Apr 19 2009
feel good story of my half a decade
This was the Krisan Refugee Camp as Semantics King Jr. and I found it in late November 2005. The UNHCR had abandoned it. The Ghanaian police had been beating down doors and busting heads for three weeks. The camp manager’s office was burned out. The remote, 1700-refugee camp would’ve been pretty hard to find if not for the overturned truck next to the bus stop.
I’ll try to summarize what happened as concisely as I can, but for more detail I wrote about it here for Diplo (a defunct international policy rag).
Three weeks earlier, frustrated with the conditions at the camp in remote, western region of Ghana, several hundred refugees from Togo and Liberia staged a political exodus. They walked and hitched lifts to the Cote d’Ivoire border claiming that they’d rather leave Ghana then put up with the camp another day. That created an international incident and a week-long standoff with Ghanaian police that ended in mass police brutality and riot.
King and I collected evidence of the injuries sustained by the refugees that were previously denied by the UNCHR via press release. Back in Accra, the front page of the Ghanaian Chronicle read, “Cover-up at Krisan.” Then, we secretly interviewed David Vanyan, a Liberian camp leader from the camp, who was then wanted by the Ghanaian police; he was escaping to Nigeria with a Christian missionary group, where he hoped to talk to political leaders about accepting some of the camp’s population.
A few days before I was leaving, we heard that because of our reporting, US Embassy staff were heading to the camp…. and that’s another long story, which I wrote about on the Maassive livejournal at the time (props to Russ Rizzo and Mary Beth Hall). Over the next six months or so, I’d occasionally hear updates. The US Committee for Refugees included our investigation in its annual report. But I also started receiving e-mails from a Rwandese refugee at the camp, a poet who would send me scans of his hand written poetry–in French. I found a professor to help translate and they turned out to be long, raging spoken word pieces against the Ghanaian police.
Krisan Refugee Camp, 2007. Photo by Doug Murray, Border Films.
As the months passed , the Rwandese would message me in broken English about the transformation at the camp as the UNHCR worked towards closing it down and resettling the population. Finally, in March of this year, he too was resettled…in Indianapolis.
I spoke to him on Easter. He’s so happy–alone, but ecstatic. Me too.
Here are two of his poems for you francophones. I think I’m in one of them somewhere.
Pourquoi Tu Les Maltraites Part 1
Pourquoi Tu Les Maltraites Part 2
