Notes and Comments

Notes and Comments NEGOTIATING THE HUMANITARIAN PAST: HISTORY, MEMORY, AND UNSTABLE CITYSCAPES IN KAMPALA, UGANDA Kristin B. Sandvik*

Keywords: UNHCR, urban refugees, humanitarianism, memory

1. Introduction This article provides an ethnographic account of how urban refugees and legal protection officers from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kampala, Uganda compete to define the present by way of a struggle to manage the past. While important work has been done on displacement and urban livelihoods in the African context,1 so far insufficient attention has been given to the effects of UNHCR’s urban refugee management *

Kristin B. Sandvik is a Senior Researcher with the Security Programme at the Peace Research Institute Oslo, Norway. The present article builds, in part, on her doctoral dissertation “On the Everyday Life of International Law: Humanitarianism and Refugee-Resettlement in Kampala” (Harvard Law School, 2008). An earlier version of the article was presented at the conference “The Anthropology of International Institutions: How Ethnography Contributes to Understanding Mechanisms of Global Governance”, held at L’Ećole des Hautes E´tudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 11 Jun. 2010.

1

L.B. Landau, “Discrimination and Development? Immigration, Urbanisation and Sustainable Livelihoods in Johannesburg”, Development Southern Africa, 24(1), 2007, 61–76; K. Jacobsen, “Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Urban Areas: A Livelihoods Perspective”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 19(3), 2006, 273–286.

Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 108–122 ß The Author [2012]. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] DOI:10.1093/rsq/hdr021 Advance Access publication 3 February 2012

Downloaded from http://rsq.oxfordjournals.org/ at University of Oslo Library on December 16, 2013

This article provides an ethnographic account of how urban refugees and legal protection officers from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Kampala, Uganda compete to define the present by way of a struggle to manage the past. Taking the bonds between the visible and invisible cityscapes of Kampala as a focal point for the inquiry, the article juxtaposes the practices involved in recording official history with the scattered memories circulating in Kampala’s urban refugee community. The article shows how urban refugee governance is produced through bureaucratic records of the past, regulatory practices, and the politics of exclusion. It reconstructs refugees’ experiences of rejection and mistreatment as physical mappings of Kampala, in which the creation and closure of urban spaces give meaning to the idea of “ protection space” and urban refugeehood. The ambition is to begin to develop a critique of urban refugee management by outlining a “ shadowgraphy” of Kampala from the perspective of the urban displaced.

Refugee Survey Quarterly

2

The discussion presented here must be understood against the backdrop of the general urbanisation of humanitarian emergencies. Half of the world’s population now lives in cities, a share that will increase to 70 per cent by 2050. Ninety-five per cent of the urban population growth will be in the developing world. About 810 million people already live in city slums, battling overcrowding, landslides, flooding, inadequate nutrition, and poor health, as well as insecurity caused by civil unrest and armed activity; see United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2007 Revision, 2008. African urbanisation is particularly vulnerable to humanitarian disaster; see A. Badiane (ed.), The State of African Cities 2008: A Framework for Addressing Urban Challenges in Africa, Nairobi, UN-HABITAT, 2008. In response, humanitarian agencies will increasingly have to go urban; see World Bank, World Development Report 2010: Development and Climate Change, Washington, D.C., 2010; R. Zetter & G. Delkun, “Meeting Humanitarian Challenges in Urban Areas”, Forced Migration Review, 34, 2010, 5–7; A. Guterres, “Protection Challenges for Persons of Concern in Urban Settings”, Forced Migration Review, 34, 2010, 8–9.

3

The article does not deal with internally displaced persons, as these became a part of UNHCR’s protection agenda only in 2005.

4

The research methods employed included participant observation, unstructured interviews with urban refugees and employees of the international and national refugee bureaucracy, a newspaper review of Uganda’s three main newspapers covering refugee issues from 1992 to 2005, and an analysis of “grey” literature. Names of interviewees have been anonymised.

5

J.L. Comaroff & J. Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Boulder, Westview, 1992.

6

E. Hirsch & C. Stewart, “Introduction, Ethnographies of Historicity”, History and Anthropology, 16(3), 2005, 262.


practices.2 To address this lacuna, the article interrogates the idea of Kampala as a gradually vanishing site of invisible memories, where refugee governance is produced through bureaucratic records of the past, regulatory practices, and the politics of exclusion.3 The argument is developed out of experiences during two different kinds of engagement with UNHCR and urban refugees in Kampala. As an intern, I did casework for UNHCR’s resettlement section from April through July 2004. From June through August 2005, I was based at the Refugee Law Project when I returned to Kampala to conduct fieldwork among urban refugees.4 The interactions that I observed between urban refugees and UNHCR’s legal protection officers in Kampala were characterised by formal and informal negotiations over urban residence permits, financial support for basic needs, refugee status, and resettlement to the West. The credibility of both individual and collective refugee narratives was central to the distribution of resources: as refugees and legal protection officers attempted to reach agreement on the wider macro histories of the Great Lakes region, East Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southern Sudan, as well as the background stories and identities of particular individuals, the past became a site upon which credibility was contested. However, I suggest that not only conflicting stories but also conceptually different ways of recollecting the past shaped views about credibility and trustworthiness, in turn becoming the basis for a reinforcement of the hierarchical relationship between legal protection officers and refugees. The past is always an intrinsic part of the contemporary ethnographic fabric.5 As Hirsch and Stewart have noted, versions of the past and the future assume present form in relation to events, political needs, available cultural forms, and emotional dispositions.6 At the same time, as Sarat and Kearns explain, “law writes the past, not just its own past, but the past for those over

109

110 Kristin B. Sandvik j Negotiating the Humanitarian Past

7

A. Sarat & T.R. Kearns, History, Memory and the Law, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1999, 3.

8

S. Slyomovics, The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998; E. Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003; M.E. Burchianti, “Building Bridges of Memory: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Cultural Politics of Maternal Memories”, History and Anthropology, 15(2), 2004, 133–150.

9

A. O’Connor, The African City, London, Hutchinson, 1983; A.J. Njoh, “Urban Planning as a Tool of Power and Social Control in Colonial Africa”, Planning Perspectives, 24(3), 2009, 301–317; D.F. Bryceson & D. Potts (eds.), African Urban Economies: Viability, Vitality or Vitiation?, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 14.

10

B. Freund, The African City: A History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007, 80.

11

C.U. Rodrigues, “Angolan Cities: Urban (Re)segregation?”, in F. Locatelli & P. Nugent (eds.), African Cities Competing Claims on Urban Spaces, Leiden, Brill, 2009, 42.

12

F. de Boeck, A. Cassiman & S. van Wolputte, “Recentering the City: An Anthropology of Secondary Cities in Africa”, in K. Bakker (ed.), African Perspectives 2009. The African Inner City: [Re]sourced, Pretoria, University of Pretoria, 2010, 3341, citing C. Nordstrom, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-First Century, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2004.


whom law seeks to exercise its dominance”.7 In the context of state oppression, Anthropology has identified the intersection between collective and individual memory and official history as a useful site for studying power and resistance.8 In a related but somewhat different vein, the present article considers the relationship between history and memory within the frame of urban refugee protection, a project almost universally recognized as inherently legitimate. While participating in and observing the interaction between UNHCR staff and refugees in Kampala, I noticed the considerable gap between what counted as official history about the past and the non-institutionalised memories that circulated within the urban refugee community. My concern here is accordingly with the ways in which UNHCR’s legal and bureaucratic procedures for refugee management “use and write history”, while also becoming “a site of memory”. More specifically, I am interested in how ideas of “protection spaces” and urban refugeehood in Kampala are produced through contestations over the creation and closure of physical spaces. Early scholarship on the African city has examined how colonial powers used zoning laws and urban planning policies to exclude Africans from the colonial cities they were creating, using racial stereotyping as a method of colonial governance.9 Poor African neighbourhoods were razed or removed when they were seen as inconvenient.10 More recent developments on the African continent exhibit two contradictory trends, however: on one hand, there is the recovery of old spatial separations created by the zoning laws and governance practices of colonialism, but, on the other, there is the simultaneous creation of new spaces, closed and fortified by social groups that have an economic advantage.11 Recently, calls have also been made for a “shadowgraphy” of the African city; these calls are premised on the idea that place is not given but made, and not always in evidence.12 Taking the bonds between the visible and invisible cityscapes of Kampala as the focal point for its inquiry, this article examines tensions between history and memory by reconstructing a set of narratives in which refugees’ experiences of rejection and mistreatment find their expression as mappings of Kampala. The


111

first section lays out the context of exile and survival in Kampala. Thereafter, I describe how the writing of official history has functioned as a way of increasing the credibility and legitimacy of UNHCR as a humanitarian actor, and how this practice shaped refugee-management practices in the Kampala branch office. Subsequently, I look at how refugees’ memories worked to contest the official view of humanitarian urban space. I explore memories of exclusion and disengagement, of physical removals, and of the physical and legal expulsion of refugees. In conclusion, I suggest that, taken together, these various narratives contribute to a shadowgraphy of Kampala.

Since 1945, various wars of independence, post-colonial civil wars, Cold War politics, ethnic strife, and regional conflicts over resources have continued to produce refugee influxes into Uganda. UNHCR arrived in the country as early as 1964.13 In 2005, the large UNHCR branch office in Kampala’s Kololo Hill Drive residential area had departments dealing with legal protection, logistics, community services, security, and administration. In addition to the Kampala office, UNHCR had six smaller offices in other parts of Uganda.14 Reflecting Uganda’s 1964 Control of Alien Refugees Act (popularly known as CARA)15 and UNHCR’s 1997 Policy on Refugees in Urban Areas, refugees were expected to live as farmers in remote rural settlements.16 In 2005, these settlements were home to some 260,000 refugees from Sudan, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Somalia, while UNHCR’s Uganda operations were managed by a staff of 110.17 Officially, there was no sizeable urban refugee population in Kampala. A small urban caseload consisted of 210 individuals who had been relocated from the settlements owing to insecurity, particular vulnerabilities, or medical problems. In addition, a limited group of relatively affluent refugees had obtained official permission to live in the city because they were considered

13

S. Lwanga-Lunyiigo, “Uganda’s Long Connection with the Problem of Refugees: From the Polish Refugees of World War II to the Present”, in A.G.G. Gingyera-Pinycwa (ed.), Uganda and the Problem of Refugees, Kampala, Makerere University Press, 1998.

14

UNHCR, UNHCR Global Appeal 2006, Geneva, UNHCR, 2005, 164, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/ 4a0ad61f6.html (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).

15

CARA was replaced by the rights-based 2006 Refugee Bill, which went into effect in 2009.

16

The UNHCR’s 1997 urban refugee policy espoused a negative and distrustful view of urban refugees as “irregular movers” prone to engage in “threats and violent protests”; see S. Sperl, Evaluation of UNHCR’s Policy on Refugees in Urban Areas: A Case Study Review of Cairo, Geneva, UNHCR, 2001, available at: http:// www.unhcr.org/3b3310382.pdf (last visited 29 Nov. 2011). After a decade of sustained criticism, UNHCR introduced its new “Policy on Refugee Protection and Solutions in Urban Areas” in Sep. 2009. This policy recast urban areas as “legitimate” protection spaces and obliges UNHCR staff to “interact regularly and directly with refugees in urban areas” (para. 41); see A. Edwards, “‘Legitimate’ Protection Spaces: UNHCR’s 2009 Policy”, Forced Migration Review, 34, 2010, 48.

17

UNHCR, UNHCR Global Appeal 2006, 164.


2. Exile and survival in Kampala


3. UNHCR history and institutional legitimacy Through their documentary practices, UNHCR’s branch offices are continually engaged in the task of writing and updating the organization’s local and global past. According to Michel de Certeau, the writing of history is “a colonization of time” by the discourse of power. History is the primary medium through which States, elites, or dominant groups confiscate linear time and proclaim official 18

Refugee Law Project, “A Drop in the Ocean” : Assistance and Protection for Forced Migrants in Kampala, Working Paper no. 16, Kampala, Refugee Law Project, 2005, 17, available at: http://refugeelawproject.org/ working_papers/RLP.WP16.pdf (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).

19

In 2006, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics estimated the city’s population at 1,358,800. The city continues to grow at a rapid rate; see A. Baguma, “Half of the World Population Will Live in Urban Areas by the Year 2008”, New Vision, 27 Jun. 2008. The total Ugandan population was estimated at 29.7 million; see United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects.

20

D. Kaiza, “The Control of Aliens and Refugees”, Sep. 2002, available at: http://peoplehouse.blogspot.com/ 2006/03/control-of-aliens-and-refugees.html (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).

21

K.B. Sandvik, “The Physicality of Legal Consciousness: Suffering and the Production of Credibility in Refugee Resettlement”, in R.D. Brown & R.A. Wilson (eds.), Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.


“self-sufficient”.18 Nonetheless, tens of thousands of urban refugees lived permanently or part time as members of “self-settled” communities across Kampala. Located on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kampala is a city of lush green hills, flaming sunsets, and deep blue shadows. Since President Yoweri Museveni “came out of the bush” and seized power in 1986, the city has enjoyed relative quiet and rapid economic expansion. At the same time, Kampala also suffered from the familiar ills of urbanisation, such as heavy pollution, traffic problems, power shortages, overcrowded schools and hospitals, poor housing, and inadequate sanitation and waste management.19 Kampala enjoys a reputation for being relatively safe. Yet, as described by David Kaiza, a journalist for the East African Standard, for its refugees, it is a city with many faces: although regional conflicts have grown, Kampala has become a centre of relative calm – for those who can hide. Refugees allege that secret agents follow them to the city, and even though both Rwandan and Ethiopian diplomats deny it, the two countries are said to be hot on the heels of political dissidents. Kampala is taking on the romantic but dangerous character of a spy city reminiscent of the Cold War era.20 In 2005, many members of Kampala’s urban refugee population were survivors of devastating physical and sexual violence and were often struggling with severe traumas. Their everyday life was shaped by fear of government security agents or paramilitary factions from Uganda’s neighbours, harassment by the local police, rampant petty criminality, poor nutrition, bad living conditions, and high-risk survival strategies. In this context, the quest to obtain refugee status, access to the third-country resettlement procedure, financial support, or urban refugee status became a quest for survival, contingent upon a refugee’s ability to produce a credible narrative of past insecurity and suffering.21


22

M. de Certeau, The Writing of History, New York, Columbia University Press, 1988.

23

For the same reasons, the negative conceptualisation of urban refugees and the distrust of their motive embedded in the 1997 urban refugee policy were particularly significant because UNHCR’s urban refugee policy shaped the attitudes of humanitarians before they arrived in the field. As Naoko Obi and Jeff Crisp pointed out, “if UNHCR staff members regard and treat all urban refugees as potential trouble makers, then they are all the more likely to act in such a manner”; see N. Obi & J. Crisp, UNHCR Policy on Refugees in Urban Areas, Report of a UNHCR/NGO Workshop, UNHCR, 2002, 8.


chronologies as master narratives. Those with power seek to make their story the official story that will dispatch others’ actions.22 Through the production of a master narrative of the activities of the Uganda branch office, UNHCR’s legal protection officers are able to register their experience as history and through the technologies of historiography, as records of their endeavours find their way into Ugandan and donor government archives, legal registers, newspapers, and finally the official history of UNHCR. I propose that this manner of writing history constitutes a central refugee-management mechanism. Through a host of reporting requirements, the various departments of the Kampala branch office were made to account for the quantitative and qualitative results of their efforts to provide assistance and international protection. The aggregate results were then made available in the public domain through online publications such as the “Country Operations Plan”, the “UNHCR Global Appeal”, and “Measuring Protection by Numbers”. Drawing on my experience as a UNHCR caseworker, I suggest that UNHCR’s schema of institutional narratives operated on three levels simultaneously in the Kampala office: utilised tactically by UNHCR headquarters in Geneva in a grander narrative of global humanitarianism in action, the same source material served as an internal frame of reference for international staff. The frequent rotations of permanent staff and the high turnover of consultants and interns contributed to an erratic institutional memory. Statistics, surveys, and country reports submitted to the Geneva headquarters in previous years become important sources of information about the past, as newcomers tried to orient themselves in their new geographical location. Finally, this continually codified past was important to the day-to-day bureaucratic decision-making process. Before my own internship in 2004, I read available annual reports, as well as the Uganda updates on the relevant UNHCR country page.23 Significantly, in order to protect their own professional interests, the legal protection officers who write these reports frequently offer a censored version of events on the ground. The senior legal protection officer in charge during my time at the Kampala office was awaiting a new assignment and was accordingly highly concerned about maintaining the best possible relationship with the headquarters in Geneva. As the material contained in local reports was subjected to further editing at UNHCR headquarters and tailored to the needs of donor assessment, additional “unsuitable” incidents were filtered out. Eventually, this process of officialisation contributed to a problem identified by Gil Loescher, namely, the formation of an institutional memory that failed to take sufficient account either

113


of the consequences of being a historically embedded actor or of the significance of contemporary institutional problems.24

4. Contesting urban spaces: refugee memories

The wordless histories of walking, dressing, housing, or cooking shape neighbourhoods on behalf of absences; they trace out memories that no longer have a place [. . .]. [T]hey insinuate different spaces into cafes, offices and buildings. To the visible city they add those “invisible” cities about which Calvino wrote.25 Life in Kampala is hard for most people. Members of the urban refugee community work, eat, drink, and start families and small businesses like everyone else. Yet, I observed how this “other” Kampala, inhabited by an illegitimate community of urban refugees, was continually made invisible – through a policy of expulsion aimed at urban refugees, through the removal of their shelter, and by UNHCR’s decision to extricate itself from the cityscape and to relocate the UNHCR office to the inaccessible interior of a residential district. While barely registering in official documents, these policies and practices had a profound impact on the urban refugee community’s perception of UNHCR’s willingness and ability to offer international protection. Deeply inscribed in this invisible urban landscape, memories of the past functioned as a reservoir from where refugees vocalised their distrust against the refugee protection system. In this article, “memory” is understood as a term that may be applied to those oral, visual, and bodily practices through which a community’s collective remembrance of the past is produced or sustained.26 The article takes up the notion that any society harbours an array of memory sites that furnish a series of locations where knowledge of the past is conveyed and sustained by a circulation of signs that call attention to its own logic of inclusion, exclusion, and selective incompleteness.27 The article adopts the view that the significance of memories 24

G. Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, 29.

25

Cited in Nordstrom, Shadows of War, 36.

26

P. Connerton, How Societies Remember, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

27

U. Linke, “The Anthropology of Collective Memory”, in N.J. Smelser & P.B. Baltes (eds.), International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Oxford, Elsevier, 2001, 2221.


The views of the refugee community were usually just mentioned in passing in UNHCR’s official documents. Nevertheless, my refugee informants frequently presented alternative acts of interpretation and allocations of meaning to events or the implementation of regulations and services described in the UNHCR reports. Many refugees seemed to speak with a sense of being subjected to a form of secondary displacement. Over time, I found that this process of exclusion could be traced onto the physical map of Kampala. De Certeau’s comment on the parallel existence of the visible city and its non-places is particularly illuminating for thinking about this process. In the words of De Certeau:


5. Exclusion and disengagement The increasingly layered ordering of refugees away from the working environment of UNHCR’s staff increased the humanitarian perception of urban refugees as “matters out of place”. Meanwhile, UNHCR did not perceive the idea of “legal protection” as being compromised by an urban refugee policy that effectively denied a large population protection. In 2004 and 2005, urban refugees were formally governed by Chapter 64 of Uganda’s CARA and UNHCR’s 1997 Policy on Refugees in Urban Areas. In these instruments, refugees were regarded as a potential source of political unrest that should be settled in rural settlements. Self-settled urban refugees were viewed as opportunistic, “irregular movers” who overburdened assistance programmes rather than as individuals in need of protection. In practice, a refusal to relocate to a settlement was also construed as a proof that there was no “real” need for protection: I overheard colleagues telling their clients that if they really had security problems, they would not mind relocating to the settlements. Yet, when rejecting requests for material assistance, the same legal protection officers frequently compared the problems faced by the client in Kampala with the more genuine forms of danger and suffering present in the remote rural settlements, particularly those bordering the Democratic Republic of Congo or Southern Sudan. In the autumn of 2004, UNHCR embarked on what I would term “a strategy of disengagement” by moving its Kampala branch office from the 28

R.J. Bernstein, “Review Essay: The Culture of Memory”, History and Theory, 43(4), 2004, 165–178.

29

Ibid.


lies not in their factuality but in their actuality:28 memory production and consumption may creatively and tactically resist the homogenising tendency of centralised systems and present a measure of possibility, not only for autonomy, but also for subversion of the dominant order.29 In the imagination of asylum-seekers and urban refugees, memories of negligence and acts of transgression committed by UNHCR and its staff loomed large. The transitory nature of the refugee community made it difficult for refugees to speak against the official, written records of UNHCR. This transient quality also made it hard for researchers to make analytic observations about the existence of any kind of coherent “collective memory” that served as the source of a common social identity. Yet, a fragmented body of shared memories circulated: in conversations with refugees, experiences of compatriots or friends often became a part of the collective experience, and later gave meaning to individual perceptions of how refugees were treated. The three examples that follow accordingly interrogate the idea of an unstable cityscape by looking at how memories of expulsion, disengagement, and removal shape the ideas of a vulnerable community, of urban refugeehood, and “protection space”, both symbolically and physically.

115


30

UNHCR, The Global Report 2004, Geneva, UNHCR, 2005, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/4a0c13d76. html (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).

31

S. Dryden-Peterson, “Duty of Care: Protecting the Rights of the Displaced in Uganda”, unpublished teaching case, Harvard Graduate School of Education, 2005.


relative outskirts of Kololo to deep within the interior of that affluent neighbourhood. In UNHCR’s annual report for 2004, the organization describes the relocation of its main office in Kampala “to larger and more secure premises at a reduced rent”.30 I think it is worth considering what the idea of “more secure” tells us about UNHCR’s conceptualisation of “protection space” and how this compared with the local memories upon which the understanding of urban refugeehood was continuously reinterpreted. During my time with UNHCR, two concerns seemed to reshape the nature of UNHCR’s work in Kampala. Refugees were increasingly considered a potential security threat to the staff. This was easy enough to understand. By 2005, the security of humanitarian aid workers was plummeting worldwide and UNHCR had suffered numerous staff casualties. In 2004, I watched from an office on the second floor as the UNHCR compound was stormed by a group of young men described by a colleague as Congolese paramilitaries: the group succeeded in gaining access to the first floor of the building before they were brutally subdued by Ugandan security forces. However, it was the presence of urban refugees outside the gate and the obstacle they presented for improved institutional efficiency that seemed to agitate UNHCR staff members the most. Refugees could not officially “apply” to UNHCR for resettlement or material benefits. Nevertheless, every morning a large crowd would gather outside and a guard would draw up a list of refugees who either had brought a referral note from UNHCR’s implementing partner InterAid or claimed to have (largely fictitious) appointments. For urban refugees, the relocation to the heart of Kololo was a deliberate disengagement. Previously, refugees could walk up Acacia Avenue – or catch a matatu – and then line up for real or imagined appointments outside the gates of the UNHCR compound. In contrast, the new office was located within a gated and guarded compound, among diplomatic missions and international corporations. There was no public transport nearby. Refugees were not allowed onto the premises of the new compound, but were expected to queue up to see UNHCR staff during the office hours held at InterAid in Old Kampala. Reflecting on UNHCR’s inaccessibility, one of anthropologist Sarah Dryden-Peterson’s refugee informants suggested that “UNHCR is just running away. They don’t want to talk with us, or to see us”.31 The urban refugee community did not interpret the relocation as a reasonable security measure. Instead, the move was seen as an effort to escape from the nuisance of dealing with refugees and their problems on a daily basis. While writing a draft version of this article in 2010, I had an e-mail discussion regarding the relocation with my field research assistant, a Kenyan refugee who had arrived in Kampala in the late 1990s. As he saw it, it was clear that “UNHCR


Can you believe it, 12 times! Then the refugee waited for a week. Every day, he went to defecate, and put it into a box. The days went by, and every day the box got a little fuller, until it was filled. The refugee took the box, and waited outside UNHCR for Samuel. When Samuel came and got out of the car, and told him to wait for another appointment, the refugee opened the box and threw the contents at him. The police came and took the refugee. He said, “Let’s go, I know what I am doing”. François then added, “It’s like you, Kristin, when you came to the restaurant [. . .] you said that you can’t think because you are too hungry”. Finishing the story, François nodded: “This is a funny story, but when there is nothing in the stomach, the wife is sick, the child has an accident and the landlord is waiting for rent [. . .] you get desperate.”32

6. Removals For Uganda’s middle classes and its expat community, the Kampala cityscape imparted a fixed quality. Any large change in the physical layout of the city was usually due to private property development or initiated as part of a donor-funded development project. In the minds of these two groups, both types of projects signified progress – for the city and for the country. For urban refugees, however, Kampala was a place of insecurity where the spectacles of the past and the present implicated each other as ambiguous and unstable categories, and where streets, parks, plazas, and buildings assumed the shape of fragile objects in flux. In their narratives, the city was a perpetually vanishing landscape, where the institutions and artefacts meaningful to refugees were constantly threatened, removed, or dismantled, and where they themselves were disposed of, or chased away, beaten, and rejected. Thus, I think that when querying the construction of “protection space”, we need to consider how the unofficial maps of non-places become the basis on which urban refugees guide themselves towards their place in Kampala. The following story about how an abandoned bus – and its removal – changed small sections of the urban landscape will provide a relevant example. 32

Interview with author, Old Kampala, 19 Jul. 2005.


shifted to a better place where by they felt protected”. He connected this need to “feel protected” particularly to a curious incident which had also come up during an interview with François, a Congolese human rights activist (at which the field research assistant was not present) in 2005: “remember the incident where by a certain refugee threw faeces at a certain protection officer by the names of ‘Samuel’, a Ghanaian, so they felt insecure”. The relevant protection officer had left Kampala a number of years before UNHCR moved premises. During the interview with François, which took place in an Indian restaurant not far from the Refugee Law Project’s offices, he had shared a story about a Sudanese refugee who had been told 12 times by Samuel to wait for another appointment:

117


He said Rwanda, but later I learnt that he was Congolese. I told him, I was interested in learning more about him, and asked him where he lived. He then took me to a wreck of a bus, which was seated just behind the police station. [. . .] Forty people were sleeping in that bus: men, woman, and children. It was an interesting bus: there were Rwandese, Congolese, Ethiopians, and Sudanese. Some of them had come to Kampala to pursue their refugee status determination process; some of them wanted to be near the police station. They did not know how long it would take to process their cases. The only thing they had in common was that they were destitute. Some of them had a little bit of money, and was able to buy and sell things [. . .] but some of them were truly destitute. I started going every day with some water, some food.33 In the course of my research, I never managed to find out precisely why the bus was towed away. According to Father Anthony, the removal happened suddenly and without prior warning. In a 2002 report, Human Rights Watch quoted several refugees who explained that prior to the time of Human Rights Watch’s visit they had been allowed to sleep inside a broken-down school bus that had been parked near the Old Kampala police station. The refugees claimed that the bus had been towed away after journalists had planned to write a story about it.34 In an interview with Mr Wamala, an officer from the Special Branch (a division of Uganda’s military police) at Old Kampala police station, I was given a slightly different explanation. Mr Wamala explained that they had stopped the practice of letting refugees sleep outside the police station because, after 9/11, they had learned that police stations could be the object of terrorist 33

Ibid., Jul. 2005.

34

Human Rights Watch, Hidden in Plain View: Refugees Living Without Protection in Nairobi and Kampala, New York, Human Rights Watch Publications, 2002, 78, available at: http://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/ kenyugan/kenyugan.pdf (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).


Neither refugees nor asylum-seekers received much in the way of financial or material support in the urban setting. However, asylum-seekers did not even have the option of going to the settlements, and thus remained vulnerable to arrest for illegal entry and illegal presence. In 2000, someone left an old bus outside the Old Kampala police station. The bus was quickly filled with asylum-seekers who had nowhere else to go while waiting for their applications to be processed. Towards the end of 2001, however, the bus was towed away. With the bus gone, its inhabitants were once again left on the street. Years later, stories about this bus continued to surface in conversations and in the grey literature. In an interview, Father Anthony, a Ugandan Catholic priest with high social standing among urban refugees and Kampala’s native citizens alike, explained that he had been walking around in town one day when he had encountered a man who had begged him for some lunch. Father Anthony asked the man where he was from:


119

attacks, and thus they had prevented the refugees from taking shelter in the bus outside the police station.35 While the loss of the bus represents a memory of powerlessness, the story is not exclusively a narrative of despair. Below is how Father Anthony described what happened when he discovered that the bus was gone and how he came to found Agape (Greek for “love”) as a shelter for urban asylum-seekers:

By the time I arrived to work with UNHCR, Agape was full and had many more potential clients than it could possible cater to. As its staff had to undertake the difficult process of rejecting or evicting asylum-seekers, they too became the objects of gossip and suspicion.

7. Outside So far, this article has focused on how UNHCR’s urban refugee policy and Uganda’s CARA produced vulnerability through a politics of exclusion, disengagement, and removals. This section will consider how the relationship between legal status and the marginality hounding outside the orbit of legal protection gave meaning to the idea of “protection space”. For asylum-seekers newly arrived in Kampala, being considered “outside” legal categories and outside recognition took on a profoundly material quality. Asylum-seekers frequently slept outside government buildings or the offices of international organizations or NGOs in an effort to attract the attention of the authorities or secure a baseline of protection. The asylum-seekers sleeping outside the offices of UNHCR, InterAid, or the Refugee Law Project belonged to the most vulnerable strata of the displaced 35

Interview with author, Old Kampala police station, 13 Jul. 2005.

36

Interview with author, Old Kampala, Jul. 2005.


But, one day when I came down, the bus was towed away, and there were all these people there, with their little bundles of personal property, who said to me [. . .] our home is gone, and they looked at me like I was the Messiah. [. . .] I said to them, “God will find a better place for you.” [. . .] I don’t know where that came from. One of my old classmates had a school he was trying to sell, and there were no buyers [. . .] so I asked him if I could bring the people there, and he agreed. It was a nice place. [. . .] While they were at the bus, I had no obligation, but once I brought them there, I was responsible for feeding them. [. . .] I thought, oh my God, what have I gotten myself into. I managed to get donations and so on from friends. I called it Agape. [. . .] We stayed there for a year or so. Then my classmate sold the school, and we had to look for something new. I borrowed 5,000 pounds from an old friend and put down the payment for the house. Now, we are housing asylum-seekers, who are in the process of getting their permit. We can only have them for three months. [. . .] [S]ome go to the camp then, and some go back to their countries. [. . .] [T]hey realize it is just too difficult.36


For about a month now many people claiming to be refugees and asylum seekers sleep at InterAid offices. [. . .] Even some of those who have been explained to what procedures to follow have insisted on staying around. To make matters worse, we get reports that some of them drink and fight here, not to mention the fact that they soil the whole compound which now is very dirty and smelly, something we fear may cause an epidemic here.39 This account differs radically from the refugees’ own perspectives. An Ethiopian informant, AE, with whom I shared drinks at a local food place near the Refugee Law Project’s offices, suggested that “this UNHCR is not like UNHCR in other countries, there is no power. [. . .] [H]ere they cannot help you, the Government decides everything.” AE then proceeded to talk about what happened to newcomers in Kampala: That man, Frank [an employee at InterAid], is very bad. He will let the refugees sleep at InterAid, and then he may call the police, and they will ask you “Where is your identity card?”, and then they will arrest you, because you have none, and then you will be taken to Old Kampala police station, and from there you might spend 2–3 months in Luzira prison.40

8. Conclusion: the outline of a shadowgraphy Between them, the Ugandan Government, UNHCR, and InterAid regularly reorganized the physical structures of the refugee-management system, including legal regulations, the map of refugee settlement and the policies determining their freedom of movement, right to work, and physical security. In the process, 37

See Dryden-Peterson, “Duty of Care”, 86, 97.

38

Interview with author, Old Kampala, 27 Jun. 2005.

39

See Dryden-Peterson, “Duty of Care”, 78.

40

Interview with author, Old Kampala, 22 Jun. 2005.


population, unable to secure any form of formal or informal housing. On the streets, they were exposed to physical risk, sexual violence, and kidnappings.37 The experiences of AA, a Rwandese asylum-seeker of Hutu origin who was sleeping outside InterAid, were typical. During our interview, he explained that his clothes had just been stolen. He agonised about his own personal safety and that of his wife, who was there with him.38 Yet, sleeping outside official buildings is considered somewhat opportunistic and viewed as a conspicuous display of helplessness in Uganda. Governmental and refugee agencies have employed a variety of repressive tactics to counter the practice. On several occasions, refugees have been rounded up and arrested while sleeping outside InterAid. One such round-up happened in 2001. Human Rights Watch obtained a copy of the correspondence sent by InterAid to the police. In its letter, InterAid requested that the asylum-seekers be rounded up on the night of 12 March 2001. This was deemed necessary on the following grounds:


41

Refugee Law Project, Jesuit Refugee Service Urban Programme Suspended, Fact Sheet no. 2, Kampala, Refugee Law Project, 2001, available at: http://www.refugeelawproject.org/archive/2001/RLP.FS02.pdf (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).

42

In Feb. 2001, the Government and UNHCR jointly implemented a policy to prohibit Sudanese from reregistering as refugees in Kampala in the hope of being sent to the Kyangwali Settlement, from where – or so the rumours went – it was relatively easy to secure resettlement to Australia; see Refugee Law Project, Sudanese Asylum Seekers Stranded in Kampala, Fact Sheet no. 1, Kampala, Refugee Law Project, 2001, available at: http://www.refugeelawproject.org/archive/2001/RLP.FS01.pdf (last visited 29 Nov. 2011).

43

The following headlines illustrate the point: “Local Leaders Link City Insecurity to Sudanese Refugees”, The Monitor, 2 Jul. 2002; “Is the Sudanese Influx in Kampala a Threat?”, The New Vision, 15 Jul. 2002; “SPLA Refugees a Security Threat”, The New Vision, 20 Jul. 2002; “Explain Sudanese Presence in Rubaga”, The New Vision, 23 Jul. 2002; “Kategaya Meets MPs over Sudanese”, The Monitor, 2 Aug. 2002. At the time of my fieldwork, the Refugee Law Project reported that there appeared to be increasing levels of concern among the local population in Old Kampala with respect to the presence of petty criminals in the local refugee populations; see Refugee Law Project, “A Drop in the Ocean” , 17.

44

L. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism and Dehistoricization”, Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 1996, 384.


they opened and closed “safe” spaces: community programmes and shelters for refugees obtained or lost funding;41 groups of refugees were permitted or forbidden to reside in Kampala;42 and the public mood swung from tolerant to xenophobic and back again.43 Hence, the experience of urban displacement in Kampala meant inhabiting a perpetually vanishing city, traceable only through the invisible maps of collective refugee memories. With the bus gone, and as Agape quickly became full and was unable to accommodate more people, asylum-seekers and refugees were once again consigned to sleeping on the streets – an environment that was becoming increasingly insecure and hostile, as previously “safe” places were declared forbidden territory for displaced persons. During the time of my fieldwork, the modes of exclusion described here had come to represent merely instances in a cycle of perceived neglect, in which the bodies of refugees were continually being relabelled and reshuffled. Despite UNHCR’s official embrace of rights-based humanitarianism, the manipulation of space and the attendant growth of the “invisible city” increasingly precluded any kind of meaningful refugee involvement in protection activities. Unsurprisingly, a significant feature of refugee memory practices seemed to be a certain implicit resignation: alternative accounts of acts of commission or omission, or of the outcome of regulatory activities, all turned on a perception of a structural lack of accountability, indicating the need for sustained and critical scholarly attention to UNHCR’s urban refugee management. In her discussion of documentary practices in a Tanzanian refugee camp, Liisa Malkki comments that the refugee-management structure failed to make any kind of record of what refugees said about their own histories and their life in exile.44 In Kampala, urban refugees and asylum-seekers have access to neither the dominant historiographies produced by UNHCR nor the technology with which they are recorded. Their remembrance practices are largely relegated to the realm of oral memory. Given the absence of alternative but equally authoritative and accessible accounts of UNHCR’s managerial activities in Kampala, UNHCR is able to monopolise the past through a steady stream of jargon-filled,

121



technical recordings of its interventions in the refugee community. Detail and nuance are replaced with a unified yet constantly evolving restatement of UNHCR’s efforts to “assist and protect”, built up from claims and statements garnered from a mix of classified institutional and publicly accessible sources. Thus, the complex webs of stories about local, national, and regional events that are so intrinsic to the lives of individual refugees as they negotiate their way through the refugee-protection system are made irrelevant and invisible. In a managerial system that only makes those events into official history that are correctly recorded and stored according to accepted bureaucratic procedure, memories of everyday interactions are lost or ignored. And, not only is the double experience of physical and symbolic displacement that this entails difficult to articulate, but attempting to do so also constitutes an act of subversion. As the map of refugee experience resides in the inferior and illicit realm of memory, invoking this realm means calling on an illegitimate version of the past. The institutional conflation of memory practices with subversion reinforces the perception of refugees as untrustworthy narrators.

Notes and Comments

Notes and Comments

Suggest Documents