Human Cargo (27 page)

Reading the reports before I arrived, I had been struck mainly by the violence of these forest camps, the sense of constant vigilance, the almost casual brutality of a state of war that never seems to end. Listening to the young Liberians talking in Cairo, their long litany of loss and fear, I had expected unease, tension, a sense of anticipation. What I actually saw, when I got there, was poverty.

Ordinary Guineans, for all the vast natural resources of their country, their diamonds and gold and bauxite, are poor in material things; Guinea has limited electricity, few roads, no train service or postal system, inadequate schools and health care. But the refugees are even poorer. Whether inside the camps or outside, they are so poor that in a literal way, they have nothing. Most of them do not even have a bucket, and they think about one and talk about one with longing. Some of the Liberians have been in Kuankan for over ten years, an entire lifetime in the case of the many small children who make up about a third of the camp’s population. Poverty is very hard to describe. It is an absence, a nothingness. But the poverty of camp refugees is about more than just not having things; it is about having no way to get them, no means of altering or controlling one’s own life. Their poverty curbs and crushes all hope and expectation. Kuankan’s refugees are destitute of possibilities.

Kuankan has twelve sections, which are known as zones, as if a word so official could lend definition to a place of such sprawling sameness. Each zone reflects a wave of new arrivals, refugees from a fresh outbreak of fighting within a radius of perhaps a couple of hundred miles. The most recent consists of white tarpaulin tents on wooden frames, donated by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), each one the same, and each one divided into compartments for different families. The tents are set up in regular lines, at a certain distance one from the next. Zone 12 stands a little apart from the others, near the edge of the forest. Its first site, closer to the main body of the camp, was abandoned after last year’s rains, when the red earth between the tents turned to deep mud and everything the refugees possessed became damp and encrusted. In the camp, there is fresh water, provided by one of the international agencies, but there was not enough to keep the children of Zone 12 free from the mud; by the end of each day they were streaked with red, slippery and wet.

At the time of my visit, Fatima was a recent arrival in Zone 12. She is a thin, tall woman in her early thirties, and she has five living children, two others having died in Liberia before she was forced to flee to Guinea last July. When I was taken to see her, by a refugee employed by the camp to guide the few visitors who make the journey into the forest, she was wearing a bright yellow sarong, her black hair pulled tightly back in the plaits many of the Liberians wear; her face is gaunt and bony, but she was brisk, without self-pity. One night, while the family slept in their house, the rebels attacked their village in Lofa county. Pulling three of her children behind her, carrying the two youngest on her back, the smallest still a baby, Fatima managed to get them all to the safety of the nearby forest. In the dark and the confusion, terrified by the sound of shots, she lost sight of her husband. She and her children stayed hidden for some days in the bush. I asked her what they ate. “Bananas,” she said. “And some leaves and roots.” From others who came to join them in the forest, she learned that her older brother had been killed and that her closest friend had been shot in the leg.

It took her ten days to reach the border, where she found people
from UNHCR waiting to ferry the refugees in lorries to Kuankan. Médecins Sans Frontières has given her, along with her portion of a tent, which measures about ten square feet, a wooden frame bed, four mats, four blankets, two pots, and two bars of soap. Her entire home was too small for us to stand inside together. She pointed to a small pile of straw, neatly raked into one corner. Here, she said, two of the children, who can’t lit in the bed, sleep. Not one of them has shoes. The middle girl, who is eight, has one set of clothes. It consists of an adult’s T-shirt, and it is so full of holes that it hangs half off her body. She wears it as a dress. She has no pants. Both the baby, who is now two, and her older brother, who is four, are breastfeeding. Fatima’s breasts are thin and withered, like those of a very old woman.

Like all the registered refugees in Kuankan, Fatima collects food rations each month from the UN’s World Food Programme. Stored in sacks at the end of her wooden bed are bulgur, cornmeal, a little salt, some dried beans. There is an old tin with a few inches of peanut oil. In the most generous days of the early 1990s, the food package included rice, sugar, and tinned fish, but what Fatima showed me was the family’s entire ration for a month. In the open spaces between the tents, some of the refugees have planted sweet potatoes. The growing cycle is too long to wait for the actual tubers to grow, but the leaves, which grow quickly, can be used to make a sauce for the bulgur. Neither Fatima nor her children like bulgur, which they had never eaten before they arrived in Kuankan, the staple grain of this part of West Africa being rice, but the refugees say that the World Food Programme has great stocks of bulgur, so bulgur is what they distribute. Later, I watched it being boiled up, in huge vats of glutinous porridge. Fatima has no other food, and no means of getting any, but she accepts without apparent envy those refugees in neighboring tents who somehow manage to buy pepper and dried fish from a market in a nearby village, or even some of the onions and tomatoes, most no larger than marbles, that are for sale near the entrance to the camp. No one has money for sugar, or milk, or tea, and she had not fed her children meat or fish or eggs since
she left home nine months earlier. The five children, accustomed to the oranges and vegetables that grew in their garden in Liberia, to the chickens the family kept and to their eggs, are not doing well on their new diet. They miss the sugar and the fresh fruit.

Fatima has learned that her surviving brothers and sisters managed to escape and are now in another camp in Guinea, about seventy miles away, near the border with Ivory Coast, and that her parents are with them. She talks of the fact that they are alive with surprise and pleasure: she had not expected so much. Of her husband, who used to hunt small deer and wild pig in the forests around their village, she has had no news since the rebel attack in July.

Fatima’s closest neighbor in the camp is Peter, an anxious and agitated former civil servant who comes from Liberia’s Lofa County, which was home to almost half the young men who came as refugees to Cairo. The enforced inactivity of the camp has begun to weigh heavily on him. Escaping his burning village in the faint light of dawn in July 2002, carrying his youngest daughter in his arms, while his wife took the baby, he was unable to help his elderly parents. The last time he saw them was when he looked back over his shoulder as he ran into the forest: they were standing by their hut, watching helplessly. Peter is now haunted by the thought of what has become of them. In Kuankan, you seldom see anyone above the age of fifty; many of the older refugees who did set out on foot are said to have given up or died along the way.

At first, Peter believed that he would find some means of contacting his parents and arranging to have them brought out to safety with friends. He questioned new arrivals, sought out the aid officials in charge of the camp, pestered the refugee organizations. But as the months passed with no news, and people coming from Lofa reported no sign of the couple, he began to accept that they are probably now dead. He sits, day after day, in front of his small, hot tarpaulin tent, thinking about the past, in an agony of boredom and despair, looking out at the thick green forest where the refugees are not encouraged to roam, for, under the terms set by Guinea’s president, they may not use the land to plant crops, nor hunt the wild pig
and porcupine and deer said to be plentiful in the surrounding countryside.

“I wish, at least, we were learning,” said the young interpreter, lent to me by the Liberians who manage some of the camp’s basic functions. “It is the fact that we sit here declining that is so hard.” This young woman, wife of an engineer with a mining company, fled for the second time from Liberia into Guinea in 2002, having spent the early 1990s in a refugee camp along the border. Her dress is Western and smart, and on her feet she wears flimsy sandals, as if to convince herself that she does not belong here. She picks her way through the rough muddy paths with difficulty. Once a cabaret singer in Monrovia’s nightclubs, she has found occasional work as an interpreter in the camp with one of the aid agencies. Her husband, the mining engineer, helps the camp’s carpenters. Her manner, though friendly, is distant and a little skeptical; a muddy refugee camp in the middle of a forest clearing is not where she planned to spend the middle years of her life, and not the place she now means to stay. With the passing of so much time, and with so little to do, expectations take on an urgent and uncomfortable dimension.

Fatima, with her five children and small tent, is perhaps luckier than some, for unlike many of Kuankun’s inhabitants she has not spent her adult years as a refugee, going back and forth across West Africa’s borders in search of safety. She and her family survived the first nine years of Liberia’s civil war without being driven from home. Unlike most of her neighbors in Zone 12, this is her first experience of a camp. She takes this reduction in her life calmly, preferring to focus on a few very specific thoughts: she worries that her children may not be growing as they should, on the bulgur that they find so hard to eat and on a diet deprived of everything that has a taste they know or like; and she fears that she will not be able to send the older children to the school run by an international agency in the camp, because they have no clothes and no shoes in which to go. She wonders how she can acquire the things she most needs: a bucket, a lamp and some kerosene, a mattress, and one more blanket.
And, just occasionally, she dreams of getting hold of a bouillon cube, to give the bulgur some flavor.

In the daytime, and for much of the night, the tarpaulin tent is stiflingly hot; the children sweat and turn in their sleep in the long hours of darkness, when the camp is lit only by cooking fires and the occasional kerosene lamps of the more fortunate refugees. I could only imagine the scene. Night falls in Guinea at about seven, and it does not grow light until twelve hours later. There is no electricity in Kuankan, and no generator, and, with the fighting so close, and the regular incursions of rebels and soldiers from across the border, no foreigners are allowed to remain in the camp after nightfall. It is then, say the refugees, when it grows dark, that the presence of rebel fighters, come to visit their families in the camp, or in search of food for themselves and their companions, becomes apparent. I tried to picture Fatima and her children in the dark, with the forest thick and black not far from their tent, and the quiet footsteps of people coming softly from behind the trees. I thought how frightening it must be for the parents of young boys, waiting for armed men come to prey on their sons, wondering if they would ever feel safe again.

I wondered too, if the fighters ever came into the camp as they are said to dress for battle, in women’s frocks and long wigs, their faces painted white or hidden by masks. These grotesque outfits gave Liberia’s seven-year civil war its macabre reputation and made commentators speculate that, together with Somalia and Rwanda, Liberia was evidence that Africa had turned its back on progress and was sinking into barbarity and superstition. Faced with apparitions like these, with men of war said to eat the hearts of their vanquished enemies in order to draw strength from them, for whom the invisible world of the spirits is a far more potent force than that of humankind, Fatima might well keep her children very close to her after the hours of darkness.

•   •   •

THOUGH THE PRECISE
origins of Liberia’s savagery lie in a complicated web of politics and plunder, the events that ultimately
drove Fatima and her neighbors in Kuankan into exile, and the band of young men I knew to Cairo, began with the death of Samuel Doe, Liberia’s twenty-first president, on September 10, 1989, at the hands of a psychopathic warlord called Prince Johnson, a good-looking man with a charming smile. Liberia was the first emergency in Africa after the end of the Cold War, coming soon after the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. To understand something of the nature of Kuankan, something of the camp’s past and its continuing existence, the way it has become a place of refuge for people buffeted by a civil war that never seems to end, and how it has for many of them taken the place of everything that went before, I had to learn about Liberia. Where refugees come from and what conditions turned them into exiles is often something that people do not want to know. In Cairo, talking to the Liberian boys, I had learned about massacres and heard the names of rebel leaders; I had also begun to understand about the value of the past as a passport that cannot be taken away. Looking around Kuankan it was impossible not to ask: for this to be acceptable, what had happened at home?

Samuel Doe had been a master sergeant in the Liberian army. A small, burly man who sported an American military beret, he was, for a while at least, a protégé of the United States; he came to power in a coup in 1980, after which he executed thirteen leading members of the former government on the beach at Monrovia. Of Liberia’s sixteen official tribes, Doe favored the Mandingo, descendants of the ruling dynasty of medieval Mali and now inhabitants of Guinea’s forest region; he took up against the Gio and the Mano and slaughtered them. Despite his appalling human rights record and the widespread knowledge that he was embezzling millions of dollars from Liberia’s rich diamond and gold resources, Doe continued to be supported by the United States, for whom Liberia had been a steady provider of rubber—to counter Britain’s monopoly—since the 1920s.

Liberia, land of the free, was invented by the United States in 1847 as a place to send freed slaves, mainly from Ghana. For over a
century, power lay with an oligarchy, American-descended, Christian, literate in English, and enjoying American-style institutions and American bank loans. In the late 1980s, nearby Burkina Faso became a rallying point for exiled Liberians, who, funded by Qaddafi’s plans to train revolutionaries for his pan-African dreams, plotted to overthrow Doe with the help of neighboring Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. Among these plotters was another psychopath, Charles Taylor, who numbered among his disaffected followers adults as well as many young children, pressed into “small boy units.” At one point, 20,000 out of the country’s 75,000 fighters were children. Though it was the warlord Johnson who closed in on Monrovia and cut off Doe’s ears before parading him in his underpants in a wheelbarrow through the streets, it was Charles Taylor who, in control of much of the country, was able to make the deals and secure the dollars with which to buy arms and followers. Between 1990 and 1994, $75 million a year was said to have made its way into Taylor’s war coffers through taxes levied on diamond exports, timber, rubber, gold, and iron ore, as well as the marijuana that he supplied to his child soldiers. Taylor might never, of course, have been so successful, had it not been for the fortuitous timing of the first Gulf War, which drew American attention away from Liberia and let in a corrupt Nigerian-led international force called ECOMOG, who themselves plundered at will, providing arms to those warlords most open to their deals.