Z. was born not far from Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, in 1957. She is a tall, straight-backed woman, but her handsome face, oval under her draped scarf, is as lined and weary as that of a very old woman. Since the mid-1990s, when the civil war destroyed her home and killed her husband, her life has been one of continuous struggle to keep alive her large and extended family. There is too much loss, too little leeway; her life has become an unrelieved juggling with necessities.
Z. belonged to a large family, member of one of Somalias six main clans. She married young and was a little over twenty when she had her first child. After this, seven more came quickly. After the overthrow of President Siad Barre in 1991, she and her husband managed to survive the early years of civil war and famine, which killed or drove into exile over two million Somalis, by staying in the city. Then one day my husband was killed in the fighting, she says. The war spread all around us. Five of my children disappeared, and I could get no news of them. Three had been with my mother, and she disappeared as well. I knew that I had to get the others out before I lost them too.
With the death of many men in the war, women, traditionally protected by large clan families, found that they had been left to fend for themselves and their children. Somalia is one of the poorest and most deprived countries in the world, and one of the most neglected. Fourteen years of civil war, repeated droughts, the botched American intervention, and the spill-over from war in Eritrea and Ethiopia have all combined to reduce the country to anarchy and widespread malnutrition, in which a transitory government battles to hold its own against thirty clans, warring over borders and cattle.
Escape to wilderness
By the early 1990s, rape of women and young girls by militia groups had become common in Mogadishu. One day Z. was arrested and tortured. Her jaw was broken. At this point she was also caring for the wife and children of one of her brothers, also killed in the fighting, and for her sister-in-laws mother. After several terrifying months, she decided that they should all leave Mogadishu. She sold some property she had left and all their possessions.
In the middle of one night they fled on foot, only to be picked up again and put in prison. They were released and moved on again, but by now the fighting was spreading and they had to keep moving. Eventually, they reached Djibouti, where Z. asked for refuge in a mosque. The family was allowed to sleep in the courtyard and an agent was found to get them to a safe country. He told them that he had bought them tickets for Holland.
We believed we would be safe and that there were new lives for us there, Z. explains. But the agent had not told us the truth and when we got off the airplane we found that we were in Cairo. Someone met us and took us to a house and told us they would come back to collect us for the next part of the journey. We waited for two weeks and no one came. Then I met another Somali in the street and he took me to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.
Today Z. lives in two rooms in Nasser City, a derelict suburb of Cairo built of unfinished breeze block houses, identical one to the next, separated by dirt and sandy dust. It is a wilderness that goes on for mile after mile, without green or trees, until it reaches the desert. In the summer, there is very little water. There is never much electricity.
After many months of waiting, she was interviewed by UNHCR and eventually granted refugee status, which entitles her to a blue refugee card and, with it, what amounts to forty pounds a month. On this, she keeps and feeds herself and her three children, her sister-in-law and her nine children and her mother-in-law, who is eighty. Both the old lady and Z.s sister-in-law have had their applications for refugee status turned down. In the chilling language of UNHCR their cases have been marked: File Closed.
Too tired to hope
Not long ago, after an appeal on BBC radio, three of her missing children were located still alive in Mogadishu and they arrived to join her. This means that she now has fourteen children to feed. Her sister-in-law, crushed by her own experiences, is ill; the eldest children, now of an age to work, can find no jobs.
After food, what preoccupies Z. most is education. Two of the fourteen children currently go to school. Under recent UNHCR financial cutbacks, parents have to contribute to the fees demanded by the Egyptian authorities for recognised refugee children. (Asylum-seeker children are not entitled to schooling.) If contributions are not met one year, the child cannot take his end of year examinations and so forfeits his school place the next. Year by year, Z.s children have had to give up their schooling.
In other circumstances, perhaps, Z., recognised as a bona fide refugee, could apply to join the resettlement programme out of Egypt, to the United States, Canada or Australia. She and her children could hope for new lives; and they, at least, would not grow up illiterate. But another arcane ruling blocks this possibility. Because the family paused in Djibouti, a third country, they are labeled as irregular movers. Irregular movers are not eligible for resettlement.
Z. has no definite news of her own mother or of the other three children she was forced to leave behind. The youngest is a boy, Adam, born in 1994; the other two are slightly older girls. Within its mandate, the International Committee of the Red Cross provides a tracing service, to locate and reunite families separated by war. Z. could request to have her daughters, mother and son traced, and even, eventually, apply to have them join her since she is a recognised refugee. But she sees no point. I have met people coming from Somalia who may have heard of them, she says. But even if they were found there is nothing that I could do for them. I would rather not know than be able to do nothing.
