Human Cargo Page 20
Looking for someone to talk to about life inside Angel Heights, I found Madina, one of the two non-African women in the hostel at present; the other is an older Belorussian woman in her fifties, confined to her room with severe diabetes. Madina is a geologist from Azerbaijan with a master’s degree, a dark, thin, bony woman in her early thirties, her hair lank and very black, her clothes black. She has a thin, awkward smile and speaks some English. Her story told me everything I wanted to know about Angel Heights.
Madina last saw her eleven-year-old son, Kolya, on January 12, 2003. He was then in a hospital in St. Petersburg with severe frostbite to his face and hands, having been thrown from a police car into the snow and found by a passerby. Kolya is half black. He was in shock and unwilling or unable to say much about what had happened to him, beyond the fact that the police had picked him up as he was walking to a school party and that in the scuffle he had lost the present he had been carrying. Madina was told by the doctors that he would be fine, and that she could return to collect him on the fourteenth. When she returned, his bed was empty. Kolya had been moved, she was informed, to a children’s ward in a psychiatric hospital, with severe mental problems. She hastened to the hospital and was refused entry. Kolya was far too ill to see her.
Though terrified and baffled about what to do next, Madina had long expected trouble—but not this kind of trouble. For almost a year, she had been involved with a group of campaigners protesting against the war in Chechnya and what the Russians were doing to Chechen refugees. She already had to flee her home town in Azerbaijan because of death threats against her second husband, Salimov, a Chechen, and because of her own work with Armenian refugees, and she was no stranger to violence. Her first husband, Kolya’s father, who was Congolese, had been killed in a bomb attack when he returned to Brazzaville after completing his studies in Azerbaijan, and Kolya had endured many racist attacks as a small boy. Since arriving in St. Petersburg, the city chosen carefully by her as the most liberal in Russia, Madina had been harassed by the police; her office had been ransacked and her computer and files confiscated, and she had been hospitalized with concussion and severe bruising after being arrested. “I’m not the kind of person who can sit back and do nothing,” she said to me, sitting in the empty dining room in Angel Heights, reminding me again how often I feel surprised by the instinctive and apparently unhesitating courage of political activists. “I feel suffering like it’s mine.” A second attack by the police had left her with two broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. And on September 19, almost four months before Kolya’s abduction, Madina was again hospitalized, this time with severe depression. Soon after she was released, Salimov was arrested and charged with spying.
By this stage, not surprisingly, Madina had lost what little faith she had ever had in Russian human rights. Even liberal St. Petersburg was turning out to be dangerous for dissidents. But the abduction of her son was more than she could bear. Having been refused permission to see him on January 14, she went home in despair. The telephone rang as she entered the apartment. Her caller did not give his name. “We have taken your husband and your son,” the voice said, “and now it is your turn.” Madina fled to her nineteen-year-old sister’s apartment. Later, they went out because the sister was going to the dentist. As they left, there was a shot: Madina’s sister fell into the snow, dead. Madina saw a policeman run away. “Next time,” said the telephone caller that night, “we will not miss.” Again Madina fled. Friends helped find an agent who provided her with a ticket for London and a visa for Italy, where the plane was landing. She reasoned that she must stay alive for Kolya’s sake. At Heathrow, she asked for asylum. She was put into a small hotel near the airport and, three months later, sent to Newcastle.
These, then, are Madina’s reasons for being in Angel Heights, waiting to hear whether the Home Office will decide to send her to Italy, for which she still has a visa, and let the Italian government decide on the legitimacy of her claim, or whether they will grant her leave to remain in Britain. The familiar and sad story of violence, fear, and torture explains Madina’s haunted look, her fragile thinness, her anxious pacing. She has no idea how or when or where she will ever see Kolya again.
Meanwhile, she waits, and thinks. She sleeps little, thinking obsessively of her son, who she knows from friends is still in the psychiatric hospital in St. Petersburg. She also knows that there is still no news of Salimov, who, she now suspects, has been “disappeared.” She spends her weekly £10 on phone calls to Russia. From dawn until late each night she wanders around Angel Heights’ long bright yellow corridors, occasionally leaving the building to walk down the hill into central Newcastle and to the main library, where she can receive and send e-mail. She found a book on geology in Angel Heights’ small library and uses it to work on her English. Every morning, she forces herself to translate something from a newspaper, as practice. Had she tried any of the novels on the shelf? “They are,” she said mournfully, “not serious.” Most days, she spends a few hours with one of the African women, recently granted leave to remain in the United Kingdom. The African woman is too frightened to walk in Newcastle’s streets on her own since some boys threw eggs at her; asked by the Home Office whether there was a close family member she would like to apply to have join her in Britain, she replied that no, she had no one, soldiers had killed them all. At six o’clock, Madina eats dinner in the refectory, alone; afterward, she sits in her small, perfectly comfortable, totally silent bedroom, with its bright purple walls, and thinks. So the days pass, each one like the last, in an outer appearance of calm, and an inner feeling of desperation and terror. I didn’t feel there was much more I wanted to know about Angel Heights: a benign prison, lived in by solitary women, waiting.
• • •
AS GEORGINA FLEXNER, who works for the Consortium for Asylum Support Services, sees it, the real messages spread by government go all one way. For all the pious words about integration, about preparing local communities for the arrival of asylum seekers, about the enormous advantages to both sides of having refugees in the community, “regionalization”—the currently popular word—is effectively all about policing and little about care. Asylum seekers are not meant to feel welcome; if their reception is too good, then they might want to stay. Since Flexner started work in the north three years ago, she has decided that the dispersal program, with all its contradictions and confusions, its ever changing regulations and its arbitrariness, is designed chiefly as a deterrent to others who would follow. It is rife not simply with contradictions, but with absurdities, which serve mainly to give ammunition to the anti-immigration lobby. Monica Bishop told me that not long ago, four young women asylum seekers needed to be transported from a hostel in one part of Newcastle to a YMCA in another. The journey was about two miles. But because the contract for transport by bus originates in Kent, a bus was sent from Ashford to Newcastle to take the four passengers, a distance of over three hundred miles. The total cost, she estimates, was around £1,000; a local taxi would have charged £5.
Georgina Flexner is not, however, altogether discouraged. What no one reckoned with, she says, are ordinary human feelings of sympathy. The northeast, impoverished by unemployment since the collapse of mining and the dockyards, its housing estates van-dalized and shabby, has grown fond of the strangers drifting into their city centers since 2000. Many of its inhabitants have found themselves, against their expectations, enjoying the fact that members of ninety new nationalities have settled in their empty houses, bringing with them new music, new customs, and even new food in the markets. When, not long ago, the Beamish Museum decided to draw asylum seekers closer into the community by offering two busloads of them a free day’s visit, there was outrage from the British National party and some of the newspapers, but an equally loud backlash from local people, who liked the idea of all these Zimbabweans, Iraqis, and Sri Lankans inspecting Stevenson’s Rocket and early railway stock. Refugee families, expelled suddenly as the result of a negative decisi
on by the Home Office from neighborhoods in which their children had grown up, faced with deportation long after they had settled and put down roots, have found vociferous champions for their cause among neighbors and community groups. Georgina Flexner talks warmly of the enthusiasm of northern plans for integrating refugees. Willing to turn their hands to all forms of employment, bringing with them skills that might transform dying housing estates, these are the very people, as she sees it, who may contribute most to a new prosperity. Studies done in recent months have shown that 80 percent of asylum seekers in the northeast would chose to stay there, should they win the right to remain in Britain, providing they can find work and housing; they find the north friendlier, less intimidating than London. As she moves between local communities and the ever growing refugee population, Flexner observes how neatly balanced are the ancestral fears of losing England to a tide of foreigners, against the newer fear of seeing the northeast become a mere transit area.
• • •
RARLY IN 2004, the Home Office announced that the number of applicants for asylum in the UK was down by 40 percent, to 61,050. The government’s delight was not shared by those who work with refugees: they view the growing restrictions with unease, and worry about all those people who, fearing rejection, are now not even bothering to try to make the journey to safety. Asylum specialists would like to see many changes, including the setting up of an independent documentation center, to provide reliable country information. They worry that the Home Office is paying far more attention to securing its borders and building up Fortress Europe than to making the system on the ground workable for those who manage it or supportable for those who live it, and that the government does little to counter the hostility fomented by the tabloids.
Lies, inaccuracies, exaggerations, untruths: this is the climate in which the current British asylum world lives, in which policy is made not so much on evidence as in response to media and public perception, and in which those seeking asylum, buffeted by the chaotic, contradictory, and discriminatory asylum procedures now in operation across the Western World, scramble for a toehold using any method they can. Not long ago, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the European Parliament that European anti-immigration rhetoric was “dehumanizing people.” “This silent human rights crisis,” he went on, “shames our world.”
• 6 •
LITTLE BETTER THAN COCKROACHES
Guinea’s Long-term Camps
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Contemporary history has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends.
— HANNAH ARENDT
It was in 1958 that Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first president, won independence from France and embarked on twenty-six years of socialist dictatorship. Touré’s isolationist views, and anger at them on the part of De Gaulle and other Western leaders, effectively ensured that all through the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Guinea remained one of the most isolated of Africa’s postcolonial countries, a distant, shuttered land, with a small stretch of Atlantic coast and thousands of square miles of semitropical forest, little touched by the material and economic development that came to other parts of the continent. Even today, despite the forest region’s many natural resources, Guinea vies with Sierra Leone and Liberia—the three Mano River Union countries of West Africa—for the title of the world’s poorest and least settled country. Her 7.5 million people are said to live on less than a dollar a day.
The capital, Conakry, is an old-fashioned place, with its fringe of palm trees along the shore and a wind that blows constantly from the ocean. It is very hot and very humid and the city is growing fast, but outward, simply, poorly, in shantytowns that vanish into the distance, with few of the plate-glass-and-steel skyscrapers that mark other developing capitals.
Guinea’s leaders since Touré have proved little more accepting of dissent: even today, twenty years after Touré’s death, opposition politicians prefer to lie low during election time, and few of them are said to sleep in their own homes while polling takes place. A courageous Guinean professor of law, Dr. Thierno Maadjou Sow, has since 1995 been running the Organization Guinéenne des Droits de l’Homme, one of the country’s handful of campaigning bodies. His dealings with the government are wary. “Tout le monde ici,” he told me when I first arrived in Conakry, “a quelque chose à coeur: We are all victims of terrible things.” He was talking about his many colleagues and friends who have spent months and years in prison and who expect to spend many more there.
In the year 2000, thirty-three of the world’s forty-one most indebted countries lay in Africa. Forty percent of the world’s refugees, and 70 percent of its AIDS victims, were also African. In the early and mid-1990s, when civil war inside Liberia and Sierra Leone had turned some 7 million people into refugees, either displaced within their own countries or driven abroad into nearby ones, Guinea, a long fat country wrapped around its neighbors, had willingly absorbed one of the largest per capita refugee influxes in the world. Seven hundred thousand people—a tenth of Guinea’s own population—had found shelter there, either within camps run and financed by the international community, or scattered around the country. As Guinea belongs to the West African Economic Community, Sierra Leoneans and Liberians, who also belong, are allowed to reside and work there. By the spring of 2003, according to official UNHCR figures, 185,000 refugees were being protected and cared for by Guinea, though the true figure, including new arrivals and those who for one reason or another had not been registered, was certainly far higher. Of all those now crossing over from Liberia and Sierra Leone, 70 percent, over two thirds, I was told, were under the age of eighteen.
As Cairo’s Liberian boys had left their roots along this rainy belt, having fled Charles Taylor and the rebel commanders either alone or with their families and crossed the nearest border to safety, Guinea seemed to be the place to go in search of them. A visit would give me, I thought, not just a clearer picture of what had driven them into exile in the first place, but a sense of what they had left behind. Some, like nearsighted Mamadu, working off his smuggler’s fee in Tel Aviv, had spent many years here, in one of the long-term refugee camps at Guékédou, and I wanted to see for myself these camps, so established and so problematic. Izako, the customs officer forced to abandon his wife and small son and daughter in Monrovia, had told me that he believed that his family might have made their way into Guinea; by going there, I half hoped that I might find them.
In Guinea’s région forestière, so I was told, I would see the gamut of African refugee life, the cycle in all its stages, from new arrivals to the residents of settled camps, indistinguishable, after long years, from the villages that surround them. In UNHCR’s headquarters in Conakry hangs an immense map, marking with arrows and bands of color the flows of people around West Africa, making me think once again, as in San Diego, of the migratory paths of birds around the world. Along the southern borders of the area, where the forest runs for almost a thousand miles, there is a swath of red. This is refugee territory, refugees coming and going, crossing and recrossing borders, settling and dying, making lives and being moved on; it was there that I wished to go, to see for myself what Africa offered its moving populations.
• • •
THE CAMP OF Kuankan lies 700 miles from Conakry, in a clearing cut out of the semitropical forest that seems to stretch forever along this part of West Africa. It can be reached by flying to Nzerekore, the nearest town, either hitching a ride on the twice-weekly UN and aid agency plane on the rare occasion when one of the thirty seats is not taken by an aid worker, or taking one of the infrequent flights by a very ancient commercial plane. Then there is a long drive, at first along a new tarmac road laid by foreign flinders to make the delivery of aid easier, then along a dark red-earth track between the tall teak and palm trees, the feathery acacias and deep green baobabs. The track is full of craters, deep crevices that become rivers when the rains com
e.
For a passenger lulled by the green, the denseness of the forest shade, the sudden clarity and light of the camp’s great open space is startling. Here, in over two square miles of mud huts with thatched roofs, and in tarpaulin tents, live 33,000 refugees, all but a very few of them Liberians escaping Charles Taylor’s long and murderous civil war. None of the Cairo Liberians had been to Kuankan, but all knew of friends here, and it was just possible that Izako’s family might be among them. My visit was in March. With the start of the eight-month rainy season in February, water begins to soak through the thatch and the torn and patched tarpaulin above the refugees’ heads, and in the bright sunshine and great heat of the morning of my first day in the camp, people were laying out their possessions to dry. The air was humid and absolutely still. It seemed an isolated, hermetic place.