City Of Thorns: Nine Lives In The World’s Largest Refugee Camp, by Ben Rawlence

Only once in my life (so far) I have visited a refugee camp, and I was there with a specific purpose, spent a few hours, observed conditions, and have had the opportunity to reflect on them. The camp I went to was not nearly as large as this particular camp, nor was it plagued with the same degree of violence and privation described here, but a lot of what the author says about the hundreds of thousands of people in Dabaab could have also have been said about the camp that I visited in Thailand, and those similarities indicate that there is a rather consistent nature to contemporary refugee camps that provides people with a lot of problems. Refugee camps tend to be deliberately isolated from the local population with the goal that people in them should either return home to their own home country–usually a nation like Somalia or, in the case of the refugee camp I visited, Myanmar, which is in a terrible state–or find themselves a way to a Western nation as a migrant. There is a lack of legal work to be done in the refugee camp, and so the camps are places of rigid rations and general boredom and corruption, as the only jobs that can be found benefit some sort of corrupt power broker in the host country. Similarly, the camps can exist for decades without the conditions going away, suggesting that some of the major problems that major nations feel are in many ways insoluble, at least via the means of the international community at large.

This particular book is a sizable one at more than 350 pages and it is divided into 40 generally short chapters separated into three parts. The book begins with maps, a discussion of the residents of the Dabaab camp who appear in the book, as well as a short prologue. The first part of the book, titled Ma’a Lul (famine), introduces the context of a particular famine that was related to the effort to fight against Al Shabab as well as the people who the book is about, discussing their personal stories and how they found themselves in Dabaab, and also what they did once they were there, discussing the informal economic life and the struggles for dignity involved in their lives. The second part of the book, Rob (rain) discusses a period of false hope that involved rain after Ramadan, the involvement of Kenya’s police and government in using conditions to justify their own efforts to divide Somalia, as well as the complicated nature of clan violence and local self-government that could be found in the camps. The third and final part of the book, Guri (home), discusses the chaotic period that led to the end of that brief period of hope and a time of violence and despair that provided a way home for some people but the destruction of the lives and marriages of others in the face of economic disaster as well as the intense suffering involved in living as a refugee from the disasters that seem all to common to Somalia. The book ends with an epilogue that exposes the author’s own struggles to understand his subjects, as well as notes, suggestions for further reading, and acknowledgements.

It must be stated, though, that what I read in this book as discussing the existence of various people in Dabaab was far beyond what I saw when I visited a smaller and far better managed refugee camp. Given that the Somalis are themselves a member of a large group of people who have never been under one government, that Somalia itself seems to be rather incompetent of uniting together given the permanent hostility of areas like Kenya and Ethiopia who have periodically supported regional clan-based states (like Jubaland and Somaliland) as a tactical means of preventing the development of a larger Somalia which could threaten their hold over Somali-inhabited lands, refugee camps full of Somalis are full of problems. These problems are predictable–political anarchy, high amounts of corruption, the continual threat of violence, frustrated longings for freedom and a better life, complicated relationships between predictable environmental and political crises and their inevitable reactions on the population flows of millions of people, and the desire of everyone involved to exploit the crisis in some fashion. The hopeless of the people in this book, and their struggles to find a better life despite the disadvantages they suffer, is something that it is important to reflect upon, as this book reminds us that the suffering that goes in in failed countries like Somalia and failed places like Dabaab is not a collective failure, but rather is full of intense individual, and sometimes even generational, suffering at a level that can be difficult to conceive of.