The international trafficking of people is now more profitable than trafficking drugs, Caroline Moorehead tells Rosita Boland.
"All my life, I felt slightly desperate about roots," says writer and journalist Caroline Moorehead, whose father was Australian, her mother English and who was raised in Italy. "I have always felt haunted by displacement. And I was always interested in people who had survived terrible things." Moorehead is one of these people herself: her mother was killed in a car crash and her brother committed suicide.
Moorehead is explaining by phone from her home in Camden Town, London, what drew her towards the subject-matter of her latest book, Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees. "I've worried more about this book than any other I've ever written," she confesses. "I worried about getting the tone right. And whether anyone would be interested in reading it. Books about refugees are not exactly best-sellers, as my agent pointed out to me. But they still gave me a small advance anyway and told me to do it."
Trafficking people internationally is now more profitable than trafficking drugs. It's estimated that €7.8 billion is turned over every year in the dense black market of shifting about 800,000 desperate people from one country to another - people so desperate to escape war and genocide that they pay huge sums of money to traffickers for the most dangerous and uncertain of passages.
Overloaded boats sink. People suffocate in containers or freeze to death in the wheel-bays of aircraft. And very often, when refugees finally arrive alive in other countries, they discover they have exchanged one horrible existence for another. Australia, for instance, has a policy of lengthy mandatory detention in increasingly infamous camps for all asylum-seekers who arrive there.
Moorehead has had a life-long interest in, and commitment to, human rights. She is a governor of the British Institute of Human Rights, a trustee and director of Index on Censorship, and has helped establish a legal advice centre for asylum-seekers from the Horn of Africa in Cairo. When she worked as a journalist for the London Times, she wrote a weekly column that profiled prisoners of conscience around the world, and which generated considerable reader feedback. "It was a way of telling people's stories."
Telling people's stories is what she has been doing all her professional life, both as a journalist and as an author. The books she has written include a history of the Red Cross, as well as biographies of war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, explorer Freya Stark, and philosopher Bertrand Russell.
"In this book, Human Cargo, I worried about whether I was telling people's stories properly," Moorehead says. To research this book, Moorehead - a grandmother for the past decade - made eight journeys to different locations around the world. The book grew out of a piece she wrote for the New York Review of Books, The Lost Boys of Cairo, and a version of which is the opening chapter in Human Cargo.
The Lost Boys of Cairo, a visceral and compelling piece of writing, is about asylum-seekers from Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda, the Sudan and other conflict countries in Africa, who have come to Egypt believing it to be a threshold from where to escape onwards. They are mostly men, because it is mostly men who survive when people are hunted down.
Cairo is a place with its own humanitarian crisis: an estimated million homeless people live in the city's biggest cemetery, because there is nowhere else for them to go. For every traumatised asylum-seeker who arrives having lost everything, only one in four is granted asylum by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which would allow onward passage to a safe country. The others remain stateless, paperless and homeless. When denied asylum, and if they escape prison, they either go into hiding, try to get trafficked, or commit suicide. "They are living subterranean lives, parallel lives," Moorehead says. "They live in the city alongside everyone else, but they don't officially exist."
Moorehead spent several weeks in Cairo, tracking the lives of 56 Liberians who were seeking asylum, having fled ethnic cleansing in their country. She interviewed them at length, went to the dreadful places they were squatting in, found out what they ate, learned their stories, their hopes, their fears. The Liberians had been teachers, lawyers, farmers, husbands, fathers. Most had seen their entire families murdered. Many had been tortured. Their names were Kono, Mustafa, Donzo, Musa, Gedaweh.
Eleven of them, all but one awaiting interviews with the UNHCR, were living together in two derelict, almost dark rooms, which contained two broken beds, two chairs, three blankets, one light bulb and an old television. Between them, the 11 lived on €31 a month: the allowance which the one man among them who had been granted refugee status was given each month by the UNHCR.
"If the figures of acceptance by UNHCR remain the same, I write in my notebook after this first visit to their rooms, seven of these 11 boys will never leave Cairo," she writes in the book. Throughout this often disturbing, but always riveting book, Moorehead consistently humanises statistics by giving people their names and telling their stories. It is a powerful, timely insight both into the lives of those who are displaced, and the political systems by which they are processed, the facts of which she also meticulously researches.
"I tried to think of it as a journey," she explains. "Theirs and mine. I've never written a book in that way before. I would go to a place and do all the research, then come home and write it up." She made eight journeys over two years. "I tried to identify the areas I thought needed writing about and went to the countries that best illustrated it." She went to the Mexican-California border, to Kabul in Afghanistan, to Guinea in Africa. In Australia, she visited the camps where all asylum-seekers are interred on arrival in the country.
"I never meant to go to Australia, but about half-way through writing the book, it became absolutely clear to me that I had to go." The suicide rate in one of Australia's detention camps, the Villawood outside Sydney, is 10 times what it is in Australia's general population.
Once on the ground in the different countries, Moorehead used her skills as a researcher and journalist to get access to the places she needed to go.
"Once you move in the refugee world, you're sent from place to place, and contact to contact; helped with transport and translators." And although the UNHCR had initially been cold to her when The Lost Boys of Cairo had appeared in the New York Review of Books - "they thought they came out of it very badly" - they continued to facilitate her research.
"I found some of it almost too hard; what I found out, what people told me," she says. "What struck me most is how these people survived. And their resilience and courage and extraordinary good manners. I passionately hope that this book won't be read only by people who work in human rights. If ordinary people read it, it will give me the greatest pleasure."
Moorehead is tired. "Incredibly tired," she says, and sighs as if impatient with herself. Then she's bright and enthusiastic again, talking about her new project; a historical biography of a Frenchwoman who survived the Revolution and who wrote her memoirs. "I love research, and I love archives. My idea of heaven is arriving in a strange city at 9 a.m. when a library or archive opens and getting lost in the research. Looking at old papers. I'm going to be doing that for the next two years and I am so happy."
She has two children, Daniel, who lives in New York, and who came with her on some of her research for Human Cargo, and a daughter, Martha, who lives nearby in London. "My mother was a great friend of Martha Gellhorn, and we all had dinner together just before I went into labour with my daughter. The name seemed to present itself for her."
In between her journeys, writing, committee work and archive visits, Moorehead minds her granddaughters, Daisy (9) and Millie (6) two afternoons a week. "It is my great joy, but it does make the life of a working granny even more confusing."
Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees, by Caroline Moorehead, is published by Chatto & Windus at £12.99
Important distinctions
Asylum-seeker: a person who is in the process of applying for asylum.
Refugee: the 1951 UN Convention Relation to Refugees defines a refugee as a person who, "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country..."
Definitions from Human Cargo, by Caroline Moorehead
