THE FALADIÉ DISPLACED PERSONS’ CAMP
An April 2021 report from journalist Massitan Coulibaly
Translation and photos by Erica Pomerance
The jihadi movement that has strangled Northern Mali for the past decade, has now reached Central Mali. Political instability has transformed the once peaceful cohabitation between Dogon farmers and Fulani herders into a violent conflict. Local groups of radicalized Fulani youth attack peaceful Dogon villages, killing residents, burning crops and stealing animals. Assassinations occur frequently in the fields. A militia of Dogon hunters formed to defend their villages, now wreaks vengeance on innocent Fulani shepherds and their families. Since 2016, the growing insecurity in Central Mali has forced thousands of people to seek refuge in makeshift camps in the cities, leaving everything behind.
One such refugee camp sprung up on a stretch of vacant land in the Faladiè neighborhood of Bamako, Mali’s capital city, located between a park of livestock pens and an abandoned garbage dump. This site now constitutes the largest informal refugee camp in Bamako. In April 2020, a large section of the camp was ravaged by fire. When the ashes cooled, most residents soon moved back, with nowhere else to go.
The number of displaced people fleeing Central Mali has continued to grow daily. The majority of residents in the camp are rural Fulani and Dogon from the districts of Douentza, Bankass, Bandiagara and Koro in the Mopti region. Far from the zone of interethnic violence, the two groups manage to live side-by-side in relative harmony.
On arrival, people survive doing whatever they can to get by. Able men and teenage boys do menial work and comb the dump for recyclable plastic and scrap metal. Others build shelters or produce animal feed to sell to nearby livestock brokers. Women do household chores and some make soap.
The government periodically provides basic staples and grain but there’s hardly enough to feed the growing population of displaced people in the Faladiè camp. According to Amadou Dicko, a volunteer social worker, the Malian state only officially recognises 140 households among a total of 4000 refugees who were living in the camp by March 2021. Various NGOS and humanitarian organisations have donated materials and funds to allow a group of volunteers to build basic infrastructure: latrines, a central artesian well with pump, a water reservoir and faucets, a few small plywood houses with tin roofs, a storeroom, a medical dispensary and even a mosque, completed in time for Ramadan.
Most families live crowded together in small shelters covered with plastic tarps on muddy terrain. In the rainy season, this is hardly adequate to keep them dry. In such an unsanitary environment, the risk of disease is high. Miraculously, no outbreak of COVID-19 has been reported to date in the Faladiè camp...
The camp has a single informal school that takes place under a hangar built by a donor, to which VFoM [Virginia Friends of Mali] contributed funds. Every weekday morning, a teacher gives primary level classes in French to a group of 50 students. Another makeshift school dispenses religious instruction in Arabic. This is hardly sufficient for the large number of children in the camp. According to Amadou Dicko, most children don’t attend school at all and a growing number go out to beg in the streets. Left to themselves, young kids play in the dust, while others help adults with domestic chores.
These exiled families of farmers and herders wonder what the future holds for their children. They can only cling to the hope that one day they will be able to return home to take up their activities in the fields in order to provide for their needs. But before this can happen, peace must return to Mali.
———————————————————-
The Virginia Friends of Mali continue to work with refugees and with MALIAN WOMEN in particular - in Ségou, which is the sister city of Richmond, Virginia, and Bamako.
Donations for the FALADIÉ camp can be made via our website http://vafriendsofmali.org/ (if you use keyword “Faladie”, we will make sure that your contribution reaches the camp).
Virginia Friends of Mali is a 501.c.3. non-profit association and all donations to our work are tax-deductible in U.S.A.