Crushed by debt, refugees have to return to Somalia
DADAAB REFUGEE CAMP, Kenya: Her friends were rushing to say goodbye. They gathered in the sliver of shade outside her mud hut, next to the pile of bags packed with everything Khairo Hassan had accumulated as a refugee.
“I’m going to miss you,” said one woman, who kissed her cheeks.
“We hope you are safe there,” said a girl who hugged her, while Hassan’s eyes fi lled with tears.
In three days, Hassan, 44, would be leaving this sprawling refugee camp for Mogadishu, Somalia, one of the most dangerous cities on the planet, with two of her daughters and her granddaughter. She hated the idea. Every week, it seemed, Islamist extremists there grew more brazen. In October, a truck bomb had killed 512 people, one of the deadliest terrorist attacks anywhere since Sept. 11, 2001.
Hassan was travelling through a UN programme called “voluntary repatriation,” which provides hundreds of dollars to refugees in Kenya who choose to go back home. But there was nothing voluntary about her journey to Somalia.
Instead, her return was a sign of how a strained international aid system has broken down amid the biggest global refugee crisis since World War II.
The problem started when the United Nations, squeezed by growing demands for aid, slashed food rations in this camp of 250,000. That left the refugees little option but to buy food on credit from local markets.
Hassan, a widow, had borrowed US$ 400 ( RM1,680) over several months to purchase rice, beans, milk and noodles to feed her family. It was an impossible sum in the Dadaab camp, where she made US$ 3 a month selling bananas. Her creditors began to threaten her with arrest or violence.
Unwittingly, the United Nations created the only viable mechanism for people like Hassan to pay off their debts: By moving to a war zone.
If everything went as planned, in three days, before Hassan boarded a plane to Mogadishu, a UN official would give her about US$ 150 per family member for their return to Somalia. She would immediately hand that cash to her creditors.
“I need this debt to be over,” Hassan said.
Asked about the practice, the United Nations said it was aware that mounting debt could motivate some refugees to return to Somalia. But officials said they did not know how prevalent a factor it is.
“This is something we are looking into,” said Denis Kuindje, the head of protection at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees ( UNHCR) office in Dadaab.
The United Nations’ voluntary repatriation program started offering the payments in 2016, after Kenyan authorities threatened to shutter Dadaab, one of the world’s oldest refugee camps. Some refugees began to pack up and head for neighbouring Somalia, which has suffered near- continuous war since the early 1990s. The UN assistance was meant to help them get settled.
But Hassan would start her new life in Somalia with almost nothing.
Now, as more people trickled into Hassan’s hut to say goodbye, a man in a shiny red robe slid through the crowd, entered her room and sat on her bed, his leather shoes resting on her dirt floor. His name was Bashir Ali. He was one of the shopkeepers to whom Hassan owed money.
“When are you going to pay me?” he asked, twirling a large white smartphone in one hand.
Hassan was getting angry. The previous night, the radio had reported another attack in Mogadishu. Her 19-year- old son, Noor Mohammed Isak, who would be staying behind in Dadaab, had shown her pictures of dead bodies on his phone. Her head throbbed, and she wondered if she had malaria, or if it was stress.
“I told you I will,” she told the shopkeeper. “As soon as they give me the money, it will be yours.”
The next day, Hassan and the girls took the fi rst step of their journey to Somalia.
Inside her hut, Hassan rolled up her thin mattress and tied it with a headscarf. She packed a Koran with gold lettering on the cover. Her daughter Falhado, 14, was surrounded by friends who hugged her.
“I hope she isn’t killed,” one friend, Sahro Hassan, 14, said after stepping away from Falhado.
The family crammed into a beat-up silver taxi, which drove off in a burst of dust. Hassan watched as her corner of the camp disappeared in the rearview mirror, heaps of sun-bleached wood, metal and plastic.
She had left Somalia in 2010, walking for 16 days, after the Islamist group al- Shabab had seized control of her town, Dinsor.
Her husband had been shot and killed in the middle of the street. Her neighbor had been slaughtered in his house. One of her daughters had disappeared after an unhappy marriage, leaving her baby for Hassan to raise.
Hassan didn’t expect to stay long in Dadaab, a string of makeshift encampments in the desert of eastern Kenya, about 50 miles from the Somali border. But the situation back home never improved. Last year, al- Shabab was one of Africa’s deadliest terrorist organisations, killing more than 4,200 people. This year, because of confl ict and drought, Somalia reached the brink of famine.
Now, Hassan was heading back, despite her friends’ warnings. There were few functional schools in Somalia, they said. Some of those who returned from Dadaab had been killed, they said.
Hassan listened and responded: “What other choice do I have?”
The taxi took them to a bus, and the bus took them to a large concrete shelter in the camp where Hassan’s family and 27 other refugees were told to wait. They were almost all travelling to Somalia for the same reason - to use the UN stipend to pay off their debt.
Adey Ali, a single mother of two, owed US$ 600, which she had spent on food and medicine for her children. Mohammed Usman owed US$ 180. Another woman owed US$ 250.
“This is debt-motivated repatriation,” Ali said.
Across Dadaab, the United Nations had posted signs that read, “Return is your choice.” Officials had set up information desks where families considering repatriation could ask questions and where UN officials could determine whether they were indeed going back voluntarily. It is a violation of international law to force refugees to return home if their lives will be at risk.
But UN fieldworkers are aware of how the fi nancial package encourages refugees to return to Somalia.
Hassan, Ali and several other returnees said they mentioned in their repatriation interviews that their debts were the primary reason they were participating in the programme.
“We know it’s the money on their mind,” said Abdi Fatah Sadik, a senior repatriation officer with UNHCR in the camp, who is responsible for interviewing would-be returnees.
The United Nations also acknowledges the devastating effect of the decrease in food rations over the past year. UN officials say they instituted the cutbacks because donors such as the United States and European countries have not kept pace with surging demand for aid around the world.
Refugees in Dadaab now receive only 70 per cent of their nutritional requirements, according to the UN World Food Program ( WFP). Nearly all of that comes in the form of sorghum, an American government donation, which most Somalis do not eat. The result has been an increase in malnutrition, according to the WFP.
“We can’t pretend people will eat a lot less and remain at the same health level,” said Paul Turnbull, the agency’s deputy country director in Kenya.
To fi ll the gaps, refugees such as Hassan headed to Dadaab’s markets, run mostly by other refugees and stocked with produce and meat from outside the camp.
As in Somalia, they can make purchases using a system of credit known as “deen,” based on trust between members of the same clans. Except, eventually, they hit their limits. — WPBloomberg
Hassan was travelling through a UN programme called “voluntary repatriation,” which provides hundreds of dollars to refugees in Kenya who choose to go back home. But there was nothing voluntary about her journey to Somalia.