I nodded.
“I’ll find you another helo. You can try again first thing tomorrow.”
* * *
—
The propellers whirred and the seats shook as we boarded the Mi-17 the next morning.
“You think it’s really a new helo, or did they just scotch tape the old one?” Laren asked.
I flashed him a wry smile and willed myself not to get rattled, especially when Ben started reeling off helicopter crash statistics, which he must have memorized long ago, because we hadn’t had Internet access since the hotel in Rwanda. Despite our collective anxiety, we lifted off without incident and banked, heading out again over the green-canopy sea. The jungle did seem as vast as an ocean, and as isolating. I tried not to imagine how difficult it would be to find us if the helo actually crashed this time. I tried to dispel my unease. But my body clenched every time we hit slight turbulence, and when Jason’s water bottle slid off his seat the sudden thud made my heart pound.
Eventually, the green canopy opened below us, the red dirt dotted with small white cement buildings strung through the clearing like teeth. We had made it to Bangadi. I felt my shoulders loosen. The pilot announced our descent and explained that because we were entering a red zone he wasn’t allowed to power down. He would land the helo near the UN base, and we’d jump out. He’d return in three hours, after dropping off the tin roofing sheets someplace else.
When the helo had landed, one of the airmen opened the door. The noise of the propellers pummeled us. My whole body shook with nerves and vibrations from the aircraft’s noise. We jumped out. As soon as our feet touched ground the helo began to rise, the chest-rattling noise of the propellers diminishing to a hum as it flew away.
We stood in the hot sun and sudden silence, gathering our breath. Laren pointed to a nearby building emblazoned with the blue UN logo. Just then a horn honked and we saw a white UN truck driving slowly toward us.
“Please get in,” the driver called out his open window, motioning toward the bed of the truck. “Have a seat back there and I’ll drive you to the base.”
“Isn’t that it just ahead?” I asked, pointing at the building just a few yards away.
The driver nodded. “Yes, we will drive you there.”
There was no time to argue about our ability to walk to the building. We climbed into the bed of the truck where a few armed soldiers already sat. Armed escorts, for a drive of no more than five hundred feet. The driver began a slow, wide turn toward the UN base. Suddenly, a noise pounded over us. A helicopter came into view.
A lump of panic rose in my throat. As the helo descended and hovered over the ground I realized it was our helo, the one we had just jumped out of. Were we being called back? Had General Zia changed his mind? Had our pilot just been radioed a warning? Was Bangadi under attack? The door opened and the crew chief who had helped us with the door jumped out and ran toward us, wildly waving his arm overhead.
“Stop, stop!” he shouted. “Madam! Wait! Madam!” the crew chief called again as he reached the truck. “You forgot something!”
I had my passport, I was wearing my glasses. What was the emergency? The crew chief leaned into the back of the truck. Clutched in one hand was my bright pink neck pillow. I had intentionally left it behind on the helicopter for our return flight. I would have felt awkward carrying it along. Now my face flushed and my ears tingled with embarrassment. I took the pillow. “Thank you,” I stammered. I could feel Laren and the others choking back laughter. The soldiers sat rigidly on alert, their guns at the ready. I looked at my lap, afraid to meet anyone’s eyes. The airman ran back to the helo and hoisted himself inside. Only when it had risen into the sky did the truck begin to crawl again.
Laren, Jason, and Ben couldn’t contain their laughter. They doubled over, unable to stop.
“A visit to a red zone,” Laren finally said, “should never be attempted without the following crucial items. Number one, an armed escort. Number two—” He fell apart again, collapsing into more laughter. “Number two, a fuzzy pink neck pillow.”
I began to laugh, too. A full-body laugh. A laugh that wouldn’t stop. The pure-joy laugh of my sons when I tickled them. A laugh that didn’t let up until my body felt emptied out and my eyes were misty with tears. I couldn’t remember the last time I had laughed like that.
12
RED ZONE
IN THE DIM foyer of the base, we were greeted by the head of the UN military contingent in Bangadi, a cheery Moroccan man. He led us down a tight hallway and into a sunny room where he pointed to a low table surrounded by intricately embroidered Moroccan pillows to sit on. Ornate dishes covered the table, steaming platters heaped with couscous, vegetables, fruit, and fish laid out whole, looking up at us with dead glassy eyes.
“Please sit down, take some tea,” he said.
Breaking bread is often a component of my work. A meeting begins with a meal, a ceremony of welcome and cultural exchange. Food is such a universal part of being human. When we eat together, we acknowledge what unites us. To offer sustenance is a fundamental way of showing respect for a visitor. And to accept it is in turn a sign of respect to the host. It’s like saying, I feel at home in your home, I’m comfortable on your turf.
The Moroccan battalion was known for serving the most delicious and lavish meals among the peacekeeping contingents in Congo. On any other day, I would have been honored to partake of the elaborate meal prepared for us. But today we had less than three hours to accomplish the one thing we’d crossed the world to do. I couldn’t bear to spend precious time lounging on an embroidered pillow and stuffing my face with a multicourse meal.
And yet, there was no way around it. We couldn’t be rude. I sat at the table. I diligently spooned something from every single platter onto my plate. And I began eating as quickly as basic etiquette would allow. If I could have shoveled the food directly into my mouth with my hands I would have done it, so urgent was my desire to get to the communities and have the conversations we’d come to have.
But the meal was like a feast in a fairy tale that constantly replenishes itself. As quickly as I could empty my plate, more trays of steaming platters were laid on the table. An hour passed and my heart sank. This meal would never end unless I made a move.
“Sir,” I said to our host. “I am so honored by your hospitality and grateful for this delicious meal. But we have only two hours until our transport returns. I want to make sure we are able to do what we have come all this way to do.”
He squinted at me. “What do you mean?”
“The interviews we have come to conduct. In the nearby communities.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We are here to speak with survivors from recent massacres.”
He grinned in bafflement and began to shake his head. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said. “Madam, I am very sorry, but there has been a misunderstanding. This is a red zone. We can’t take you out there.”
Out there? On a Human Rights Watch map I’d seen of LRA attacks in the Haut-Uele region since August 2009, the attack sites were marked with stars, the UN bases at Bangadi and Niangara marked with triangles. Sometimes the space between a triangle and star was less than a pinky’s width. When he said “out there,” he was talking about villages mere miles away.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I must insist. This is the reason for our trip, to speak to people directly and understand exactly what they need.”
He looked for General Zia’s chief of staff, who left, presumably to make a call to General Zia.
“We can just walk to the villages,” I said. “And we really must leave now.”
His face flushed. “The risk is too great! I cannot allow you to leave the safety of our compound.”
Just then General Zia’s chief of staff came back and told the Moroccan head of the UN delegation that General Zia had confirmed th
at he had already approved our trip to the villages. Our host bowed his head in concession.
* * *
—
We loaded in the back of the UN trucks and drove along a narrow dirt road, the jungle crowding in on both sides. The only other travelers on the road were men carrying farm tools and women in long floral wrap dresses with goods from market on their heads. They pressed back against the green so we could pass.
In the village, people rushed up to us, brimming with urgency. A community leader stepped forward to greet us.
“Thank you for coming and for caring about what is happening to us,” he told us through our interpreter. He handed me a notebook with a handwritten log of the people killed and abducted in recent attacks. He had recorded the names and ages of those missing and dead, and details from witnesses and escaped abductees. I scanned the accounts from the survivors, the roster of brutality.
As I paged through the dust-streaked notebook, what struck me most was the incredible resilience of the survivors—and the fact that the trauma and threat of violence were far from over. All day, every day, these people who had already experienced unthinkable horrors were living in danger of more violence.
To have survived the brutality once wasn’t enough. Those who had witnessed their neighbors and friends and families being hacked to death mere months ago were at risk of being the next to die. Those who had been captured by the LRA and had managed to escape and return home were the most vulnerable of all. The consequences would be especially horrific if the LRA returned. Meanwhile, the regional and UN forces close enough—and with the weapons and mandate to protect the many communities like this one—weren’t showing up.
* * *
—
The most painful part of the trip for me was when we headed to an area with thatch-roofed homes where a nine-year-old girl came to speak to us, accompanied by her father. She had closely cropped hair and wore a brightly colored T-shirt and a long skirt. She approached us with her head lowered. Through a translator she haltingly began to tell us her story. She didn’t lift her face as she spoke.
I always struggle with this part of our work. When people in affected areas share their experiences, I worry that they feel they must tell their stories to the white person who came to hear. To share something so deeply personal and vulnerable—to relive the trauma—must lead to change. The listener has no right to hear without accepting responsibility for participating in the work of change.
The girl sat carefully in a hand-carved wooden chair. I knelt near her feet. Staring at her small hands, speaking to the translator in spare sentences, she told us she had been captured by the LRA and held captive for three days. They had raped her. On the fourth day, she and her friend were left alone in a hut while their captors went to pick food from the fields. She knew it was their chance to run. But her friend was too terrified to go. She hugged her friend and ran. She didn’t look back, she didn’t stop until night fell and she couldn’t see where she was going. She slept alone in the bush, she woke with the dawn and kept running, she ate nothing but the occasional wild yam she could dig up in her flight.
She wore a strand of green beads around her neck and a gold Saint Christopher medal on a pale string—a pendant worn to show devotion and ask for blessing, a gift from the NGO worker who had helped her after her return. She sat folded inward when she was done speaking. I felt awed by her resilience—she was closer to Connor’s age than to mine, and she had experienced something most adults would never have to: she had saved her own life. But her incredible bravery couldn’t bring back the life she’d been robbed of.
Her father hovered behind her, a hand on her shoulder. “I’m frightened,” he said. “The LRA returns for those who escape. This time they will kill her.”
I could hear the fear in his voice, and the thing that as a parent I know must hurt worse than almost any other pain: the feeling that you are helpless to protect your children. Beneath the fear I saw his hope, too, that in sharing her story, his daughter could help make a safer world.
* * *
—
I couldn’t stop thinking of her or of her father’s face.
After we left Congo, we stopped over in Rwanda. In Kigali, before we flew home, I took Laren, Jason, and Ben to pay our respects at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a place they had never been, that honors the victims of the Rwandan genocide. The memorial garden and museum house the final resting place of more than 250,000 victims. A long granite wall lists the many, many names of the dead. In darkened chambers hung with black velvet curtains, photographs of the dead are displayed. Mothers holding babies, couples embracing in wedding clothes, cutting into flowered cake, children holding schoolbooks, families gathered around picnic tables, young people in graduation gowns. In glass cases, artifacts from the dead: children’s shoes, rosaries, skulls shattered by a machete’s blade. A plaque at the entrance to the Children’s Room reads: In Memory of Our Beautiful and Beloved Children Who Should Have Been Our Future. This was always the hardest room for me—life-size photos of children killed, engraved plaques with their names, ages, their last words, their favorite things, where and how they died: Hacked to Death; Tortured to Death; Shot to Death; Grenade in Shower; Hit Against Wall; Eyes Stabbed Out.
After a somber tour of the museum, we made our way to a bench in the memorial garden, overlooking the green hills of Kigali. Around us, visitors rested and walked in silence. Some offered flowers. Some cried. It was a place to grieve, to face an evil that flourished in a world that did nothing to stop it. And a place to heal. To say we are better than the worst in us. To say never again.
13
LEATHER SHOES AND RADIOS
ONE OF THE most depressing aspects of the current LRA situation was the lie at the heart of the UN presence in Congo: the protection they offered often was only an illusion. And the illusion itself was dangerous. Thinking that a group was there to protect them gave communities a false sense of security. I knew we were going to have to try something different. That until we did, we were part of the broken system.
There was no road map for how a private humanitarian foundation could truly engage in the operational aspects of trying to stop a conflict. Training and communications. Training and communications. These were the needs our friends at Human Rights Watch, the US State Department, and, most important, community organizations in Central Africa had identified. Better communications between communities, and better-trained troops to stop the perpetrators.
Everyone was telling us that military training was necessary because the tactics the Ugandan military had employed against the LRA in northern Uganda weren’t working in the current environment. After Operation Lightning Thunder, the failed assault on Kony’s camp in 2008, the LRA had broken into small, agile groups, while the Ugandan army continued to operate in large, slow units. While the LRA had adapted to the jungle environment, crossing rivers and employing countertracking strategies, the Ugandan army hadn’t altered its standard operating procedures. Yet, the Ugandan military was the only group on the planet that knew the LRA’s devastation firsthand and had a proven track record of combating the LRA.
“Let’s stop in Kampala on our way home,” Laren said that night over dinner in Kigali. “We can see if the Ugandans are open to collaborating on an intervention.”
In Los Angeles, just a few weeks before, we had talked about the need for an out-of-the-box, creative solution to the crisis. But this was the first time either of us had put words to a specific strategy, especially something that was potentially so far beyond the bounds of traditional philanthropy.
Laren could sense my hesitation. “We can’t go home without at least asking the question,” he said.
* * *
—
The next afternoon we sat in the office of Henry Okello, Uganda’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. A thickset, amiable man with gray hair and eyebrows that arched in a
way that made him look perpetually surprised, Henry Okello was the son of General Tito Okello, the Acholi leader who had been president of Uganda for six months before being overthrown. The minister now served in the government of President Yoweri Museveni, the man who had ousted his father.
Laren had built effective relationships with most of the Ugandan government ministers and knew Henry Okello well enough to get straight to the point.
“Would the Ugandan government be open to receiving support from a private foundation in filling the identified military training gaps in the counter-LRA mission?” he asked.
At the word military, my body tensed. Despite the unanimously expressed need for counter-LRA military training in the region, I was deeply uncomfortable with the idea of collaborating with a military entity. I had been willing and eager to support the State Department’s contributions to a counter-LRA intervention, but to do it directly ourselves still seemed impossible, even ludicrous, to me. A private humanitarian foundation didn’t support military operations, and it was beyond unsettling to hear Laren utter those words in a government official’s office. We all wanted the LRA to stop abducting children and committing violence. But I didn’t know the Ugandan government’s intentions regarding getting top LRA leadership to the International Criminal Court.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” I said. “I must know: Is your plan to capture Kony?”
A silence followed. Laren seemed embarrassed by my blunt question, and Okello looked confused. He nodded his head.
“Let me be clear,” he said. “Our plan is to capture Joseph Kony and take him to The Hague.”
I trusted Laren’s trust in him, and I believed him, though a part of me wondered if he was only telling us what we wanted to hear.
To Stop a Warlord Page 8
