Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees

Caroline Moorehead

Editions

Review

Caroline Moorehead has written biographies of Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn.  She has also written widely about human rights issues, including a history of the Red Cross.  Human Cargo combines immense experience with a broad range of interests: it is a balanced enquiry into the problems and aspirations of refugees, the conditions in which they are obliged to live, and the social and political difficulties of accommodating them.

In our ‘climate of disbelief’, it is salutary to be told that there are thousands of people nowadays who have been living behind razor wire for years, many of them children. And though nobody intends murdering them, they share with the inmates of concentration camps their innocence: they have committed no crime.  Unfortunately, the right to asylum enshrined in successive international agreements conflicts under pressure with a nation’s right to control its borders.  This was lately brought into sharp focus in Australia, where – shockingly – Moorehead finds the harshest conditions for asylum seekers.

Moorehead builds up a careful, complex profile of the origins of some recent asylum-seekers and the various limbos in which they live – travelling to Cairo, Sicily, Australia, Newcastle and Guinea, and on the Mexico-USA border.  Then she considers the Palestinians and the ramifications of exile over two generations.  A more general chapter follows, called ‘The Illness of Exile’, which is a superb essay on the psychological damage that can be caused by extreme violence and forced exile, the guilt and failure associated with surviving while others have died, and the difficulties of helping the victims.  The last third of the books consists of studies of two cases where refugees’ plights appear to have been resolved.  The first is Afghanistan, where more than a million people returned from exile in six months in 2002. The other, rather bizarre case is that of a group of Sudanese Dinka who have been accepted by Finland for resettlement in Lapland.

Caroline Moorehead does not directly address the question of why the West should take some responsibility for refugees, although she quotes what other people and institutions have said.  But refugees appear from Human Cargo as such an integral part of our world that the question of whose responsibility they are seems no more interesting than whose fault global warming is.  Moorehead’s magnificently energetic and intelligent book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of refugees; and it is only by understanding them that we can benefit them, and benefit from them – even more than we do already.

- from my review in the Daily Telegraph - review by John de Falbe