Nakivale refugee camp

Getting back to the refugee camp visit that I mentioned in my last post: On Monday we went to the Nakivale (NAH-chee-VAH-lee) refugee settlement camp, and it was such a better experience than when we went to Orom. Part of that was because they reacted to us differently, part because we were more prepared for the whole experience and actually knew what was going to happen. We had a briefing beforehand and talked about what kind of questions we wanted to ask and stuff, which helped so much.

We were visiting the camp to see the Rwandan (primarily Hutu) refugees who had fled after the genocide and are afraid of reprisals from Tutsis and potentially unfair trials, because there’s such a big bias against Hutus in Rwanda now. (Of course, it’s likely that many of them have a legitimate reason to fear a fair trial as well.) The camp also had refugees from Congo, Somalia, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and a couple of other countries. Each nationality has its own zone within the camp. We ended up splitting into two different groups, with half going to see the Rwandans, and half going to see the Congolese. I was in the group that saw the Congolese, which I’m really glad about because the conflict in the Congo is definitely something I’m interested in and relatively informed about and this program doesn’t really deal with it all that much, and because we ended up talking a lot more about issues in the refugee camp and among the refugees than the other group, which mostly heard about how the refugees wanted their names cleared in Rwanda.

Again, we were asked a lot how we could tangibly help the people we were talking too, and a large portion of the time we spent talking to them ended up being about how we were there to learn and that we would be helping less directly. The people here were a lot more confrontational than the people in Orom – it was like the difference between frustration and desperation. One of the refugees compared our visit to watching a drowning man and asking him, “How are you sinking? Tell me about how you’re sinking” instead of pulling him out of the water. There were two really great moments: one when the program director from Gulu said that his people had been suffering a lot too and he felt their condition and if they shut themselves off from people coming to ask them what is happening, they would ultimately lose. At this point one of the leaders among the refugees asked a bit snarkily, “Well have you ever been a refugee?” To which the director was able to say, “Yes, actually, and my mother and brother and family and people have been in the IDP camps.” The other came after the sinking metaphor, when one of the girls in our group spoke very passionately about how we can’t save everyone, and how can we choose to save one person when hundreds of others are also drowning? This seemed to really hit home with them, and afterwards we weren’t really asked that question.

It’s frustrating that we have to spend so much time dealing with that issue, and it’s something that I’m concerned about with doing research, but at the same time, I completely understand how frustrating it must be to tell these comparatively rich and powerful people about your problems and then hear them say that you won’t really see a tangible improvement.

Before we reached the camp, this guy who was in charge of the camp came and spoke to us about the refugees. [Side note: right now it’s about 6am in the hotel in Kigali and these birds are singing outside our window (for once not roosters!) and I just heard this one bird call that was so strange and beautiful.] We asked him about whether there were tensions in the camps and whether all of the different groups received the same aid. He said that everything was peaceful in the camp because everyone identified as a refugee and there is a sense that everyone was in the same condition and that everyone got the same aid. All of which turned out to be total BS. One of the first things the Congolese said was that they are terrified because of killings within the camps. Because so many different people of different ethnic groups and political loyalties have fled Congo and are all mixed up in “New Congo,” as they call it, people are living with the very enemies they fled. Since June, three of the Congolese refugees have been killed in their homes, and they basically have no idea who is responsible. Plus, they mentioned that some have threatened to start massacring people in the camp once they know they are going to be repatriated.

That’s one of the “cool” (i.e. interesting to study) things about refugee camps – that you have such a mix of people of different nationalities who are there for completely different reasons so the camp becomes this meeting point for all sorts of different conflicts in the region. I think it would be so cool to look at how ideas are exchanged in refugee camps and how the different conflicts interact with each other.

The other major issue they talked about was the special treatment given to the Somali refugees in the camp. They felt that UNHCR (the UN body responsible for refugees) only ever brought enough aid to help the Somalis and focused their resources far too much on the Somalis, increasing tensions in the refugee camps. The U.S. has also been accepting a ton of Somali refugees, and almost no Congolese refugees, in large part because of the War on Terror agenda. This policy was something the refugees kept asking us about and wanting us to help them with.

One of the other really startling things they talked about was water. Of course, I had expected that they would tell us about lack of water or lack of clean water. What was surprising, and if true, disgusting, was the accusation they leveled against one of the NGOs supposedly supplying them with water. They accused this NGO of reporting (to headquarters, to UNHCR, to donors, etc) that it has been supplying the camps with clean water, but when they showed us a jug of the water they were supposed to be drinking and bathing with, it was literally green with little things crawling in it. Gross. I think that’s maybe one of the places where the whole refugee camp structure breaks down. You have this pseudo-state formation with UNHCR and the NGOs acting sort of like a government (imposing order, providing services, etc) but it gets to be such a problem when the “government” is not accountable to the people, but rather to its own headquarters or to its donors, who can’t see conditions in the camps.

By the way: new phone number is +250-078-537-0788 hopefully it will work better than the Ugandan number.