Refugees Worldwide 4
This is a piece written for a German-language anthology, Refugees Worldwide 4 (ed: Ulrich Schreiber), which was published recently. This is my original English, written in summer 2023.
I
Cairo swells and recedes, millions of people pouring into its clogged arteries every morning driving the population count up to twenty three million, before retreating back out to the desert compounds and river villages with the sunset. Cairo is the last point of concentration of the Nile, where the river flows fast and compact before splitting and spilling out into the shallow floodplain of the Delta. Politics, history, entire civilizations have their apotheosis in Cairo before shattering and scattering. It is a city forever pushed to its breaking point – twenty three million people pressing out into the desert and up into the sky – but a city which somehow endures.
By some counts, among those twenty three million people, one million are displaced. A second city lives between and beneath the official one.
On maps, in guide books and in the popular imaginations of Egyptians, Cairo can be broadly understood within Egyptian historical and social boundaries, a series of cities built by successive ruling styles: the Coptic city, the walled Islamic city with its Ayyubid Citadel framing the later Ottoman grand mosque, the modern exuberances of the Khedival bourgeoise in Downtown, then Zamalek, the British colonial planners of Maadi and Garden City, the cement towers of Nasserist socialism, the capital flight to the desert that began with Sadat City and is lurching today towards the concrete climax of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s New Administrative Capital – a vast ghost town designed to divert a river of public funds into private pockets.
But between these districts is another city: between the southern walls of Coptic Cairo and the garden villas of Maadi is Dar al-Salaam, home to the city’s Somalians. The flyway that connects Nasserist Mohandeseen to the desert compounds passes over Ard el-Lewa, home to Cairo’s Eritreans and Ethiopians. Out in the desert, in the heart of Sheikh Zayed City, is Little Syria.
For two years I taught in a night school for the city’s refugees, looking for some small point of access to this second city.
Samuel had been training as a doctor in Eritrea. Five years into his studies he had to flee the country. He paid a smuggler and they walked through the night to a crossing point where he was told to run and not look back. From Ethiopia he paid for a route into Sudan, then again into Egypt. Each time the price dropped. What began as $5,000 to get out of Eritrea ended at $1,000 to cross the busy and porous border into Egypt. He is polite, hard-working and takes extensive notes. I have to ask him to put his hand down, to give other people a chance to answer. He works now as a nurse for the elderly while waiting for an arranged marriage to an Eritrean woman in Canada to move him on.
Cairo has always been a crossroads, a stop on the Nile, a waystation in the desert, the end of Africa and the beginning of Asia – or the end of Asia and the beginning of Africa. Every year millions of birds either cross the Mediterranean directly and make their way up the Nile, or skirt the Levantine coastline to the Red Sea and on to their southern wintering grounds. The heroin trade follows the same lines: either crossing Anatolia towards the Bosphorus, or driving up through Egypt.
Birds and heroin follow north-south axes, but weapons score the country relentlessly: driving to and from the warlords in Libya, into the insurrection in Sinai, across the peninsula to Gaza, into official Mediterranean ports from North Korea or down to reactionary allies across Africa. In 1994, to give one example, a shipment of bombs, grenades and machetes disguised as aid was sold to Rwanda’s Hutus. Most recently, in 2023, a communication was intercepted by the Americans in which Egypt’s President instructed his Minister of Military Production to prepare rockets for sale to Russia for use in Ukraine. But mostly, of course, they flow south: from the USA, from France and from Germany direct to the ruling military’s warehouses.
The lobbies of Cairo’s five star hotels are filled with international businessmen, diplomatic delegations, sex tourists, arms traders, gunrunners and mercenaries all wetting their beaks at the watering hole, the staging post into the South.
Amanuel, an Oromo Christian, has not left the city in five years. He passes his days practising in the choir, reading, learning English - and waiting. Not for a decision, but for a second interview. He is sure that something’s gone wrong, that his name has slipped out of the system, that this waiting is leading to nothing. When he calls, nobody will tell him anything. I happen to know someone at UNHCR - the UN body responsible for refugees. My friend looks into it, but the answer comes back: nothing has gone wrong. He is in the system and he must wait.
Waiting has become the condition of the entire country. Waiting for one-man rule to end, for the economy to recover, for the traffic to improve. Egypt has always been a country where people came and settled - but now it is not just a transit country, but an expeller. The numbers of Egyptians crossing the desert to Libya, and then the sea to Italy, have tripled since 2021. There are at least eight million Egyptians scattered around the world. Entire villages are emptying of young men as the economy collapses year on year. When Abdelfattah al-Sisi launched his military coup one Egyptian pound bought you $0.15 cents. Today it buys you $0.03. By every metric – inflation, debt to gdp, ppi, employment – the economy is collapsing. This is the result of the rapacious corruption of the military junta, who threaten and coerce themselves into almost every sector of the economy, drying up private investment, scaring off foreign money and running up as much international debt as possible – all, of course, at the cost of the people.
In France at the height of the Gilets Jaunes protests in 2019 President Emanuel Macron went on national TV and promised €5bn of tax cuts to try and pacify the people. Where would that money be made up? In 2015, and then again in 2021, Egypt bought fighter jets for $5bn and then $4.5bn from France. By all accounts, the French jets are incompatible with the rest of the Egyptian Air Force planes and systems. It did, however, solidify the friendly relationship between Presidents and secure a Chevalier d’Honneur for the Egyptian dictator.
The alleyway behind EgyptAir’s office in Downtown leads to an inner courtyard with a Sudanese restaurant and cigarette stand.
If you go for a beer in the dive bar at the crossroads of Tahrir and Doqqi streets you’re guaranteed to make new friends from Yemen.
Nadine, from Sudan, has been living in Cairo for ten years and was studying to become a lawyer at Cairo University when I first met her. She is the most naturally talented linguist in the class. But by our second year she has grown surly, bored – she graduated months ago but can’t find a job. She has lost momentum and stays home now, watches television, waits for something to change.
For years the Egyptian pound had been pegged to the dollar; its exchange rate was set by Egypt’s Central Bank and not by international currency markets. When al-Sisi took power he relied on three principal sources of funds: grants from the autocracies of the Gulf, loans from international banks and structural adjustment loans from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – which are repaid at a much lower interest rate. But the IMF, whose mission is to spread the tenets of free market capitalism, required the currency to begin a process of flotation in order to qualify for new loans.
And so, on the 3rd of November 2016, Egypt devalued its currency by 48%. It would not be the last such devaluation. Four months later, the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, posed for smiling photographs with al-Sisi at the pyramids as she pledged $500mn for security cooperation to combat, among other things, human smuggling. From then on, the Mediterranean out of Egypt has been a closed route. The road forks west at the Delta, and more and more people began journeying across the desert to Libya.
The perils of the road to the West are formidable – war lords and their internment camps; ISIS soldiers like those who beheaded 21 Egyptian copts on video in 2015; Egyptian army helicopter gunships strafe any unknown vehicles in the desert, killing “hundreds” with the support of French surveillance planes; then the deathly sea beyond.
But still they leave.
Movement over stasis. The human need for a horizon.
In a recent meeting with two Western politicians, Egypt’s Foreign Minister laid things out plainly: if we fall, then a hundred million people will soon be off looking for that horizon.
I read an essay by a Sudanese writer living in Cairo that I liked so I wrote to him. We became friends, meeting twice a year in a Downtown dive bar and talking politics: him updating me on the state of the then ongoing revolution in Sudan, me giving him the gritty details of the unrelenting crackdown on opposition politics in Egypt. He was full of detailed information about the popular committees in different cities, the histories of the relevant unions, electoral coalitions and fractures, the illicit flows of gold from Sudan to Dubai keeping the paramilitary RSF funded. He was optimistic. Sudan had learned the lessons of our failures in Egypt, they would not abandon the streets nor trust any Army promises of democracy.
He was optimistic, and he was missing out - stuck in Cairo because his wife had been gone too long and was unhappy back in Sudan. He did not like the city and wished his young son could instead be having a Khartoum childhood, one of single story buildings, open doors and shared courtyards. Instead he lived in a cement tower on the road out to the airport, in a flat next to his wife’s mother’s, listening to their family plan out a future move to join relatives in Oakland, California. He wished he could be in the throes of the revolution, but satisfied himself that he was doing important online work from Cairo.
I send him a message to ask how he’s doing, now that all the politics and coalition-building of the revolution has been swept away by two generals turning their troops on each other. He has not answered.
Back at the night school, Mohamed would always come late. Always. Thirty minutes into the class. He is smiling and confident and is quickly reaching for a marker pen to prove his lateness isn’t impacting his skills. He often gets it wrong, but he’s perpetually unbothered. He’s from Nubia, and his game is sharing words with the class nobody’s ever heard before. He hits a groove when he proudly tells the class he’s the guardian of his language.
Nubia, submerged now underneath Lake Nasser, an inland sea that flooded the valley with the construction of the High Dam in the 1960s, home now to thousands of flamingoes. On the banks of the lake is the Temple of Abu Simbel: four huge carvings of Ramses the Great cut from the mountain, with a door between the king’s ankles to an inner complex. To save the temple from the rising waters it was cut into blocks, lifted to higher ground, and re-assembled in 1964. This, these four colossi, were once what would have been called a border: a sign to anyone sailing up the river that you are entering something new, welcoming you to the place of a people capable of building great things.
For hundreds of years this symbol stood at Abu Simbel.
In other times the transition between Egypt and not-Egypt was further south into Sudan. Always it ran along the Western border, the fertile floodplain that rose and fell between the river and the desert, the intermittent pyramids built at the first moment of infertile desert, symbols of transition from non-state into the state, towering structures from which lookouts could observe a horizon that stretched further than it ever had before.
II
Map by Sabine Réthoré
The Mediterranean Sea has been re-engineered in the modern European imagination to allow a hubristic self-delusion to take hold: the idea that Europe is somehow distinct from other parts of the world. That Europe is something other than an extended peninsula on the edge of Asia, or one shore of a shared basin with Africa, or breathed upon constantly from the Gulf of Mexico. The horizon that we have looked out at for thousands of years has changed many times:
An end-point not to be ventured towards (when they imagined the world to be flat, or when - as in Egypt - the land gave everything an empire needed); a source of military menace (the Sea Peoples, the Romans, the Normans, pirate fleets, the Venetians, the Ottomans); a medium for transport, trade, exchange and return. (for some it was easier to cross the sea than the mountains or desert); a common ground between people and places; navigable, crossable. Now almost every voyage across the sea is one way only. Boats fleeing wars and warlords. Boats loaded with ancient fuels to be burned. Boats filled with items to be consumed and discarded.
As I write there are 37 cargo ships and 32 oil tankers in the Suez Canal. Three of those oil tankers started their voyages in Russia. By my rough count there are at least 390 oil tankers crossing the Mediterranean at this moment (3pm on a Sunday).
But Europe’s imagination has been seized and twisted to the point where it is small boats with children looking for temporary harbour that are the political crisis.
The Mediterranean today is not a sea but a moat to keep out these child-enemies, to drown them on the doorstep and contemplate their bodies. It is a barrier, a psychological break, the deathly edges of an idea that a socialist in Ireland or France has more in common with a financier in Frankfurt or a neo-fascist television producer in Hungary than a video-artist from Gaza or a journalist from Nigeria. The Mediterranean has produced a fatal imaginary in Europe’s internal compass that the line dividing the world is North vs South when it is Left vs Right - or, those who believe in a public world tempered by a common good, and those who believe in a private world ruled by individual desires. This is today’s Mediterranean: a trick, an idea summoned to convince people of the limitations of our dying age: that Europe has hard edges, finite and dwindling resources, collapsing health systems, that it, that we, that democracy, that progress, that charity, that self-awareness, that historical knowledge, that responsibility all end at the water.
The water is again as it was many thousands of years ago - a shelf beyond which you will fall off the edge of the world.
It’s not just those in Egypt who are forbidden the wonder of a horizon.
III
We send messages constantly over the water. Some speak of justice and morality, some of responsibility, others reach for a higher conception of humanity. We issue the same warning again and again: what is being done to us will one day be done to you.
This is not a metaphor.
Small boats of refugees did not become a crisis overnight. The crisis is by design. The crisis took months to craft and years to take its numb hold. This iteration of the crisis did not begin in Syria but between Moscow and Washington DC, with Obama abandoning his ‘red line’ forbidding chemical attacks on civilians and Putin thrusting himself into the regional vacuum with barrel-bombs on hospitals. It began when Angela Merkel rescinded her invitation of welcome to Germany. It began when the EU abandoned its own protocols and hotel owners on Lesbos realised nobody was coming to move these lost young men off the island. It began when a politician faced with some us vs them question did not have easy access to a cultural rhetoric of justice or history or responsibility and so joined in making a them. It began with a millionaire’s wire transfer to an Offshore Finance Centre in the Caribbean and the closing of a school or a hospital. It began when the UK blocked Turkey from acceding to the EU. It began when the Emperor of Byzantium mistakenly summoned the forces that would avalanche into the First Crusade. It begins again every time a ruling party has a bad week in the news.
It begins with every invocation of an imagined, coherent continental identity. What is this Europe? What binds a Finnish school-teacher to a Sicilian farmer other than a confused Christianity? A belief in democracy, in human rights, in equalities of people? Does anyone truly believe those end at the Mediterranean? If Europe can hold these multitudes what defines where Europe ends, where the moat is dug? It’s not nature; nature flows in and out of Europe down the Bosphorous or through the forests of Bulgaria or along the Levantine Coast or across the straits of Gibraltar. As humans once did. How much of what binds the Finn and the Sicilian now in this idea of Europe is fear? A deep, perhaps unconscious understanding that the gains their nations made through the historical accident of being the first to industrialise, that the infrastructural fortunes accrued at the expense of the earth’s atmosphere, are finite, crumbling, and must be hoarded. The world outside is scary, people want what we have, and we have no choice but to look after ourselves.
This is national life lived as a horror movie.
Roughly once a month the British Conservative Party finds itself in a new scandal of incompetence, corruption or gross negligence. Without fail, the following day, the newspapers will be plastered with news of new floating barges to imprison refugees on, plans to deport refugees to Rwanda or Moldova or Papua New Guinea, that navy boats will now be used to patrol and deter, new legislation to strip citizenship will be written, militarized jet skis will be rolled out, the right to appeal decision will be reduced and police powers will be expanded, new arrivals will be tagged, woke civil servants obstructing the government’s plans will be removed, that the European Convention on Human Rights must be exited.
What is being done to us will one day be done to you.
How does it end?
Angela Merkel rescinded her invitation to Germany, the European Union paid €6bn to Erdogan to seal the border, the first of unknown billions paid out to Egyptian dictators and Libyan warlords and international weapons companies since 2015. This has also handed Erdogan and Sisi eternal blackmail privileges. Erdogan can arrest his opponents in their thousands, but he keeps the border closed. Sisi’s Egypt is in a death-spiral of violence and corruption - but he lets only oil tankers reach the high seas.
It ends, in one telling, in this telling, in a world of unitary nations defined by the sturdy, impassable, unquestionable border fences between them. It ends with militarized police forces patrolling both borders and populaces, of kettled protests and sentenced protestors, with biometrics and genetic sequences, of facial recognition and ever-stricter voter requirements - it ends with a narrow band of elites agreeing to put their national and ethnic differences aside as they realise their common cause of population control.
But the Mediterranean does not have to be a border.
It has never been just a boundary, it is meant to be the middle of us, the body that connects us and it is in all of our interests to wrest our imagination back from those that would have you believe otherwise, those who have convinced so many that a packaged beach holiday is the only time anyone should be able to consider the horizon.