“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s search for meaning
What does homelessness do to a refugee’s soul? Important as this question is, it has been covered only quite obliquely by humanitarian or anthropological literature – often focusing on radicalization processes of migrant and refugee youth. The link between exile and religious faith is, however, very old, quite deep and extremely varied. As Alexandra Ocasio-Ortez recently reminded all who have ears, “Christ’s family were refugees, too”. Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina, and the asylum he was granted there, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. An old platonic tradition affirms that truth is always a re-discovery, a return home from an exile in ignorance – propelled by the wings of desire. In Eastern and Western literature, the travels and travails of exile have long signified a path towards spiritual reaffirmation, growth or change.
Absence is, often, the best proof of the existence of the intangible. Thus, forced migration often exposes the fact that we human beings are made of connections, of extended emotional tissue with persons, territories and culture. Our sense of self cannot be understood without the social relations, the reputation, standing and love we find on those who surround us: family, friends, classmates, colleagues, those with whom we have build things and shared memories of joint efforts.
Forced displacement entails, often, a complete breakdown of all of these and hence, the erosion or destruction of identity. How this identity is kept, destroyed or rebuilt can often be understood only in terms of spiritual transformation. Thus, there is little surprise that forced displacement also has sometimes deeper, more subterranean and invisible and yet more everlasting effects at the more personal and intimate level of how religious faith is lived. This article contains some memories and reflections on this often neglected issue.
War, displacement and faith in Latin America
Latin America has long been a land of migration and of longlasting religious transformation and conversion processes – often linked to the dynamics between collective and individual values. Back in the middle of the XIX century, the Catholic church became afraid that massive migration from southern Europe to Latin America was emptying rural Europe of believers – off to lands where the Catholic church, weakened by the independence movements from Spain, was wholly unprepared to welcome them back to the fold. Since then, strategies of “accompaniment” were created, with the sending of missionaries and even the creation or re-orientation of whole orders for ends of reconnecting migrants to the Church.
After 1967, the exponential growth of liberation theology, with its “preferential option for the poor”, gave a new dimension to the relationship between faith and displacement. In Guatemala, back in the 60s, poverty started to push poor Guatemalans to escape exploitation by colonizing the northern jungle, next to the Mexican border, and establishing an agrarian cooperative economy. At the time, the National Institute for Agricultural Reform as well as some catholic orders, including the Jesuits, provided material and spiritual support to the process.
Later, during the 70s, a long simmering civil war between the right wing Government, supported by big landowners and the US, and left-wing URNG gerrillas, exploded into a massive scorched earth campaign against peasants suspected of supporting the URNG. More than 200,000 Guatemalans took to exile in Mexico and the US. Massacres were exacerbated after the military coup of General Efrain Rios Montt, a self-declared evangelical leader. The arrival of evangelical missionaries from the US bible belt began to be promoted by the Government and the Army as a counteract to Catholic missions, seen as too revolutionary. Researchers have recorded how the Army, when raiding coloniser settlements, would often burn the Bibles, fearful of the revolutionary messages that they would contain.
Guatemalan refugees, in Mexico in 1997, used to recall their fear at army checkpoints in northern Guatemala – how they would be questioned about their religion, and how they would invariably declare themselves evangelical. At the camps in Campeche, Mexico, tensions were often visible between those organizing for return (which was linked to continuing the fight for a collective, grassroots cooperative economy particularly in northern Guatemala) and those wishing to stay – more preoccupied with providing for a more secure future for their families and children in Mexico. The will to stay and to make a clean break with the past often went along, among Guatemalan men, with conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism – and with other personal processes of change, such as quitting alcohol and stopping beating their wives.
The dynamics between displacement and religious faith and conversion was also present, although in less visible ways, during the worst times of the Colombian civil war, in the late 90s and 00s. UNHCR’s operation at the time, focusing on internal displacement, developed an interest for the prevention of displacement. After the opening of a small field office in Barrancabermeja in 2001, we started collaborating more closely with the Programa de Desarrollo y Paz – a collaborative endeavour by the Catholic Diocese of Magdalena Medio and Petroleos de Colombia, geared to promote community-driven development in the region – partly financed by oil revenues. Quite surprisingly for us at the beginning, we found in the PDP a strong joint interest in prevention of displacement.
Back in 2003, the Magdalena Medio region was object of a fiery territorial dispute by the left-wing Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional (ELN) and right-wing paramilitaries. In March 2003, the latter started the siege of remote hilltop hamlet of Micoahumado, an ELN stronghold – displacing some 2,000 peasants to nearby Arenal, down in the valley where the paramilitaries held control. We assisted the displaced in Arenal and paid regular monitoring and protection-by-presence visits to Micoahumado, where we would often be caught in the crossfire between the ELN and the paramilitaries, shooting from a nearby hill. We often coincided with the local priest, who was very busy organizing meetings with the locals, to eloquently persuade them to resist displacement. Then, as now, and as it had been the case in Guatemala, Catholic priests were considered as key providers of courage, emotional strength and social cohesion in the face of external aggression.
We were in UNHCR in two minds about the initiative. On the one hand, when developing – entirely from scratch, at the time – a strategy about prevention of displacement, the individual right to be displaced, as a protective measure, always featured high in our thinking. On the other, we slowly came to understand the strategy and motivations of the PDP and the Catholic Church.
As in many civil wars, control over the economic use of land was and is at the heart of violence in Colombia. To wrestle control from local inhabitants, the paramilitaries typically resorted to dividing and terrorizing the local population and killing social leaders, which inevitably provoked displacement. This was particularly virulent in areas where civil society organizations were strong or FARC and ELN guerrillas were present, and more so in areas (such as Magdalena Medio) where ELN cadres had had a historical role in forming social leaders. Displacement and the killing of leaders destroyed social tissue and negated the possibility of economic models based on autonomy, a cooperative economy and a strong link between economic life and local development. Displacement and destruction of the local tissue also opened the door for land dispossession and other development models based on extensive landowning, including cattle rearing and single crop agribusiness. This is all the Catholic Church and the PNDP were up against in Magdalena Medio.
Influencing local development models was, at the time, rather outside of UNHCR’s remit. At the same time, it made sense to collaborate with the PNDP, at least from the viewpoint of protection monitoring and advocacy – since the preservation of social tissue was also a good strategy for the prevention of forced displacement.
One further issue was, of course, always at the back of our minds: was there a more religious foundation for the insistence of the Church on prevention of displacement? The attachment of the Catholic Church to the territory, its reinforcement of local social tissue, identities and cultures (as in Catalonia and the Basque country), as well as the protection and encouragement of local cults (in particular for the Virgin Mary) are well known. By strengthening its role as a link between the population and the territory, was the Church not protecting that between itself and the population?
We will see later in the article how the exponential growth in the ranks of the displaced in urban centres prompted a quick reaction of light, mobile protestant churches, establishing themselves in the poorest neighborhoods for missionary work and thereby “robbing” the Catholich church of adepts. Before that, however, let us stop for a while at a question which is somehow the symmetrical twin of the main one in this article – what’s in the mind, and soul, of those who commit atrocities and displace people?
Mysterious symmetries
To kill in the heat of combat, OK, so be it. But to massacre human beings just like that, in cold blood, like one butchers a chicken, that I don’t understand. How can get themselves to do that?
Indigenous leader, Alto Naya, Colombia, 2001
The destruction of all social tissue around a person – links to family, to friends, to comrades, to the territory – is both a cause and an effect of displacement. What about, however, the others: the violent ones, those who displace and commit atrocities? What does displacement do to them? Or, seeing it from a different angle – what needs to happen to one’s soul to make it adept to violence against the defenseless? Where does that soul need to go – and is there a way back from that dark place? Also: who forces these souls into that dark place, and why? Isn’t that, too, some sort of exile?
Back in 1997, stories abounded among Guatemalan refugees in Mexico on how the Kaibil, an elite counterinsurgency force within the Guatemalan army, were made so ruthless. One of the most popular referred how they were made to adopt a puppy early during the training period and were left, afterwards, in the jungle with no other food – or how they were made to sacrifice live chickens with no tools.
Years later, with that story still somehow in the memories of many humanitarian workers in Colombia, we found ourselves during a field mission deep in the Chocoan jungle, to provide protection by presence in a remote village where paramilitaries had attacked the civilians. We got lost in the jungle, there were shootings nearby, we had to steal a canoe under heavy rain to reach the main river where we could be rescued, and when the motor boat finally came for us the next day, the propeller shaft broke against a floating log and we had to slowly drift downstream for hours on end, through the silent and menacing jungle, until our destination. There, in that empty village, amidst the destruction, the invading jungle and the threatening messages on the walls, the scariest thing to see was a small headless duck on the ground, with his plumage soaked by the cealessless rain, half buried in the dirt alleyway. Was that a message, or just a coincidence? Impossible to know. After all, we are not the masters of our fears – our memories are.
Fear was not supposed to be part of the picture when approaching checkpoints in Colombia. Guerrillas or paramilitaries, at the time, dreaded the political cost to be paid for attacking UN officials. The administration of fear is quite a rational issue – the use of irrationality, in itself, can be fully rational. None better than Mario Vargas Llosa has described how fear is withhold or administered by those in power, depending on what is best in each moment – here describing the inner thoughts of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo:
[…] la rabia lo llevo al borde del sincope. Se fue calmando. Siempre supo controlarla, cuando hizo falta: disimular, mostrarse cordial, afectuoso, con las peores basuras humanas, esas viudas, hijos o hermanos de los traidores, si era necesario. Por eso iba a cumplir treinta y dos anos llevando a las espaldas en peso de un pais. […] Ahora, que agradable era dar curso a la rabia cuando no habia en ello riesgo para el Estado, cuando se podia dar su merecido a las ratas, sapos, hienas y serpientes. Las panzas de los tiburones eran testigos de que no se habia privado de ese gusto[1].
Under that rationality, checkpoints were, often, not dangerous. However, once in a while one would approach a checkpoint manned by raging youth, up to the teeth in drugs, waving their pistols madly. Somebody had blundered, and one was to learn how it was to be mistaken for fair game. What was worst was knowing that somebody had been carefully dismantling in these youth the only thing that could save you – their humanity.
The indigenous had, sometimes, their way to pay armed men back and use drugs in a completely different way. In October 2003, UNHCR was very active working with indigenous people in the southern Governorate of Putumayo. During one of our numerous consultative meetings with indigenous groups, we met a local leader who was also a chaman. He regularly organized yagé ceremonies. Yagé, or ayahuasca, is a psicoactive herb used often in religious ceremonies in the Amazonian region. Its effects are hallucinatory, but visions are often linked to a sort of moral introspection – offering a lens to our past and also to our personality, character, vices and virtues.
This leader once explained to us his first yage experience, when he was training as a chaman. When the herb became active, he clearly saw the chaman administering it taking a small saw and carefully sawing off his skullcap, uncovering the brain. His brain was dotted with small, black spots. The chaman then deposited his skullcap on the ground, took a sharp knife and started carefully picking the black spots out. Each spot represented some bad action he performed in the past – some of which he thought he had forgotten. He felt no physical pain – however, he had to painfully relive his memories of bad deeds as the chaman pointed at the black spots with his finger, and then removed them, one by one, with his sharp knife. When he finished, he felt as much as peace as he had felt in his whole life.
A few weeks after he graduated from his training as a chaman, and with the experience of the black dots still fresh in his mind, a young paramilitary came so see him, south from La Hormiga, half-jokingly asking to take some yage. He took him seriously and organized a ceremony for him, which lasted a whole afternoon. When he finished, the paramilitary awoke from his stupor, stood up in horror, hastily put his rubber boots on, picked up his AK47 assault rifle and ran away. He locked himself in a nearby hut and spent the next three days crying his eyes out. He then threw away his rifle into the Putumayo river and flew to his village of origin, never to return to his unit. He also never told the chaman what he saw during the ceremony. Or perhaps the chaman never wanted to tell us in the first place. There was a bright, barely concealed little spark of triumph in his small black eyes while he told us the story. Perhaps he knew he had just helped that wretched paramilitary youth come back from exile.
Life and re-birth in Altos de Cazucá
Religious symbols provide sense to the pain of suffering by creating hope of a reward and converting the personal pain of an isolated consciousness into something collectively shared.
Max Weber, Sociology of Religion
It was all very hard. And we said to ourselves, we will return to Huila. But we went to the Church on Sundays and the word of God said to us, “no you cannot leave. This is your place, your Gilgal”. Here is our promised land.
Displaced person in Altos de Cazucá[2]
Altos de Cazucá, a huge hilltop slum south of Bogota, is perhaps the neighbourhood with the highest concentration of internally displaced persons in the country. This big melting-pot of ethnicities and different origins, housing hundreds of thousands of persons, most of them displaced, has long been infamous due to lack of services and chronically high levels of violence.
UNHCR opened a field office in the area back in 2006, hoping to attract other institutions and to have an effect of protection by presence. Field visits revealed a grim reality. Lack of both space and of public sewage meant that the slim wooden shacks built barely a metre from the lake where all raw sewage was spilled, had to retreat regularly due to erosion. Invisible frontlines between FARC guerrillas and paramilitaries were known to everyone. IDPs were often re-traumatized by unspeakable levels of violence and retribution against civilians along the frontline. Inhabitants used to complain that, if you were yourself not victimized, you would anyway not be able to sleep due to others being victimized at night close to your home.
Population in Altos de Cazucá had, nevertheless, a high level of community organization, perhaps harking back to 1975 when the Communist Party helped organize land invasions and building of the informal neighbourhood. Absence of institutions and big humanitarian organizations (with the exception of the MSF-Spain clinic and, later, UNHCR) was compensated by the very active work of grasroots organizations, local NGOs and churches.
Cazucá is also home to one of these very Colombian paradoxes – the combination of terrifying lawlessness with being the object of study of an acutely profficient intellectual class. Institutions such as the Universidad Javeriana have long studied the ethnography and the religious life of IDPs in the neighbourhood. Close attention has been paid, in particular, to the rapid eclosion of small evangelical churches at the heart of the neighbourhood, combining aid to the displaced with zealous missionary activity. It remains an open question, however, how successful these and other churches have been in recruiting at the troubled waters of traumatized IDPs – and how religious practice and religious conversion have played a role in the reconstruction of the IDP’s inner and social lifes.
Certainly, research has shown the leve of inner turmoil and degradation of the self that displacement enacts into IDPs. The keyword is loss of sense. An inability to find rational sense in the inhuman violence at the heart of displacement; the loss of your entire social life and the sense of identity that recognition by family and friends creates; and the fear and disorientation linked to being thrown, without emotional, personal and economic resources, into a complex and hostile environment. Certainly, the State was not entirely absent – IDPs could access the Ombudsman’s office or the Personeria in nearby Soacha, to initiate the cumbersome process to be officially recognized as an IDP.
However, IDPs were often disheartened at the coldness of the process and lack of empathy of officials. The new label on offer, that of being an IDP, certainly provided some sense of identity which at the same time reconnected the person with the welfare state. However, this was often seen as degrading and humiliating, given the paucity of assistance, the level of dependence and the stigmatizing label of being an IDP. The Catholic Church was present but often seen as relatively distant and institutionalized. It is, however, interesting how popular Catholicism, linked for instance to the cult of local incarnations of the Virgin, was brough to Cazucá from the countryside by displacement.
In contrast, protestant pastors lived among the IDPs and their churches were built among and like their houses or shops – all of them small structures of brick or wooden planks with zinc roofs, with colourful signs: Finca raiz, hacemos documentos; Panaderia & Cafeteria Multipan del rincon; Iglesia Cristiana de Vida, Fuego y Restauracion. Going to the temple and listening to the pastor, contrary to official IDP determination interviews, provided a sense of community with persons who had suffered the same fate – but in a comparatively safe space, where no conversations where necessary about why one had been displaced and by whom – which, of course, risked labelling again the IDP as a supporter of this or that armed group, thereby retraumatizing the IDPs and perhaps reinforcing their sense of guilt. The focus was, rather, on the future.
As said above, it is still difficult to pinpoint how much this phenomenon found traction among IDPs. Existing research shows also a high level of pragmatism among the IDP population – often just “shopping around” institutions and churches, hoping to maximize support. Also conversion rates were low in particular among adult Catholic men – who sometimes felt insulted by the rejection of the cult to the Virgin Mary. Many IDPs also simply simply sought to reconnect with the religious practice of their place of origin, be it Catholic or Protestant. In contrast, women (in particular young mothers), children and the youth were more open to the reconstruction of social tissue and inclusion in an informal network of services on health, assistance and cultural activities.
For these persons, often the personal example of the pastor, linking salvation with an entrepreneurial sense of earthly success, provided also a sense of hope and a model to emulate – linking faith in God with faith on oneself, and faith on oneself with success in life. Success is, after all, the ultimate creator of sense – little need to keep asking why life has been so cruel with you, if after all you have succeeded. And perhaps, after much suffering, as important as liberation from suffering is the liberation from the question of: why did such a thing happen to me and my family?
Fleeing or coming back home? Sufi brotherhoods in Cameroon
There are some instances in which refugees can recover, in the place of asylum, their own spiritual home. This is the case of traditional, long standing transnational networks such as sufi brotherhoods.
2013 and 2014 saw violent intercommunal clashes in the Central African Republic, expelling close to 250,000 refugees into Cameroon, many of them Mbororo nomadic or semi-nomadic cattle herders, of Fulani ethnicity. As in many situations, protecting populations cannot be done without a summary knowledge of their social structures for which the humanitarian profession provides only little time and rudimentary tools, which in many cases need to be complemented by sheer curiosity.
I joined the UNHCR operation in Eastern Cameroon in January 2014, coming from the Central African Republic. A few months after my arrival, I learned that many of the Mbororo belonged to the Tidjaniyya brotherhood. I tried to get to know a bit more the connection. Some of my local staff explained to me the importance of the Mawlid, the celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, for the Fulani in general and for the Tidjani in particular.
The town of Mandjou, twenty minutes from our base in Bertoua, happened to be a centre of Fulani culture in Cameroon, as well as a centre of some important refugee Mbororo leaders. After pulling some strings, I got to know one important Tidjani sheikh in Mandjou who promptly invited me to their own celebration of Mawlid. On that night of the 23th of December 2015, celebrations started with a dinner and a gathering of leaders at the ample, walled home of the sheikh. The sheikh, a small man with a perpetual smile and vivacious, sharp black eyes, welcomed me at the gathering of robed dignataries. In attendance was an important Tidjani sheikh who had come all the way from Dakar.
Not being a Fulani herself, he spoke at length in French, extensively warning against the temptations and dangers which lied in Boko Haram. At the time, the real or perceived penetration of Boko Haram at the refugee camps was one of our main protection concerns, and became almost an obsession for the local military intelligence (with whose commander we had a very positive relationship – we used to sit for almost a whole afternoon every month, jointly analyzing the situation of the refugees, of the CAR and of Cameroon).
After the dinner and the speech, we joined the thousands of Mbororo refugees and locals squatting at a wide square and sat at the tribune, made up of huge carpets, cushions and sofas taken from inside the houses, under a makeshift bamboo and red cloth canopy. The local prefet opened the speeches – his off-the-cuff call for public order to be kept did not go very well, presumably, among the poker-faced religious leaders and attendants. Then the local Tidjani sheikh, always the shrewd politician, looked at me in the eye and announced through the speakers that the head of the local UNHCR office was among them – something that, obviously, I had been trying to avoid. I improvised a speech on Islam and refugees being agents of peace, and took care of carefully pronouncing ʿalayhi s-salām after every mention of the Prophet Mohammad – which drew, everytime, a sigh of surprised relish from the crowd, perhaps all too used to slightly less respectful adresses from outsiders.
It has long been fashionable in Western intellectual circles to present sufism and sufi brotherhoods as both allies in the figth against extremism, and proof that Islam is not a violent religion. Others have cautioned against a naive view of brotherhoods and have recalled how shrewd politicians, including in Northern and Western Africa, have used the brotherhoods’ transnational networks to extend their diplomatic influence beyond their borders.
Be it what it may, the presence of refugee Tidjani sheikhs in most refugee camps in Eastern Cameroon was possibly a factor of stability and one of the reasons why the threat of Boko Haram penetration never came to be. What is more, the fact that most refugees were actually out of the seven official camps, in towns and villages, obviously facilitated the contact (new or renewed) between the Tidjani refugees and their Cameroonian brethren, as it happened in Mandjou.
We often discussed with local authorities how allowing many refugees to stay out of camps was a wise decision in terms of national security. They were not entirely exiled – somehow, emotionally and spiritually, they were home, and there was something to gain for everybody in this.
Faith, conversion, spiritual death and rebirth – these are also part of the refugees’ life. There is here perhaps a humble lesson to be learnt for all of us – to see also these very human aspects when we talk about refugees.
[1] Anger brought him to the brink of collapse. He calmed down. He always knew how to control it, when necessary: to pretend, to be cordial and caring with the worst human scum, those widows, sons and sisters of traitors. This is how he had survived thirty two years running the whole country. Now, how pleasant it was to let anger loose when there was no risk for the State, when he could give what they deserve to those rats, snitches, hyenas and snakes. The sharks’ bellies bore witness that he hadn’t renounced that pleasure. Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat.
[2] Quoted by Gomez Carrillo, Eduardo Ignacio, Espiritualidad y desplazamiento: consideraciones para los estudios de migración, Theologica Xaveriana – vol. 62 No. 173 (61-84), January-June 2012, Bogotá, Colombia.