Human Cargo (51 page)

In the autumn of 2003, having by now spent almost two years penniless on the streets of Cairo, Ansu was informed that he was to be resettled in New York. His first weeks were very lonely. The city seemed too big, too frenetic. But then the parents of a young legal intern whom he had known in Cairo and who had recently lost their own son, befriended him, and then he started to feel better. Talking about himself, with charm and self-mockery and in the lilting cadences of West African English that stay long in the mind, Ansu often refers to himself by name. “And then,” he says, “Ansu thought to himself: I’m a city boy. New York is the perfect place for me. I’m going to make it here.”

At times, it seems that asylum seekers and refugees exist in a world almost exclusively governed by luck, good as well as bad. When Ansu’s luck finally turned, it set in train a series of events so improbable that they belong better in fiction. Once he resolved to make the most of New York, he determined to make money in order to put himself through the college education the Liberian civil war had denied him. He found a first job as a restroom attendant, and a second as a cleaner, after advertising his services on the Web with the words: “I can make your house clean beyond all your expectations.” People believed him, and he soon had enough saved to join the highly competitive two-week course as a Yellow Cab driver, emerging at the end of it as one of the few to get through on a first attempt.

Ansu’s weekly contract with a cab company costs him $1,250, but as soon as that money has been paid each week, with something left over on which to live, he goes on to act as an interpreter for new West African arrivals. Not long ago he was invited to join, a theater company staging shows to introduce New York children to foreign lands and foreign cultures. The children, who found his name hard to remember, christened him African Child. When Ansu reflects on the future, he toys with the idea of business or public relations, and sometimes, when he is feeling philosophical, he talks about joining
the CIA, where he senses some of the unseen power that intrigues him about public life might lie.

Meanwhile, his life has again changed course. One morning, driving his Yellow Cab down Central Park West, he picked up an African passenger heading for the airport. From her clothes, a smart Western coat over a lapa, a tied cloth skirt worn by West African women, he thought she might be Guinean or even Liberian. She asked him, as many of his passengers do, where he came from. They fell to talking. It turned out that she was a businesswoman from Conakry in Guinea and that her name was Khalidatu. Idly, Ansu remarked that this was also his mother’s name. As she paid her fare, his passenger gave him her card, saying that she worked with a Liberian woman also called Khalidatu, who traded in textiles across West Africa, and that Ansu might like to contact her, in case she might have news of other Liberians who had survived Charles Taylor’s massacres.

Several attempts made to reach his passenger by phone failed, and Ansu lost the card on which her number was written. A few months later, cleaning out his room, the card fell out of a book. This time, his passenger answered and gave him a number to call. He dialed. A woman answered. He tells the story: “My heart stopped. I knew the voice. I said: ‘Mom, it’s me, Ansu.’ There was silence. Then cries, laughter, screams. She couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.” All that day, impervious to the Yellow Cab company’s pleas that he pick up passengers, Ansu and his mother talked. She told him that she had managed to escape Monrovia with two of his sisters and one brother, and that she was now caring for them in a rented flat in Conakry, together with two orphaned nieces. Ansu suggested that he should immediately apply to have her join him in New York. (Resettlement allows for family reunification of a parent, a child, and a spouse). “Ansu,” his mother told him, “I’ve got a boyfriend, I’m forty-nine, and I’m not going nowhere.”

Ansu and Khalidatu now talk five to six times every week. “I started to get happy when I got hold of my mom,” says Ansu. They talk as he ferries passengers up and down Manhattan, and as he
walks home to his apartment in the Bronx, having parked his cab in the company garages; they talk late at night and early in the morning, as if to make up time for the six years they have lost. With the money that he sends her, $150 every two weeks, she has bought a plot of land in Conakry, and the foundations of a house have already been laid. But it is only when the roof is on that he will go to visit her, for by then he will have done what an eldest son should do, and that is care for his widowed mother and younger brothers and sisters. The thought that he is now in a position to do so gives him pleasure every day. But just as the Liberians do not talk to one another about their pasts, so his mother does not talk to him about what happened to her in the weeks that followed his and his father’s arrest. He fears it was something terrible, and fears, too, that he might not have the strength to listen. “If I knew,” he says, “maybe I wouldn’t be able to drive.” And so, in his baseball cap set at a boyish angle and his dark blue Ralph Lauren woolen jacket, bought with the first money he earned—clothes, like mobile phones, are crucial to Ansu’s image of survival, just as they are crucial to all the young Liberians—he rides the city in his Yellow Cab, loving the early mornings when Central Park is full of mist. “African Child, I say to myself, you’re a lucky guy. New York, where everyone says the F word, that’s the place for Ansu.”

•   •   •

THE FIRST TIME
that I had bought glasses for Mamadu was late at night in a poor district of Cairo, where the shops stay open until after midnight and where a few generous-minded doctors and opticians see patients for free after their salaried working days. That was in the spring of 2002. Mamadu was then twenty-one, a thin, anxious, scholarly young Liberian, sole survivor of the massacre that had seen his parents and four younger brothers and sisters murdered in front of him. He was so shortsighted that the optician could not believe he was able to see his way across Cairo’s frenetic streets. I then explained that Mamadu had spent six years in a refugee camp in Guinea before being helped by a family friend to come as an asylum
seeker to Cairo. When he tried on his glasses, on that still, warm night, Mamadu marveled at a world he had until then perceived only as a blur.

The second time that I bought glasses for Mamadu, having at last tracked him down after more than a year of silence, during which I had feared that he might be dead, it was on a brilliantly sunny afternoon in January 2005. We were in a shopping mall in Tel Aviv, and the Israeli optician, like his Egyptian counterpart, could not believe that a boy so shortsighted could negotiate the hazards of everyday life without help. What I didn’t tell him was that Mamadu had lost his first pair of glasses during his flight from Egypt across the Sinai, jostled and harried by the people traffickers to whom he had promised $3,000 for a one-way passage to Israel. It is through Mamadu’s tale, and that of the other eleven young Liberians who fled to Egypt in 1999 and 2000, with their sequences of brutality and violence, fear and loss, hardship and poverty, that the other story of modern asylum and refugee life can be told, one in which luck can play so poignant and so harsh a part.

It was the arrest and torture of Amr in a police lockup on the outskirts of Cairo in the autumn of 2003, and his appearance in court with bruises on his face and neck and clearly fragile and confused, that had first unnerved the young Liberians. Not long afterward, Mustafa—the wiry, bookish boy who had been seven years old, and out fishing, when the rebels attacked his village in Liberia’s Grand Capemount County and killed his parents and eleven brothers and sisters—was picked up and spent three weeks in a police cell in Cairo, blindfolded. Then Iziako was arrested after an argument with an Egyptian neighbor and deported. Hearing these stories, the young Liberians began to lose their nerve.

It was soon after all this that the departures had started. Though cautioned by others not to panic, the sense of fear, for some of them, became overwhelming. People traffickers are not hard to find in Cairo. In the last few years, a highly lucrative network of Africans and Egyptians, using the Bedouin nomads for the passage across the Sinai desert, has started trafficking groups of refugees from Egypt
into Israel, following the routes traditionally used to smuggle drugs and arms. (In 2002, the Israeli paper
Ha’aretz
published the log of a border policeman who patrols the frontier. “July 22,” it read, “3 bags of marijuana; July 24: 6 bags and 25 prostitutes; July 26: 10 prostitutes; 5 Africans; July 31:4 Egyptians, 4 foreign workers, 1 woman.”) In twos and threes, twelve of the young Liberians now agreed to pay middlemen for the traffickers $3,000 each for a passage to Tel Aviv, to be taken out of their wages on arrival. It was Mamadu, who had the easiest journey, who had the worst arrival.

Transported by car and truck, then put across the border on foot in only a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, with no documents, Mamadu had immediately found himself locked up by his smugglers in a bakery on the edges of Tel Aviv. He was awakened at four in the morning to start work, and kept working until seven at night. He was fed mostly bread and cakes. At night, he slept on a concrete floor with a single blanket. The dust and flour got into his lungs: he coughed. After a month, during which time he had not been allowed outside, the middleman for the smugglers, who was a Russian, moved him to a road-construction unit, giving him a uniform so that he would not be questioned by police. Together with a dozen other Africans, also paying off their smugglers, he was closely guarded, locked at night in a warehouse, and given food but no money. He was told that the fee would take eight months to work off: he counted the days, one by one. Allergic to some chemical in the machinery, he developed sores on his face, arms, and hands, which bled and became infected. These were the months I did not hear from him.

The smugglers’ fee paid off, Mamadu joined the other smuggled Liberians from Cairo and applied to UNHCR in Israel for refugee status. Elsewhere, his case would probably have won recognition and resettlement in the United States or Canada. In Israel, the process is different. Though in theory a new immigration and refugee law, enforced by a special commission with the help and advice of UNHCR, regulates policy, in practice, as elsewhere in the world, asylum remains a murky area. Broadly, those who enter illegally from countries hostile to Israel, who are known as “infiltrators,” are
either quickly resettled in a willing third country or deported. Palestinian refugees have separate laws of their own. All the others— except for Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and the Congo, which are “conflict” countries—are examined and either given refugee status or rejected. The nationals of the four current “conflict countries,” providing they can prove that they are who they say they are, are given six-month visas, renewable until the moment when their country is declared “safe,” when they are deported. Not long ago, Sierra Leone was declared “safe” and Sierra Leoneans are now on their way home. “The moment the weather looks better,” an immigration lawyer said to me, “the Liberians will be on their way, too.”

Mamadu and the other eleven Liberians live and work along the margins of Israeli life. They wash dishes in restaurants, clean lavatories, take the most dangerous and dirtiest of the construction jobs for wages that fall below the national level. After the government, worried about the failing economy and rising unemployment, embarked on a crackdown of illegal immigrants in 2002—said at their peak to number a quarter of a million, mainly African, Asian, and Eastern European, drawn by the demand for cheap labor in Israeli construction and agriculture—a new immigration police force was set up, which periodically carries out raids on poor neighborhoods. Most of these take place in the middle of the night, and those without papers are taken into detention and deported. All the Liberians have stories of being stopped, questioned, taken into custody. One day, coming back to the room he shared with another young African from his job washing up in a hotel, Mamadu was picked up by the police and handcuffed. When he asked to be allowed to urinate, the police refused; when he eventually did so in the police car, he was punched in the stomach.

Not one of the eleven young Liberians can forget that had they waited in Cairo, they would now be resettled in the United States or Canada. It haunts them. Mamadu, in particular, is tormented by all he senses that he has lost. In October 2004, while cleaning a house, he started to hear voices murmuring in his head. They told him that he was being watched, and they sounded angry. Sometimes, he told
me when I saw him in January 2005, “I can hear people reading in my head. I shout abusive things. I see people laughing at me. I do believe people tried to use supernatural powers to destroy me.” These episodes are followed by blinding headaches. “I am hungry for recovery,” he said to me.

“Any time am out in the streets, I see angry faces,” he wrote not long ago, in one of the many e-mails that followed my visit. “But am tired of living as such. I’ve always been running away from threats and intimidation. I am really tired.” For the first time, he began to talk of going back to Liberia, to Monrovia, where as a nine-year-old boy he had heard his family being murdered in the road behind him.

Much—perhaps most—of the research in this book was performed in interviews with asylum seekers, refugees, and migrants in different parts of the world. Their stories form the heart of the book. Many have preferred not to be named, and for those I have invented new names; others were happy to be identified and I have accordingly done so. I also talked to many people who work and have worked with refugees.

The main human rights and refugee organizations issue regular reports, country profiles, press releases, and publications and have Web sites with up-to-date information about the countries and places I visited. I found the following particularly useful: Amnesty International, the
British Medical Journal
, the British Refugee Council,
The Economist
, the European Council on Refugees and Exile,
Forced Migration Review
, the Global Internally Displaced People project of the Norwegian Refugee Council, the UK Home Office, Human Rights Watch, Index on Censorship, the Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees, the International Rescue Committee, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Opendemocracy, Refugees International, the Refugees Studies Centre, Reliefweb, the UN Commission on Human Rights, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, U.S. State Department Country Reports, and the World Refugee Survey.