Human Cargo (30 page)

UNHCR, and in particular the High Commissioner, Ruud Lubbers, were not thought to have handled the situation well, initially dismissing it a little lightly. But later, realizing the extent to which any scandal of this kind is damaging to the entire aid world, Lubbers set up a department in the Geneva headquarters to investigate all allegations of misconduct within UNHCR. In 2002, 125 separate complaints were explored, from corruption to harassment. More important perhaps, the scandal raised disquieting questions about the harm that humanitarian intervention can unthinkingly bring in its wake.

Not all Kuankan’s refugees find it easy to accept the invisible line that keeps them in the camp, free and yet not free, dependent always on the whim and charity of others, enclosed in poverty few can see any way to escape, beholden at every step to foreigners who have apparently boundless power yet are often curiously pedantic and ungenerous. Something of the anger simmering among people condemned to permanent inactivity and supplication found expression not long ago in a teachers’ strike. Mary, the head of education for the International Rescue Committee, is a brisk and purposeful American in her fifties from Seattle, who, having climbed in Tibet, felt the moment had come in her life to pay something back for the pleasures she had enjoyed. What an administrator and former Peace
Corps worker had to offer was schooling. IRC gave Mary a job.

Mary has 1,200 teachers and their assistants under her, having won a battle to include a woman assistant in every classroom as a way of protecting and encouraging girl pupils. Classes have seventy to eighty students, and it is often a struggle to keep them functioning. The few schoolbooks go missing and have to be coaxed back with threats and the help of sorcerers; new pupils pop up unexpectedly in class, having been sent over the border from nearby Liberian villages now that education has collapsed in Liberia with the renewed fighting, and many students are far behind their ages and abilities. Mary is acutely conscious that she is running programs that she herself has never been present to see work, like all the evening education classes. These begin after dark, long after she, as a foreigner, is obliged to leave the camps. She is also extremely aware that the children under her care would do far better in small classes in which they could overcome their fears. She was in her office in Nzerekore when she was informed that the teachers had gone on strike in Kuankan. “Though it seemed to be about pay,” she says, “it was really about anger. That was all I heard when I went to talk to them. ‘We have no dignity’ was what they said. ‘Why can’t we have a plot on which to grow some food? Why will no one give us seeds?’ Some of these people have been in Kuankan for ten years. They feel abandoned. They don’t feel like real people anymore. Our intentions are good, but we do nothing for their self-esteem. It doesn’t make me feel good to belong to a system that so diminishes people. So I talked to them about hope and the future and, even if I am a teacher, I began to think of ways to find them seed and hoes. These people are farmers. If you devaluate and demotivate them, what will happen to their children?” What struck the aid workers trying to resolve the strike was that some of the teachers had gone above their heads, written directly to the headquarters of UNHCR in Geneva, taken the law, as it were, into their own hands. It seemed to some of the aid workers bold, even a little impertinent. To Mary, it was an excellent sign. It suggested that the teachers were taking control
over their own lives. But the ambivalence of the relationship between helper and helped is never far below the surface.

No one really believes in camps, not in the sixty or so camps in Guinea, not in the camps dotted all over the world, wherever refugees are on the move. Neither those who care for refugees, nor the people who live in them, regard them as more than temporary constructs, meant to be holding facilities until something better is worked out. The skills at which UNHCR excels, the creating and designing of these tented cities, lose their edge as months turn into years, and something of the early bustle and energy is lost in the apathy and unhappiness of unresolved situations. Once the humane and efficient answer to crises, now forgotten by funders and resented by their hosts, these camps have become places where people wait, and where they do not want to be. Jason Scarpone, the new country director of IRC, shares Mary’s longing to see more integration and development, more boosting of local economies, and less pursuit of unending crises. Like most of the new players in the international refugee world, he talks, with passion, about refugees as agents of development and the importance of widespread income generation.

Yet more than 3 million people in Africa today live in what have come to be called protracted refugee situations, long-lasting and intractable limbos in which dispossessed people are sequestered, concentrated, and kept out of danger as most closely suits host governments, the international community, and often the refugees themselves, who feel safe in the company of others in the same position in a strange land. Camps are places dealt with by other people. However, camps are also profoundly destructive places. More fundamentally even than prisons, they deny all freedoms, even the freedom to make the most basic choice. Those who service them do so humanely and with certain standards in mind, but in practice these standards are extremely low. In practice, too, as an evaluation report produced by UNHCR in 2003 concluded, the “circumstances and conditions” of these refugees are deteriorating all the time, as conflict becomes endemic and asylum ever more unpopular, and as the
refugees themselves turn into pawns in larger political games.

In Africa “protracted refugee situations” are to be found where the land is poorest, the climate harshest, the conditions least hospitable. Though agreements in Burundi, the Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere may bring a measure of peace, violence has become a way of life for a generation of young Africans. And Kuankan, like the other camps up and down the forest, is full of children, single women, and adolescents. As world attention shifts away from them, toward new, more imperative crises, so do money and rights—rights to move about, to have a proper legal status, to freedom of choice, to an education. The camp dwellers feel truly forgotten. It was this world, of camps without seeming futures, so poor that even a bucket spelled riches, that Suleiman and Mamadu, Mohamed and Musa had all turned their backs on when forced to flee the war in Liberia. However terrifying the journey, however unpredictable the future, staying in a camp was not an option any of them considered bearable. Although I had not found Izako’s family, I had seen the conditions under which, somewhere along the
région forestière
, they were probably living; and I had come to understand better the desperation of the Liberians in Cairo, their ferocious need for education, for another life, in a better place.

The tragedy for Fatima and Peter and their neighbors goes well beyond the refugees to Guinea itself, its present and its long unfinished business with the past. Guinea, as a country, is neither poor nor without possibilities. It is a fertile and rich land, in which four of Africa’s major rivers rise. Its economy stagnant, its borders under constant assault, its population swollen by huge numbers of refugees it has neither the resources nor the desire to care for, it is not flourishing.

•   •   •

IN KUANKAN, I
asked about depression, whether people so long frightened and displaced showed signs of deep sadness and apathetic despair. At the far end of the camp, in a single-story brick building, is a mental health clinic, opened in 2002 by a Norwegian agency. It
is run by a Liberian former nurse, Sophie. In 2003, the UN carried out a survey of the health of the refugees in the forest regions and concluded that 12 percent suffered from some degree of clinical depression. Sophie rejects the figure as grossly low.

In Kuankan, Sophie explains, depression is described by a curious phrase, brought by the Liberians from home. Any profound lowering of the spirits goes by the name of “open mole,” meaning the fontanelle, on the crown of the head, where the skull does not fuse shut for some weeks after a baby’s birth. In later life, as Sophie’s patients tell her, this hole can open once again and let in depression.

Sophie’s treatment is simple. She asks an herbalist attached to the clinic to cut the patient’s hair, clean the head, and rub in herbal potions; she herself provides paracetamol and counseling. But what she really does is listen. Behind every open mole, as she is very aware, lies a terrible tale of rape, loss, violence. As the story unfolds, the mole is felt to close. The day comes when the patient appears proudly in the clinic to announce that the gap has gone.

•   •   •

THE REFUGEES
KEEP
coming. In the far east of Giuinea, there are twenty crossing points from the Ivory Coast, and nearly as many from Liberia; but there is often little, in this hilly, densely forested countryside, to mark a frontier. At Thio, a path winds away through a clearing down toward a patch of forest, with the river beyond. It is hard to write about the richness and thickness of this tall forest, or the variety of the leaves that spread out like giant hands or whispery feathers over the bush below. This is the boundary with the Ivory Coast. Up the path, when I visited it in the early spring of 2003, were walking small groups of people, thirty to forty a day, weighed down by bundles and small children. Thirty, across a single border point, is worrying for those who work with UNHCR, for it suggests a pattern of oppression that might easily produce panic. It is when the numbers reach the hundreds, a hastening, jostling, anxious crowd, pushing its way across, over bridges and through rivers, that a state of permanent half emergency becomes a crisis. At Thio there
is a small military post, with a policeman and several members of the Guinean Red Cross, waiting to process the day’s arrivals from the Ivory Coast, the first step in this particular odyssey to safety, one that will involve, in the days and weeks that follow, medical checks, registration, the allocating of a tent or hut, a few clothes, a ration book, the promise of a school.

At Lola, farther into Guinea along this particular route, there is a transit center. It used to be a reception center for children, but necessity has turned the immense hangar into a staging post for new arrivals. I stopped to look. A young Guinean working with the Red Cross was standing by the door with a clipboard. He told me that there were 1,002 people inside, 444 of whom were children. Reading off his clipboard, he gave me the figures: 925 Liberians, 1 Ghanaian, 13 Nigerians, 28 Ivorians, 20 Nigerois, 11 Malians, and 4 Guineans, themselves former refugees in the Ivory Coast, now driven back by fighting in the country they had made their home. The hangar was busy, noisy; it made me think of Ellis Island, except that it was dark, with shafts of bright light, like searchlights in the surrounding dimness, the motes of dust clear in the air. On the floor, the refugees have built themselves a mosaic of small patches of territory, their mats, boxes, containers, jerry cans, baskets, and bundles, the luggage of West Africa’s refugees, each denoting a small, private area. Within these spaces lay small children. It was a strangely peaceful scene.

Fallah was born in a small village in northern Liberia, not far from the border with Guinea. She is a restless, assertive woman, eager to talk and full of gestures, and she is uneasy in the hangar, eager to get on and sort her life out. She said that she was not married, but that she has two sons. In 1996, when the older of the two was ten, rebels came to her village in search of boy recruits. She heard stories about women on their own being abducted and raped. Fallah took her children and fled over the border, not into nearby Guinea but toward Ivory Coast, where she sensed that they would be safer. She is strong and energetic, so the three-day walk, carrying clothes and mats on her head, pulling along the five-year-old, was not a problem.
She settled in Danane, a town well inside the border, and found work on a cassava farm. The two boys went to school. With her wages, she bought cocoa, which she was able to sell in the market at a profit. She found a friend, a younger woman, Maja, who like her had fled the fighting in Liberia. Maja, too, had children but no husband. After the elections in Monrovia in 1997, and Charles Taylor’s doubtful victory, she thought of going home to enjoy the promised peace, but by now the two women and their children felt settled in the Ivory Coast.

Late in 2002, political unrest in previously safe Ivory Coast, sparked off by politicians fanning ethnic differences, began to spread to the countryside. Fallah and Maja watched and waited. But then the day came when Ivorian rebels began to close in on Danane, and word came that they, too, were looking for recruits and porters. Fallah’s sons were now aged ten and fifteen. The two women packed up what they could carry, Maja put her eighteen-month-old daughter on her back, and they set out for the border with Liberia, planning to travel on to Guinea, just as I imagined that Izako’s wife must have done, carrying one small child and pulling along the other. They walked for three days, stopping at night to sleep under the bushes, aware that the rebels were not far behind them, occasionally hearing shots in the distance.

On January 28, 2003, they reached the Cavally River, which separates Ivory Coast from Liberia. The bridge across, which acts as frontier between the two countries, was closed. By now they could hear persistent shooting in the forest behind them. The river was not very deep, though the current was strong. Between them, the two women managed to get their four children and baggage across. They laughed, telling me their story, two women friends who have endured much together. But then they stopped laughing. They said that it had been all right for them, because they are strong and fit, but that sitting alone on the banks of the river were small children, terrified by the fighting in the forest behind, but unable to swim and too frightened to cross. Then Fallah described watching a little girl hesitate, then slip into the water, where for a second she seemed to
hold steady against the current; but almost immediately, she lost her footing and was pulled under and swept away, her yellow T-shirt bobbing brightly in the water as it was carried along until it vanished from sight in the sunshine.