Читать книгу Outcasts United: A Refugee Team, an American Town - Warren John St. - Страница 8

In 1997, at about the same time Luma was graduating from Smith College in Massachusetts, a woman named Beatrice Ziaty was struggling with her husband and sons—Jeremiah, Mandela, Darlington, and Erich—to survive in the middle of a civil war in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. Rival rebel factions had laid siege to the city, and soldiers roamed about, some decked in women’s wigs and costumes—partly because of a superstitious belief that such costumes would fend off harm and partly because of the sheer terror such surreal getups induced in others. Bullets from the fighting cut down civilians with regularity, and mortars pierced the rooftops of family dwellings without warning. Then one night, the Ziatys were startled by a knock at the door.

Beatrice’s husband was a paymaster, a midlevel bureaucrat whose job entailed handing out wages to employees of the former government, and the men at the door wanted whatever cash he could access. Yelling, with machine guns, and in disguises, the men seemed like emissaries from hell. Beatrice couldn’t make out what faction they belonged to, or if they were simply common thugs.

“You got all the government money—we got to get rid of you,” one of the men said to Ziaty.

“Why? I’m only paymaster,” he protested. “I want to take care of the people. I only want to work to give the people a check! I got no government money.”

“You have to give the government money. If not, we will kill you.”

“I don’t have!” he pleaded.

THE ZIATYS’ STORY, as well as any, shows the extent to which modern refugees can trace their displacement to the mistakes, greed, fears, crimes, and foibles of men who long preceded them, sometimes by decades—or longer. Liberia had been founded in 1821 by a group of Americans as a colony for freed slaves who lived there first under white American rule and then, in 1847, under their own authority, as Africa’s first self-governing republic. For the next 130 years, the Americo-Liberian minority—just 3 percent of the population—backed by the U.S. government, ruled the nation of around 2.5 million as a kind of feudal oligarchy.

Americo-Liberian rule came to a brutal end on April 12, 1980, when Samuel Doe, an army sergeant who had been trained by American Green Berets, stormed the presidential compound with soldiers, disemboweled President William Tolbert, and proclaimed himself Liberia’s new leader. Doe was a member of the Krahn tribe, a tiny ethnic group that composed just 4 percent of the population, far less than the larger tribes in Liberia, the Gio and Mano. With the Krahn essentially replacing the Americo-Liberians as an American-backed oppressive ruling elite, it was only a matter of time before other ethnic groups felt aggrieved enough to revolt as well.

The man who consolidated their rage was a former Doe associate named Charles Taylor, a Liberian who had gone to college in Boston and New Hampshire and, after being convicted in an embezzling scheme, escaped an American jail through a window, using a hacksaw and a rope of knotted bedsheets.

Taylor began with a band of just 150 soldiers in a Gio section of the country. Their motto: “Kill the Krahn.” His incitement to ethnic violence worked and his force grew, in no small part because of boys—some of them orphans whose parents had been killed by Doe, some of them kidnapped from their families by Taylor’s own militias—that he armed and drugged into a killing frenzy. By 1990 he had laid siege to Monrovia. Water was cut off. There was no food or medicine. Soldiers terrorized citizens and looted at will. More than 100,000 Krahn refugees flooded into Ivory Coast, even as Doe’s Krahn soldiers committed atrocities of their own. Over one hundred and fifty thousand Liberians died.

In 1996, Taylor made another attack on Monrovia and the Krahn who lived there. “Fighters on both sides engaged in cannibalism, ripping out hearts and eating them,” wrote Martin Meredith in his book The Fate of Africa. “One group known as the ‘Butt Naked Brigade’ fought naked in the belief that this would protect them against bullets.” Even soldiers from ECOMOG—a regional peacekeeping force deployed to separate the warring factions—joined in the looting. “Monrovia,” Meredith wrote, “was reduced to a wrecked city.”

MONROVIA, OF COURSE, was where Beatrice Ziaty lived. She and her husband were Krahn and remained in the sector of the city under Krahn control. During the siege of 1996, they hid in their house as battles raged outside. When her youngest son, Jeremiah, fell sick, Beatrice could do nothing but pray. It was too dangerous to go outside for help.

“There was no food, no medicine, nothing,” she said. “I saw my child sick for five days. When that child doesn’t die, then you tell God, ‘Thank you.’”

Eventually, though, even the Ziatys’ home failed to provide refuge. The men who came in the night for Beatrice’s husband began to beat him when he said he didn’t have access to any stash of government money. Beatrice panicked. She grabbed Jeremiah and Mandela, her next oldest, and ran for the back door, which let out onto an alley full of shadows. The last words she heard her husband speak echo in her mind today as clearly as when they were spoken that night.

“Oh, what do you do!” he cried. “They are killing me! Oh—they are killing me!”

WITH JEREMIAH AND Mandela, Beatrice trekked through the darkened streets of Monrovia, past checkpoints manned by menacing teenage boys and young men burdened by the weight of guns and bandoliers absurdly oversize for their small frames. The soldiers were content to let the Krahn leave Monrovia. Beatrice and her sons made it out of town and began walking east, toward the border with Ivory Coast. She scavenged for food and hitched rides when she could. But mostly she lumbered through the bush until, after ten days of travel, she arrived at an overflowing refugee camp across the border. She had left behind Darlington, who was staying with his grandparents in the Liberian countryside. Eventually Darlington got word of his mother’s whereabouts and made his own harrowing two-day trek on foot to the camp to reunite with his mother and younger brothers.

Together and with the help of other refugees, Beatrice and her sons built a mud hut for shelter. Then they waited—for what, they weren’t exactly sure. The end of the war—if it ever occurred—wouldn’t be enough to lure them back to Monrovia. Beatrice’s husband was gone. The city was in shambles. Taylor, whose forces laid waste to Monrovia, would come to power in an election in 1997—famously employing the campaign slogan “He killed my ma, he killed my pa. But I will vote for him.”—winning largely because people feared he would restart a civil war if he lost. He used the power of his post to continue the killing until he eventually became the rare example of a Liberian leader who fell out of favor with Washington. He went into exile in Nigeria, was indicted for war crimes by the UN, and was eventually captured in an SUV stashed with cash and heroin on the Nigeria-Cameroon border.

Beatrice passed the time in the camp by standing in lines to apply for resettlement by the United Nations, an act she undertook out of equal parts desperation and stubbornness. She knew the odds that she would be selected were minuscule—but what else was there to do? The camp, home to more than twenty thousand refugees from the war in Liberia, was squalid, with frequent food shortages and a quiet threat in the form of soldiers who worked in the camp to recruit young men back into the war. In such conditions, education for her boys was next to impossible. Beatrice focused her energies on surviving, protecting her sons from recruitment, and getting out.

Beatrice and her sons spent five years in that camp. Against all odds and after countless interviews with UN personnel, Beatrice learned that she and her boys had been accepted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for resettlement. They would be sent first to Abidjan, the largest city in Ivory Coast, and from there they’d fly to New York and then to Atlanta, Georgia, and their new home in Clarkston, a place they had never heard of.

THE ZIATYS’ RESETTLEMENT followed a typical path. They were granted a $3,016 loan by the U.S. Office of Refugee Resettlement for four one-way plane tickets to the United States. (Beatrice repaid the money in three years.) The family was assigned to an International Rescue Committee caseworker, who would oversee their resettlement in the United States. On September 28, 2003, the Ziatys made the two-day journey from Abidjan to Atlanta. Bleary-eyed and disoriented, they met the IRC caseworker at the airport. The woman drove them past downtown Atlanta, with its gaudy skyscrapers and gleaming gold-domed capitol building, to their new home, a two-bedroom dwelling in Clarkston’s Wyncrest apartments. The cupboards had been stocked with canned goods. The walls were dingy and bare. There were some old sofas to sit on, and mattresses on the floor. The Ziatys stretched out on them and went to sleep.

At the encouragement of the IRC, Beatrice Ziaty began her job search almost immediately. Like all refugees accepted into the United States for resettlement, she would have only three months of government assistance to help her get on her feet, to say nothing of the debt she owed on her plane tickets. With the IRC’s help, she landed a job as a maid at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the Buckhead section of Atlanta—one of the most exquisite hotels in the South, and in Atlanta’s most exclusive neighborhood. It was an hour’s commute by bus from Clarkston.

Beatrice wasn’t worried about the work. She was sturdy and self-sufficient—that’s how she’d gotten to Atlanta, after all—but she didn’t like the idea of leaving her boys behind. They were going to school during the day, but she wouldn’t get home from work until well after dark. She encouraged them to stay inside until she returned in the evening. Beatrice didn’t know how to use the bus system in Atlanta, but a fellow Liberian offered to show her the way from Wyncrest to the bus stop on her first day of work. At five-thirty a.m. she set out for the Ritz.

The work there was hard. Maids were expected to clean fifteen to sixteen rooms a day by themselves, and though the shifts were technically eight hours long, in reality it took much longer to clean so many rooms, extra work that occurred, Beatrice said, off the clock. Beatrice’s back ached when she made it back to the bus stop at around ten o’clock. Without her friend to guide her this time, she was on her own. As she rode the bus back through the strange glimmering landscape of Atlanta, she tried to put the fear of the last few years out of her mind. She allowed herself the uncharacteristically optimistic thought that maybe she and her family were finally safe.

The bus heaved to a stop in Clarkston. Beatrice got off, hopeful she had chosen the right stop. She looked around and tried to recall the way back to her apartment. It was easy to get turned around in Clarkston—there were no tall buildings to help her orient herself—and it would take Beatrice the better part of a month to feel confident about the way back to Wyncrest. She set out haltingly along the sidewalk. It was a cool October night filled with the sounds of chirping crickets and the intermittent whoosh of passing cars. Beatrice heard a noise and looked over her shoulder. A man was following her. She sped up and clutched her bag. It contained her new driver’s license, social security card, work permit, and all the cash she possessed. She felt the man’s hand on her arm.

“Halt,” he said. “Give me the purse.”

Beatrice let go of the bag and braced for a blow that never came. The man ran, and she took off running herself in the opposite direction. Eventually she stopped, out of breath, and began to sob between gasps for air. She didn’t know where she was, or how to call the police. She was tired, and tired of running. A stranger, another man, found her and asked what had happened. He was friendly, and called the police. The officers took Beatrice home and offered to help find the mugger. But she didn’t get a good look at him. She only knew his accent was African.

The incident robbed Beatrice of the hope that her new home would provide her and her family with a sense of security. She became obsessed with her boys’ safety. In Liberia, a neighbor would always look after her kids if she needed to leave them to run an errand or to visit a friend. But Beatrice didn’t know anyone in Clarkston. Many of her new neighbors didn’t speak English, and some of the ones who did frightened her. There was plenty of gang activity in and around Wyncrest. Gunshots frequently pierced the quiet at night. For all Beatrice knew, the man who mugged her lived in the next building over. She didn’t particularly trust the police either. She’d been told by Liberians she’d met that the police would take your children away if you left them alone. So she told the boys and told them again: When you come home from school, go into the apartment, lock the door, and stay inside.

ONE EVENING NOT long after the mugging, Jeremiah disobeyed Beatrice. He was playing outside alone at dusk when a policeman on patrol stopped and asked him where his parents were. He had to think fast.

“She’s inside sleeping,” he told the cop.

“Well, then go inside,” the officer said.

Later that evening, Jeremiah told his mother what had happened. She went into a rage, fueled by the anxiety that had been building up for months.

“When you come home from school, go inside and you lock yourself in the house,” Beatrice shouted at him. “When you come from school you will lock yourself up!”