The Concerned Women of Buduburam: Refugee Activists and Humanitarian Dilemmas

By Elizabeth Holzer

In The Concerned Women of Buduburam, Elizabeth Holzer offers an unprecedented firsthand account of the rise and fall of social protests in a long-standing refugee camp. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the host government of Ghana established the Buduburam Refugee Camp in 1990 to provide sanctuary for refugees from the Liberian civil war (1989–2003). Long hailed as a model of effectiveness, Buduburam offered a best-case scenario for how to handle a refugee crisis. But what happens when refugees and humanitarian actors disagree over humanitarian aid? In Buduburam, refugee protesters were met with Ghanaian riot police. Holzer uses the clash to delve into the complex and often hidden world of humanitarian politics and refugee activism.

Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and subsequent interviews with participants now returned to Liberia, Holzer exposes a distinctive form of rule that accompanies humanitarian intervention: compassionate authoritarianism. Humanitarians strive to relieve the suffering of refugees, but refugees have little or no access to grievance procedures, and humanitarian authorities face little or no accountability for political failures. By casting humanitarians and refugees as co-creators of a shared sociopolitical world, Holzer throws into sharp relief the contradictory elements of humanitarian crisis and of transnational interventions in poor countries more broadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781501701207

Elizabeth Holzer

Elizabeth Holzer is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Human Rights at the University of Connecticut.

Book preview

The Concerned Women of Buduburam

Refugee Activists and Humanitarian Dilemmas

Elizabeth Holzer

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I. Everyday Politics in Crisis

1. Achieving Everyday Life in Humanitarian Crisis

2. Civic Engagement in the Refugee Camp

3. Bifurcated Governmentality

Part II. Contentious Politics in Crisis

4. The Concerned Women Protests

5. Refugee Dissent as a Social Problem

6. Legitimacy in Repression’s Aftermath

Conclusion

Methodological Appendix

References

Index

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the people who took the time to share their stories with me in difficult circumstances, especially the members of the Concerned Women, the Stakeholders, and the Vision, whose grace and public-spiritedness in the face of crisis continue to inspire me. I am grateful also to my fellow researchers who worked in Ghana and Liberia and generously shared their insights: Anthony Nimley and Jelbeh Johnson, who contributed valued research assistance; and Samuel Agblorti, Susanne Tete, Jeff Crisp, Kaisa Akvist, Akosua Darkwah, Dörte Rompel, Guy Threlfo, and Tehila Sagy.

This book owes much to the support of my colleagues and friends at the University of Connecticut’s Research Program on Humanitarianism, Human Rights Institute, and Department of Sociology. Cathy Schlund-Vials read the entire manuscript at a crucial juncture and gave valuable guidance. Eleni Coundouriotis, Kathy Libal, Richard Wilson, Emma Gilligan, Gaye Tuchman, Manisha Desai, and Davita Glasberg read and offered insights on several selections. Susan Silbey, Sandy Levitsky, Bandana Purkayastha and Nancy Naples offered practical and professional support throughout. Chapters 2 and 3 benefited greatly from exchanges with Claudio Benzecry, Hallie Liberto, Jeremy Pais, Mike Wallace, Shauna Morimoto, Alice Kang, and Kristy Kelly. I presented earlier versions of Chapter 5 at the University of Mary Washington and the Law and Society Conference and received valuable feedback from Hui-Jung Kim and Mark Massoud. An earlier version of Chapter 6 received valuable feedback from Andreas Wimmer, Ann Swidler, Silvia Pasquetti, and others at the 2010 Junior Theorists Symposium. The conclusion benefited enormously from debates on the alternatives to refugee camps that I have participated in with Galya Ruffer, Zachary Lomo, Michael Kagan, Paula Banerjee, and others on the Sanctuary without Refugee Camps panel series at the Human Rights Institute 10th Anniversary Conference and the 2014 International Association for the Study of Forced Migration Conference. An earlier version of the Methodological Appendix received valuable feedback from Anna-Marie Marshall, Mark Suchman, Elizabeth Mertz, and others at the 2008 Midwest Law and Society Retreat. In its earlier life, this project benefited greatly from the support of my mentors, Myra Marx Ferree, Erik Wright, AiIi Tripp, Dave Trubek, Pam Oliver, and Ivan Ermakoff. Now, as it nears completion, I benefited greatly from advice and feedback from Roger Haydon, my editor at Cornell University Press, and the anonymous reviewers.

This work was supported by the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, the National Science Foundation (0719733), the University of Connecticut’s Large Faculty Grant, and the Human Rights Institute’s Faculty Fellowship and Faculty Research Grant.

Portions of the introduction and Chapter 2 were published in Sociological Forum 29 (2014): 774–800. Portions of Chapter 4 were published in Journal of Refugee Studies 25 (2012): 257–281.

Introduction

The Midnight Hour in This Refugee Crisis

‘Jayboy go inside!’¹ My neighbor shouted to her thirteen-year-old son. Startled by the panic in her voice, I stumbled outside to see her. It was a Saturday morning in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in Ghana, West Africa. I had been here for eight months studying camp politics, living with about thirty-five thousand refugees from the Liberian civil war, a few hundred refugees from Sierra Leone and Côte D’Ivoire, and their Ghanaian neighbors.

Across a dirt field where the kids usually played football, behind an evangelical church at the edge of the camp, I could see three men, running. ‘What’s happening?’ I asked my neighbors crowded in the compound yard. Police had come for men, they told me. I noticed that no men stood among my neighbors.

The police had come to end protests by refugee women that had started five months ago. It was a gut-wrenching shock—they were peaceful protests, I thought. And what men? There were no men on the protest field.

I left the compound and headed to the field near the entrance of the camp where the protesters had been gathering for the past month and a half. I witnessed the confusion and disorder of the raid through a lightheaded haze of disbelief. Not far from my compound, I stopped to talk with a woman crying in her yard. We locked the door and they bust the door, they break our door, she said, pointing to the thin wooden door now propped in a corner of the room. Then he went in the bathroom, and they bust the bathroom door, and they went, and they got him from there with force, no slipper on his feet, we were here crying; they were carrying him. Beating him, a neighbor interjected. Why this man? The makeshift house was not near the protest field. Did he go near there? I asked. He was here, the woman said emphatically. He always here selling the water. It was not uncommon to see people selling buckets of water for washing or small sachets of drinking water in camp. It’s because of the noise—that what cause him to come in, the neighbor clarified. There was noise around, people were running, so he got afraid. That how he took it upon himself to come in. And before coming in, I think they spotted him coming in.

Near the camp’s entrance, police buses still stood in the field, and an armored truck and dark police jeeps were parked across the road. The officers were wearing riot gear or nondescript white shirts and black pants, so I knew they must have come from the capital. ‘Why are the men being arrested?’ I asked a young policewoman. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Who is in charge?’ I asked, and she waved vaguely toward the taxi stand. I approached a man holding a megaphone, dressed in black. ‘What are these men being arrested for?’ He kept walking, acknowledging my question with a sharp downward cut of his hand.

On the field, it was chaos—a few vivid images amid a blur of movement and noise. A young woman ran, dragging a toddler away from the protest field by the arm. The tiny girl glided through the air like a ballet dancer, her feet barely skimming across the ground. ‘Wait!’ the girl cried in a teary voice, her sandal slipping off as she stumbled. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ the woman said, pausing to pick up the sandal and slide it on the girl’s foot before taking off again. A small group of police officers dragged a middle-aged man, women swarming around them, entreating the police to release him. The officers huddled around the man they carried. They walked past the buses, crossing the road at the end of the field, cars passing on the heavily trafficked highway. A woman bolted from the crowd, sobbing as she threw herself to her knees on the road. A fast-approaching truck halted a few feet from her, and another woman dragged her from the road. She broke from the arms of her friend, grabbed a stone from the road, and chucked it at the rear officer; an adolescent girl standing with a group of children at the roadside threw another stone, and the other children followed. Stones bouncing off his riot gear, the officer fumbled with a canister on his belt, turned to the woman and the girls, paused, and then set the canister back down and continued walking to the dark SUV. ‘Where are you taking him?’ I asked. ‘What is he charged with?’ You can inquire in the Accra central office, an officer told me. ‘This is not a safe place,’ my friend said to me, nodding to the group of women and children who were growing progressively more enraged. Her own husband had been taken as he left the house to brush his teeth that morning. There was no running water in the camp, so most people washed their faces and spat out the toothpaste in their yards.

Conflict over Durable Solutions in the Buduburam Refugee Camp

Kwamena Bartels, the interior minister of Ghana, had sent security forces from the capital to end protests over what the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the leading refugee aid agency, called durable solutions—a lasting end to refuge. Humanitarian aid conjures images of medical tents or bags of rice, but durable solutions programs are actually the most powerful form of humanitarian aid in the agency’s arsenal: migration programs that help people return to the country from which they originally fled (repatriation), travel to a third country to find asylum (resettlement), or permanently join the country currently hosting them (local integration). No one ever intended to leave people in the refugee camp forever, but seventeen years had passed since the UNHCR and the Ghanaian government established Buduburam, and people desperately needed those migration programs. The Liberian civil war had ended in 2003, but few camp residents believed that they could make a home for themselves in the fragile peace of their decimated country. The UNHCR had ended the unpopular repatriation program in June 2007, but faced with pressure from the United States and other donor countries, the agency had closed its highly desired resettlement programs as well. The UNHCR had yet to reach an agreement with the Ghanaian government on local integration. After seventeen years, Ghana no longer wanted to host the foreigners. Concerns were rising that Ghana would invoke the cessation clause, stripping all Liberians of refugee status and forcing them to return to Liberia. No policy for the naturalization of Liberians or even the granting of residence permits had been created, but the UNHCR had nonetheless begun to create local integration programs.

Most people in Buduburam opposed local integration. In November 2007, that opposition to local integration crystallized in a social movement led by a newly formed group, the Liberian Refugee Women with Refugee Concerns (hereafter, the Concerned Women). I followed the Concerned Women as they tried through demonstrations, letter writing, hunger strikes, and boycotts to convince the UNHCR to support them in what they called the midnight hour in this refugee crisis in our lifetime.

I had not once taken seriously the possibility of violent repression. For the organizers, it had always been a calculated risk. They told me that the UNHCR would try to protect them but that demonstrations risked provoking a crackdown from Ghanaian authorities. They call you rebel, people would say, unable to escape the taint of the civil war that spilled over to three neighboring countries. I did not share their distrust of Ghanaian authorities or confidence in the UNHCR. As it turned out, we were both wrong. The Ghanaian government did suppress the movement, but it acted at the behest of the UNHCR.

The Puzzle: A Place for Ordinary Politics in Humanitarian Crisis?

This is a story about conflict over humanitarian aid. It is an attempt to understand how and with what consequences people engage with ordinary political concerns in extraordinary circumstances. Disaster may seem like a fleeting moment—colloquially, we say the world stood still or everything changed in a blink—but in refugee camps, people experience calamitous tragedy for years and sometimes decades in cumulated daily struggles to find food, water, schooling, jobs, family, and belonging. They may remain politically, economically, and socially out of place, but as the years pass, camp residents construct buildings, roads, and markets. They establish new social understandings of how good people ought to act in inhumane circumstances.

We often unintentionally treat refugees as passive figures adrift in a tumultuous world. This book attempts to recapture some of the efficacy and autonomy of people living as refugees, but in the subdued, sociological vision of agency that C. Wright Mills (2000, 3) expresses so powerfully in his book The Sociological Imagination: Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. This book attempts to balance people’s autonomy and responsibility and the wider structural and cultural forces that constrain life in crisis.

What is the place of ordinary political acts in humanitarian crisis? How do constituents understand and relate to the authorities who govern them in crisis? Why do some mundane political activities become viewed as dangerous politics rather than civil society in action? What happens after repression? This book asks ordinary political questions of humanitarian crisis to encourage a deeper and more precise interrogation of the dilemmas that confront humanitarian officials, hosts, and refugees. In so doing, it allows us to grasp more tightly and thoroughly the uneasy relationship between humanitarian action and political activism. It opens a window onto the relationship between compassion, human rights, and politics more broadly.

Humanitarianism mobilizes compassion for people who suffer, cutting across social and geographical distance (Wilson and Brown 2009). Didier Fassin (2012, xii) calls it the morally driven, politically ambiguous, and deeply paradoxical strength of the weak. For Michael Barnett (2011, 7), humanitarianism is a flawed hero defined by the passions, politics, and power of its times. With the rise of humanitarianism, compassion became institutionalized in the seemingly heartless world of international security. But of the more than 4,400 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and 274,000 humanitarian aid workers that compose the contemporary humanitarian system, a small handful of organizations dominate (Taylor et al. 2012, 9); the UNHCR is the most powerful actor among them all (Loescher 2001). How the agency responds to the people who live in crisis sets the standard that other humanitarian organizations follow or struggle to reform.

The emergence of this humanitarian system has had dramatic consequences not just for these organizations and their staff but for the people living in crisis. It is sometimes hard for well-intentioned aid workers to recognize that they are accumulating power over the vulnerable (Barnett 2011, 170). But the large humanitarian actors have done just that, and their successes raise moral and political questions for the relationships engendered. To deserve compassion, must one always respond with gratitude? Must gratitude come without question? Do people who challenge a system still deserve support from that system? These are not questions that humanitarian actors or refugees ask out loud, but one can witness them grappling with their implications in action.

That the UNHCR would act harshly against activists still shocks many people, but for those who live and work in refugee camps, this is a well-documented quandary. Barbara Harrell-Bond’s Imposing Aid (1986), David Rieff’s A Bed for the Night (2002), Jennifer Hyndman’s Managing Displacement (2000), Michel Agier’s Managing the Undesirables (2011), and other works have shown that humanitarian interventions chronically fall short of their human rights principles. What this book contributes to that discussion is an account of how people living as refugees experience this quandary. In the first part of the book, I chronicle everyday life in the refugee camp. Most strikingly, I illustrate the extent to which humanitarian administration actually relies on the civic engagement of refugees. It is easy to imagine civic engagement as a luxury, a bastion of well-to-do communities, but in the absence of consistent public goods, civic engagement becomes more, not less, necessary.

In the second part of the book, I explore the dynamics of contentious politics to understand what camp residents did when they disagreed with the administration of public goods and how camp administration responded to these disagreements. With the Concerned Women at the center of the story, we witness how camp politics transforms civic debate into social protest and protest into a social problem. For social movement scholars, the case raises questions about women’s organizing, transnational authority, and the dynamics of repression. Women are at the forefront of organizing around the world, and scholars have shown that the autonomy of women’s movements is a key determinant in movement outcomes (Tripp, Casimiro, and Kwesiga 2009, xiv). What the experiences of the Concerned Women contribute so vividly to this line of inquiry is insight into the micropolitical challenges of sustaining autonomy not just against authorities but from the men who may seem natural allies.

The experiences of the Concerned Women also encourage us to take a closer look at the authorities at the center of movement struggles. Social movements organize not only against the state but against a wide range of powerful actors, including transnational actors. This means that a surprisingly wide range of actors have the potential to become repressive authorities. Because our interest lies primarily in activists, social movement scholars often fail to give repressive actors due consideration. We interrogate the interests, emotions, structural positions, cognitive maps, and social ties of activists while treating repression as an intervention into the lives of activists. This book examines repression as an act committed by actors with their own good intentions and structural constraints.

In tracing the ill-fated trajectory from compassionate politics to repression, the story starts from and expands upon three propositions. The humanitarian administration of refugee camps creates inescapable dilemmas for all parties. Transnational actors can become quasi-government authority figures. And caregiving can serve as an act of government. In the remainder of this introduction, I situate the case more thoroughly in the social and political space of Liberia and Ghana, flesh out the three underlying propositions, and then present my argument.

War, Development, and the Limits of a Model Refugee Camp

Frequently visited by the international press, dignitaries, and volunteers, the Buduburam Refugee Camp had assumed the mantle of a model refugee camp by the time that I started fieldwork in 2006 (Apeadu 1991; Dzeamesi 2008; Kpatinde 2006; Zongolowicz 2003). What exactly it meant to be a model refugee camp was never wholly clear, but I think it is fair to say that Buduburam was a moderate version of a harsh form of social life. Between the horrors of war and wearying drain of a stingily meted sanctuary, most camp residents had slid into the ranks of the dispossessed alongside the slum dwellers, street hawkers, and other members of the urban underclass in Ghana. But if few people knew where their next meal was coming from, no one starved in the refugee camp. Not many people felt safe walking in the street late at night, but the camp had few murders. Rarely would a Ghanaian citizen hire a Liberian employee or buy goods in the market from a Liberian refugee, but the locals did not generally harass or beat them, either. Ghana did not integrate refugees into their land, but the hosts participated so actively in the administration of refugee policy that the UNHCR implemented the programs for food, health, education, and women and children through Ghanaian organizations rather than international organizations. This may not sound like glowing praise, but the people living in Buduburam experienced the best-case scenario for camp residents. Elsewhere, refugees have faced warfare, imprisonment, and xenophobic violence in refugee camps (Lischer 2005; Milner 2005; Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005).

Three historical-institutional forces converged to bring the Buduburam Refugee Camp into its particular state of being: the war and exodus from Liberia; Ghana’s slow, unsteady climb to the ranks of lower-middle-income democracies; and the cycles of expansion and contraction at UNHCR-Ghana. It began in 1989, when Liberia descended into a civil war that would rage for more than a decade and displace more than half of the country’s population (Johnson 2007; Moran 2008). The civil war was an ignominious fall for a country that had stood as a political and intellectual beacon in West Africa for decades. And yet Liberia had embodied the contradictions of the eras from its inception. Founded in 1822 by black settlers from the United States, for more than a hundred years, descendants of the original settlers had subjugated the local people’s quelling, although not wholly destroying indigenous forms of political participation (Moran 2008). Their dominance ended in 1980, when noncommissioned officers led by Samuel Doe overthrew the regime. The coup d’état replaced one oppressor with another, as Doe proceeded to give every advantage to his allies. In 1985, a failed coup prompted harsh reprisals from Doe, who transformed that act of political opposition into a purported ethnic conflict between his own Krahn people and the Gio and Mano people. In 1989, Charles Taylor, as leader of a newly formed rebel group called the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), mobilized Gio and Mano opposition in a large-scale attack against Doe. The NPFL soon splintered, and as the war intensified, nearly a dozen different rebel groups emerged.

Ghana and Anglophone West Africa intervened in 1990 in the first peace-keeping mission of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS; Howe 1997). The peace-keepers proved unable to stop the capture and execution of President Doe. Doe’s regime waned, but he had succeeded in redefining the conflict in ethnic terms, and the Krahn and Mandingo people found themselves increasingly threatened. When Ghana evacuated their nationals via the Monrovian port patrolled by ECOWAS peace-keepers, thousands of Liberians gained passage to Ghana through kindness, bribery, or trickery. These refugees, predominately lower-middle-class urban dwellers and high school and university students of Krahn and Mandingo heritage, credited Ghanaian ECOWAS soldiers for their rescue.

Although many groups would eventually come to coexist in the Buduburam Refugee Camp, the camp population retained this distinctively urban lower-middle-class composition over the ensuing years. Poorer families could not win passage on the ships, and wealthier families departed by plane to the United States or other prosperous sanctuaries. Liberians from the countryside fled to closer sanctuaries in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Côte d’Ivoire. Ethnic conflict did not come to define camp politics, but the Krahn remained the largest ethnic group in the camp.

When they arrived in Ghana in 1990, the refugees found a host on the cusp of major political and economic transformations. The authoritarian Provisional National Defence Council had ruled Ghana for almost a decade, but the regime had begun to transition to electoral democracy with district-level elections in 1988. Inflation and unemployment were high (39 percent and 26 percent, respectively), but the economy was rising.

Ghana had the political will to offer sanctuary, but the government lacked the resources to sustain refugee aid (Addo 2008, 64), so it turned to the UNHCR for resources and guidance. The UNHCR had no experience in Ghana prior to 1990 but agreed to organize aid for the Liberian and the subsequent Togolese and Ivorian refugee crises. Over the two decades that Liberian refugees lived in Ghana, the local UNHCR offices would go through several cycles of expansion and contraction. But it started in 1990 by establishing Buduburam on twenty acres of land in the Gomoa District (Apeadu 1991).

Over the next several years, as the Liberian civil war continued to rage, witnesses in Buduburam observed the slow rise of Ghana into the ranks of lower-middle-income democracies. By 1993, the authoritarian Provisional National Defence Council regime ceded power, returning Ghana to constitutional rule (Gyimah-Boadi 1994; Oquaye 1995). Paralleling these political developments, the economy grew consistently in the 1990s. If the benefits of economic development proved highly uneven (Konadu-Agyemang 2000), the greatest growth occurred in the urban centers on the coast—the part of the country near Buduburam. In time, a newly renovated highway ran through the refugee camp to link the capital city of Accra with the critical port city of Cape Coast. This development project increased the value of the land occupied by refugees immensely. What had started as a rural backwater became part of the urban sprawl of Accra.

In the middle of these transformations in Ghana, the war in Liberia began to show signs of ending—an illusion, but one with lasting consequences for camp residents. In 1996, the warring parties signed the Abuja II peace agreement, the fourteenth peace accord since 1989. The 1996 peace accord was the first agreement to have a significant influence on the course of the war. Per the terms of the peace agreement, in 1997, Liberia held national elections. Few refugees voted in the 1997 elections, because they had to return to Liberia to cast their votes (Kumar et al. 1997). Taylor was elected president after a campaign that included the slogan, He killed my ma, he killed my pa, I will vote for him (Polgreen 2006). It was widely understood that Taylor would not honor the election of a rival; what’s more, he controlled a substantial portion of the mass media resources, including the only countrywide radio station. An international election committee, which was unable to monitor voting in rural Liberia, deemed the elections free and fair.

In the Buduburam Refugee Camp, the UNHCR followed the international consensus to declare that it was time for the refugees to go home. In its largest period of contraction in Ghana, the UNHCR departed, technically closing the refugee camp in 2000. But few camp residents agreed to return to Liberia. Some feared the possibility of renewed violence, while others hoped for resettlement, but in the meantime, most camp residents