For some Burundians, the consequences of their country’s ethnic conflict just don’t stop. By Benno Muchler, Niklas Schenck and Pierre-Christian Fink
The Dadaab refugee camp near the Kenyan border, photo Getty Images
We met brothers Abdul and Ali* one October night in Nairobi. While they told us their story, we sat around a wooden table just metres from the tent a US aid worker had pitched for them in her compound. Emblematic of the conflicts in East Africa, especially the one in Somalia that now grips the entire region, their story also sheds light on the fertile grounds that nourish these confused and bloody situations.
They come one morning in July 2003, around six o’clock, 40 men from the Hutu tribe, and they carry a list of Tutsi names. “You are one of them, Margeruite Kwizera,” one yells to Ali’s mother. “Step outside.” Ali, who has been sleeping upstairs, wakes and watches while his mother is slain by machete, then his sisters. He screams, then climbs to the rooftop to hide in a water tank. But the attackers have dogs and find him. “Where does your father keep money?” they demand.
“I don’t know,” Ali replies, “I’m still young, only 16.” They beat him with shotguns and burn his arm with a tin can, then leave him face down in a pool of blood, certain he is dead or will soon die. That night Ali regains consciousness. Shivering from the cold, he tries to get up, breaks down, then manages to drag himself to a tap and drink water. He falls into a deep sleep. The next morning he stumbles through his house in Musaga’s 3rd Street, a suburb of Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. He sees his dead mother, his dead sisters. In his mother’s bed he finds his six-month-old brother Said, who has been stabbed to death. Ali starts running.
The morning their mother dies, Ali’s brother Abdul is being trained as a mediator by the Red Cross, 50km away. The course is meant to reconcile Hutu and Tutsi, 10 years after the genocide in Burundi saw 300,000 people dead, mostly Tutsis. Abdul learns of the attack in Musaga from the radio. He rushes home, finds the house destroyed and his family dead. He, too, starts running.
From Musaga to Bukavu in Congo, it’s 130km, and Ali runs, stumbles, falls. Sometimes he ducks into a ditch to avoid discovery. He follows a Burundi mother of six fleeing in the same direction. She had seen he was young and alone and would not leave him behind. From Bukavu they cross into Uganda to safety. “From here on I’m going my way,” the woman tells him, “and you go yours.”
In Kisenyi, the Somali quarter of the Ugandan capital of Kampala, Ali meets an old man praying in the Tawhid Mosque. “Do you know my father, Suleiman Abdi Wali?” he asks. “A truck driver, isn’t he?” the man replies. A glimpse of hope for Ali, who finds work to save money for a bus ride to Somalia, where he hopes to find his father, his last shot at a family.
Halfway there, Kenyan police stop Ali, who carries no passport. They send him to Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, in eastern Kenya. Seventy kilometres divide him from the border with Somalia, where he assumes his father is.
Meanwhile, Abdul is on the run. He carries no papers, just a rucksack and some clothes. Most of the time he wears his uniform from the mediation course: a white shirt, black dress pants and black leather shoes. He slices open the leather lining of the shoes to hide some banknotes; he has heard there are thieves and robbers along the way. Abdul flees on foot through Uganda, Tanzania, Mosambqiue, dodging the border posts. In Zambia, he’s arrested. All Somalis there are suspected of supporting al-Shabaab, the al Qaeda-linked Islamist terror group making sure Somalia stays the failed state it is.
Abdul remains locked up for two months. When he is finally heard, he pleads to the judge. “My mum is dead. You are like my mother now. I am no criminal, I lost everything. I ran away to look for a future.” The judge releases Abdul on condition he return to Uganda. Back in Kampala, he finds work in a tiny shop named Tawakal, in the middle of Kisenyi. In the streets people are offering pieces of electronic metal waste from Europe. Between blacksmiths’ workshops and teahouses, smoke rises from rusty iron shacks, where young Somalis weld car parts together. The smell of burnt fuel lies heavy in the air.
One night in April 2008, a Somali refugee claims to have met Ali in Dadaab. “No,” says Abdul, “my brother is dead.” He gets angry and leaves, but around four the next morning, he dials the number the stranger gave him. Ali is afraid to answer the phone. He asks, “Who’s there?” Abdul asks, “Who’s there?” “Ali,” says Ali. “Ali who?” asks Abdul. “Ali Abdi Wali,” he replies. Abdul asks the names of his mother and father. Then the brothers speak Kirundi, the language of Burundi. Their voices, cracking after puberty, cannot deceive them now, and both cry into the dark. Abdul returns home and packs his bags. “I’m going to see my brother,” he tells his astonished roommates. “I have someone left in this world, I must find him.”
Abdul takes a bus to Nairobi, then Garissa, then Dadaab – 48 hours in which he doesn’t sleep. Exhausted, he falls crying into his brother’s arms. “This is a miracle,” Ali tells him, weeping. The brothers eat breakfast, and Ali falls asleep.
In the camp Abdul and Ali live in a block with refugees from Congo, Uganda, Zambia and Tanzania; section four, tent two. They don’t get along with the Somalis in the camp. They look like them, but act differently, drawing trouble. “We have to learn to behave like Somalis,” they tell each other.
And Abdul learns another lesson. Speaking six languages, he finds the word “refugee” is a curse in all of them. “It wasn’t until Dadaab that I understood that I myself am a refugee. Because I ran from a war.” Every 15 days the brothers receive food rations: two cups of wheat flour, two cups of maize flour, two cups of lentils, one cup of vegetable oil and a teaspoon of salt. But it’s barely enough to last a few days. Ali earns money as a kitchenhand for German aid organisation GIZ, and Abdul helps translate for Western journalists.
One day Abdul is standing by the camp’s gates, watching UNHCR staff register thousands of new arrivals. He sees only women and old men. After some hours he asks one of them where all the teenagers and children are. He looks at him in disbelief. “Our kids?” the old man replies “They were taken from us by al-Shabaab long ago.”
The few refugees Abdul’s age are bored. Few go to school; the chances of employment are dismal, anyway. Many take drugs, including marijuana. When one of them leaves, rumours start that he has joined al-Shabaab to make some money.
In mid-2008 some Somalis from the same clan carry a message from the boys’ father. He wants them to come to Somalia. The brothers decide only one should go, so that at least one of them survives. They last saw their father years before, tall and lean then, driving fuel trucks from Somalia to Kenya, from Kenya to Burundi, from Burundi to Congo. He used to bring home presents for his children and go swimming with them at Musaga beach. But then he came back less and less often, finally not returning for years.
In June 2009, Ali meets his father in Gedo, 100km behind the Somali border. He is fat and has grown a beard. They eat and drink, then Ali realises the people around him are all carrying guns. He asks his father: “What are you doing here?” His father replies: “Have you not heard of al-Shabaab? I am a leader of al-Shabaab, and you are my son, so you, too, are now one of us.” Ali learns his father’s militia has become rich extorting money and goods – in the camp there are many goats and camels. His father has six wives.
Ali glances around the camp. He spots Somalis and Sudanese, Ethiopians and Nigerians, Chechens, and Arabs from Hizbollah. He sees a school where fighters are taught to build bombs. He sees how they kill a guy because they want his cigarette. A Somali woman returning from Kenya gets hacked to death because they find a sex movie on her cellphone. And when they cannot read the notes an Ethiopian has scribbled into his notebook, they kill him, citing verses from the Koran that don’t exist, claiming he is an enemy of Allah.
“This world is only about death,” Ali’s father tells him. “If you die, you will go to Allah.” He has a plan for his son, who is fluent in the languages of Uganda and Burundi. He wants him to join the African peacekeepers stationed in Mogadishu, most of whom are from Uganda and Burundi. Ali is supposed to plant a bomb there, and he despairs. He confides in a Kenyan al-Shabaab fighter in Kisuaheli. “Take me out of here,” he pleads. The Kenyan drives him across the border, where Ali drops the al-Shabaab uniform and walks back to Dadaab.
His father is furious. He calls him a traitor and promises punishment. “Forget about being my father,” Ali begs. Then he changes his phone number. The brothers fear al-Shabaab will find them inside the refugee camp. “In Dadaab you are not safe from al-Shabaab. They are everywhere. They kill people in broad daylight at 11 o’clock. The police arrive late and never investigate,” says Abdul. The terrorists can come and go as they please; there are no fences around the camp. “No one knows who is al-Shabaab and who is not.”
Abdul and Ali muster up courage and approach an American aid worker. They tell their story for the first time. The woman smuggles them to Nairobi, where they have lived on her property for the past four weeks. She trains Abdul in accounting; Ali helps in the kitchen. The brothers hardly leave the compound for fear the Kenyan police might send them back to Dadaab. They have become more aggressive towards Somali people since the Kenyan army crossed into Somalia to push back al-Shabaab. Next week the American aid worker will fly home to raise funds. “What if she doesn’t come back?” asks Abdul. “Where will we go then?”
Niklas Schenck spent a year in Katikati and visits New Zealand frequently. He works for the daily national Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and German public radio and does television reporting for the national public broadcaster (ARD). Benno Muechler also writes for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Pierre-Christian Fink writes for the weekly paper Die Zeit.