[inaudible conversations] good afternoon. My name is jerry fowler, and im a senior policy analyst here at the open Society Foundations, so im pleased to welcome you to this event thats hosted by open society and by our friends at politics and prose. To hear about ben rawlences new book, city of thorns. Were very proud, actually, because ben did part of the work for this book while he was an open society fellow, and so were happy to have made that particular contribution to the work. Were also pleased this afternoon to have karen atilla who is an editor at the Washington Post and who is going to be interviewing ben. Shell say a little bit more about bens background, but let me tell you about karen. She, before joining the Washington Post, reported for the Associated Press from cure sow, and her work has appeared in publications across the world including can i have a list here, i wont go through the whole thing but salon, the haitian times, morningside post. Shes also made Television Appearances on a number of International Networks including mtv africa and aljazeera. She has degrees from columbia and northwestern and was a fulbright scholar in ghana. Were very happy to have her here. Shes going to e interview ben for a while, and then therell be a question and answer period. And then therell be a book signing. As you probably saw coming in, politics prose has copies of the books available outside. While the book signings going on, were simultaneously going to be removing the chairs and everything from this room for the reception which i hope you all will stay for. So my colleague, toby shepard, when we get to that point, shell provide some guidance on where people should line up so that we can do the book signing, remove the chairs and set up for the reception all at once without too much of a mess. But anyway, i welcome you again to open society, very happy that youre here and particularly happy that ben and karen have joined us. And with that, karen, ill hand it over to you. Thank you so much. Thank you all for joining. Im really happy to be here and very excited to talk about this book, about city of thorns with ben rawlence. Ben is a former researcher for Human Rights Watch in the horn of africa, and he is the author of radio congo and has written for a wide range of publications including the new york times, the guardian, the london review of books and prospect. He lives in wales currently with his family, and for city of thorpes he spent thorns, he spent a total four years, the book of 20132015 making repeated trips to dadaab to really research the lives of people in this camp. So with that, i mean, dadaab in kenya very often, obviously, called a refugee camp which in peoples imaginations, id imagine, just gives the image of makeshift tempts, of families tents, of families squatting their temporarily. But the dadaab of ty of thorns is much more than that, its a city, its an ecosystem, its a metropolis thats powered by conflict, african geopolitics and just the basic need for human survival. You have the themes of intervention by ngo tos, by the u. N. , or the lack thereof, hostile or neglectful host government of kenya. But a lot of it has a lot to do with relationships and the need for, the need for survival and the ways that people, ordinary people, very ordinary people, remarkably ordinary people cope in extraordinary circumstances. And to quote from the book, the refugees are literally between a rock and a hard place. On one side is a kenyan government that harasses and ransoms the refugees, a world thats indifferent to them, and on the other, the terror of alshabaab. So thank you so much for joining me, and id like to be able to start big and then telescoping and then telescope back out again in discussing the book. So can you give us just a background, just a sense of the history of dadaab . What led people to begin fleeing there in the first place . Well, dadaab was established in 1991. Many of you, i see familiar expert faces, will remember that time. Following the collapse of the government in somalia in 1990, there was then the failed u. S. And u. N. Interventions, blackhawk down was the signal event that spawned pote the film but both the film but also the u. S. Withdrawal from motion mogadishu, and the country spiraled further and further into civil war and has pretty much continued in that vein ever since with various flareups at different points resulting from the ethiopian invasion to the rise of alshabaab and now a kind of fragile peace in mogadishu but still conflict in other parts of the countriment and that initial of the country. And that initial camp was three towns, each one about 30,000 people, and and they were arranged in a kind of hemisphere around the town of dadaab which is a small, sort of dusty outpost in northern kenya 17 miles from the border with somalia. Fast forward to 25 years later, there are now five camps, each one between 70 and 100,000 people, and there are three generations of people from those initial populations in 91 who came. Theres a character in the book whos a person not a character, we should, i keep saying that, but a person who is in the book, and his father came and his mother came in 1991. He was a very young boy. Hes now had children. His, some of them are, will soon be having children, and there are friends of theirs who have had, who have grandchildren. So were now on to our Third Generation in the camp of people who have never left. Those people are coexisting with more recent populations, people who came, for example, in the famine, 2011. And everybody is subsisting in this, as karen described, this makeshift metropolis. And, of course, weve all seen the images of these grids of tents laid out. Its kind of crazy aerial photos that suggesting the scale of the place. But what thats quite easy to picture. But whats hard to picture is the daily life thats going on within those grids, the people coming and going, making a living, working in the market, collecting their food rations, falling in love, falling out of love. And thats, those are the kinds of fine grain stories that, well, well probably get to, hopefully. Sure. So the majority is somali in the camps, but one thing that i didnt particularly know until reading the book is that it is actually, some parts of it are quite cosmopolitan. So its a bit of an oasis for the conflicts besetting the region. Can you talk a little bit about some of the other populations that are also in the camp . Yes, absolutely. The reason i first went there in 2010 was as a researcher for Human Rights Watch on the horn of africa. And i joked at the time with my colleagues that we should have a suboffice in dadaab, because we need to go there so often. Its a kind of outpost of all of the conflicts in that region. We were going frequently in order to interview people who had come from somalia to find out about human rights abuses in somalia and also to find out what was going on in ethiopia, the recent arrivals coming from ethiopia. And then, of course, there is the human rights crisis in dadaab itself which later on in, i think, 2010 bill will correct me in the back from human rights refugee program. But there were two reports done about the human rights crisis in dadaab itself. The way that this is, the way i sort of approached that in the be book is to talk about a love story between muna who is a young somali girl who was born in the camp, raised in the camp and a young sudanese lost boy could mundai who was, in fact, a friend profiled in dave eggers book. He was one of the thousands of lost boys that were resettled to the United States, but there were tens of thousands, of course, who stayed in the region in refugee camps in ethiopia, kenya. Mundai was one of those. So they met, fell in love, had a baby. But that went very much against the conservative strictures of her family and some of the more hardline mullahs. And there was pretty much a witch hunt for these two and especially for the infant. They wanted to capture the infant and sacrifice it as an honor killing because munas the dignity of the family had been offended by this halfchristian, halfmuslim child so theres a, part of their story is hiding from this mob, being defended by the lost boys with their spears in block s1 which is far from the other part of the camp where muna lived x. Through that we learn, you know, a lot about in fact, as i was researching that story, i found out that this was the third time that the church of the sudanese community, Little Wooden Church of sticks had been burned down by muslim people from the adjacent block. Thered been this ongoing tension. And that story goes on and on and on. Let me stop there. So, yeah, in that vein, we know two of the nine i even keep calling them characters, because they are that them roll, but they were real people, they are real people that are living in the camp that you got a chance to get to know. Can you talk a little bit gulad is one of the first people that we meet in the camp. Can you give an introduction and why he ended up in the camp in the first place . Yeah. He was, first arrived in the camp in 2010. He grew up in mogadishu. Through the first chapter basically deals with a potted history of somalia from those who dont know from 19 t 1 and the blackhawk down incident. He was, in fact, born, he doesnt really know, but as far as we could ascertain, we think he was born in the month that the helicopters were shot down and in the district where they crashed. He grew up in that district. In 2010 he was a 16yearold who was going to Primary School in mogadishu, and one day in his geography class seven armed men showed up at the back of the school and pulled out seven students, and he was one of them. And he was taken to a training camp, and for about a month he worked for the alshabaab Morality Police in mogadishu. This is in the aftermath of the 2010 battle for motion douche shoe mogadishu which was very brutal. At that time i was covering the abuses in that conflict. But he was there in the middle of it trying to go to school, then working for alshabaab. And i wont go into the details, but he got an opportunity to run away, to escape. And, of course, he couldnt stay in mogadishu because he was afraid of retribution. So he made his way as a young boy along with many others 400 miles south to the border with kenya and across that 70 miles of no mans land to get to the camp. And what people perhaps sometimes dont realize is that its not simply a question of just walking to the refugee camp. Even to get there is an incredible challenge. Because from the border kenya is very hostile to refugees. It generally theres no Welcome Center where you get a cup of tea and a bus ride to the camps. What you have to do is make your own way across that scrubland. Because if you get interdicted in the meantime, the most likely thing thats going to happen to you is the kenya police will lock you up, shake you down and take you back to somalia again. So you have this sort of chicken run that youve got to run, this gauntlet, in order to reach the camps. Once youre there, which he managed to do, you present yourself to the u. N. , you get remsterred, you have a ration registered, you have a ration card, you can then begin your life as a refugee which is by no means roses. Hes coming from one very difficult situation and entering another. But that journey of his forms the first few chapters so, to show you what it takes to actually reach this place. And what i like about what youve done with the various stories, they all sort of use them as vehicles to kind of explain the certain factors or conditions in the camp. So we have you mentioned earlier, for instance, tieu wan nay who i found his case extremely interesting. Hes a very bright, entrepreneurial youth leader. And as the book progresses, he learns how to kind of take on, in a sense, the affectations of the ngo world and sort of learns the, puts on the mantle of transparency and accountability. And so we mentioned youth who spent their entire lives in the camp. What, in your interactions with them, i mean, how how do the yoh see themselves . How do they cope when youre in a situation where the future is uncertain . Youre in a place where a government doesnt want to acknowledge your existence and yet leaving doesnt seem to be an option . How do the youth envision themselves and see themselves . Well, i mean, to follow on from guled, guled arrived in 2010, beginning of 2011. But he was one of what they call the new arrivals. So, the uane and muna had been there from the start. And those guys who came then, they call it the good old days, in fact, when their access to education was easier, when most kids could go to Primary School, when the rations were mostly rice and beans instead of now sorghum and millet and things people often dont know how to cook. Thus, not to mention all the ration cuts. But that group who came then refer to themselves as the 92 group. And they, many of them have since been resettled, but a lot are still there, and tuane was their leader for a while. And these guys have for the last 25 years gone through Primary School, gone through secondary school, taken diplomas now. Theres a branch of Kenyatta University in dadaab, people also have done degrees online, through the mail, through the internet, and theyre finish all of this activity is based on the principles that they are preparing for a life outside, a life somewhere else after they escape from the refugee camp. But as time goes on, that horizon is looking increasingly unlikely, and the reality that theyve lived up until this point feels increasingly tenuous. So as, i mean, over the five years that ive known tuane, his mental state gets more and more flexible, more and more under pressure. So for those guys or for most people in the camp, in fact, you have to in order to get through the day, you have to have hope that somehow your life is leading outside the camp. So daily life really is an exercise in manufacturing hope. So for tuane, sometimes you talk to him and he says, yes, im going back to somalia soon. Theres a new government, its all going to be great. You talk to him the next day, and its all doom and gloom and depression, and, oh, did you see, there was fighting, we cant go there. He still is very much affected by the trauma of, the received trauma, in fact. Not that he experienced himself because hes grown up in the camp, but all these stories that hes been told about how his brothers were murdered and how his father was beaten up and abused. So the way i sort of see it is, the way i try and describe it is dadaab b is like a pressure cooker. A stable point of view, a stable mental attitude is very hard to maintain. So this group who have been brought up on this diet of hope, that diet is wearing very thin. By now theyre really struggling. Yeah. And the camp, is there any sort of, i mean, we hear about programs that we launch from washington, Psychosocial Support or things is there any sort of Services Like that in the camp for these people . Yes, there is. And cairo, one of the women i followed, does work in a counseling center. But this doesnt really apply. I mean, its people like tuane are the rockings of the community. These are the normal people, these are the guys who havent been sexually abused, theyre not victims of domestic violation. They havent had firsthand experience of conflict. Their problems are very much a result of living in the camp. And certainly, the programs are not designed for people like that, nor is there the capacity really. This is just the reality of this limbo life, which is what ive tried to convey. Whats the role of the ones who have access, the role of facebook and social media in constructing hope and identities for people in the camp . Well, in a way, facebook is a bitter pill, to be honest. Because it makes it worse. So for tuane, hes got friends who one of his friends, in fact, now is in the u. K. Hes coming to the book launch in london, and it just kills him that this guy got a lottery, a resettlement, got a lottery ticket, in effect, is how it is, to get resettled to the u. K. Through the quota system, and tuane didnt. And its massively unfair, and theres no real reason why one guy should get it and one person shouldnt. Its a total lottery. So they see, and there are facebook groups, for example. Dadaab youth on facebook, a closed group took me a very long time to win admission. And everybodys chatting to each other. And there are people in minnesota and washington and london and stockholm, and theyre posting photos of whats going on in the camp, and everybodys saying, oh, wow, its changed, and dont you remember these days, and theyre putting up old photos and remembering each other. Theres a lot of love and a lot of support, but its also very painful to see some people well off, well fed, having a nice life and others really suffering. One interesting aside on this is that i recently checked guleds facebook profile, and it turns out hes from ghana. [laughter] and he recently went to paris. Okay. And theres a photo of him in the united strip with his face photoshopped on top of Wayne Rooneys body. [laughter] so, and thats quite common. People say that theyre from ohio or london or wherever, and theyre constructing these kind of fantasy profiles for themselves, living out this life and laying claim to these images that are inaccessible to them in the camp. But they can do it on facebook. Uhhuh. Okay. So moving on a bit to another set of people who you follow. I guess guled and marion. So guled meets maryam, and they end up together. And one part about the book that i actually i really, really like, you have a quote. So romance places heavy demands on the future, making the intolerable situation in the camp into a tolerable domestic reality for the present was a gymnastic trick that broke many marriages. So can you talk a bit about how these pressures we talk about it individually, you know, that youre not, that it breaks you, that its a pressure cooker, but how does it play into men and womens relationships with one another . So can you talk a bit about that . Well, guled, as i mentioned earlier, was a refugee from alshabaab. Before he fled he got married. Its very common to marry young in somalia. It was always common to marry young, but the age is going down. And they got married when they were 16, guled and maryam, just before he was kidnapped. When he arrived in dadaab, he had to make a phone call. One thing he wanted to do was to make a phone call to tell maryam that he was okay. Finish but getting hold of cash in the camp is very difficult because y