world outside – unlike at summer camp, however, the outside world is precisely where the UN is attempting to intervene. The UN in Abyei felt very much like a summer camp, and had a correlative lack of success in the outside world: people had flings, drank expensive wine and never sat with the local people. Divorced from the world outside, as if on a reality-TV show, the intrepid contestants of UN-World found themselves united: all the talk there was not of Sudanese politics, but of who had slept with whom. Camps create particular types of ties. Their frenetic nature anticipates and acknowledges their temporariness. You can recreate yourself at camp, because you know it is virtually cost-free: summer comes to an end (or your lucrative UN contract finishes), and you are back home, amidst the solid weight of lived identities. Camp is wonderful only in comparison to home; a life lived forever at camp is a life of forced infantilism. 4. Accompanying Heathcott’s article, there is a photograph of children at a Farm Security Administration (FSA) camp in Robstown, Texas. They look suspicious – chastened – and the photograph is ambiguous as to whether they are shrinking from the bright light that pins them to the front wall of the bungalow, or from the photographer. The photograph itself is suspicious. Identical houses run in rigid rows alongside perfectly mowed lawns. Whilst the refugee camps I have visited do not have the same levels of material comfort evinced by the photograph of Robstown, they share a family resemblance. The architects of all such camps try and ensure that they are composed of neat lines and right angles. They are so orderly that, just as when one wanders around American suburbia, the mind always turns to the spectre of chaos that must haunt the minds of the architects to justify such stultifying order, and which, without such order, would spill out and turn it all to dust. UN workers talking to the civilians they are supposed to protect. Chaos. Children wandering off into the woods at summer camp. Chaos. Refugees heading for the city, and the prospect of employment. Chaos. 5. The passion for order in the camp is not simply intended to forge a new identity among its inhabitants; it is to make sure you do not go outside the camp. From summer camps to UN camps, those who go outside are treated with suspicion. Heathcott relates that part of the reason the FSA built camps for those displaced by drought was that they viewed self-built squatter camps with alarm, as an ‘ungovernable landscape full of moral and physical danger’. This is the story of every refugee camp and internally displaced peoples’ (IDP) camp since 1947. The refugee is to remain in camp: don’t work, don’t move – just accept the help we are going to give you. Just stay put and keep quiet. Barbara Harrell-Bond, amongst others, has tirelessly shown how disabling it is to simply receive in this fashion. Dadaab, in north- east Kenya, is the largest refugee camp in the world (though it is actually three camps). It shot into the news recently, as its population almost doubled in a year, rising to 510,000 by October 2011. The UNHCR said there is no more room in the camps, and the media filed endless stories about impoverishment and famine. What was less reported is that refugees are not eligible for humanitarian assistance if they elect to stay outside the camps. The camps make refugees visible – something that sends donor money to the UNHCR via the aforementioned media reports – and means they can be controlled. Dadaab has now existed for twenty years. In return for food handouts, refugees are prevented from building their own lives. Camps, which, in UNHCR-speak, should be an option of ‘last resort’, have created a permanent state of impermanence for millions around the world. 6. Before arriving in an unknown country, I ensure there is a hotel room waiting for me. In the confusion of a new place, white walls and clean sheets calm me. Later, I tell myself, there will be strange tents and street markets; for now, I will safely sink into anonymous oblivion. Camps, for both refugees and the internally displaced, are existentially akin to never leaving the hotel room. 7. The permanent state of the FSA camps, Heathcott writes, was impermanence – ‘they were momentary and ephemeral, much like the dust that drove people westward in the first place’. Today, this impermanence has gathered around it institutions, funding and millions of people who want to begin lives outside the order of the camp. The camp is not a place of politics. You are not able to work or to form communities. Life is given to you. And you wait. Wait for ration cards. Wait for food. Wait for the camp to end, and life to begin again. You wait. Joshua Craze Cairo
8
Could I sit calmly and draw them slowly, detail over detail? Or is the rural landscape to broad for our urban eyes used to seeing through glimpses and in fragmented frames?
symptomatic of my relationship to the rural, it was in-between territory that connected two urban conditions I was heading from and into. Could I take my time to actually inhabit those landscapes?
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