Human Cargo (26 page)

These, then, are Madina’s reasons for being in Angel Heights, waiting to hear whether the Home Office will decide to send her to Italy, for which she still has a visa, and let the Italian government decide on the legitimacy of her claim, or whether they will grant her leave to remain in Britain. The familiar and sad story of violence, fear, and torture explains Madina’s haunted look, her fragile thinness, her anxious pacing. She has no idea how or when or where she will ever see Kolya again.

Meanwhile, she waits, and thinks. She sleeps little, thinking obsessively of her son, who she knows from friends is still in the psychiatric hospital in St. Petersburg. She also knows that there is still
no news of Salimov, who, she now suspects, has been “disappeared.” She spends her weekly £10 on phone calls to Russia. From dawn until late each night she wanders around Angel Heights’ long bright yellow corridors, occasionally leaving the building to walk down the hill into central Newcastle and to the main library, where she can receive and send e-mail. She found a book on geology in Angel Heights’ small library and uses it to work on her English. Every morning, she forces herself to translate something from a newspaper, as practice. Had she tried any of the novels on the shelf? “They are,” she said mournfully, “not serious.” Most days, she spends a few hours with one of the African women, recently granted leave to remain in the United Kingdom. The African woman is too frightened to walk in Newcastle’s streets on her own since some boys threw eggs at her; asked by the Home Office whether there was a close family member she would like to apply to have join her in Britain, she replied that no, she had no one, soldiers had killed them all. At six o’clock, Madina eats dinner in the refectory, alone; afterward, she sits in her small, perfectly comfortable, totally silent bedroom, with its bright purple walls, and thinks. So the days pass, each one like the last, in an outer appearance of calm, and an inner feeling of desperation and terror. I didn’t feel there was much more I wanted to know about Angel Heights: a benign prison, lived in by solitary women, waiting.

•   •   •

AS GEORGINA FLEXNER,
who works for the Consortium for Asylum Support Services, sees it, the real messages spread by government go all one way. For all the pious words about integration, about preparing local communities for the arrival of asylum seekers, about the enormous advantages to both sides of having refugees in the community, “regionalization”—the currently popular word—is effectively all about policing and little about care. Asylum seekers are not meant to feel welcome; if their reception is too good, then they might want to stay. Since Flexner started work in the north
three years ago, she has decided that the dispersal program, with all its contradictions and confusions, its ever changing regulations and its arbitrariness, is designed chiefly as a deterrent to others who would follow. It is rife not simply with contradictions, but with absurdities, which serve mainly to give ammunition to the anti-immigration lobby. Monica Bishop told me that not long ago, four young women asylum seekers needed to be transported from a hostel in one part of Newcastle to a YMCA in another. The journey was about two miles. But because the contract for transport by bus originates in Kent, a bus was sent from Ashford to Newcastle to take the four passengers, a distance of over three hundred miles. The total cost, she estimates, was around £1,000; a local taxi would have charged £5.

Georgina Flexner is not, however, altogether discouraged. What no one reckoned with, she says, are ordinary human feelings of sympathy. The northeast, impoverished by unemployment since the collapse of mining and the dockyards, its housing estates van-dalized and shabby, has grown fond of the strangers drifting into their city centers since 2000. Many of its inhabitants have found themselves, against their expectations, enjoying the fact that members of ninety new nationalities have settled in their empty houses, bringing with them new music, new customs, and even new food in the markets. When, not long ago, the Beamish Museum decided to draw asylum seekers closer into the community by offering two busloads of them a free day’s visit, there was outrage from the British National party and some of the newspapers, but an equally loud backlash from local people, who liked the idea of all these Zimbabweans, Iraqis, and Sri Lankans inspecting Stevenson’s Rocket and early railway stock. Refugee families, expelled suddenly as the result of a negative decision by the Home Office from neighborhoods in which their children had grown up, faced with deportation long after they had settled and put down roots, have found vociferous champions for their cause among neighbors and community groups. Georgina Flexner talks warmly of the enthusiasm
of northern plans for integrating refugees. Willing to turn their hands to all forms of employment, bringing with them skills that might transform dying housing estates, these are the very people, as she sees it, who may contribute most to a new prosperity. Studies done in recent months have shown that 80 percent of asylum seekers in the northeast would chose to stay there, should they win the right to remain in Britain, providing they can find work and housing; they find the north friendlier, less intimidating than London. As she moves between local communities and the ever growing refugee population, Flexner observes how neatly balanced are the ancestral fears of losing England to a tide of foreigners, against the newer fear of seeing the northeast become a mere transit area.

•   •   •

RARLY IN
2004, the Home Office announced that the number of applicants for asylum in the UK was down by 40 percent, to 61,050. The government’s delight was not shared by those who work with refugees: they view the growing restrictions with unease, and worry about all those people who, fearing rejection, are now not even bothering to try to make the journey to safety. Asylum specialists would like to see many changes, including the setting up of an independent documentation center, to provide reliable country information. They worry that the Home Office is paying far more attention to securing its borders and building up Fortress Europe than to making the system on the ground workable for those who manage it or supportable for those who live it, and that the government does little to counter the hostility fomented by the tabloids.

Lies, inaccuracies, exaggerations, untruths: this is the climate in which the current British asylum world lives, in which policy is made not so much on evidence as in response to media and public perception, and in which those seeking asylum, buffeted by the chaotic, contradictory, and discriminatory asylum procedures now in operation across the Western World, scramble for a toehold using
any method they can. Not long ago, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told the European Parliament that European anti-immigration rhetoric was “dehumanizing people.” “This silent human rights crisis,” he went on, “shames our world.”

——————

I
t was in 1958 that Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first president, won independence from France and embarked on twenty-six years of socialist dictatorship. Touré’s isolationist views, and anger at them on the part of De Gaulle and other Western leaders, effectively ensured that all through the sixties, seventies, and eighties, Guinea remained one of the most isolated of Africa’s postcolonial countries, a distant, shuttered land, with a small stretch of Atlantic coast and thousands of square miles of semitropical forest, little touched by the material and economic development that came to other parts of the continent. Even today, despite the forest region’s many natural resources, Guinea vies with Sierra Leone and Liberia—the three Mano River Union countries of West Africa—for the title of the world’s poorest and least settled country. Her 7.5 million people are said to live on less than a dollar a day.

The capital, Conakry, is an old-fashioned place, with its fringe of
palm trees along the shore and a wind that blows constantly from the ocean. It is very hot and very humid and the city is growing fast, but outward, simply, poorly, in shantytowns that vanish into the distance, with few of the plate-glass-and-steel skyscrapers that mark other developing capitals.

Guinea’s leaders since Touré have proved little more accepting of dissent: even today, twenty years after Touré’s death, opposition politicians prefer to lie low during election time, and few of them are said to sleep in their own homes while polling takes place. A courageous Guinean professor of law, Dr. Thierno Maadjou Sow, has since 1995 been running the Organization Guinéenne des Droits de l’Homme, one of the country’s handful of campaigning bodies. His dealings with the government are wary.
“Tout le monde ici,”
he told me when I first arrived in Conakry,
“a quelque chose à coeur:
We are all victims of terrible things.” He was talking about his many colleagues and friends who have spent months and years in prison and who expect to spend many more there.

In the year 2000, thirty-three of the world’s forty-one most indebted countries lay in Africa. Forty percent of the world’s refugees, and 70 percent of its AIDS victims, were also African. In the early and mid-1990s, when civil war inside Liberia and Sierra Leone had turned some 7 million people into refugees, either displaced within their own countries or driven abroad into nearby ones, Guinea, a long fat country wrapped around its neighbors, had willingly absorbed one of the largest per capita refugee influxes in the world. Seven hundred thousand people—a tenth of Guinea’s own population—had found shelter there, either within camps run and financed by the international community, or scattered around the country. As Guinea belongs to the West African Economic Community, Sierra Leoneans and Liberians, who also belong, are allowed to reside and work there. By the spring of 2003, according to official UNHCR figures, 185,000 refugees were being protected and cared for by Guinea, though the true figure, including new arrivals and those who for one reason or another had not been registered, was certainly far higher. Of all those now crossing over from Liberia and
Sierra Leone, 70 percent, over two thirds, I was told, were under the age of eighteen.

As Cairo’s Liberian boys had left their roots along this rainy belt, having fled Charles Taylor and the rebel commanders either alone or with their families and crossed the nearest border to safety, Guinea seemed to be the place to go in search of them. A visit would give me, I thought, not just a clearer picture of what had driven them into exile in the first place, but a sense of what they had left behind. Some, like nearsighted Mamadu, working off his smuggler’s fee in Tel Aviv, had spent many years here, in one of the long-term refugee camps at Guékédou, and I wanted to see for myself these camps, so established and so problematic. Izako, the customs officer forced to abandon his wife and small son and daughter in Monrovia, had told me that he believed that his family might have made their way into Guinea; by going there, I half hoped that I might find them.

In Guinea’s
région forestière
, so I was told, I would see the gamut of African refugee life, the cycle in all its stages, from new arrivals to the residents of settled camps, indistinguishable, after long years, from the villages that surround them. In UNHCR’s headquarters in Conakry hangs an immense map, marking with arrows and bands of color the flows of people around West Africa, making me think once again, as in San Diego, of the migratory paths of birds around the world. Along the southern borders of the area, where the forest runs for almost a thousand miles, there is a swath of red. This is refugee territory, refugees coming and going, crossing and recrossing borders, settling and dying, making lives and being moved on; it was there that I wished to go, to see for myself what Africa offered its moving populations.

•   •   •

THE CAMP OF
Kuankan lies 700 miles from Conakry, in a clearing cut out of the semitropical forest that seems to stretch forever along this part of West Africa. It can be reached by flying to Nzerekore, the nearest town, either hitching a ride on the twice-weekly UN and aid agency plane on the rare occasion when one of the thirty seats is
not taken by an aid worker, or taking one of the infrequent flights by a very ancient commercial plane. Then there is a long drive, at first along a new tarmac road laid by foreign flinders to make the delivery of aid easier, then along a dark red-earth track between the tall teak and palm trees, the feathery acacias and deep green baobabs. The track is full of craters, deep crevices that become rivers when the rains come.

For a passenger lulled by the green, the denseness of the forest shade, the sudden clarity and light of the camp’s great open space is startling. Here, in over two square miles of mud huts with thatched roofs, and in tarpaulin tents, live 33,000 refugees, all but a very few of them Liberians escaping Charles Taylor’s long and murderous civil war. None of the Cairo Liberians had been to Kuankan, but all knew of friends here, and it was just possible that Izako’s family might be among them. My visit was in March. With the start of the eight-month rainy season in February, water begins to soak through the thatch and the torn and patched tarpaulin above the refugees’ heads, and in the bright sunshine and great heat of the morning of my first day in the camp, people were laying out their possessions to dry. The air was humid and absolutely still. It seemed an isolated, hermetic place.

In the autumn of 2002, Human Rights Watch sent a mission to these borders with Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where Guinea dips down into a narrow prong they call the Parrot’s Beak. Researchers visited Kuankan. The report they came back with was alarming: it spoke of incursions by Liberian rebels and government forces over the border and as far as the camp, of complicity by Guinean soldiers and police, of forced recruitment of young refugees as boy soldiers and porters, of rape and looting. A third of the food eaten by the rebels in Liberia is said to have been stolen from camps like Kuankan. The picture painted by Human Rights Watch was disquieting, but it was not unexpected. Other reports written by similar organizations in recent years have dwelt on the violence and confusion now endemic along one of Africa’s most permeable borders, where Sierra Leoneans, Liberians, and Ivorians
cross regularly from country to country in response to the ebb and flow of war. In Kuankan, at any one time, there are Liberians who have gone back and forth into Guinea in response to the fighting; Sierra Leoneans who fled first into Liberia when the rebels began amputating the arms and legs of villagers to terrorize the countryside, and then fled again, into Guinea, as conflict pursued them; Ivo-rians who have spent much of their lives circling around the camps of West Africa. That many come from the same ethnic groups, for the most part Mandingo, Krahn, and Gio—the groups that I had heard so much about from the Liberians in Cairo—and speak the same language would make the fact of the border itself almost irrelevant, were it not that soldiers from all sides use it to intimidate and plunder those who wish to cross. Simply crossing the frontier, with soldiers behind and predatory guards ahead, is a terrifying ordeal.