Human Cargo (46 page)

The civil war has not been kind to Babur. His garden today lies in chaos, the fountains dry, the pavilion chipped and pitted by bullets, and the plane trees blackened stumps. Babur’s tomb is said to be a place where young returnees come after dark to take drugs. But by day two municipal pools nearby are full of children swimming, coming out of the water to eat hard-boiled eggs sold from baskets and dyed russet brown by the skin of onions, and the occasional visitor to Kabul still makes the long hot dusty walk up through the former gardens where now only marigolds grow, to where Babur and his obedient wife Bibi Mobaraka lie, Bibi in a smaller, more modest tomb not far from his feet. Only the inscription above his tomb has not been harmed. This tomb, it says, was constructed “for the prayer of saints and the epiphany of cherubs.”

At the airport, where Red Cross and UN flights leave for Kandahar, Herat, or Mazar-e-Sharif, where Ariana brings back from Dubai returning refugees, professional people keen to observe their reclaimed homeland, and where there is a new sign saying that no
one may traffic in precious saplings, threatening devices, or “Knife-Swords,” I found Mo from Brooklyn. He was still chewing gum, but he was very jaunty. Kabul is a great place, he said, and he loved his mom’s family. He planned to stay around and see what Kabul had to offer him, as soon as he got back from a quick visit to Dubai to meet a cousin.

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W
hat,” asked Shinfig, who is nine, “is this?” He was pointing to a picture of snow, a mountain slope covered in thick white snow, down which people were skiing between the fir trees, somewhere in northern Finland. Shinfig is Sudanese, a Dinka from southern Sudan, the second son of Mary and Maum Awol, whom I had met in Cairo in the spring of 2001, soon after I started working with the refugees. Mary had been brought to see us by our Sudanese interpreter, David Deng, another Dinka, a huge, genial man whose fluent English made him a leader in the large Sudanese community of asylum seekers in Cairo.

Mary was well over six feet tall, with rather large front teeth, and hair neatly cornrowed across her rather small head. She had a limp, which made her gait slow and awkward. She spoke no English and was often solemn, but when she smiled it was with great warmth. Mary was a “closed file,” David told us, an asylum seeker not just refused refugee status by UNHCR, but informed that any further appeal
would be useless. Would we, he asked, consider interviewing her again and trying to put together a new case for UNHCR? Without it, she faced not deportation—Egypt had no money to send Mary and Maum and their four children back to Sudan—but a state of permanent limbo on the margins of Egyptian life, her children without education and often with little to eat. I still have the first lines of the testimony she brought to us. “My name is Mary Agum Masayo Kou,” she had written. “I am from Southern Sudan and a member of the Dinka tribe. I was born in the Rumbek Lake States in 1963. My father, Mayo Kou, worked as a medical assistant in Rumbek hospital. My mother was a prison warder in Rumbek while my grandmother looked after me and my many brothers and sisters. When I was very small, I contracted a childhood disease, which left me lame in my left leg.”

But there was more that she hadn’t thought to explain to UNHCR, or she had said it badly or too fast. Mary and her family had been forced to flee Rumbek when it was captured by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, and her father had died of heart failure before they reached the safety of nearby Wau. Later, when she was a young married woman working as a dental nurse, fighting had broken out between the Dinka and the Fartit, and her husband and small daughter had been shot dead. She had fled to Khartoum, taking her remaining child, a boy, with her. There she had met. a childhood friend called Maum, and married him and had four children, before being harassed and pursued by the security forces, anxious to use her services as a spy on other southerners. When she refused, they arrested both her and Maum in the middle of the night and took them to security headquarters. “I was kept for two days and given torture,” Mary explained carefully through David. “Many times I was beaten with leather lashes all over my body. I was beaten on my feet. I was burned with lighted cigarettes. From all these punishments, I have scars. I was all the time insulted because I am a Dinka.” Down the corridor, the security forces had also been torturing Maum. When Mary and her husband were allowed to go home, she saw that he had a tooth missing and that the front of his body
was covered with welts from a whip. Six months later, having been constantly followed and watched, the family bought false passports and early one morning slipped out of Khartoum and made their way to Egypt. Mary was forced to leave behind her eldest son, who had been forcibly conscripted into the army.

Having heard her full story, we helped Mary to prepare a new statement for UNHCR, then persuaded them to reopen her case. And then she waited, for month after month, to hear what they would say, and each time I returned to Cairo I would go to see her and her children, Majok, the eldest boy, who was eleven; Shinfig, the boy who had marveled at the snow; a girl of seven, Anwen; and a little boy of three, Nuomshett. For several months, the six of them lived in two rooms in a shantytown on the edge of the city, sharing the small space with David and another young Sudanese man. Maum could not find work, but Mary found an occasional job as a cleaner, always badly paid since as an asylum seeker she was not officially allowed to work and was often exploited by her Egyptian employers. When she was away from home, the children stayed indoors, because Mary feared for their safety on the streets. Most months, she expected to be evicted for paying the rent late, and the children seldom had much to eat besides beans, rice, and onions. When I went to see her, I took with me clothes, oranges, milk, and a tray of the pastries that Egytians love to eat. Mary never complained about her life.

Once, she was evicted. By now she was also looking after her thirteen-year-old nephew, Joshua, who had fled southern Sudan to escape forcible conscription as a boy soldier. I heard from David that she was living in a new apartment, in another part of Cairo; it proved to be an empty shell of a flat, due shortly for demolition, with no electricity or running water, where the floors sloped and the ceilings sagged. The place was completely bare except for a few tattered velvet hangings and two enormous damask sofas without springs, remnants from a more splendid past, abandoned by their Egyptian owners as they moved on to better things. In this dark and
cavernous space, Mary, Maum, their four children, Joshua, David, and the other young Sudanese man, all lived on the very little Mary earned as a cleaner and on the money David brought back from occasional jobs as interpreter. They slept on the floor. Mary’s health was often poor, and weeks passed when she could not work. From time to time, Father Anastasi at the Coptic church gave her a little money and some secondhand clothes for the children. Mary was always cheerful when I saw her. “Ooooooooh,” she would say, a long-drawn-out sound of pleasure that was the greeting she gave to visitors, and which I had grown used to over the phone on the few occasions I had managed to reach her from Europe. Her embrace was enormous.

Late in 2002, Mary heard that UNHCR, against all probability, had decided to grant her and her family refugee status. With it came the much-prized blue refugee card, which gave them a measure of protection against the Egyptian police, and a small monthly allowance of around £12, which helped buy food. This was also the year that Finland decided to open its quota of resettlement places for refugees to people from Sudan, and early in 2003 Mary learned from the Finnish embassy that they were being offered new lives in Finland. They visited the embassy for the orientation talks for refugees who were about to be resettled, about Finland’s weather and education, work and living conditions; it was a brochure about the snowy Finnish countryside that Shinfig showed me when I went to see them. Snow is not easy to describe to a nine-year-old boy accustomed only to varying degrees of great heat. Only much later, when I went to Finland, did I hear an immigration officer describe how she tries to convey what snow and ice will feel like to refugees who have never even worn a coat: “I ask them whether they have ever seen a freezer. If they say yes, I tell them to imagine putting their hand inside and keeping it there for a few minutes. Then I tell them about the way that we deal with the cold, about the thermal underclothes and the padded jackets.”

Describing his first encounter with snow, when he arrived to live
with the Eskimos in Greenland, the Togolese writer Tété-Michel Kpomassie wrote: “So thick were the flakes, you’d have said that all the white birds in the world were shedding their feathers.”

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THOUGH THEY HAD
taken in a few hundred Chilean asylum seekers fleeing Pinochet’s persecution in the 1970s, it was not until 1989 that Finland adopted a formal resettlement program. The Vietnamese boat people became its first experiment. Resettlement was not an option then widely offered in Europe, which, throughout the 1980s, had remained a place of refuge principally for the “good refugees,” those fleeing communism. Only Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States had opened their doors to UNHCR’s Convention refugees, people for whom there was no possibility of ever going home. In Finland, the Vietnamese, taken in, cared for, eventually granted citizenship, flourished. They seemed to adjust without too much pain to the freezing darkness of Scandinavia and soon began to open restaurants and small shops. Other Southeast Asians followed, and they too appeared to thrive and to meet with their hosts’ approval. There was something pleasing in their temperament, something about their quiet reticence that ordinary Finns, quiet and reticent themselves, found soothing. Kielo Brewis, who works for the Ministry of Immigration in Helsinki, has become interested in what she calls the intercultural exchanges between the Finns and the resettled refugees, the way that the Finns and the Asians share patterns of noncommunication that are both subtle and remarkably similar. “We Finns take a long time to talk,” she says. “We never talk very much and when we do, we really take our time. We are never too explicit. The Asians, too, take their time. It has worked very well here.”

But Finland is not immune to the new crosscurrents of refugee politics. Its borders, with Russia to the east and Sweden to the west, make it vulnerable to the arrival of asylum seekers by train and sea, and all through the 1990s, when a direct train service linked Helsinki and St. Petersburg, refugees arrived in their hundreds in
search of work and asylum. The numbers have dropped in recent years, now that the border with Russia is heavily guarded and thickly mined and the train has been stopped; people trying to enter Finland without papers are swiftly returned. However, Finland still has about 3,000 asylum seekers entering its territory every year, for the most part using the services of smugglers, to begin a process of interview, appeal, and acceptance, or rejection followed by deportation, that closely mirrors what happens in other parts of the European Union. But with at least one difference: Finland is both small—it has fewer than 6 million people—and orderly. It is not a country in which it is possible to disappear. Failed asylum seekers— some 60 percent of all who apply on arrival—are sent speedily home, often accompanied by police to see them returned to their original countries. “We are good at clarity here,” said Leena-Kaisa Aberg, head of the Finnish Red Cross refugee team, when I went to see her in Helsinki. “There is no one in Finland who is just in limbo. We like to have things orderly.”

I had come to Finland to study not asylum but resettlement, the acceptance of refugees given status by UNHCR under the 1951 Convention as eventual citizens with full rights. The main countries for resettlement remain the United States, with some 70,000 places each year, followed, at some distance, by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Scandinavian countries have been generous, in proportion to their small populations: both Norway and Sweden take around 1,000 people every year. Finland, too, has always said that it intends to honor what it sees as its obligations under a Convention it was one of the first countries to sign and ratify. Unlike the United States and Canada, which are accused of skimming the “best” of the refugees, those most educated and most likely to contribute to their new country, the Finns offer homes to the most vulnerable and the most needy. Around 15 percent of the Finnish annual quota, which started at 500 people in 1989 and has since built up to 750 (there has been talk of raising it), goes to single mothers with many children, to the elderly, and to the sick. For some years, Finland steered away from Africans, particularly after a large influx
of Somali asylum seekers, arriving without warning on a direct flight from Mogadishu to Moscow and on by boat via Estonia in the 1990s, caused tension and unease. The Somalis, unlike most of the Asian refugees, struck their hosts as neither reticent nor quiet. Then, in 2001, mindful of Africa’s apparently unsolvable problems, the Finnish government took the decision to offer 500 places, over several years, to those escaping Sudan’s long civil war. Mary and her family were among them.

Over the past fifteen years, the Finns have made an art of resettlement. Having realized their initial mistake—they sent three single Kurds to three separate towns in Finland, to avoid producing a ghetto of foreigners, and thereby left them miserably confused and lonely—they have come around to the idea of communities. They study the needs of their new guests carefully, and prepare their own inhabitants for all eventualities. Before the arrival of a number of Burmese not long ago, talks were arranged in the municipalities where the newcomers were to go. They were enthusiastically attended. Policemen, librarians, school cleaners, and mayors flocked to learn about Burmese politics, culture, dress, and food. Municipalities—twenty-five have now joined the resettlement program—have considerable autonomy in Finland. They are invited by the national government to make offers to resettle refugees, for which they will get generous national support, including interest-free loans for any new housing they will need to provide. For the refugees, the package is also generous: at least three years’ guaranteed fall support, and many years beyond that if necessary, on a par with that given to unemployed Finnish citizens, as well as help of every kind from the Red Cross, from municipal social workers, and from the ministries of education, health, and labor. “Sometimes,” said Ann-Charlotte Siren-Borrego, who has worked in resettlement affairs since the program began, “we say that this is just like a laboratory. We can test things out. We are a microcosm of what resettlement can provide. And because we know each other, and talk and cooperate, we iron out problems before they arise.” As Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Ireland are all considering resettlement as
a policy, Finland, whose experiment is small and neat, is being looked at as something of a model for other countries to follow.