Human Cargo Read online

  The next to go was a wiry, bookish boy called Mustafa Kromer. Mustafa had once explained to me that as the youngest son of a man with many wives and many children, he had never been quite sure how many of the boys and girls who thronged the family compound in Liberia were his full brothers and sisters. His own mother died when he was seven, and he had been cared for by a grandmother. Mustafa was out fishing when the rebels came to Grand Capemount County in 1991. His grandmother, fearing the advance of the soldiers, took him to hide in the bush, but life was very hard and she was elderly. She died. Returning to his village, Mustafa found his father; with him and other children he moved from village to village across northwestern Liberia in search of safety. He was eleven when he saw his first killing, a cousin beaten to death in front of him for failing to answer questions from rebel soldiers. Because the rebels now advancing through Grand Capemount County toward Monrovia were led by a man called Alhaji G. V. Kromah, anyone bearing the name Kromah or Kromer was suspect in the eyes of the government forces sent out to confront them. One by one, members of Mustafa’s large family were captured and killed. Mustafa himself was picked up with two of his brothers and taken to an army camp, where he was beaten and questioned. My record of his testimony, given to me over several weeks, runs to many pages: it is a slow, sad story of flight, violence, and the gradual destruction of a once happy and united family, as adults and children disappeared, were killed, or simply died from hunger and exhaustion. By September 1998 Mustafa was the only survivor. A family friend, finding him wandering on the streets of Monrovia, smuggled him to Cairo. He was seventeen.

  Mustafa spent three weeks in an Egyptian cell behind a police station in the spring of 2002. My notes say that his friends, who had been allowed to see him, told me that he was given only water for the first five days and kept permanently blindfolded. He was not allowed to use the lavatory. He was also slapped and kicked, something he made little of, being accustomed to physical brutality. In Cairo, prisoners give the name of “freezer” to the room set aside in prisons and police stations for questioning and physical brutality. Mustafa was not subjected to the electric shocks given to many taken into detention, but when they took off his blindfold after five days they put him into a small cell and left him there. It was not empty; on the contrary, it held about fifty people. There was no room for the prisoners to do anything but stand. They took turns sitting down.

  Mustafa was eventually released; he was not told why he had been arrested. By now, however, there was a rumor going around the Liberian community that they were being singled out for persecution by the Egyptian police because Charles Taylor, who was then the president of Liberia, had publicly announced his support for Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon. It was now widely said that the Liberian boys were suspected of being spies for Israel.

  As more arrests took place, as more of the young men were taken in for questioning, slapped about, held overnight, threatened with deportation and indefinite detention in one of Egypt’s infamous jails, where prisoners remain for years without charge or trial, as Amr remained inside and, it was learned, had been tortured again, as Kono disappeared altogether, so fear began to spread among the Liberians. The fact that Amr had been an accepted refugee, with his blue card from UNHCR and the possibility of being resettled before too long in the West, and yet was still not safe from police brutality, added to the tension. UNHCR, whose mandate of protection for refugees should in theory have saved Amr from torture and arbitrary detention, was able to do nothing. Edgy and fearful, the young Liberians began to fall out among themselves, accusing one another of absurd and random misdemeanors, watching over their shoulders for betrayal. A feeling of panic seized the group. Musa, who had avoided all overtures of friendship, suddenly disappeared from Cairo. He was reported to have returned to Liberia to look for his wife and children, but a rumor started going around that he had become a spy for the Egyptian secret service in return for food and a place to sleep. He was said to have been sighted talking to a stranger near the Mogamma. His ticket to Monrovia was said to have cost $650, and the fact he could find such a sum was proof, said the others, of his guilt. I had last seen him walking along the towpath by the Nile, in his emerald green sneakers, talking feverishly about his rejection by the group, like an animal expelled from a pack. He was defiant and agitated.

  Toward the end of July 2002, a month when temperatures in Cairo rise to over a hundred degrees and the normally frenetic city is stunned into inertia, six more Liberians lost their nerve. Approaching one of the foreign smugglers and traffickers who prey on refugees and asylum seekers everywhere, they were directed to catch a bus to Nueba, a resort on the Red Sea. The plan was for them to cross by night into Israel, something of an irony given the suspicions of their spying. Before they were able to slip across, as they were leaving their hotel in the dark, the Egyptian security police arrived and arrested them. Two of the group were married, a young couple called Gedaweh and Mahmada, who had been forced to leave behind their two children in Liberia when fleeing from Charles Taylor’s men in 1999. Gedaweh and Mahmada were both recognized refugees, but they had already waited over three years for their promised resettlement in the West, from where they would be able to have their children join them, and they were now afraid that if arrested they might never see their children again. Gedaweh, like Musa, was a teacher. He later told a friend what happened to them in Nueba. They were just leaving their rooms in the hotel when the security men arrived. Mahmada was pushed back into the room and onto the bed, with such force that she fell to the floor. The Liberians were then taken to the local police station, and next morning they were interrogated. “They asked us,” Gedaweh told his friend, “what we were doing in Nueba. We said that we were tourists. They insisted that we were spies for Israel. When we asked for some water to drink, because it was very hot and we were very thirsty, they gave us seawater. For three days, all we were given to drink was salt water.” Later, Gedaweh heard one of the policemen say to his superior officer: “Captain, you’re wasting your time with these people. If it was me, I would open fire on them, and that would be the end of it.” The six were freed.

  By the time I returned to Cairo in November 2002, Gedaweh and Mahmada had gone. The trafficker had found a better route across the Sinai and they were in hiding in Tel Aviv, paying off the smuggler’s fee in hard labor, laying a new water pipeline for the settlements. They were living, word reached Cairo, in a disused hangar, under guard, and working twelve-hour days. They were said to be hungry. They had taken with them Fumbe, the soccer player, who had cleaned our kitchen meticulously during our first visit to Cairo in 2000; and also a shy and gentle boy called Mamadu, with a rather small head and close-cropped hair, who had been badly slapped about by the police on their first attempt at escape. Mamadu was one of the Liberians I knew best. He was among the first who came to talk to me, and having come once, he came back again and again, adding details to his original testimony that he had been at first too ashamed and too afraid to recall. Mamadu had been a boy soldier. A small, myopic child, he had seen his parents and his three younger siblings dragged out of their house in Monrovia and killed in front of him, his mother and father shot, the children battered to death. At least, he said, he hadn’t actually seen this happen, because the rebels had pulled him behind their jeep; but he had heard it, the shots and the sounds of bodies being hit and the cries. He was then eleven. The rebels took him back with them to their camp, to join the other children they intended to turn into soldiers. What happened to him next was something I only slowly pieced together later, when I had got to know him well and he trusted me, and when I had finally understood how very shortsighted he was and taken him to an eye doctor, who told me that he could barely see across a room. For a while, the rebels left Mamadu with the girls they had captured on earlier raids. These children prepared food for the rebel leaders, fetched wood, and washed clothes. But the day came when Mamadu was ordered to follow the soldiers on a raid, and a day soon after when he w
as given a Kalashnikov and told to shoot a captive, a terrified woman with a small child clinging to her. Mamadu refused. He was beaten, slapped, denied food. Later, he was again taken on a raid and given a gun. He was told that if he refused to shoot, he would be killed. The captives, this time, were all men. Mamadu shut his eyes and fired. He never asked whether he had killed anyone; he didn’t want to know. He suspects that he did. The raids went on. Mamadu spent his days planning his escape. At last the day came when he was trusted sufficiently to be sent to a nearby village in search of food. When he got there he found a woman in the market and begged for help. She took him in, hid him, and later helped him to make his way to Monrovia. Behind the fragility, the shortsighted stare, the gentle manners, lay an absolute will to survive. In Cairo, this became a desperate need to be educated, as if only an education could redeem the horror of the past. Education was all he wanted to talk about when I saw him on my visits to the rented Liberian classrooms. He was one of the most eager and dedicated students, attending every session, whatever it was about. Now, having heard that he had been taken by the smugglers to Tel Aviv, I tried to find him. I could only imagine how frightened he must have been, how very close to the edge of endurance, to have made the decision to flee. His last e-mail from Cairo had been sad, but then I had not known what he was planning. “We do promise to never forget about you. Especially me, Mamadu. You know it’s just such kind of cruel juke [sic] of nature to suddenly surprise us with such big and ugly separation.” In Israel, friends tried to trace him. He seemed to have disappeared.

  In November 2002 I started to keep a proper diary. Eleven Liberians were by now in Israel, among them probably Donzo, the boy with the scars across his face. Two had left for resettlement in the States. Two had vanished, rumored to have been deported to Liberia. Musa was still missing. Abdula, the charming, jaunty boy with an American accent and spiky hair, who had watched his father burned very slowly to death over an open fire, was in the hospital, seriously ill with tuberculosis and pneumonia. “The Liberians are frightened,” I wrote in my notebook. “Amr is in prison, Kono in hiding, Mamadu has fled. No one feels safe.” The Liberian apartment had been closed down, after the security police called in the teachers for questioning. The classes had been transferred to a room in the American University, but only half the Liberians were now attending, and when they came they were anxious and distracted. The others were staying at home, not daring to be seen on the streets. At UNHCR, in the wake of September 11, the refugees said that the emphasis during interviews was on lies, how best to catch out the asylum seekers, find holes in their testimonies so that they could be turned down. I learned that a new stamp had been devised—”LOC,” for “lack of credibility”—and that it was now stamped onto most of the files as a reason for rejection. “But who is to say what is credible,” I wrote in my diary, “when you have been shot at by rebels, when you have seen your mother raped and your brothers and sisters burnt to death in your house, when your father has disappeared and you are now alone in the world? When you are ashamed to describe to the young woman sitting across the desk from you with her tapping pencil and her inquisitive eyes what the soldiers did to you and how you are afraid that you may have AIDS from being raped by the guards and how you ache for news of your family whom you really know perfectly well that you will never see again? How do you explain that the journey from your village in Africa to Cairo took everything you had in terms of money, and more than money, courage, imagination, and hope? That if the woman sitting at the desk turns you down, you have no idea what you will do next, and that your reserves of hope have gone? That though you look tidy, well turned out, this is because you have spent the money you borrowed on soap with which to wash yourself and your clothes for this interview, and that you are absolutely terrified that you may not be saying the right things?”

  I wanted to see Amr, still in a police lockup on the edge of Cairo. There was talk that he would soon be released, after almost a year in prison, for lack of evidence. One morning, I had a call from Fofana, the best-educated of the young Liberians, with a degree in law, completed at Al Azhar after arriving in Cairo. Fofana had recently been told that his resettlement application for the United States had gone through. With his serious, even ponderous manner, he had become something of a legal spokesman for the group. He would, he said, take me to the police lockup, where we would at least be able to call to Amr through a fence.

  Later, I wrote: “Amr’s name is called. I see his fingers first, clutching at the top of a black-painted iron gate covered with thick wire netting, where there is an eighteen-inch gap between the gate and the ceiling. After his fingers, the top of his head appears, and then his eyes, as he pulls himself up by his arms, helped by other prisoners below. We call out to each other. I have brought him a belt, to hold up his trousers, because his own has been taken away from him, and some food. It is passed from hand to hand, from guard to guard, and then given to Amr, whose arm can just squeeze through the gap. Since I can only see the top of his face, I cannot tell how he is.” Going back into Cairo by bus, we passed the City of the Dead, Cairo’s great array of mausoleums and mosques built to house the bodies and spirits of the departed. Konoba told me that it now has six million live people living in it, a figure I find almost impossible to believe.

  • • •

  SIX MONTHS LATER, in the spring of 2003, I was back in Cairo. Amr had been released. A Spanish woman, Ana Liria-Franch, had been appointed to head UNHCR’s Cairo office and with her had come more generous policies toward the asylum seekers. Some groups were now being accepted de facto as refugees under the 1951 Convention, not by virtue of their individual fears of persecution but because of the continuing turmoil inside their home countries. First interviews had speeded up considerably; by now, all the Liberians were through that stage, and some were on their way to resettlement in the West. Those destined for the United States were full of excited dreams, and had taken to carrying American comics and magazines around with them. For those who remained in Cairo, better things were promised. Liria-Franch and her colleagues were trying to make plans—”durable solutions” in the language of the UN—for those whose cases were not strong enough to win them full refugee status under the 1951 Convention but who nonetheless were unable to go home. Among the Liberians—now down to thirty-four—the other twenty-two were scattered among Israel, the United States, Canada, and Liberia—the mood was buoyant. “Group very depleted,” I wrote. “Most of those who remain are excited, talkative. But some are still worried. Bility, in his brown woolly hat, says that he can’t talk about English grammar any longer when he has nowhere proper to live and often nothing to eat.” Bility told me that he had been buying chicken carcasses from restaurants, on which the wings are usually left, and that he made soup from them.

  But for the most part the young Liberians were reclaiming their lives. All, that is, except for those who had fled across the desert and into Israel and who now found themselves in limbo. After many months, news had reached the group in Cairo that those in Israel had worked off their smugglers’ fees and were now free. Accorded the lowest rung of recognition by the Israelis, they were safe to stay, but they still had no proper papers and no right to travel, and their prospects for an education were very poor. Gedaweh and Mahmada had not seen their children for almost four years now, and there was no possibility of bringing them to Israel. Like Fumbe, the young soccer player, they felt most bitterly about the fact that, had they stayed in Cairo, they would by now have been on their way to the United States, Australia, or Canada, with Kono and Mohamed, to be resettled in new lives. It was from Mamadu, the shortsighted boy soldier, from whom I had heard nothing in almost a year, that I had the saddest news.

  Having twice tried and eventually succeeded in reaching Tel Aviv, Mamadu was still working off his smuggler’s fee in a cement factory. His health was poor, and made considerably worse by the dust; he had lost many days of work through illness. He wheezed constantly. He was sleeping on the f
loor of a disused warehouse; he seldom had enough to eat. “I feel myself growing older and do not know anything,” he wrote. When I sent him money, partly for a doctor to treat a rash that had spread across his face, he wrote again, about “repairing wounds from my face… There is no way I can pay you back for everything that you’ve done for me, you are a special credited person from the deepest part of my heart and someday I believe you will be proud of me… hopefully I will be fine as long as I know myself.” A few months later, he e-mailed me to say that he had found work washing up in a hotel. “Am quite sure some day things are going to be much better with lots of fun and joy. A day that one does not have to always worry about how life is going to be tomorrow. Pretty soon that day will arrive.” This was soon after his twentieth birthday. He had been alone for nine years. His dream was to become a mathematician.

  • • •

  THE REFUGEES ARE not absolutely without help in Cairo. There is something in the utter desolation and loss of the refugee existence, the courage of the stories of endurance, that strikes a chord among those drawn to work in human rights. Lawyers, doctors, teachers, and a few social workers, both Egyptian and foreign, struggle to respond to a situation that appears more intractable with every passing week. In shabby offices in various parts of the city, I discovered people helping the asylum seekers with their testimonies so that no opportunity would be lost when the date for an interview with UNHCR finally arrived; doctors who, in their spare time, treated those who have been tortured the worst and who worried about increasing alcoholism among the men and about how to alleviate the profound depression that afflicted so many refugees; priests who collected money and unwanted clothes to give to the most destitute; church workers who ran small feeding programs. Like charitable endeavors everywhere, all this touched only the very edges of what was wrong. Lying at a crossroads for the flows of Africa’s displaced people, Cairo is a staging post for refugees, a step on a journey that should, but seldom does, move from terror to safety. Neither the beginning nor the end of their odyssey, Cairo is where the policies and the resolutions succeed or fail, where all that is expected of UNHCR is most visibly exposed. In the great international debate about the future of asylum, the trading in quotas, the many arguments about mandate and responsibilities, the haggling over economic migrants, the seminars about “irregular movers” and the internally displaced, Cairo provides one view of the collapse of this ideal.