Ian MacLellan

Pictures from a story we did up way north in Kenya. It’s a nine hour bus ride from the nearest real town, which doesn’t count the 7 hours you can spend waiting for the bus to leave or the 6 hours you spend getting to the bus stop.

Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

Kakuma Refugee Camp is up in the forgotten, far North of Kenya. The permanent refugee settlement sprawls over 10km with urban centers where you can buy fancy hijabs and fresh fruit, use a cyber café, or watch Bollywood movies over satellite television. Amidst this warehouse, where some residents have lived for 17 years, where you can eat at a fancy Ethiopian restaurant that plays Feist, Yael Naim, and Bob Marley, is an independent refugee run newspaper fighting for existence.

The Kakuma News Reflector, KANERE, was started in December 2008 by a group of refugees in order to create a human voice for refugees. They were helped by Bethany Ojalehto, an American Fulbright Scholar, to start a blog to reach the wider media and world and to help force NGOs and the Kenyan Government to have transparency in financials and policy creation.

The newspaper grew into a source of hope for many of the journalists involved. Hope is far from staple within the camp. One KANERE writer said, “I don’t feel like a normal person. I feel isolated, not like a human being.”

On top of the difficulties universal to everyone in the camp, such as crowding and lack of food and freedom, the newspaper staff has to also fight threadbare finances, without concrete recognition by the Kenyan Government, UNHCR, and other NGOs that they can even exist..

KANERE is not the first refugee newspaper, but it could be the first to publish its content using modern technology. The UN operated a newsletter in Kakuma from 1993-2005 called The Kakuma News Bulletin, KANEBU. KANEBU died off as journalists were resettled or moved to other camps. In Osire Refugee Camp, Namibia, The Voice of Refugees was a handwritten newspaper that was snuck out of the camp and then spread around to shed light on what happens there. The Namibian Government and UNHCR shut down the venture before long.

Within a month of the first issue of KANERE, the UNHCR mass media officer Catherine Opile was unfriendly to KANERE and issues over whether refugees have a right to free press were raised. Some journalists were told their written work could threaten their other jobs.

KANERE journalists are very inspired by their work, but also recognize that much of what they do is seen as “illegal” because the right to free press is not fully understood for refugees.

The LWF project coordinator told Bethany Ojalehto that he didn’t expect her to become involved with the refugees on this level and that the UNHCR mass media officer had called enquiring about Bethany’s housing. Bethany felt that the LWF and UNHCR were threatening her housing because of her work with KANERE.

The journalists generally shared the belief that when the UNHCR chooses to take responsibility for refugees, they have an obligation to uphold their rights, and a free press is one of those rights.

KANERE has received significant help in their struggle for legal existence from Dr. Ekuru Aukot a Kenyan lawyer with Kituo Cha Sheria. He laid out the legal reasoning for the existence and acceptance of a refugee paper under Kenyan and international law and later published his research in an expert contribution to KANERE.

The humanitarian groups working in Kakuma Camp generally concluded to accept and work with KANERE as long as they respect the ethics that are necessary to protect sensitive individuals and cases. UNHCR went forward and asked KANERE to submit papers to get funding from UNHCR and other NGOs in Kakuma. KANERE submitted the required papers, but the process has not proceeded since these discussions in the beginning of 2009.

Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond, the author of Rights In Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism with Guglielmo Verdirame and founder of the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University, found out about KANERE’s blog and wrote an expert contribution, Speaking for Refugees or Refugees Speaking for Themselves, for the January issue of KANERE. She has also represented KANERE’s interests at conferences on refugee rights.

KANERE is a form of hope counter to the dominance of information by NGOs about the camp. As a Ugandan refugee journalist’s October, 2008 blog post says: “I keep on hoping but I never see anything good happening to me, I mean look at those preaching to the poor, they already have it all, but they keep preaching to those who don’t have a thing and asking them to have hope and pray.”

Merril Smith of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in a January article expressed the power of a refugee newspaper to democratize humanitarian decision-making, “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu!”