Human Cargo (2 page)

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,
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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.

Over the next three years, shocked by what he felt to be betrayal, Musa slowly shed his hopes. He accepted that he had nowhere to sleep, but had to move from week to week to the floors of other refugees’ rooms, always hiding, knowing that if he was picked up by the police without papers he might be deported or imprisoned. He had understood that he would still have to wait, perhaps for years, for UNHCR to decide whether what he witnessed and endured amounted to the “justified fear of persecution” that would alone grant him refugee status and the possibility of resettlement in the West. He had accepted that he would find no work other than occasional day labor in the black economy, for as an asylum seeker with no papers he could not officially work. He concentrated only on one thing: finding his wife and children and bringing them to live with
him on the streets of Cairo. (It was not until much later, when I went to the border between Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, that I really understood why the young Liberians had known that they had to flee.) Among the small community of Liberian lost boys, he was seen as a loner; he preferred to put his energy into his dreams, alongside which Cairo, with its overcrowding and its incessant noise, its poverty and racism, its bullying police and indifferent aid workers, was a passing nightmare. The boyhood image he had of himself as a teacher and future village elder remained as real to him as it had ever been; he could not and would not give it up, just as he would not learn Egyptian Arabic, for to do so meant that he had accepted that he would never leave. And so he preferred not to seek out the company of the other Liberians, with similar pasts, young men like Abdula, who made jokes in an American accent learned from the tourists who used to come to Egypt before the specter of terrorism destroyed the holiday market, and who saw rebel soldiers burn his father over an open fire before hacking him into little pieces, or Mohamed, a tall boy with a moonlike face and frightened eyes, who watched as his godmother’s head was kicked about like a football, or Abu, the boy soldier, whose rite of passage included the slitting open of a pregnant woman’s stomach. What these lost boys had seen and been forced to do is not something others cared to hear about.

•   •   •

IN AUTUMN, THE
early mornings in Cairo are almost cool. The pollution, which normally hangs over the streets like a heavy yellow blanket, is light and at this hour the city is still and quiet. Long before it is properly day, the asylum seekers gather at the gates of the offices of UNHCR. There are the Dinkas from Sudan with their very long legs, and the elegant high-cheekboned Somalis; some of the Sierra Leoneans have no arms or hands, the rebels there having decided that mutilating civilians was an effective way of terrorizing those who might be tempted to support the government. Then there are the Ethiopians, whose ancient allegiance to Haile Selassie has branded them as traitors to their country’s new regime; men and
women from Rwanda and Burundi, where massacres became a way of life; other Sudanese, dissident survivors of torture in Khartoum’s security headquarters. They come at dawn to wait, in the hope that their names may feature on the new lists of those called for interview, to hand in documents, to jostle for a slip of paper with a date on which they can collect a form that will allow them to apply for an interview, many months, even years, into the future. Documents of any kind, even scraps of paper with a number on them, are infinitely precious: they suggest identity, a possible existence. Tattered high school certificates, old driver’s licenses, envelopes with addresses on them, preserved against all odds during flight, are guarded and produced with pride. At UNHCR’s gates all fear that they may learn that their appeal has failed and their file is closed, so that the future contains only statelessness or deportation. “Closed File,” the terrible phrase that signifies the end of this particular road, is written in large black capital letters.

•   •   •

SINCE THE MIDDLE
of the 1980s, Egypt—along with forty other countries—has opted for the solution of having UNHCR interview its asylum seekers in order to decide how well founded is their fear of persecution. The result is that the UN body, once revered for its mandate of protecting refugees, is, in Egypt, both prosecution and defense, an anomalous and uneasy position it occupies today with growing prickliness and suspicion. In 2000, 3,057 refugees left Cairo for new lives in the United States, Canada, and Australia (nearly all go to the United States). But after September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush declined to fix a quota for that year’s intake, thereby closing the door not only to the refugees who hoped to win places, but also to all those who had already been accepted but had not yet left and have now been told they need to be vetted again for possible terrorist links. No one really thinks that the United States will ever again be very welcoming to those persecuted in other lands.

Inside UNHCR’s offices, where only those called for interview
ever penetrate, there is an embattled air. It is not easy to be a gatekeeper to the future of so many desperate people; nor is it easy to keep in mind the intricacies of civil war and political repression across much of the African continent. Not all the young Egyptians employed to vet cases enjoy pronouncing on whether the violence suffered and remembered constitutes a degree of persecution extreme enough to make return too dangerous. In this daily listening for the nuances of deceit, the little lies that will mark a claim as false, something of UNHCR’s noble mandate is being lost, but it is perhaps wrong to blame those who listen, hour after hour, to these tales of bloodshed and torture. There are too many cases, too much suffering, too little time. What is happening in Cairo today is happening all over the world; as the funds are cut and the number of asylum seekers keeps on growing, as the West becomes more fearful and more isolated, those who man the gates in Cairo are under pressure to search ever more keenly for lies and inconsistencies, while refugees despair.