No one knows how many asylum seekers there are in Cairo. It could be as many as a million of Cairos 16 million inhabitants. They come from the Horn of Africa and beyond, drawn to this vast, polluted city in the desert, drawn north by civil war, religious and ethnic cleansing, and political persecution.
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The voices and the stories of these people are the modern history of a continent for which the world seems, since the end of colonial rule, to have no money and no solutions. In their tales of ordinary life, made unordinary by political mayhem, bloodshed and natural disasters, the continents despair becomes real.
These men and women, all of them young very few of the elderly have the strength or the determination to make the journeys that survival entails have been beckoned upwards both by Egypts generous open door policy and by the belief that once there, the United High Commissioner for Refugees, which handles refugee determination on behalf of the Egyptian authorities, will recognise them as bona fide refugees, give them papers and a small living allowance and put them on a list for possible resettlement in the west.
In the 1980s, the numbers were manageable, the process quick, the outcome likely to be good. But as the wars of Africa have spread and intensified, and the numbers of those fleeing have steadily gone on growing, so the future for these desperate people has grown ever more uncertain, and the sense of hopelessness around them has spread.
UNHCR, overwhelmed all over the world by calls for help, facing repeated cuts in its budget and its staff, confused by an absence of will by the governments who fund it to decide on clear and binding refugee policies, is failing everywhere in its responsibilities towards refugees. In Cairo, where the situation grows more acute all the time, that failure is simply more visible.
As an asylum seeker, to wait in Cairo is to exist in limbo. Waiting means waiting for as much as two years for a first interview with UNHCR, after which one in three applicants, on average, will be recognised as a refugee and have his foot on the first ladder to a future. Under Egyptian law, asylum seekers receive nothing. They may not work and their children may not go to school.
In the derelict and crumbling tenements in the city and around its edges, where shanty towns of half built houses sprawl out towards the desert, under cardboard boxes, blankets, strips of corrugated iron and rough stone walls, the asylum-seekers live and wait. A few of the men find occasional days working as labourers; some of the women take jobs as maids. Others live on scraps and handouts, too frightened to move about in case they are picked up by the police, and, not having papers, deported. Small children sit, day after day, in dark hutches. Everyone is hungry. Many have TB, lice, scabies and respiratory diseases.
Cairo is not unique as a staging-post for the modern worlds displaced people. Wherever there is apparent safety and frontiers that have not been turned into barricades against them, there asylum-seekers try to gather, to take stock of their position, to consider possible futures, to pause and plan. What makes Cairo particular is the sheer number of those who wait, and the seeming lack of all will at government or international level to make coherent plans for their future.
There is something else that makes Cairo particular. No asylum-seeker who has made his way so painfully north, by foot or train or ferry, having abandoned home and language and the expectations of safety formulated in childhood, has any intention of making Egypt his home, however long they stay there. Cairo is a waiting room, a necessary evil on the way to life. This sense of transit colours every refugee action.
Cairo is not unconscious of its refugees. In 1998 the American University set up of a programme of refugee studies, taught by academics with more than a passing professional interest in the subject. Under its auspices, a legal office opened in the autumn of 2001 to help asylum seekers prepare for the one interview granted them by UNHCR, so that the long awaited moment when their future is determined will not be squandered on irrelevant and contradictory details; to give assistance to those whose first interviews have resulted in rejection and whose last hope is to appeal. It is staffed almost entirely by young Egyptian and foreign legal volunteers, whose jobs consist of painstakingly taking down the testimonies of people traumatised by loss and brutality, picking out the salient points under the 1951 Refugee Convention that will maximise their chances of acceptance.
The legal office is more than simply a place where advice is proffered. It is an archive, a repository of this history of modern Africa: it is from here that the first voices will be heard. Among those seeking asylum, there are boy soldiers from Liberia, orphaned by Charles Taylors rebel killers; amputees from Sierra Leone, who have lost arms and hands to bands of fighters eager to deter all who might support the government; Christian families from Southern Sudan, fleeing armed horsemen from the plains, Muslim women with small children from the North, whose husbands have been tortured to death in Khartoums jails; Ethiopian dissidents, Eritrean freedom fighters and Tutsi survivors of the Rwandan massacres.
