When does conflict stop? The easy answer would be when the peace agreement is signed and the guns stop shooting, right? When is a refugee officially in a post-conflict or non-conflict setting? Does it start when s/he crosses the border into a different country? Once s/he's been through registration and settled in a refugee camp? A month after being there? A year? After s/he's been resettled to another country? Over the ten days I spent in Kakuma refugee camp, I kept checking in with myself to ask, 'what is it I'm looking at?' A camp, yes, and it seems calm. Peaceful. But after talking with the IRC program managers in health, nutrition, community promotion, women's protection and empowerment, and HIV/AIDS, I began realizing that just because I couldn't see or hear violent conflict didn't mean the camp is a place of refuge from other types of conflict.
Rates of sexual and gender based violence are high in Kakuma, as are rates of malnutrition and diseases such as lung infection, malaria, and water-borne illnesses (though for the record, they are at or below UNHCR's standards). There are over 20 nationalities represented in Kakuma camp, and tensions between groups, often those that have moved from the same country and have a history of dissonance, are stressed when they're told to live side-by-side. Forty nine percent of the refugees in Kakuma are from South Sudan, a young country that's been in conflict since its independence in 2011. The majority are women and children, many unaccompanied minors, who have left their homes because of violence and insecurity. And it's not as though they're coming to greener pastures, either. Turkana County, where Kakuma camp is, is one of the driest, hottest regions in Kenya. Seasonal droughts are broken only by torrential heavy rains that lead to flooding, which virtually halts all movements of aid organizations for weeks at a time.
Meeting with refugees, volunteer refugee workers, and IRC staff got me thinking about how people, countries, NGOs, grassroots organizations, and international forces stop conflict. What compels violence to finally lay down arms and come to the peace table? A B.A. in diplomacy and world affairs has taught me that there's no one, universal, fool-proof answer, nor should there be. Often though, the human collateral of conflict - the casualties and the refugees and the internally displaced - become a reason for ending it. Rhetorically anyway. Western audiences love numbers and statistics, as if a staggering death toll or breath-takingly swift increase in refugee numbers are enough to bring everyone to their senses. How many times has an infographic with bright colors been used by organizations or politicians to demonstrate the scale of a conflict? What these don't and can't show is the weight of a conflict, the emotional and mental weight of a conflict, which its casualties bear long after peace has been declared. And what's more, human numbers do not compel those engaged in conflict to stop. And isn't that what matters? The refugees keep crossing borders and the aid organizations keep scrambling to count them all and account for their needs. International audiences become tired of the numbers, bored by their ineffectual impact and the continuation of conflict in spite of the narrative told by the numbers. The human brain doesn't cope with disaster through numbers, and when conflict is made into an Excel sheet of statistics and data it becomes in-human. The numbers are crucial for humanitarian management and budgeting, but then the human becomes a number in the transaction.
My question then is, when do we stop counting? When do conflict numbers stop and post-conflict numbers start, and what exactly is it that's being counted? It's easy to lose the human life in the numbers. I'm deeply grateful I was able to gain a sense of the humans behind the numbers that I crunch on a daily basis, but I now find an anxiety attached to the numbers too, that the narrative I'm telling isn't the right one.
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