Human Cargo (36 page)

“The Palestinians are resigned to suffering,” explained Bassam Jamil Hubaishi, a Palestinian in his fifties working for a human rights organization. “But for how long will they be willing to watch their well-educated children working as manual laborers? We need to find a solution to this soon. No one is living as a human being should. No one meets even the minimum requirements.” It was Bassam who pointed out to me that while those born in the camps and now in their forties and fifties are more interested in a decent life than in return to Palestine, the young by contrast are once again growing up more militant. “If they are given no chance to improve
their lives, who can blame them for talking of a homeland? They feel precarious, unwanted. They don’t belong anywhere. When they look around them at the hovels and alleys in which they grew up, they think: at least that isn’t home, home is somewhere better, home is where I can live in dignity and where I will be wanted.”

Not long ago, a researcher asked Palestinians what they felt about the right of return. A little over three quarters of those interviewed did not hesitate: it was their entitlement, they said, and not something they would be prepared to negotiate about. Their words were both sad and chilling. It is many years since the right of return to the lands they left over half a century ago has been anything but a bargaining tool, useful in talks conducted by people who themselves live far from the camps. This gives the Palestinian refugees—the more than 5 million people spread out today through Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the whole Arab world from the Gulf States to Iraq—a true feeling of abandonment, an almost biblical sense of betrayal and forsakenness. The notion of redemption by return is an absurdity, a game played by politicians. There can be no homecoming for those of the Naqba. (Not long ago the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki, questioning 4,000 Palestinians about where they would choose to live, found that the overwhelming majority wanted to live, not back in what is now the state of Israel, but in a Palestinian state, a finding that has been used and interpreted in different ways in the Arab world.) Ghazi, who had farmed his father’s fields of olives and vines in Galilee as a boy, and imagined that one day they would be his, tried to work as a farmer in the fields around Ein el-Helweh, and for a while was even able to rent some small fields and farm them. But they were not his fields. Before I left the camp, having spent nearly a whole day listening to him describe his life with more anger than self-pity, he took me up to the top of his house. In old kerosene and gasoline cans on the roof, he grows onions, marjoram, and mint. He picked some herbs and gave them to me, saying that he would willingly have given me an onion, except that since I was traveling, I would probably have no use for one.

“All those who have been destined to exile share the same features,”
wrote Mourid Barghouti, not long ago. “For an exile, the habitual place and status of a person is lost. The fortunate ones are looked upon with suspicion, and envy becomes the profession of those who have no profession except watching others…. The calm of the place of exile and its wished-for safety is never completely realized. The homeland does not leave the body until the last moment, the moment of death.”

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W
hen Lamine was seven, his mother’s only child, and living in a suburb of Algiers with two younger half brothers, his father was assassinated. The killing had been carried out in error, and the military men who ruled the new Algeria did what they thought was best for the eldest son of a martyr: they put him in a uniform and sent him off to military cadet school over 500 miles away, across the desert and near the border with Morocco. There Lamine stayed, year after year, bewildered, frightened, and lonely. The descendant of an Armenian Orthodox Christian, he was the only boy in the school who was not Muslim; though he agreed to read the Koran, he would not convert, and this added powerfully to his sense of apartness. The freedom fighters who came to train the little future officers were hard men from the Atlas Mountains, more used to guerrilla warfare against the French than to the ways of small boys. When Lamine went home to see his mother in Algiers—he had two ten-day holidays each year, several days of which were eaten up in
transit—he found her always in tears, lamenting her loss of his childhood. He did not cry himself, having quickly learned that, to survive among soldiers, one must suppress one’s emotions. “I had lost my loving,” he says. “You can’t hold on to love when no one treats you gently.” But when his twelve-year penance was coming to an end, and he had been made an officer, he began to dream of another kind of life, one not circumscribed by bullying, orders, and desolation. Behind the outer shell of impassivity, he nurtured a longing for a gentler life.

Today, Lamine is no longer so innocent; he is a watchful, taut figure, precise and knowing. But in those years there must have been something innocent about the slim, boyish officer who stares boldly out of graduation photographs, because when he was just eighteen, about to embark on the next step in a military career of which every twist and turn had long been ordained, he questioned his superiors about his future. Was it absolutely necessary, he asked, for him to remain in the army? Might he not now return to civilian life?

It was 1983. Algeria had not yet begun its long descent into civil conflict, but the military rulers who held the country in their grip were not in a mood for vacillating young officers, with who knew what dark plots and secrets in their minds, particularly as Lamine was not alone in his discontent, but one of a group of similarly troubled young cadets, boys who had been together since the age of seven and shared a profound revulsion for the military life. Lamine was accused of wanting to overthrow the government, of being a ringleader with contacts abroad. He was sent to spend the next three years in secret military detention, sharing a cell with twelve other prisoners, men also deemed to present a threat to the stability of Algerian military rule. From time to time, in order to extract the names of fellow conspirators, guards put electrodes on his genitals, kicked him with their heavy military boots, and sprayed him with freezing jets of water. They told him that he was a rebel and that he deserved such punishment. They said that he was an animal and should not exist on this earth. One day, they kicked him so hard that they broke his leg and knee; most days, he was carried unconscious
from the torture room and zipped back into the overalls they had stripped from him before they began their work, blood pouring from his nose and mouth and ears. He survived, Lamine says now, for one very simple reason: he was accustomed to ill-treatment.

One morning, as his torturers prepared their electrodes, Lamine laughed out loud. He had, he says, realized a profound truth: either they would kill him, or they would stop torturing him. Either way, he had ceased to care; he was free. After this, they tortured him all the more: the pain became so great that he deliberately moved to another room in his mind, and tried to imagine himself another person. Since they had teams of torturers, working around the clock, they came for him at random moments of the day and night. “They wanted us to die,” he says.

But the time came when the military was forced to recognize that there was in fact no plot afoot, that they were dealing simply with a group of disaffected boys. All but a handful were released. Lamine was among the seven supposed ringleaders to be sent for court-martial for plotting against the security of the state, since all these years of punishment could not be allowed to appear a mistake. He received a six-year prison sentence, with hard labor. He was greatly relieved: he had heard from a cadet friend that the seven “ringleaders” would be shot as an example to others, and believes now that he was spared because of a campaign mounted on their behalf by Amnesty International, which had long regarded them as conscientious objectors and had convinced the Algerians that their deaths would bring worldwide criticism. In his prison life, Lamine had seen many others lined up and shot against the wall of the courtyard where they exercised. Sent to a civilian prison—but obliged to keep wearing his military uniform—he offered to teach and write letters for illiterate detainees, in exchange for extra rations of coffee and cigarettes. He learned a lot about death, he says now, for many of those he helped were due to die, and often in the mornings, when he went on his rounds, he found their cells empty.

After six years, Lamine and his surviving friends were set free. One had died while in detention; another had gone mad, and a third
would shortly die from the effects of the treatment he had received. A fourth had agreed to work for the regime. Lamine had lost almost ten years of his life (he tends to look back on his twelve years in cadet school as lost years, too); but now, at last, he was allowed to become a civilian. He applied to the Ministry of Health to train as a paramedic, and though they kept a close eye on him lest he show any signs of political activity, they taught him about epidemiology and tropical diseases and sent him off to work for the World Health Organization in Africa. He was constantly in pain, all down his spine and around his neck, as well as from his broken knee. In the years that followed, while he kept his eye on the military rulers in Algeria, hoping and waiting for the day when his country might become a safe and free place for him to live, Lamine roamed on behalf of WHO: the Congo, Zaire, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, and the southern deserts of Algeria. For a while, he was based in Djanet, an outpost deep in the Sahara, where early nomadic hunters had painted antelopes on the walls of their caves, and where he would go in search of the missionary fathers of Père Charles de Foucault, to whom he was drawn because of their spiritual certainties, even though he sensed that they did not have quite enough to offer him. Until 1994, when the political tensions and pressures of the civil war caused those in power to begin to fear even shadows from the past, Lamine came and went between Algeria and the rest of Africa, restless, always alone, but free. But his record stalked him. “They wanted,” he explains now, “to do away with the silent opposition. They saw me as hostile.” When he felt the threat growing closer, when he saw others arrested and imprisoned for milder pasts, he slipped over the border one day and crossed to Spain. With his known file, his story, and Amnesty International’s testimonial, he was granted asylum.

Lamine had become a refugee. And it was now that his real problems began.

People have forgotten a very simple truth: no one wants to be a refugee. Exile is a terrifying, lonely, confusing experience. “Imagine,” said a psychiatrist I went to talk to one day, “being a baby in a
loving, happy family. Your mother loves you, feeds you, smiles at you, hugs you. You wake up one morning to find that she no longer appears to know who you are. She doesn’t smile. She doesn’t even look at you. You cry, you laugh, you make noises. She remains withdrawn and silent. All that was familiar and safe has gone. That is my image of what it feels like to be a refugee. A world without known contours, its geography hostile and alien.” No surprise, then, that exile can become a form of mourning, as memory invades the present, as traumatic events—torture, flight, the death and loss of those you love—flare up, like sudden fires, into despair.

For Lamine, the descent into grief was slow. In Spain, he started teaching French, Arabic, and Russian, which he had studied at military school; when he ran out of money, he washed plates in a restaurant. In his spare time, he interpreted for other refugees, helping them to prepare their applications for asylum; he reminded himself how fortunate he was to have papers no one could challenge. He felt neither happiness nor misery, though, looking back on those years today, he knows that day by day, he was growing sicker. When he worried, it was about the constant pain in his knee, spine, and shoulders, which no doctor seemed able to cure. He did not feel part of his new life, but he had friends and work, and when he woke in the middle of the night, with tears on his face, from dreams about cadet school and prison, he pushed the dreams firmly to one side. He dismisses the word “integration,” saying that it is actually the bane of every refugee’s life and that it means nothing in the vocabulary of displacement, but has been invented by those who like to pretend that the past is a country easily left behind. He was helped by his nature, he says, which is to struggle and look for solutions, though he wonders now how far his refusal to confront his sense of alienation paved the way for what was to come.

Lamine might have lived out the rest of his life as a refugee in Spain, speaking his many languages, helping other refugees, keeping his demons at bay with willpower, writing occasional articles for a Catholic magazine about the poor and the dispossessed of the modern world. But late one night, going back to his room, he was
stopped by a group of men. They were Algerians—agents of the Algerian government, he assumed—and they had come to find him. They had knives. He was stabbed, but survived.