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The lives of 'Human Cargo'

Refugees fleeing tragedy and looking for a better world often find the world doesn't want anything to do with them.

By JOHN FREEMAN
Published March 18, 2005

Sixty-year-old journalist and biographer Caroline Moorehead remembers the moment that pushed her over the edge.

"I was in Cairo about four years ago, and we went out to this shanty town, where mothers would leave for the day and essentially lock their kids up until they got back at night," she said in an interview in New York City. "And so the kids would just lie there in these tents all day. In the heat. Doing nothing."

Moorehead went back to England and raised enough money from a wealthy friend to start a legal defense fund to help asylum seekers prepare their applications. She also helped start a nursery school so children in the refugee camp had someplace to go during the day. "This happens on just $1,000 a month," she said, sounding proud, yet looking sad. "It's so easy."

Unfortunately, as Moorehead knows well, it's not always that easy to make things happen for refugees and displaced people. Despite numbering about 17-million, they are an invisible population to many.

That's why Moorehead also wrote Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees (Henry Holt, $26, 352 pages), a profound book made up almost entirely of stories of such people.

"I just wanted to tell the stories," she said. "Their testimonies are all they (have), really. They haven't got anything else. And so their testimonies become their passports, in a way."

To read Human Cargo is to encounter the world on a very different kind of passport. In Cairo, Moorehead introduces us to Abdula, a Liberian boy who tells of witnessing his father being burned over an open fire before being dismembered, and Abu, a former soldier who was forced to cut a pregnant woman's belly.

When Moorehead met these refugees, they were living nearly 20 to an apartment on $40 a month, the amount one of them brought in because he had been given official refugee status. Although the dollar goes far in Cairo, it doesn't go far enough. The money allowed the children to have vegetables a few days a month, but much of the time they lived off bread and water. They rarely left the flat in fear of being rounded up and shipped back to Liberia, where worse fates awaited them.

Human Cargo starts with that situation and then recounts visits to nine other locations, from Australia to Mexico, sketching portraits of lives upended by war and famine, and brought to a halt because of a border.

"There's all this talk about how we live in a borderless society now, about free trade and open markets," Moorehead said. "All these people will tell you that's not the case."

Many places you might think would be receptive to refugees - such as Australia, which, after all, was started as a convict colony - are among the worst for a refugee to wind up.

As Moorehead reminds us, Australia, under the administration of Prime Minister John Howard, has stashed some asylum-seekers on the island of Nauru. The ones who make it into Australia are funneled into sweltering, overburdened camps surrounded by razor wire. Conditions are so bad that an Iranian boy recalled that when an escape riot was quelled in one location, those still inside took the broken glass and were caught trying to kill themselves. Another boy Moorehead interviewed said he was caught digging his own grave.

Given such conditions, she said, it's no surprise that 90 percent of the world's refugees show signs of depression. Even successful resettlement can be lonely. In one passage, Moorehead describes how Dinkas from the Sudan were successfully resettled in Oulu, a small town in Finland's far north, where it is entirely dark for several months of the year. "I thought, this is such an image of the world gone mad," Moorehead said.

"They treat them so beautifully, they receive them, they settle them, they give them nice apartments, they give them enough money to buy clothes, and there they are - they're all about 6 foot 6 - these enormous, lonely, solitary black Dinkas wandering around the streets of Oulu in the dark. And you think to yourself, it's mad."

Moorehead has done a lot of interviews, but she said she is especially vulnerable when the stories involve children. "In Afghanistan, there was this woman telling me this story about having to leave her baby by the side of the road, and I knew where it was heading. And I just hardly could bear it. I remember thinking, "I don't know that I can listen to this.' "

But she did. That's her job. As she said, "They've been through it. All I have to do is listen to their story for an hour." And she has been listening for years.

Moorehead went to work for the Times of London in 1980 and shortly thereafter began writing a column about human rights. She started by focusing on prisoners who had been detained in countries where they were neither charged nor tried - such as the "enemy combatants" held by the United States now in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - and told their stories. She moved on to a general human rights column, made films for the BBC and wrote books on topics ranging from apartheid to Bertrand Russell and Freya Stark.

Moorehead writes that about 17-million people are being watched over as refugees, displaced people and people of concern by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Only a lucky few get out, the book says, and the journey they undergo is almost always long and arduous. And often upon arrival, they realize that their journey has just begun. Though the total number of refugees has dropped from a high of 19-million in the 1990s, she said, conditions for their care have gotten worse. Border zealousness is seen around the world, and even worse than physical barriers are legal ones, she said.

"(Prime Minister) Tony Blair in England has made great mileage by the fact that applications for asylum halved between 2002 and 2004," Moorehead said. "Why did they? Well, they sure as hell didn't halve because there were less people needing asylum; they halved because it became nearly impossible to get asylum. And why should we be so proud of that? We should be ashamed."

Recently, Moorehead visited with one of the Liberians she met in Cairo who made it to the United States and now drives a cab. Speaking about him, she smiled for the first time in an hour of interviewing.

"He's going to make it; he really is. Resettlement is a great thing when it works," she said. Then the moment passed; a shadow returned to her face.

"But we need to remember that what we see are the survivors," Moorehead said. "It's not surprising they're all fit young men. They're the best. The rest do not fare so well."

- John Freeman is a writer in New York.

[Last modified March 17, 2005, 08:55:02]