Human Cargo (29 page)

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.

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 implications 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.