Human Cargo Read online

  A distinguished biographer, Caroline Moorehead writes for The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, and Index on Censorship. She has worked directly with African refugees in Cairo, as a founder of a legal advice office, in addition to raising funds for a range of educational projects. She is the author of Gellhorn and lives in London.

  ALSO BY CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

  The Collected Letters of Martha Gellhorn (editor)

  Gellhorn: A Twentieth-Century Life

  Iris Origo: Marchesa of Val d’Orcia

  Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross

  The Lost Treasures of Troy

  Bertrand Russell: A Life

  Betrayed: Children in Today’s World (editor)

  Troublesome People

  Beyond the Rim of the World: The Letters of Freya Stark (editor)

  Freya Stark: A Biography

  Sidney Bernstein: A Biography

  Fortune’s Hostages

  HUMAN CARGO

  HUMAN CARGO

  A JOURNEY AMONG REFUGEES

  CAROLINE MOOREHEAD

  PICADOR

  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

  NEW YORK

  HUMAN CARGO. Copyright © 2005, 2006 by Caroline Moorehead.

  All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America.

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  The author would like to thank Eva Hoffman for permission to quote from The New

  Nomads; Mandla Langa for permission to quote from The Naked Song; and Random House

  for permission to quote from Giuseppe Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

  Parts of the prologue are based on an article that appeared in

  The New York Review of Books in 2001.

  Designed by Victoria Hartman

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Moorehead, Caroline.

  Human cargo : a journey among refugees / Caroline Moorehead.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 0-312-42561-9

  EAN 978-0-312-42561-6

  I. Refugees. I. Title.

  HV640.M66 2005

  305.9′06914—dc22

  2004054239

  First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company, New York

  First Picador Paperback Edition: April 2006

  D 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3

  To

  Lyndall

  CONTENTS

  A Refugee Story

  Prologue: The Lost Boys of Cairo

  Part One: A View of History

  —————

  1. The Homeless and the Rightless

  Part Two: Leaving

  —————

  2. Gli Extracommitari: Sicily’s Boat People

  3. The Fence: The Migrants of San Diego and Tijuana

  Part Three: Arriving

  —————

  4. Fair Go: Australia and the Policy of

  Mandatory Detention

  5. Newcastle and the Politics of Dispersal

  6. Little Better than Cockroaches:

  Guinea’s Long-term Camps

  7. The Corridors of Memory:

  The Naqba and the Palestinians of Lebanon

  8. The Illness of Exile

  Part Four: Afterward

  —————

  9. Going Home: Afghanistan

  10. Dead Dreams: The Dinkas of Oulu

  Epilogue: A Mode of Being

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  HUMAN CARGO

  A REFUGEE STORY

  One day a man in a country in Africa was arrested and accused of belonging to an illegal opposition group. He was sent to prison and tortured. In his cell was a very small window. By standing up very straight, in the far corner of the room, he could just see a field outside. From time to time, cows came to graze in it. As the weeks passed, he grew to recognize their shapes and colors. One in particular pleased him, and he gave her a name. From that day on, whenever she passed his window, he talked to her. He told her about his wife and children who had disappeared, about his house and his parents, and about the village where he grew up.

  The day came when he was freed. He left his African country and went into exile, taking his cow with him. In his new country, he was offered an appointment with a doctor, to talk through his experiences. On the first day, he arrived in good time, leading his cow behind him. When the receptionist ushered him into the consulting room, he made sure the cow had plenty of room to follow him. Week after week, the man and his cow attended sessions together.

  Several months went by. One day, the doctor suggested that the moment had come for the man to bid farewell to his cow. He replied that it was too soon. Several more months passed. Then the morning came when the man accepted that he could keep his cow with him no longer. That day, he was extremely sad. He brought the cow with him, as usual, and then, crying, told her that the time had come for her to go home. Saying good-bye to his cow made him weep more than he had wept for many years.

  PROLOGUE

  The Lost Boys of Cairo

  ——————

  Refugees live in a divided world, between countries in which they cannot live, and countries which they may not enter.

  — ELIE WIESEL

  When Musa Sherif arrived at the house of his friend, a tailor from Sierra Leone, early in February 2000, he found no one there. He was surprised, because his friend was nearly always at home, waiting for him with his supper, but he reasoned that the tailor might have had to make a long journey to the other side of Cairo for a fitting with a client. The room looked unusually neat and empty, but his place was laid, and there was dinner in a pot on the stove. On the table sat a brown paper parcel, tied with string. Musa sat and waited. When some time had passed, he began to grow anxious. He needed to eat and leave, so that he could find somewhere to sleep that night; as a Liberian asylum seeker in Egypt he had no money for a place of his own. And, this being his only meal of the day, he was hungry. Finally, he ate, sitting uneasily at a corner of the table. Then he waited some more.

  It was now that he suddenly noticed that the brown packet had his name on it. He opened it. Inside were a newly made pair of trousers, a shirt, and a tie, folded neatly, with a letter on top. “Dear Musa,” it said. “Here is a present for you. Forgive me. I have wanted to tell you every day for many weeks now, but I have been too cowardly. I was chosen for resettlement in Canada. Today I am leaving.” Musa took the clothes his friend had made for him, put them on, threw away the frayed and filthy ones that he had been wearing for many months, and went back to the streets.

  Musa is one of the lost boys of Africa. Though the phrase has come to be used for the young Sudanese separated from their families during their flight from the civil war of the 1990s, who grouped together and eventually made their way to the United States, Cairo is full of lost boys, though most are no longer boys now, but young men, from Sierra Leone and Liberia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Sudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Rwanda, and Buru
ndi. Over the last ten years they have come to Cairo by a hundred different paths, on foot, by ferry, in airplanes, on trucks and trains, by camel and horseback, believing that, for all its horror, life was still worth living, that Egypt would be the gateway to a future, and that their past, as victims of the savagery of civil war and modern conflict, was somehow their passport to that future. If the lost boys have something in common, beyond a look of stunned and mistrustful defeat, a sort of hooded inwardness, it is that they have all witnessed acts of unconscionable cruelty, which they alone, out of their large families, have inexplicably survived. Fate—luck—has a particular meaning for them.

  • • •

  I MET MUSA Sherif for the first time in the late afternoon of February 5, 2000, shortly after his friend’s departure for the United States. It was my first day in Cairo. I wouldn’t have noticed him, for he was one of fifty-six young Liberians gathered in the office of the African Studies department of the American University in Cairo, had it not been for his pressed, almost starched new trousers. He was also the only young man in a tie. Later, I would see him in very clean denim dungarees, and in a baggy green suit of trousers and bomber jacket, in a fashionable military color, with striking emerald green leather sneakers: clothes, for Musa, as for many of the young men, were a symbol of possibility, of belief that there was some order in a profoundly disordered world, and still some hope of being able to make an impression on it.

  On this afternoon in early February, Musa had followed the other young men to a meeting called by Barbara Harrell-Bond, who, as emeritus professor in refugee studies at the American University, long a defender and protector of refugees, had become a point of reference for asylum seekers in Cairo. They were sitting on the floor, pressed closely together because the office was too small for such gatherings, in a room of faded elegance, with ornate latticed doors and decorated tiles, remnants of Cairo’s earlier grandeur. Musa was one of the young men who spoke. His English was good and his voice clear and precise. With his shirt and tie, and his overly big glasses with their round frames, he had the look of a bookish, eager accountant or librarian. What I didn’t then know was that Musa had been a schoolteacher until the nightmare of his current life overtook him, and that, as the brightest and most promising in a large family of sons, he had been selected by his father as the one to study and make his way in a world beyond their farm and village. Nor did I know then that peculiar-looking little Abdullai, with his bright pink woman’s quilted jacket and children’s furry earmuffs, to which were attached wire antennae, which quivered as he moved his head, was not yet fifteen, and living in a derelict car abandoned beyond the airport, and that he was often hungry; or that Abdularam, sitting cross-legged in the front row and asking a stream of highly technical questions about the Refugee Convention,* spoke such unfathomable English because he had no back teeth on either side, from years of violence and neglect. Eater, all these Liberians would become real people to me, as I carried their stories around with me in my head, stories of murdered parents and burned-out homes, tales of terror and flight, and as I slowly pieced together, fragment by fragment, from meetings or calls late at night from public telephone boxes and offered tentatively as bits in a vast, uncompleted jigsaw, the map of each one’s particular odyssey. In the same way, later, Liberia itself would become a real place for me, a country of rivers and mountains and towns, but also a place of war and violence, with its military commanders, its rebel checkpoints, and its random, hideous brutality. Unschooled, for the most part on the run and lost for several years, these young men turned out to be keen historians of the civil wars that had destroyed their families and their childhoods.

  • • •

  THAT LATE AFTERNOON in February, as the winter sun went down, and the light in the small cramped room faded, and the noises from the narrow street of car repair shops and spare parts outside began to grow faint, the Liberians talked on and on, about themselves and their fears about what was happening to them. It marked a particular moment in the lives of these fifty-two young men and four young women. Until that afternoon, these young people had been drifting along the margins of Cairo’s immense refugee population in search of help, teaming up sometimes, like Musa, with another asylum seeker from another African country, but for the most part totally alone. After this time, they would become a band, with the rivalries and animosities inevitable among people so anxious and so destitute, but a band nonetheless, looking after the interests of the others, so that when Abudu was the first to be accepted for resettlement in the United States, and Amr went to prison on obscure charges of spying for Israel, these events would be personal in the life of each of them.

  • • •

  IT WAS ON that late February afternoon in Cairo that I started to keep notes and that this book began. I wanted it to be about those whose stories I had been hearing for over twenty years of writing about human rights: refugees and asylum seekers, both those who travel to flee torture and persecution and those who move to escape poverty and failed lives. It would be, I hoped, a record of what happens to people when their lives spiral out of control into horror and loss, of the lengths they will go to in order to survive, of the extraordinary resilience of ordinary men and women and children who must accept the unacceptable, and also an account of how the modern world is dealing with exoduses that far exceed in complexity and distance anything the world has known before. And as the months went by and I got to know the Liberians, and then traveled to other places in search of other refugees, this account grew to take in their journeys and their expectations, their former lives, their destinations, and the experiences of those working with them and struggling to formulate coherent policies for the future. I would start with no preconceived ideas, beyond a recognition that among the asylum seekers there are those who lay claim to a history of persecution they do not possess. Without attempting either to cover all parts of the world or all facets of the subject, I would listen to their stories and follow wherever they led, over the whole journey of exile from flight to resettlement or return home, describing only what I saw and heard.

  • • •

  AMONG THE YOUNG Liberians, Musa is remarkable only for the remorselessness of the horrors that overtook him. His father was a prosperous Mende farmer in Grand Capemount County, with four wives. Musa, the brightest boy in the family, was sent away to Sierra Leone to train to become a teacher. He was a studious boy and he learned good English and Arabic. When he was seventeen, he went home to teach in the local school and prepare to succeed his father as village elder. In a photograph taken at the time, which he has carried with him all these years, he looks absurdly small and young. He is a short, stocky young man, with a very round face and an almost jaunty manner. Musa was at home, in the large family compound, with his pregnant new wife, sixteen-year-old Zainab, when in 1997 Charles Taylor’s second wave of civil war brought marauding killers to Grand Capemount County. Taylor’s soldiers wanted no elders and no educated Mendes in the new Liberia. The killing was slow and deliberate. First the women and the girls, after raping them; then the elders, using machetes to chop off arms and legs; then the young men, shot with Kalashnikovs. Musa, in a line with four of his brothers, was the last. By the time the soldiers reached him, an officer had arrived. The killing was stopped. His brothers were all dead, along with his mother, father, and sisters. Musa was alive.

  • • •

  HE FLED, THREE days later, at the border with Sierra Leone, he found Zainab; she had been raped twice but had not lost the baby. They crossed the frontier and wandered in the bush, eating grass and roots, with Zainab’s mother and a little girl of five, found abandoned along the way, whose parents had been murdered in front of her. One day rebels—bands of soldiers roamed both sides of the border— caught Musa’s mother-in-law as she was gathering berries; they raped and mutilated her, and, in great pain, she died. Then Musa was captured, slapped about, scarred with the blade of a bayonet. But Zainab hid in the bushes with the little girl; Zainab’s
baby, a boy, was born under a tree soon afterward and survived. Musa escaped and found them and they pressed on, hiding in the undergrowth, begging food from villagers. At last they reached a refugee camp, but they were turned away: it was full, and those who ran it by now feared that all young Liberian men might be killers with tribal scores to settle.

  So they wandered on, stopping from time to time to rest, until one day, on the outskirts of Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, they met a friend of Musa’s father, a Lebanese trader. The friend, knowing that Musa could not survive for long in a country run by Charles Taylor’s men—who were then hunting down all they suspected of being-rebel fighters—brought him a plane ticket and a visa for Egypt. Zainab, their son, their adopted daughter, and a new second baby found refuge with an aunt. Musa was now twenty-two. In Egypt, he believed that he would find asylum; the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—UNHCR—would surely grant him refugee status and bring his wife and children to join him. He flew to Cairo, expectant, exhausted by months of fear, frantic with worry about his family.

  • • •

  THAT WAS IN 1999. By the time I reached Cairo in February 2000, Musa was still alone, stateless, without papers, work, a home, or his family. UNHCR had neither interviewed him nor recognized his claim to be a refugee. He had lost touch with Zainab and the children; he believed they had fled over the border into Guinea, where the camps for those who escape Liberia’s continuing carnage are renowned for rape and casual murder. The politics of the modern refugee world are not on Musa’s side, chiefly because he arrived in Egypt too late. By 1999, all Africa seemed to be on the move, running from the civil wars that to this day consume the continent, while many other desperate people had been drawn north by Egypt’s open-door policy, not knowing that the country had neither the means of looking after those they so hospitably allowed in, nor any intention of doing so, and that the rest of the world had few plans to give them refuge, either.