Human Cargo (5 page)

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 floor 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.

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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.

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NOT LONG AGO
a Sudanese man, carrying a small girl in his arms, managed to get past the guards at UNHCR and into the office of a member of the staff. The child was crying loudly. The man was also crying. Arriving before the interviewer’s desk, he drew back the skirt of the girl’s dress and pointed to her legs: they were covered in open, bleeding, infected sores. “Help me,” he said to the woman. “Help me to do something, help me to go to a doctor.” The woman, it seems, sat frozen, speechless. The man grew more agitated and insistent. Still she did nothing. At last, in despair beyond endurance, he pulled from his pocket the blue refugee card he had fought so long and so hard to obtain, and tore it in shreds. “Now,” he cried out, trying to explain an act so symbolic and so momentous in words that nothing could make strong enough, “I am ashamed to be a refugee.”

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W
hen Henri Dunant arrived home from the battle of Solferino in June 1859, full of disgust and pity at the treatment of wounded soldiers, Geneva was a small, pious, scholarly city, where people lived modestly and regarded themselves as enlightened conservatives. In the narrow streets of the fine old town, up and down the Grande Rue where the rich, long-established families lived, they had long felt pride not only in the number and variety of their philanthropic endeavors, but also in the welcome they extended to the people they called aliens, the foreigners and political refugees like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who had come to settle along the shores of their lake, and whom they regarded as assets and not as liabilities. For all their instinctive misgivings about Dunant’s impetuousness and touches of vanity, the Genevois quickly perceived that there was much luster to be gained for their city in his impassioned pleas for humane action in the conduct of war. Soon, committees were meeting to draft articles on the laws of war, on the care of wounded soldiers, and on injuries caused by particular kinds of weapons. They were not the first proposals for the regulation of warfare, but they
were more ambitious than most that had gone before, and the timing was right. In 1863, the Red Cross movement was born and the next year the first Geneva Convention was drafted and presented for signature to the nations of the world. The Genevois took immense pleasure in their new initiative, though by now Dunant himself was an outcast, victim of a foolish financial speculation, consigned to obscurity until unexpectedly awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize as an old man nearly forty years later.

Geneva’s credentials for the new humanitarian movement were excellent. Switzerland was strategically placed at the heart of Europe, its absolute neutrality sanctioned by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and again by the Treaty of Vienna in 1815, since when it had welcomed a steady flow of people at times of European unrest. It was prosperous and it was pacifist. Not surprising, then, that when millions of people were made stateless by the dismantling of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and the collapse of tsarist Russia, it was to Geneva that the world looked for the creation of an organization to care for those fleeing chaos, famine, and persecution. By then the League of Nations had been set up in the Palais des Nations, not far from the lake. For the International Committee of the Red Cross, just up the road, deeply involved in refugee matters and enjoying considerable international prestige as a result of its work during World War I, it was an obvious step to put pressure on the new League to care for refugees.

In 1921, the League persuaded the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen—he was sixty and would have preferred to pursue his scientific interests—to take the job of negotiating the repatriation of some 500,000 Russian prisoners of war; the following year, he was appointed the League’s first High Commissioner for Refugees. Nansen received little funding, but he possessed a great deal of passion and energy. He persuaded governments to recognize travel documents for stateless Russians—the “Nansen passport”—and then turned his attention to helping the hundreds of thousands of Bulgarians, Romanians, Magyars, and Armenians—the latter, survivors of the Turkish massacres—all now wandering around Europe,
repeatedly turned away at borders. “Once they had left their homeland,” wrote Hannah Arendt in the 1950s, “they remained homeless; once they had left their state, they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their rights, they became rightless, the scum of the earth.”

Nansen worked extremely hard all through the 1920s. By his death in 1930, he had almost single-handedly helped a large number of people and established a principle of moral responsibility for the displaced; but that principle had as yet very little bite, and could do little to help the Jews who by the early 1930s were already looking for safety from Nazi rule and finding the doors of western states closed against them. In 1933, the League of Nations set up a High Commissioner for Refugees from Germany, but so anxious was it not to offend the German government, still at this point a member of the League, that it agreed to regard the treatment of Jews solely as an internal affair and to confine its attentions to emigration and travel documents, with no questions asked about domestic conditions and the causes for flight. An outspoken early commissioner, James G. McDonald, resigned in despair in 1936. Two years later, the Germans left the League, but even so the Western governments remained reluctant to offend them. When it came to human lives, McDonald urged bitterly but without effect, “considerations of diplomatic correctness must yield to those of common humanity.”

The economic depression that spread across North America and Europe in the 1930s did much to set back the refugee cause. National interests, governments argued, would be best served by imposing tough limits on immigration. In country after country, ever more restrictive laws, aimed at keeping out all but carefully selected groups, were passed. Only under considerable pressure from Jewish associations did President Roosevelt agree, in 1938, to call an international conference at Evian, at which to discuss ways to resettle the Jews now trying to escape Austria and Germany. Evian is a shameful milestone in the history of refugee affairs. Delegates from most of the major Western powers rose to talk about their own national levels of unemployment and to argue that the movement of so many
Jewish refugees could only be “disturbing to the general economy.” Evian offered no lifeline to the Jews of Europe. All it achieved was the creation of a feeble intergovernmental committee on refugees, unable either to persuade Germany to allow its Jewish citizens to emigrate with money or possessions, or to convince Great Britain not to curtail the immigration of Jews into Palestine. Germany, encouraged by the world’s evident indifference to the suffering of the Jews as well as to the other unwanted members of its population, set about stepping up its own punishments and restrictions. Nansen’s dream of a world that took responsibility for the fate of those who fell victim to human rights abuses and were forced to flee their homes lay in ruins.

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BY EARLY
1945, there were more than 40 million people drifting about Europe, stateless, displaced, lost. There were Germans, trying to go home; there were the survivors of the concentration camps of occupied Europe; there were the people whose countries and homes had been swallowed up when borders had been redrawn and territory changed hands. Many of these people, Russians and Czechs, Poles and Hungarians, Ukrainians and Romanians, found themselves in Germany, where almost everything—houses, roads, railway lines, water supplies, industry, agriculture—had collapsed.

The Western powers had been preparing for this moment. In November 1943, meetings had been held by the Allies to discuss what relief measures would be necessary when the Axis countries were at last defeated. Mindful of their lack of generosity in the prewar years and appalled by the knowledge now emerging from the occupied countries of the German atrocities, forty-four states agreed to donate large sums to assist and repatriate the displaced. Between the autumn of 1943 and the summer of 1947, a UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, employing at its peak more than 27,000 people, spent $3.6 billion, the bulk of it given by the United States. One of UNRRA’s many tasks, debated at some length at both the Yalta and the Potsdam conferences, was how to repatriate
as quickly and as efficiently as possible all those wanting to return home at the end of hostilities. Unlike its predecessors, UNRRA proved effective. In the first five months of peace, three quarters of the displaced went home.

However, it soon became apparent that not everyone actually wanted to go home, particularly as news began reaching the West that Stalin was sending many of those who returned straight to the gulags. By 1946 repatriation had all but stopped, and a million people were still in Europe’s refugee camps. Unlike earlier refugees, who had fled their countries in the 1920s and 1930s and could not go home because they were not wanted, these were people who were wanted—if only for reasons of revenge—but who were themselves unwilling to go home.

It was in New York and Washington, rather than in Geneva, that the next step in the refugee story took place. At the heart of the postwar sessions debating the new United Nations, and among those drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, the talk was all about the rights of people, their right to flee from oppression, to express their own views, to practice their own faiths, and to choose for themselves where they wanted to live. Refugees, lacking state protection, became people of international concern and subject to international protection. And their problems were no longer understood simply as a matter of groups of people, fleeing and assisted together, but of individuals, with their own cases, their own choices and fears and anxieties. According to Article 14 of the Universal Declaration, every individual was to have the “right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

UNRRA had been established to deal with repatriations. As its chief funder, America now decided to wind up its activities. In the face of bitter opposition from the Eastern Bloc, which continued to call on its former citizens to come home, the United States voted to create a new body, the International Refugee Organization. The IRO’s mandate was subtly different: to “resettle” people uprooted by war. The Soviets refused to join, accusing the West of turning refugee camps into centers of anticommunist propaganda and using
them to recruit the forced labor needed to rebuild western Europe’s shattered countries. But an important step had been taken. Under IRO’s mandate fell a vital new element: the protection not merely of groups but of individuals with valid objections to being repatriated. During the four and a half years of IRO’s existence, barely 50,000 people returned to their former homes in central or eastern Europe.