or even flown to join them. These reunions can be terrifying for the children, particularly for those long separated from their families and shocked by all that they have experienced and seen. Boy soldiers, in particular, face the prospect of rejection, if not by their parents then by people from their villages, against whom they have sometimes been forced to perform acts of great cruelty. Not long ago, Christian, whose office is in Conakry, arranged for a young boy called Sekou to be repatriated together with some of the Sierra Leoneans going home. He knew that the boy’s parents were alive, and despite Sekou’s evident reluctance, persuaded him to try to live with his family again. A few weeks later, Sekou was back, having walked through the bush for ten days to return to Conakry and the safety of the children’s center. When he was eleven, Sekou had been kidnapped by the rebels. As a boy soldier he had been ordered to lock some people from his own village into their hut and set fire to it. The survivors of his community would not accept him back, and for his parents the shame of what he had done was too great for them to take him in.

The size of the task facing Christian, and the delicate complexity of its demands, became clear to him not long ago when he heard about two refugee children living in a village just inside the border. He set off to find them, driving one of the white Toyota Land Cruisers that have become the hallmark of international aid the world over. On making inquiries, he discovered that there were another 205 separated children in the same village, having stopped there as they fled the war in Liberia, and now stuck as a kind of indentured labor force for the Guinean villagers, who see nothing wrong in using these young children to work in their fields and houses in return for food and lodging. If there were 207 lost children in a single border village, Christian reasoned, then how many more must there be in other villages, where their escapes had been
brought to a halt by hunger? Few of the children had ever heard about the refugee camps, and none knew what they were for or how to find them.

Finding ways of tracing these lost children’s families, ensuring that in the meantime they are safe and not exploited, persuading the families who have taken them in and are benefitting from the work they do that the children would be better off in the camps is a time-consuming and complicated process. In eighteen months, Christian and his staff have found 7,500 separated children along the border and in Conakry. These children were all traveling absolutely alone. The true number of the separated may be three or even four times as high, for it is widely accepted that somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of children who become refugees from war are separated from their families in flight. How many die on the way, too tired or hungry or frightened to go on, no one can say.

In Conakry, in a shabby building with a large inner courtyard shaded by mango trees, Christian runs a transit center for children who are on their way to be reunited with their families, or whose problems are so acute as to make camp life too hard. He keeps it intentionally shabby, and the dormitories have bare foam mattresses on the floor and ragged sheets: he does not want the children to see the place as anything but the most temporary pause, between a past that they are putting behind them, and a return to their families and a new life. It must not, he insists, become home. There are no toys and few books. The boys fashion cars out of old tins, ingenious contraptions of wire and cotton reels and flattened bits of metal, which clatter around the concrete at the end of strings.

In spite of the center’s transitory nature, Abu and his three brothers have been there for over a year, waiting for papers that will allow them to join an uncle in the United States. The boys are the sons of a prosperous and influential businessman and politician, a man much envied and much disliked, according to Abu, in their small town in Port Loco in Sierra Leone. When the rebels reached the town in 1997, his father was one of the first to be surrendered and killed. Their mother, eight months pregnant at the time, was
shot and killed while struggling to squeeze out of a back window of their house with the younger children. The nine children, three of them by the politician’s second wife, who had died in childbirth some months before, were caught and tied up. Abu’s eldest brother was asked where their father kept his money. He did not know. So the rebels cut off first one of his hands, and then, when he still said nothing, the other. Abu’s father had confided in him alone out of all the children; when his turn came, he led the soldiers to a hiding place in another house. While the men were clearing out the money, he managed to untie the other children and run off into the bush. He lost sight of his two sisters and two of his brothers, including the one whose hands had been amputated. When it was clear that they would not be able to go home, he set out through the bush with the four younger boys, carrying the smallest, then only two, on his back.