City Of Thorns by Ben Rawlence:
Book Note
Last week (March 2017) I read Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s
Largest Refugee Camp (published in 2016 by Random House Canada). Rawlence is a journalist and former
researcher for Human Rights Watch. In this book, he focuses on nine (pseudonymous)
people who live in the Dabaad refugee camp in eastern Kenya, close to the
Somali border. About a half-million people live in the camp, which is in reality
a huge city. Most residents are ethnic Somalis from Somalia, but others are refugees
from Sudan and Ethiopia. Some, indeed, are Kenyans who live in the camp and
register illegally as refugees in order to have access to free food.
This doesn’t seem like a camp full of refugees
in the usual sense, since many who live there cross back and forth to Somalia,
the country they ostensibly fled. Maryam travels from Mogadishu to Dabaad to
marry Guled, who has fled the terrorist Al-Shabaad group that had forcibly
recruited him. Her mother comes with her, but later returns to Mogadishu and
persuades Maryam to return there as well. They would rather live in a house
with adequate food, even at the risk of being bombed, than live in a tent in Dabaad,
reliant on rations that are often cut. In any event terrorists, presumably
al-Shabaad, start attacking the camp itself, so one way or another, they face
the threat of bombs. Meantime international aid personnel live in walled
compounds.
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| Ben Rawlence |
The camp is also are rife with what we might
call corruption, but in practice is normal business. While the World Food
Program (WFP) distributes rations on a strictly equitable basis, food is bought
and sold. Even starving people sometimes sell their rations so that they can
acquire enough funds to make a phone call home. Food destined for the camp is
sold en route, and food distributed in the camp leaves it for Somalia. Some
people amass fortunes while others starve.
The Kenyan police who are supposed to maintain order can be bribed and
bought. An honest Kenyan police supervisor is quickly dismissed, perhaps
because the corruption reaches to the very top of the Kenyan political
structure. Some WFP food even ends up in the hands of Al-Shabaad, the terrorist
Islamist group whom the Somalis are ostensible fleeing.
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| Dabaad refugee camp |
One reason for the corruption is that refugees
are not permitted to work in the camp or outside it, as scarce jobs are reserved
for Kenyans. Expatriate personnel are, however, permitted to offer refugees “incentive
jobs” where they can work and learn skills at a tenth or less than other people
are paid for the same job. There is fierce competition for these incentive
jobs, as even the tiny amounts the refugees can earn put them at a distinct advantage
over those who simply languish in tents, waiting for food handouts.
Meantime the camp is rife with all the
problems that any other city faces, including racism. Muna, a young Somali woman,
falls in love with Monday, an older Sudanese man. They marry, but they cannot
live in a Somali area of the camp because the Somalis as horrified that Muna
has married a black man. They retreat to the Sudanese area where they are
guarded night and day by Monday’s compatriots. When Muna gives birth, she has
to be transferred to a hospital outside the camp because Somali nurses in the camp
hospital have threatened to kill her child as soon as it is born.
Other Somali women and girls in the camp are
still subject to the control of their male kin. The foreign aid workers offer
numerous lessons on gender balance and other liberal norms of the Western
world, but women who accept these norms are often considered to be outcasts. They
are still expected to marry: relatives arrange their marriages to men who may
be in the camp but may still be in Somalia. Dabaad camp is, in effect, merely an
extension of Somalia itself.
Sadly, just as I finished reading this book
the media started publicizing another famine in Northern Kenya, Somalia, and
South Sudan. As usual, the WFP and other organizations began to appeal for
funds. After reading City of Thorns, I wondered briefly what
the point was of donating money. Would my donation actual reach the people who
were starving, or would it merely enrich a businessman in a refugee camp? Worse,
would it end up in the hands of Al-Shabaad or one of the unbelievably cruel and
cynical warlords now wreaking havoc in South Sudan? If so, my donation might be used to buy
weapons and kill the many people I would like to feed.
Books like Rawlence’s run the risk of creating
isolationists, people who wash their hands of conflicts in faraway places. What
is the point of trying to help if so many people profit from the funds that we
donate? I decided to make my usual financial contribution nevertheless, hoping that
some of it might help to feed a few people somewhere.
