Human Cargo Read online

  The trouble was not, of course, just in Liberia. Though the région forestière of Guinea shelters mainly Liberians, there are many other Africans there, too. The 1990s were barely more peaceful in Sierra Leone, a largely Muslim former British colony that emerged from three decades of one-party rule only to descend into a ten-year civil war, triggered by an invasion of disaffected Sierra Leoneans from Liberia. Sierra Leone’s own war would see executions, abductions, rapes, and at least 100,000 people mutilated by having limbs amputated; whole neighborhoods of Freetown were set alight, often with their residents inside.

  By 1997, when Charles Taylor brought his own kind of peace to Liberia, there were said to be 7 to 8 million firearms in West Africa, transferred from one area to another as conflicts developed. UN investigators have discovered a network of arms brokers and transport companies leading back to Slovakia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. The heady mixture of greed, ethnic tensions, ruthless warlords, and the conviction that power has its roots in the invisible world and that man’s destiny can be revealed through marabouts, soothsayers, priests, and “heartsmen” (providers of human hearts) had effectively created a generation of refugees, driven to choose between starvation, life in a camp, or death at the hands of marauding soldiers dressed as women. “I identified with those crazy people,” a former government official and later employee of a foreign food agency told a journalist. “We all wear masks. Behind those masks is a mad, horrified people.”

  When, on July 19, 1997, an exhausted people voted Charles Taylor, the most successful warlord of them all, into the presidency, the flow of Liberian refugees into neighboring countries briefly stopped, and UNHGR and the international aid agencies turned their attention to the consequences of the fighting within Sierra Leone, where rebel forces against the government were now cutting off the arms and legs of their own citizens and driving abroad those who survived. These horrors fueled further speculation that what was now being seen was a taste of the future: desperate, deracinated youths driven into frenzied wars by environmental degradation, vast movements of the population from countryside to city, and high birthrates. Not everyone agreed; the critics of the “new barbarism” idea argued that, on the contrary, war was always war, whether fought with machetes or smart bombs, and that these West African wars were not different but only cheaper. For a while, in Liberia, it seemed as if peace might even be made to work. Taylor’s victory in the presidential elections, closely observed by international experts, was accepted as generally legitimate. But not for long. By the spring of 2002, Liberia’s fragile five-year peace was coming to an end and rebel forces were once again challenging Taylor’s rule; new men of war “with no contrite hearts” and no compassion were again looting, raping, and murdering. The insecurity was worsened still further by violent xenophobia in Côote d’Ivoire, where leading government officials were inciting ethnic and religious hatred, and security forces were targeting victims, mainly in the Muslim north. Liberian refugees from the looting, the abductions, and the burning of villages were again on the move, Fatima and her five children among them. As people fled north into Guinea, Liberian government soldiers and rebels were moving west into Sierra Leone, to abduct fighters and recruit mercenaries for the next stage in their war.

  These, then, are the causes of Fatima’s flight, and the flight of Peter her neighbor, and that of the Liberians in Cairo: violence, loss, grief in comparison with which the uncertain waiting of the camp takes on a different aspect.

  • • •

  BENEDICT IS FIFTEEN, a lively, slender boy, watchful and old for his years. He is one of Kuankan’s large population of single, unaccompanied children, the term by which the aid world designates children who have lost their families. When Benedict was thirteen, fighting broke out in Liberia’s Lofa County, which borders Guinea, and whose contours I had grown to know from the stories of the Liberians in Cairo. As soon as his family heard that both the rebels and the government forces were looking for boys to take as soldiers, they sent him into the bush to hide. All the other villagers, watchful of the approaching trouble, sent their young sons, too. In the bush, the boys quickly learned to survive. They found yams and plantains, and cooked them over a small open fire, cautiously so as not to attract attention with the smoke, and they added these to the food brought out from the village from time to time by their parents. Weeks passed, and still the rebels were known to be in the area. One of the boys fell ill from something he had eaten; after a few days he died. Messengers from the village came to tell them that it was still not safe to go home.

  Then, very early one morning, Benedict woke to see smoke rising on the horizon, from the direction of his village. It was too far away to see more than wisps of white against the blue of the sky, and too far to hear any sounds, but later that day villagers appeared and told of a rebel attack. The smoke on the horizon grew thicker and new arrivals described their huts being set alight; many of the occupants, they reported, had been herded inside and burned to death. Next morning, a neighbor of Benedict’s arrived in the boys’ camp. He told Benedict that his parents, his younger brother, and his elder sister had all been burned to death inside their house.

  It took Benedict and some of the other boys orphaned in the rebel attack four days to reach the border with Guinea; fortunately, they had no difficulty surviving on foraged roots and fruit. Like Fa-tima, Benedict was welcomed by UNHCR and eventually taken to Kuankan by truck. Offered the chance to live as a foster child with another refugee family, he asked to be allowed to live on his own, preferring the independence he had learned in the bush. Once a month, together with the others, he collects his dried rations from WFP, which he cooks for himself, together with a few onions, sweet potatoes, and peppers that he has planted next to his hut. What he has left over, he sells, and buys dried fish and sugar. However much he saves, he is never able to afford a second set of clothes or a pair of shoes. When he arrived in Kuankan a year ago, the Guinean Red Cross gave him a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. Since he owns nothing else, he cannot wash them and is now embarrassed when he goes to school in such ragged and dirty clothes, though nothing will keep him from class. He wants, he says, to become a scientist. Because of the school, if for no other reason, he believes that the camp life is better than the one he was leading in the bush, though he says that he is hungry at the end of every month, just before the rations arrive. He does not like to talk about his parents or the past.

  It is not easy to care for all these lost and orphaned children, those who saw their parents hacked to death or watched their homes burn down, those who were separated from their families during flight and cannot find them again, or were abducted and forced to do things as child soldiers that they are now too ashamed to confront. In the spring of 2003, there were just over 1,500 of these separated children in Kuankan. Some of them are babies and children so small that they do not know their own names, so they cannot say where they came from. Other refugees found them abandoned along the route toward the border, picked them up and carried them, and later gave them to UNHCR to care for. Photographs of these children are posted throughout the camps of West Africa, in the hopes that someone will recognize and claim them. I wondered whether Izako’s son and daughter might be among them, and whether, not having seen them for so long, he would recognize them now. They made me think of the posters of small, nameless children separated from their parents in the European exoduses that followed World War II; their photos hung in post offices and stations throughout liberated Europe in 1946, as 40 million displaced Europeans wandered in search of what had been or could again be home.

  Throughout Guinea, the task of caring for the separated children falls to one of the most impressive of the international aid organizations, the International Rescue Committee, which, as implementing partner for UNHCR, runs the entire educational program of the camps. Christian, who is in charge of the separated children, has eighteen local offices and a staff of 127, who act as tracers and social workers; when parents are found, th
e children are driven or even flown to join them. These reunions can be terrifying for the children, particularly for those long separated from their families and shocked by all that they have experienced and seen. Boy soldiers, in particular, face the prospect of rejection, if not by their parents then by people from their villages, against whom they have sometimes been forced to perform acts of great cruelty. Not long ago, Christian, whose office is in Conakry, arranged for a young boy called Sekou to be repatriated together with some of the Sierra Leoneans going home. He knew that the boy’s parents were alive, and despite Sekou’s evident reluctance, persuaded him to try to live with his family again. A few weeks later, Sekou was back, having walked through the bush for ten days to return to Conakry and the safety of the children’s center. When he was eleven, Sekou had been kidnapped by the rebels. As a boy soldier he had been ordered to lock some people from his own village into their hut and set fire to it. The survivors of his community would not accept him back, and for his parents the shame of what he had done was too great for them to take him in.

  The size of the task facing Christian, and the delicate complexity of its demands, became clear to him not long ago when he heard about two refugee children living in a village just inside the border. He set off to find them, driving one of the white Toyota Land Cruisers that have become the hallmark of international aid the world over. On making inquiries, he discovered that there were another 205 separated children in the same village, having stopped there as they fled the war in Liberia, and now stuck as a kind of indentured labor force for the Guinean villagers, who see nothing wrong in using these young children to work in their fields and houses in return for food and lodging. If there were 207 lost children in a single border village, Christian reasoned, then how many more must there be in other villages, where their escapes had been brought to a halt by hunger? Few of the children had ever heard about the refugee camps, and none knew what they were for or how to find them.

  Finding ways of tracing these lost children’s families, ensuring that in the meantime they are safe and not exploited, persuading the families who have taken them in and are benefitting from the work they do that the children would be better off in the camps is a time-consuming and complicated process. In eighteen months, Christian and his staff have found 7,500 separated children along the border and in Conakry. These children were all traveling absolutely alone. The true number of the separated may be three or even four times as high, for it is widely accepted that somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of children who become refugees from war are separated from their families in flight. How many die on the way, too tired or hungry or frightened to go on, no one can say.

  In Conakry, in a shabby building with a large inner courtyard shaded by mango trees, Christian runs a transit center for children who are on their way to be reunited with their families, or whose problems are so acute as to make camp life too hard. He keeps it intentionally shabby, and the dormitories have bare foam mattresses on the floor and ragged sheets: he does not want the children to see the place as anything but the most temporary pause, between a past that they are putting behind them, and a return to their families and a new life. It must not, he insists, become home. There are no toys and few books. The boys fashion cars out of old tins, ingenious contraptions of wire and cotton reels and flattened bits of metal, which clatter around the concrete at the end of strings.

  In spite of the center’s transitory nature, Abu and his three brothers have been there for over a year, waiting for papers that will allow them to join an uncle in the United States. The boys are the sons of a prosperous and influential businessman and politician, a man much envied and much disliked, according to Abu, in their small town in Port Loco in Sierra Leone. When the rebels reached the town in 1997, his father was one of the first to be surrendered and killed. Their mother, eight months pregnant at the time, was shot and killed while struggling to squeeze out of a back window of their house with the younger children. The nine children, three of them by the politician’s second wife, who had died in childbirth some months before, were caught and tied up. Abu’s eldest brother was asked where their father kept his money. He did not know. So the rebels cut off first one of his hands, and then, when he still said nothing, the other. Abu’s father had confided in him alone out of all the children; when his turn came, he led the soldiers to a hiding place in another house. While the men were clearing out the money, he managed to untie the other children and run off into the bush. He lost sight of his two sisters and two of his brothers, including the one whose hands had been amputated. When it was clear that they would not be able to go home, he set out through the bush with the four younger boys, carrying the smallest, then only two, on his back.

  Once across the border, encountering no UNHCR officials, Abu stopped at the nearest village and asked for help. A farmer agreed to take in the boys and feed them in return for work. Every day, Abu, then aged twelve, worked in the house and in the market, before going out into the cassava fields. One day, many months later, he heard about the camps; he set off again with his little brothers, eventually reaching Guékédou, the large camp for Liberians run by UNHCR. They had not been there very long when the camp itself was attacked by rebels coming across the border, and in a skirmish one of his brothers was killed. Abu took the surviving boys and set out again, only to be rounded up by the Cuinean military, who accused them of being boy soldiers with the rebels. Eventually released, they made their way to Conakry, where they were found by Christian.

  Only Abu can now remember their parents, though his twelve-year-old brother has a vague memory of their village and life before the war. The four boys sleep together on two mattresses pushed together, waiting for the moment when they may be sent to America. Two other brothers who share their room are also waiting to know their future. After many inquiries, Christian discovered that these two small boys’ father was alive and living in Chicago, having escaped Liberia early in the war and gone on to make a life as a lawyer in the States. Their mother had died in the fighting. But their father has taken a new wife, a woman considerably younger than himself, and by whom he has two new children. Christian has written repeatedly but the letters that come back are vague; and to his last one there has been no answer at all. Some of the children who arrive at the transit center do not speak. They listen, and will do what they are told to do, but they will not talk. It can take several months, says Christian, for them to say a single word.

  Before I left Conakry, I asked Christian to look out for Izako’s children, and I gave him a little money for the center. He seemed pleased. We drove slowly back into the center of town, in a traffic jam of overflowing communal taxis and decrepit trucks; the extreme humidity of the day was giving way to cooler evening. The money, Christian told me, would go toward food for an evening of remembrance for Muna who had died two weeks before. Muna was twelve years old; Christian thought that she had died of AIDS. He had found her living in the house of an elderly Guinean shopkeeper. Neighbors had told him that Muna had only been fed when she agreed to sleep with the man, and that once, after she had tried to run away, she had been kept locked in a cupboard for two days. At the transit center, the other children had asked to have a party at which to remember her.

  • • •

  KUANKAN IS JUST one camp, along a border crowded with settlements that have shifted, opened, closed, opened again as fighting has ebbed and flowed up and down the région forestière. On December 6, 2000, as it was growing light, the small market town of Guékédou, a few hours’ drive from the camp of Kuankan, was attacked by rebel soldiers coming across the border from Sierra Leone and Liberia and up into the Parrot’s Beak. It wasn’t the first attack in the area—rebels and government soldiers from both countries had been making forays into Guinea all through the autumn—and it would not be the last. In the months that followed, many Guineans and refugees were killed in sudden incursions of fighters. In Guékédou, in December, the inhabitants fought back, anxious to defend their town, and
soon the Guinean army arrived with reinforcements. When the locals seemed to be making little progress against the attackers, when they had been forced to allow the rebels to occupy a village nearby for several weeks, the army sent in helicopters, which machine-gunned the central market square in Guékédou, having been informed that among the crowds were many Liberian and Sierra Leonean soldiers. The townspeople scattered and took to the bush. By evening the town was practically empty.

  Guékédou happened at the time to be a base for UNHCR’s eastern operations in Guinea, and several large houses and offices had been built to accommodate a substantial number of expatriate and local staff. There were also new offices and houses for the people working for the many international organizations that make up the aid constellation. It was a bustling, purposeful place. On the first day of fighting, UNHCR’s office was destroyed. Then one of their staff was killed in Macenta, not far away, shot by rebels as they retreated along the road on which he lived. Another UNHCR employee was abducted, though later he was released alive. Seeing no signs of a quick end to the fighting, UNHCR ordered its staff to pull out of the area and retreat, in their Land Cruisers and trucks, to Kissidougou, a town farther from the border.

  Until that autumn, Guinea had appeared to be a place of safety for West Africa’s refugees. The Guinean government had been allowing the Liberian rebels to use the refugee camps as bases; now, the armed incursions looked like Liberian government reprisals for that support. Guinea’s president, Lansana Conté, made a speech in which he called on his people to defend their country against all invaders. Widely reported in the papers and broadcast over the radio, his words were seen as signs of a tough new stand against the refugees. The Liberians and Sierra Leoneans in the camps, declared President Conté, were supporting the fighters with food and arms. They should either go home or be confined to the camps, and in any case they should be controlled. Refugees were, he added, little better than cockroaches.