p An ordinary refugee camp. In the midst of a warm, sunny November day, when everything around is green, human misery and grief seem particularly unbearable, of an ashen-grey—like the blanket on the tent floor. While the tents—of khaki and plain green in the smiling sun—are like oxygen bottles suddenly introduced at a gala; unexpected, nightmarish, wanted when others bask in the warm sunshine.
p An ordinary camp, with misery written on every face, with sick children, with quarantine, with the ever imminent threat of an epidemic, with incessant laundering, with a feeling of dispossessed insecurity and anxiety and a longing for the future, and everyone and everything still there in Nicaragua, in Nica, as they say here.
p Anxiety clamours from morning till night; people eagerly grab newspapers and burst out of tents whenever news from Nica is broadcast.
p The eyes of the children reflect an ageless sadness.
p “How old are you?”
p “Eight.”
p “Here long?”
p “Very long!" (Three weeks, the camp schoolteacher explains.)
p “Why did you leave Nicaragua?”
p “They’re killing people there.”
p The little girl says this simply, matter-of-factly, to burst into sobs only when she recollects that her mother and father are still there, that she is here with her grandmother.
126p The teacher (here tent serves as school) tells me later that nothing is known of the whereabouts of the little girl’s parents. Attempts have been made to trace them, but to no avail. Quite likely they are no longer alive.
p There are 33,000 Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica alone, even then only foi October and November 1978. ’I he camp wheie I am is one of the many the Red Gross has set up conjointly with the Costa Rican Government.
p Every tent is a token of grief, every person, a token of grief.
p The worst news is not from newspapers nor from broadcasts; it comes itself, conveyed from mouth to mouth. The teacher I chatted with at the camp school has learned but today that his brother has been killed by Somoza’s men in Nica. News comes quickly. The Nicaraguan border is only several kilometres away, the border across which is fascism.
p Only a few kilometres part democracy from fascism. For the refugee it does not divide, it unites, linking the two sides of one tragedy.
p None wants to talk to a journalist here. Nobody wants to show grief or imperil a relative still there, on the other side of the border that runs through jungle.
p Maria de Leon, 45, tells her story with difficulty. Not only because it is hard to tell. It is hard for her to speak. She lies on a felt blanket carpeting the tent’s plastic floor, her head swathed in a towel, her legs still bleeding, and barely able to move her right arm. Her story is shockingly simple.
p She was a shopkeeper. A small-time shopkeeper who sold sundry notions in her small stall. Never had anything to do with politics. Had her hands full without that. Aren’t eight children enough? She was arrested at six o’clock in the morning, while cooking breakfast. Five National Guardsmen burst in, trussed her up, gagged her, drew a sack over her head, carried her out like a parcel and thrust her into an army truck. (She, of course, had heard of the countrywide arrests. But it was one thing to hear about somebody else, another thing when you yourself were being arrested.)
p She was questioned in haste. What she said was barely 127 heeded Room had to be made for the next. All that she was asked was how many times she had concealed weapons for the Sandinistas. She had never done that. She doesn’t even have much of a notion of who the Sandinistas are, although she has heard the name. All she ever did was to sell sundry items in her little stall and take care of her children. Quite enough to forego politics.
p She was suspended from a hook by hei bound hands and beaten up. She was kicked, struck at with rifle butts, and clubbed. In command was a Somoza captain. Seated beside him was an American explaining something to the officer as he munched on a sandwich. She is sure it was an American—the accent, the appearance, the rest.
p She cried out that she didn’t know anything. That she had never seen a Sandinista. That her neighbours could bear her out.
p “You wouldn’t wear a red kerchief if you’d never seen a Sandinista,” the captain tiredly objected. The American finished his sandwich and said, "Go on. She probably knows something.”
p The words about the red kerchief, the kerchief she had bought not so long ago and had worn several times, unaware that she had bought herself misery, were the last to reach her. She was taken into the mountains and while still unconscious, tossed over the edge. (The sack had previously been removed, needed for the next victim.) She was picked up by local peasants. Her house was razed and the ashes packed down by a tank.
p Feeling faint, she interrupts her story time and again. One of her boys brings her a drink of water. The youngest sits by her side, listening as he plays with a scarlet plastic toy truck.
p Nowadays it is hard to astonish the world with stories of cruelty, with stories of grief, repression, and betrayal. But when you touch grief, when-it cries out, the skin crawls.
p Imprinted forever on the eyes of everyone here from Nica are pictures time will hardly ever erase.
p Here, now, are some of these stories which I took down in the camp, as related to me by refugees.
128p “... On the way from Masaya to Managua I saw a man helping along a wounded woman. She was weeping and crying that National Guardsmen had killed her two children and that she had nothing to live for. A National Guard patrol drove up, the officer calmly pulled out his pistol, and fired it at her. Without anger, he simply said, "Well, if you don’t want to live, don’t.” She shuddered and her eyes opened. He fired his pistol once again, straight into her face. Then he holstered his gun and the patrol moved on. The man stood there, his face buried in his hands. He thought he would be killed too, but he wasn’t. I ran towards a truck parked by the roadside to hide behind it. Inside was a man. I touched him. He was dead... .”
p ”. . . In Esteli, it was, they led a group of teenagers out into the street, eight or nine of them, none of them older than fourteen. They ranked them up and the sergeant said he was going to teach them how to march in formation. All of a sudden they were fired at. By three soldiers with submachine guns. The children dropped. Surprise was written on their faces. I hid in the doorway of a gutted house. Then the soldiers took out two jerry cans and poured petrol over the bodies. Some of the boys were still alive, and stretched out a hand. But the soldiers didn’t bother even to kill them. They dragged them together and set fire to them. I stood in the doorway till nightfall, afraid to step out.”
p Nowadays it is hard to astonish the world with cruelty.
p But Somoza seemed to have set himself that aim.
p It is hard to astonish the world with hypocrisy. But the US Administration, that staunch and consistent ally of dictator Somoza, seems to be doing that.
p After Somoza drowned the popular October 1977 uprising in blood, after he killed opposition leader and journalist Pedro Chamorra in January 1978, President Carter officially congratulated President Somoza on his “achievement” in improving the human rights situation.
p After Somoza had massacred thousands of compatriots for hating his fascist dictatorship, the White House finally announced after long silence, that it condemns violations of human rights in Nicaragua.
129p In the refugee camp on the border with Nica, these words, “condemnation” and “violation”, are seen not as hypocrisy, but as mockery. As a mockery of the grief felt by the little girl who fled from Nica because they are killing people there, of the grief felt by Maria de Leon, of the grief felt by the mothers whose children were gunned down and burned in the streets of Esteli, of the grief felt by the teacher whose brother was slain in Nica the other day.
p The US Administration says it is discontinuing all aid to Somoza. In the refugee camp on the border with Nicaragua they know the true price of these words, which they see as an outright lie. They know just as President Carter knows that American advisers still advise the National Guard and that American mercenaries still pilot Nicaraguan aircraft.
p The US Administration has announced that it has stopped selling arms to Somoza.
p But in the refugee camp on the border with Nicaragua, they know that in Managua four days ago there landed with the US government’s connivance four Israeli air transports bringing in weapons for Somoza’s National Guard. They even know the make of the submachine guns delivered to the butchers, that they are Galil submachine guns. The US Administration tells the world that it wants to help settle peacefully the conflict in Nicaragua, but in the refugee camp they know that the US State Department men mediating between Somoza and the Broad Opposition Front did all they could to keep Somoza in power.
p I am writing this at a time when the deadline which the Sandinistas have put before the fascist dictator Somoza, for him to abdicate and leave the country by 21 November 1978, is running out.
p But today Somoza encouraged by American backing and having built one more ferro-concrete wall around his bunker in Managua has declared that he is "proud of his Presidency”, and hopes to be governing after the next “elections”, in 1981.
p Today, only three hours ago, the overweening Somoza, encouraged by US backing, ordered his cut-throats to intrude 130 into Costa Rica at a point but several kilometres away from the refugee camp.
p National Guardsmen have again crossed into Costa Rica, causing casualties.
p Only this moment Costa Rica’s President has announced the rupture of diplomatic relations with Nicaragua.
p In the refugee camp no one sleeps.
They anxiously wonder what will happen next.
Notes
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