"This life of refugee"
Somalis in Dadaab occupy the grey spaces of international law
Noor Tawane is approaching 30. He is of average height and medium build and beginning to thicken around the middle. Seven children and several businesses have taken their toll: lately, a patch of grey hair has appeared on the very top of his black crown. Mr Tawane is tired. His eyes that twinkle when he is excited are mostly dull these days.
For 23 of his 29 years, Mr Tawane has lived in Hagadera camp, one of the five that make up the complex of refugee camps around the north-eastern Kenyan border town of Dadaab. It sprawls in the middle of an arid red desert, 113km from his homeland of Somalia. Since his father fled in 1992 carrying him on his back, Mr Tawane, his ageing parents and his extended family have lived every day on the verge of going back to Somalia. They thought that each creak and shift in the war might be the break that would allow them to return. They never expected to grow old and die in Kenya, but that possibility advances daily.
In the beginning Mr Tawane's father refused to build a permanent house. Instead, he opted for an aqal, the Somali nomadic tent, arguing that the family would soon be returning. When he was offered a plot in the market, he turned it down. As the war in Somalia ground on, slowly they made adjustments: a hut of mud and sticks, a donkey cart for fetching water, a butchery business and now a generator, which sells homemade electricity to several blocks of the camp for a fee of 1,000 Kenyan shillings ($12) a month. And all the while they knew that this dry dusty soil was not home. They dreamed that they would soon be going to another place, that there was another life, waiting for them, somewhere.
Under international refugee law, people who flee their country because of war or persecution should be offered one of three "durable" solutions: either return to their country of origin; integration into their country of arrival; or resettlement to a third country. The huge refugee camps of Dadaab are a living testimonial to the failure of that system.