Human Cargo Read online

  In the days that followed, Guineans formed vigilante groups to harass the refugees. Previously harmonious relations between Guineans and their country’s vast foreign population were soured by attacks and accusations. There were large numbers of casualties. When the fighting died down, UNHCR and the international agencies took stock. One request made by President Coné was that the camps should be pulled back from the border areas, to make their use as rebel bases harder. Since the aid agencies no longer felt it to be safe to leave staff in such troubled places, they closed up operations around Macenta and Guékédou—at the time, UNHCR’s largest branch office in Africa—and opened up new camps about 200 miles farther north, around Albadaria.

  Early in 2003, I drove through Guékédou, to see what remained of the camps that had been home to 400,000 Liberian refugees for almost six years. Mamadu, the boy who as an eleven-year-old had been dragged away by rebels from his parents and four younger brothers and sisters, had spent six years in a camp in Guékédou. He had, he said, been happy here. There is now almost no trace of it left. The sea of tarpaulin that once stretched across the plain as far as the eye could see has gone, as if it had never been there. The tents and huts have long since been pulled down, and the surrounding land has reverted to savannah and forest; only a few of the more solid international offices still stand, but they are empty and abandoned, with the look of mildew and imminent collapse that comes quickly to these rainy areas. Guékédou itself is now poor and rundown, the fine houses lived in by the expatriate staff shuttered and derelict. Not long ago, an aid worker from Kissidougou visited Guékédou to discuss the possibility of setting up a small education project in the town. The mayor greeted her with great caution. He would not wish the proposal to go ahead, he told her, unless the foreign investors were prepared to appoint a number of foreign resident staff and open a proper office. Guékédou simply could not risk a second economic collapse. It was a mark of what prosperity the refugees, however poor, bring.

  Kissidougou, meanwhile, is booming. It is here that the aid organizations have settled, and built themselves offices and airconditioned houses around central courtyards, behind tall gates. They have brought generators, provided Internet access and e-mail, and improved the roads. At night, after dark, they gather in the Hotel Savannah to eat, drink beer, and talk over their day, parking their identical white Land Cruisers in rows outside the door. The food is good, with distant memories of the French who once occupied this part of West Africa, and there is plenty of beer. The night I ate there, there was steak au poivre on the menu, and poulet chasseur. In Kissidougou there are doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières, lo-gisticians and protection officers from UNHCR, sanitation experts, community workers, teachers and water engineers, men and women from several dozen different countries for whom the sense of purpose and adventure that comes with aid work offsets the punishing humidity and constant attacks of malaria and diarrhea. At dinner, I was introduced to a woman from the Southern Illinois Trauma Center. She is in Kissidougou, she told me, to train refugees to counsel and otherwise help those among them who have been tortured. “Just do it,” reads the logo on the Nike sports cap worn by many of the foreign workers. I had known from Izako that his wife and children were not in Kuankan, but I had hoped to find some trace of them in Kissidougou. No one knew of them, and their names were not on UNHCR’s lists.

  • • •

  UNHCR IS AT its most impressive when conducting the emergency operations for which it is best known. Long-term situations— camps that endure year after year—are not its strong suit, and much of their administration is sensibly left to implementing partners. These include the IRC, which besides providing for separated children organizes much of the education in the camps, and Médecins Sans Frontières. All are aware of the envy that local people understandably feel over the relatively generous help given to the refugees; in keeping with current thinking, efforts are made to integrate and widen services wherever possible. The challenge is made easier in Guinea, where refugees and the surrounding people speak the same language and poverty is universal. Among the experts I passed along the tracks through the forest, hastening between camps and villages, were community and welfare officers, development experts and environmental consultants, come to improve conditions throughout the entire forest region. Refugees as “agents of development” has been a catchphrase since the early 1970s, when it was first noted that relief and emergency assistance, leading to dependency, were an increasing burden to the countries that took refugees in, but not much progress has been made. UNHCR is not a development agency, and other organizations have been reluctant to undertake expensive projects promoting self-sufficiency, particularly since refugee aid and development have none of the urgency and drama of emergencies, and funds are hard to come by.

  Just as it is not easy to care for separated children, whose lonely migration has left them troubled and uncertain, so it is not easy to attract foreigners to work for very long in Guinea. The constant humidity and endemic diseases, the sense of insecurity and lawlessness, and the widespread disinclination to stir up trouble, lest worse be unleashed, leaves permanent posts unfilled or quickly abandoned. Short-term missions are greatly preferred. The idealism that drew many into the work has long since given way to despondency, thanks to the endless cutting of corners as funds eat into already meager supplies and the logistics of caring for so many people with so few resources become more intractable day by day. The very nature of the daily issues—the arrival of insufficient quantities of tarpaulin, the axing of nonfood items from the basket of provisions for each registered refugee, the quarreling and rivalries of people reduced to so little—induces inertia and exhaustion. Guinea, one aid worker told me, has the reputation of being the worst country in the world in which to work.

  Conakry itself has little to offer either foreigners or refugees, of whom between five and six thousand are said to live in the capital’s poorer quarters, harrassed by their Guinean neighbors and prey to demands for bribes. For these refugees who do not wish to live in the camps, there is very little that UNHCR can do, beyond offering them a measure of protection against detention or refoulement. Danger, insecurity, is something everyone refers to, but they use the words “fluid” and “vulnerability,” as if the risks were made more manageable by softer language. David Kapya, who in 2003 was running the UNHCR office in Conakry, compares refugee flows to a bush fire that may spread at any time and that has to be contained and dealt with. Kapya’s language is about the movement of populations, the raising of grants, the delicate administration of 200,000 desperate and confused people. He has little time for global policies.

  Not long ago, in keeping with the world’s declining budget for UNHCR and more pressing needs elsewhere, there were calls for cuts in spending in Guinea. Already pressed to the edges of necessity, UNHCR had no choice but to pare away at inessentials: an end to the occasional tins of sardine or bars of soap distributed in the camps, a cutback in adult education and prevention programs for gender-based violence. But with the borders officially closed— though unofficially passable—who knows what new crisis may be bottled up beyond the confines of the camps, deep inside the forest areas that no one visits? The head of UNHCR’s Nzerekore office is a Peruvian, Cesar Ortega, who has run refugee programs in many parts of the world. Contemplating the bridges and crossing points along the many miles of frontier, he waits and worries. “Sometimes,” he says, “I am lost. I think of all the people out there, who may be waiting to come in.”

  In 2001, a scandal erupted in the enclosed world of Guinea’s camps. Refugees, who live so close to the surface of life, constantly alert to the possible fulfillment of wishes and needs, are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, so the news that a team of researchers doing a report on the protection of refugee children had discovered that women and young girls were being sexually exploited by other refugees and aid workers alike came as no great surprise to the foreign community. But the scale of the activity and the impli
cations were shocking. It became clear that prostitution, in the sense of bargaining the bare necessities of life in return for sex, had become endemic in places where small items—a few fish, a pair of shoes, a pretty scarf—can transform a meager daily life into something with light and color. Where people have nothing, even a bouillon cube acquires a powerful lure. In the soul-searching and recriminations that followed, seven teachers were dismissed from Kuankan’s schools. When challenged, they reacted with surprise. “This is Africa,” they said. “This is our way.” Like the Guinean families providing the separated Liberian children with a refuge in return for work, they appeared genuinely astonished at the fuss. What the inquiry also brought out, more worryingly, was the extent of the sexual coercion and outright rape visited on refugee women all along the forest region and on their long journeys to find safety—including rape by aid workers.

  UNHCR, and in particular the High Commissioner, Ruud Lubbers, were not thought to have handled the situation well, initially dismissing it a little lightly. But later, realizing the extent to which any scandal of this kind is damaging to the entire aid world, Lubbers set up a department in the Geneva headquarters to investigate all allegations of misconduct within UNHCR. In 2002, 125 separate complaints were explored, from corruption to harassment. More important perhaps, the scandal raised disquieting questions about the harm that humanitarian intervention can unthinkingly bring in its wake.

  Not all Kuankan’s refugees find it easy to accept the invisible line that keeps them in the camp, free and yet not free, dependent always on the whim and charity of others, enclosed in poverty few can see any way to escape, beholden at every step to foreigners who have apparently boundless power yet are often curiously pedantic and ungenerous. Something of the anger simmering among people condemned to permanent inactivity and supplication found expression not long ago in a teachers’ strike. Mary, the head of education for the International Rescue Committee, is a brisk and purposeful American in her fifties from Seattle, who, having climbed in Tibet, felt the moment had come in her life to pay something back for the pleasures she had enjoyed. What an administrator and former Peace Corps worker had to offer was schooling. IRC gave Mary a job.

  Mary has 1,200 teachers and their assistants under her, having won a battle to include a woman assistant in every classroom as a way of protecting and encouraging girl pupils. Classes have seventy to eighty students, and it is often a struggle to keep them functioning. The few schoolbooks go missing and have to be coaxed back with threats and the help of sorcerers; new pupils pop up unexpectedly in class, having been sent over the border from nearby Liberian villages now that education has collapsed in Liberia with the renewed fighting, and many students are far behind their ages and abilities. Mary is acutely conscious that she is running programs that she herself has never been present to see work, like all the evening education classes. These begin after dark, long after she, as a foreigner, is obliged to leave the camps. She is also extremely aware that the children under her care would do far better in small classes in which they could overcome their fears. She was in her office in Nzerekore when she was informed that the teachers had gone on strike in Kuankan. “Though it seemed to be about pay,” she says, “it was really about anger. That was all I heard when I went to talk to them. ‘We have no dignity’ was what they said. ‘Why can’t we have a plot on which to grow some food? Why will no one give us seeds?’ Some of these people have been in Kuankan for ten years. They feel abandoned. They don’t feel like real people anymore. Our intentions are good, but we do nothing for their self-esteem. It doesn’t make me feel good to belong to a system that so diminishes people. So I talked to them about hope and the future and, even if I am a teacher, I began to think of ways to find them seed and hoes. These people are farmers. If you devaluate and demotivate them, what will happen to their children?” What struck the aid workers trying to resolve the strike was that some of the teachers had gone above their heads, written directly to the headquarters of UNHCR in Geneva, taken the law, as it were, into their own hands. It seemed to some of the aid workers bold, even a little impertinent. To Mary, it was an excellent sign. It suggested that the teachers were taking control over their own lives. But the ambivalence of the relationship between helper and helped is never far below the surface.

  No one really believes in camps, not in the sixty or so camps in Guinea, not in the camps dotted all over the world, wherever refugees are on the move. Neither those who care for refugees, nor the people who live in them, regard them as more than temporary constructs, meant to be holding facilities until something better is worked out. The skills at which UNHCR excels, the creating and designing of these tented cities, lose their edge as months turn into years, and something of the early bustle and energy is lost in the apathy and unhappiness of unresolved situations. Once the humane and efficient answer to crises, now forgotten by funders and resented by their hosts, these camps have become places where people wait, and where they do not want to be. Jason Scarpone, the new country director of IRC, shares Mary’s longing to see more integration and development, more boosting of local economies, and less pursuit of unending crises. Like most of the new players in the international refugee world, he talks, with passion, about refugees as agents of development and the importance of widespread income generation.

  Yet more than 3 million people in Africa today live in what have come to be called protracted refugee situations, long-lasting and intractable limbos in which dispossessed people are sequestered, concentrated, and kept out of danger as most closely suits host governments, the international community, and often the refugees themselves, who feel safe in the company of others in the same position in a strange land. Camps are places dealt with by other people. However, camps are also profoundly destructive places. More fundamentally even than prisons, they deny all freedoms, even the freedom to make the most basic choice. Those who service them do so humanely and with certain standards in mind, but in practice these standards are extremely low. In practice, too, as an evaluation report produced by UNHCR in 2003 concluded, the “circumstances and conditions” of these refugees are deteriorating all the time, as conflict becomes endemic and asylum ever more unpopular, and as the refugees themselves turn into pawns in larger political games.

  In Africa “protracted refugee situations” are to be found where the land is poorest, the climate harshest, the conditions least hospitable. Though agreements in Burundi, the Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere may bring a measure of peace, violence has become a way of life for a generation of young Africans. And Kuankan, like the other camps up and down the forest, is full of children, single women, and adolescents. As world attention shifts away from them, toward new, more imperative crises, so do money and rights—rights to move about, to have a proper legal status, to freedom of choice, to an education. The camp dwellers feel truly forgotten. It was this world, of camps without seeming futures, so poor that even a bucket spelled riches, that Suleiman and Mamadu, Mohamed and Musa had all turned their backs on when forced to flee the war in Liberia. However terrifying the journey, however unpredictable the future, staying in a camp was not an option any of them considered bearable. Although I had not found Izako’s family, I had seen the conditions under which, somewhere along the région forestière, they were probably living; and I had come to understand better the desperation of the Liberians in Cairo, their ferocious need for education, for another life, in a better place.

  The tragedy for Fatima and Peter and their neighbors goes well beyond the refugees to Guinea itself, its present and its long unfinished business with the past. Guinea, as a country, is neither poor nor without possibilities. It is a fertile and rich land, in which four of Africa’s major rivers rise. Its economy stagnant, its borders under constant assault, its population swollen by huge numbers of refugees it has neither the resources nor the desire to care for, it is not flourishing.

  • • •

  IN KUANKAN, I asked about depression, whether people so long frightened
and displaced showed signs of deep sadness and apathetic despair. At the far end of the camp, in a single-story brick building, is a mental health clinic, opened in 2002 by a Norwegian agency. It is run by a Liberian former nurse, Sophie. In 2003, the UN carried out a survey of the health of the refugees in the forest regions and concluded that 12 percent suffered from some degree of clinical depression. Sophie rejects the figure as grossly low.

  In Kuankan, Sophie explains, depression is described by a curious phrase, brought by the Liberians from home. Any profound lowering of the spirits goes by the name of “open mole,” meaning the fontanelle, on the crown of the head, where the skull does not fuse shut for some weeks after a baby’s birth. In later life, as Sophie’s patients tell her, this hole can open once again and let in depression.

  Sophie’s treatment is simple. She asks an herbalist attached to the clinic to cut the patient’s hair, clean the head, and rub in herbal potions; she herself provides paracetamol and counseling. But what she really does is listen. Behind every open mole, as she is very aware, lies a terrible tale of rape, loss, violence. As the story unfolds, the mole is felt to close. The day comes when the patient appears proudly in the clinic to announce that the gap has gone.

  • • •

  THE REFUGEES KEEP coming. In the far east of Giuinea, there are twenty crossing points from the Ivory Coast, and nearly as many from Liberia; but there is often little, in this hilly, densely forested countryside, to mark a frontier. At Thio, a path winds away through a clearing down toward a patch of forest, with the river beyond. It is hard to write about the richness and thickness of this tall forest, or the variety of the leaves that spread out like giant hands or whispery feathers over the bush below. This is the boundary with the Ivory Coast. Up the path, when I visited it in the early spring of 2003, were walking small groups of people, thirty to forty a day, weighed down by bundles and small children. Thirty, across a single border point, is worrying for those who work with UNHCR, for it suggests a pattern of oppression that might easily produce panic. It is when the numbers reach the hundreds, a hastening, jostling, anxious crowd, pushing its way across, over bridges and through rivers, that a state of permanent half emergency becomes a crisis. At Thio there is a small military post, with a policeman and several members of the Guinean Red Cross, waiting to process the day’s arrivals from the Ivory Coast, the first step in this particular odyssey to safety, one that will involve, in the days and weeks that follow, medical checks, registration, the allocating of a tent or hut, a few clothes, a ration book, the promise of a school.