by
Charles R. Larson
Unmarked on
any official map, Dadaab—in eastern Kenya—is still today home to
roughly 500,000 refugees, mostly from Somalia. You can follow it on
Dadaabcamps.com. Dadaab was formed in 1992 to hold what was
anticipated to be 90,000 refugees from Somalia’s civil war. When
the war did not end and famine in the Horn of Africa exacerbated
conditions, it grew to half a million refugees, though some estimates
add a couple hundred thousand more. Its residents are forbidden from
leaving, from building permanent homes, and from working. Entire
families have grown up in the camp, initially fleeing al-Shabaab
fundamentalism in Somalia. The United States and other Western
governments have supported the camp, the UN managed it, and the
Kenyan forces policed it—all this until the Kenyan government
officially closed it, in 2014.
The
existence of Dadaab (composed, actually, of several camps) has always
been complicated. Kenya didn’t want the Somalis, who considered the
area, historically, their own land. The camp’s explosive growth,
especially during the drought of 2011, was not anticipated. UN
resources for refugees are always stretched thin. As BenRawlence says
in City of Thorns, his scathing indictment of the authorities, “Early
warning [of the famine] was a waste of time—there would have to be
people dying on television before the money from rich governments
would flow. And when it finally did, it would come in a flood. And
the markets for the local farmers would collapse entirely. The same
thing happened every time.” Ten thousand children had been
dying each month, trying to walk to Kenya. “The mortality rate
was seven times over the emergency threshold.” Eventually,
260,000 people would die, half of them children. The site became a
circus, with TV journalists everywhere and the profiteers of misery,
who are always waiting for tragedy in order to pounce.
The rains
eventually came and things were somewhat better, though too much rain
can make matters worse. Then, because of infiltration by al-Shabaab,
two Spanish women, aid workers, were kidnapped. The international
agencies suspended their work and Kenya declared war on al-Shabaab,
with the intent of forming a buffer zone known as Jubaland between
the two countries (but within Somalia borders). That war was largely
ineffective. The residents of the Dadaab camps experienced increased
violence. The Kenyan government (“less a state than a corrupt
collection of rival cartels, some of whom probably had an interest in
prolonging the fighting”) and the Kenyan police, an “assortment
of drunk and overweight…officers staring at the television,”
were largely motivated by corruption and profit.
And the
refugees themselves? Rawlence describes them as mostly trapped in
Dadaab. Some waited for years for papers for immigration to the few
countries that would accept them. Some fled to Nairobi in spite of
the restrictions on them. Some returned to Mogadishu, believing that
it might be safer than continuing to live in the camps. There was
social breakdown, a blurring of traditional gender roles, especially
for men, who had a difficult time being providers. People gave up as
their lives dried up. Then, to make things even worse, external
events changed all of the parameters. The UNHCR had to cut food
rations for the refugees in Dadaab, because the money was needed
elsewhere, especially for Syria and Iraq. September 21, 2013, masked
gunmen attacked shoppers at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, amidst
shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and “We are al-Shabaab,” killing at
least 67 people over several days. The ineptitude of the Kenyan
forces was on full display and video caught their looting of the
mall. But that hardly mattered. The outcry was, once again, for
closing down Dadaab, described as an al-Shabaab breeding ground.
Rawlence does not agree with that assessment.
Following
the rulebook of other countries in recent decades, the Kenyan
government simply declared “Dadaab Camp Officially Closed.” No
matter that there were still 400,000 people living there and
conditions in Somalia had not significantly improved. The refugees
(including Somalis in Nairobi) were expected to return to Somalia,
and some did, sent on Kenyan busses. Rawlence describes the situation
as “the pogrom against Somalis.” Nor does he mince words
when he states that Dadaab had “the structure of punishment”
like a prison, though the residents had committed no crimes. The
crime was somewhere else: “There was a crime here on an
industrial scale: confining people to a camp, forbidding them to
work, and then starving them; people who had come to Dadaab fleeing
famine in the first place.” With nowhere else for people to go,
Dadaab actually grew larger, instead of smaller.
City of
Thorns is a perfect metaphor for our time, a perfect storm of human
misery because of mismanagement. It doesn’t take much imagination
to realize that other similar refugee camps are springing up all over
the Middle East. The wonder of Rawlence’s book is its emphasis on
the human dimension, in spite of the writer’s massing of historical
evidence. (Rawlence worked for Human Rights Watch in the area for
several years.) The book’s sub-title is Nine Lives in the World’s
Largest Refugee Camp, although, sadly, since the book was completed,
there are several camps in the Middle East competing in their size.
The lives of
nine refugees fleshes out the horror of the story by providing it
with a human context. Thus, one of the first people we encounter is
Guled, who was born in Mogadishu in 1993, and, years later, fled the
country, arriving in Dadaab late in 2010. Before that, he’d been
conscripted by the fundamentalists, forced to join the moral police
(boy soldiers), checking the market. He describes some of their
tactics. “Beating was routine. If you had music or inappropriate
pictures on your phone you might be forced to swallow the SIM card.
Smokers often had their faces burned with their own cigarettes. One
man who had been beaten for smoking…later broke down crying when he
recounted the story—not for the physical pain he had suffered but
the heartbreak of being assaulted by children.”
After some
weeks of policing the market, Guled managed to escape and flee to
Kenya, soon after marrying a girl named Maryam. In Dabaab, he had to
register with the UNHCR and claim asylum “in order to be given a
ration card, personal items like a blanket and a bucket….”
Guled remained frightened that al-Shabaab’s infiltrators would
recognize him. He had to struggle to find a job but eventually found
day work as a porter. Since he was single, he’d not been given a
plot of land and a tent but had to share space with a family. After
some months, Maryam arrived, pregnant, and the two were united. Their
lives and that of their two children were tenuous. Guled’s jobs are
never adequate for supporting his family; he’s also addicted to
“playing and watching football.” Eventually, Maryam gives
up on their marriage and returns to Mogadishu with their children.
Guled remains in Dabaab for fear that al-Shabaab will recognize him.
Another
marriage—between Monday, who was born in the camp, and Muna, who
was brought to the camp by her parents—falters because Muna became
addicted to khat. Her addiction occurred after the birth of two
children and after the family was put on “fast track” for
resettlement in Australia. Fast track is an oxymoron; the time often
stretches into years. Muna became so compromised by the khat that she
tried to kill herself. Monday was left for a time raising their
children. Rawlence’s inclusion of their story is obvious. As he
notes, “Muna was perhaps the ultimate child of her generation.
Raised in the limbo of the camp, the true daughter of Dabaab, Muna
had relinquished responsibility for herself entirely to the testing
mercy of events,” simply giving up. Yet, months and months
later, after the two were reunited and Muna was pregnant again, their
paperwork (which had been lost) finally resulted in their
resettlement in Australia. Whether they would remain intact as a
family—after so many years of disappointment—was doubtful.
In City of
Thorns, Rawlence is anything but hopeful about the lives of the
refugees he followed over several years. The book suffers from poor
editing in a number of places, possibly because of an attempt to get
it into print just as the refugee situation in other trouble spots of
the world has gotten out of control. Still, Rawlence’s rage at the
lackadaisical approach of donor nations (often the cause of the
problems) about refugee crises is totally understandable and
justified. As he concludes, “Ranged against the Kenyan desire to
see Dadaab leveled was not just the law, but all the forces of human
ingenuity and determination that had raised a city in this most
hostile desert. Dadaab worked. It served a need, for the miracle of
schools and hospitals and a safety net of food, and for respite from
the exhaustion of the war. It had become a fact. Through the
accumulated energy of the generations that had lived there it had
acquired the weight and drama of place. It was a landmark around
which hundreds of thousands oriented their lives. In the imagination
of Somalis, even if not on the official cartography, Dadaab was now
on the map.”
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