As the U.S. ambassador to Somalia, Crigler had a primary responsibility to manage the relationship with this Cold War ally. Though it was the summer of 1989, few as yet had a notion that the Cold War was going to end so abruptly in such a dramatic fashion only a few months later. Crigler’s legitimate concern was that the publication of Gersony’s human rights report would signal to Siad Barre that “we’re done with you.” Thus, the very act of publishing “Why Somalis Flee” would be a political act that sent a strategic signal to the regime, especially as that regime was beginning to come apart. Gersony’s report had also embarrassed Crigler, whose embassy had not been reporting very much about the human rights violations that Gersony had unearthed.
The DCM in Mogadishu, David Rawson, as well as Hank Cohen, the assistant secretary, were inclined to release the report, especially as “this guy Gersony” was already a big name in the refugee assistance community and so suppressing the report would eventually lead to an even bigger controversy. In any event, the deputy secretary of state, Lawrence Eagleburger, approved the release of Gersony’s “Why Somalis Flee” in August, with several thousand copies going to Congress, U.S. diplomatic missions, and the media.
On September 8, 1989, the front page of The New York Times carried a story by Jane Perlez, headlined “U.S. Says Somali Army Killed 5,000 Civilians,” which quoted extensively from Gersony’s report. Within days, similar articles appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Houston Chronicle, in addition to the International Herald Tribune and other newspapers in Europe. Perhaps, more significantly, six years later, Oxford University released a survey of refugee literature, decrying how “unbalanced, emotive, and highly polemical” accounts had marred the study of Somali refugees, but singling out Gersony’s “Why Somalis Flee” as “one of the very few exceptions that provides objective evidence” of the events of 1988.5
Gersony’s report certainly weakened Siad Barre’s regime, undermining what little international standing it had left. But it was the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 that would change the whole context of power dynamics in the Horn of Africa, just as it did in Central America. In 1991, Mengistu’s Marxist regime in Ethiopia unraveled, even as Siad Barre was toppled without the United States coming to his aid. Somalia then fell into a deeper level of chaos, leading to the famine of 1992 that spawned America’s ill-fated military intervention there.
As it happened, Gersony’s report, which unmasked what would later be termed the Isaaq genocide, was a harbinger of the greater role played by human rights in U.S. foreign policy in the period between the end of the Cold War and 9/11.
CHAPTER 10
Liberia by Way of Nicaragua
1990–1993
“It All Grew Out of the Methodology.”
Bob Gersony was turned off by the exultations about the coming age of democracy and stability that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of Moscow’s communist empire in Central and Eastern Europe, because the world he knew in the far-flung corners of the earth was not stable at all. He saw no democratic pattern emerging in the Horn of Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Central America, and so on. Thus, he never bought into the optimism of the 1990s. It was another example of Washington elites manufacturing a theory, a theory born of dramatic events in Central Europe that they mistakenly applied to the whole world. As for humanitarianism, the end of the Cold War was a double-edged sword: it removed the strategic self-interest to care about human rights in many a country, even as it allowed humanitarianism as a cause to replace the obsession with strategic interest.
Gersony had a lot of time to think about these things, since, for reasons entirely unconnected with the geopolitical upheaval in Europe, he was suddenly out of a job.
It was the same old story, which any private contractor or freelance operator of any kind knows only too well. Your survival is always tied to patrons who support your work, and when someone replaces them as the boss—someone who is less sympathetic to you—suddenly half a dozen valid bureaucratic reasons emerge about why your services are no longer required. Officially it’s never personal, but it often is. You just have to force a smile, say polite things you don’t really mean, and move on to find another patron somewhere else.
This is sort of what happened when Princeton Lyman took over the Bureau of Refugee Programs following the change of administrations, from Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush: from George Shultz as secretary of state to James Baker III.
But in this case, it really wasn’t personal. It was just that Princeton Lyman, a former upper-level official in the Africa bureau and former ambassador to Nigeria, had a decidedly more conventional view of the role of the refugee bureau than Jim Purcell, Gene Dewey, and Jonathan Moore had had.1
The Bureau of Refugee Programs had its origins in the great cataclysms that befell Indochina in the 1970s.2 When Vietnam and Cambodia came under communist and Khmer Rouge rule, millions streamed across land borders and sought to escape by boat. As a result of this pressure, which brought 14,000 Indochina refugees into the United States each month during the Carter administration, the refugee bureau was carved out of a financially scandal-plagued human rights bureau, and set up as a stand-alone division of the State Department on July 31, 1979. Chas Freeman had drawn up the original plan, and Jim Purcell, a Tennessean who was friends with the moderate Republicans George Shultz and Wyoming senator Alan Simpson, came over from the Office of Management and Budget to run it. Following Reagan’s election, Purcell chose Gene Dewey as his right-hand man. Both men were activists who believed in crisis response, and Shultz gave them considerable running room when he became secretary of state. As it would turn out, Bob Gersony—and to a much lesser extent, Fred Cuny—became the tip of the spear for Purcell and Dewey.
Jim Purcell remembers working with Gersony after he and Dewey had just discovered him:
“He was quiet, intense, meticulous, and turned over every rock. When he did speak, sparks would fly.”
But the Africa bureau had often quietly chafed as the refugee bureau and particularly the human rights bureau stole part of its thunder. The Africa bureau had openly tried and failed to take away ownership of Jerry Weaver’s Falasha rescue operation from the refugee bureau. So when Princeton Lyman, one of the stars at the Africa bureau, took over the refugee bureau, there was an element of a hostile takeover about it, even as Lyman himself was dedicated to refugee work.
Whereas Purcell, Dewey, and Moore had wanted the refugee bureau to contribute active human intelligence and have a seat at the table when the geographic “line” bureaus made daily policy, Lyman did not want Refugee Programs stirring the pot quite as much, with forward operators such as Gersony and Cuny. And while Lyman was deeply impressed with Gersony’s work in Mozambique, he was also at the Africa bureau when Gersony caught the bureau off-guard with his reports about the Luwero Triangle that made it into The Washington Post. In the back of his mind, too, might have been the cable dustup between the Sudan and Chad embassies over Gersony’s reporting about the predations of the Goran tribesmen, in which Gersony was unintentionally undermining a pro-American regime in Chad.
Nevertheless, Lyman told me from the vantage point of a third of a century removed, several weeks before he died, that “Bob’s reports enabled us to lay down markers on human rights in areas where we had competing interests.” In other words, while the Africa bureau, as opposed to the refugee and human rights bureaus, was concerned primarily with national interest and bilateral relations between specific African regimes and the United States, Gersony helped provide a deeper perspective on human rights for the bureau, so that the bureau could better balance our values with our interests.
Yet at the time Gersony represented an irritant and an unorthodox force who could always discover things that the bureau couldn’t control. There was also the matter of Gersony’s self-negotiated pay, quite high for a contractor since he billed for seven days a we
ek, which only Purcell, Dewey, and Moore were willing to fork out. The State Department comptroller may also have been concerned that the Africa bureau kept certifying, again and again, that only Gersony could do these consulting jobs. Perhaps, too, for such a smooth, old-school FSO like Princeton Lyman, Bob Gersony was just too much of an outsider.
Finally, there was an element of coincidence about it. In 1989, the news focus shifted dramatically to Europe, even as the military conflict in Yugoslavia would not begin in earnest for almost another two years. So there was a temporary lull in high-profile humanitarian emergencies that required the talents of someone like Gersony.
Whatever the reason, in late 1989 and the beginning of 1990, the phone line from the refugee bureau to Gersony went dead. No follow-up requests, nothing, despite all the work he had done in Uganda, Thailand, Mozambique, Chad, Sudan, the Horn of Africa, and elsewhere. It’s like that in life. You’re a star until a moment later, when management changes at the top, and you’re gently or not-so-gently nudged aside.
Finally the phone rang.
It was USAID.
The December 1989 invasion of Panama by the United States to oust dictator Manuel Noriega had displaced the population of one slum neighborhood and USAID was providing these people with temporary housing. Would Gersony go down to Panama to do an assessment of how the relief operation had been handled, and how it was progressing? Gersony said sure. He was out of work and had no other options. He made several trips to Panama during the first half of 1990, interviewed scores of displaced persons there, and was able to give a seal of approval to the USAID mission. It was a no-sweat assignment.
Then he continued unemployed.
The phone rang again in December 1990. It was Janet Ballantyne, the USAID mission director in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. Ballantyne, who died in 2017, was a truly formidable woman, with a doctorate from the Cornell School of Business, who had worked like Gersony as a private contractor before becoming an FSO. Tall and imposing, she was a realist, committed to privatization, who was also a liberal Democrat, even if it had been Republicans who usually put her in key positions throughout her career. People just loved her and were charmed by her, including the so-called Sandalistas, aging and scraggy former hippies who always wore sandals and streamed into her office with grim expressions, demanding that USAID do more for the left-wing Sandinistas.
Ballantyne would rise to become the most senior woman in the Foreign Service and be a counselor to the administrator of USAID himself, the third-highest person in that bureaucracy. In her, Gersony would find another loyal patron to replace Jonathan Moore, Gene Dewey, and Fred Schieck. In fact, it was through Schieck that Ballantyne had found out about Gersony’s work for USAID in Central America.
Janet Ballantyne, the official for the United States Agency for International Development who brought Bob to Nicaragua for years of work in the early 1990s.
Ballantyne now had a challenge on her hands that Schieck convinced her only Bob Gersony could deal with.
* * *
—
Nicaragua is the most sparsely populated country of core Central America, with only four million people by the mid-1990s. Most of the population, the descendants of Spaniards and other Europeans, live close to the Pacific coast, while the vast forests close to the Atlantic or Caribbean coast are populated by only a few hundred thousand Miskito Indians and descendants of African slaves: 5 percent of the total population, as it happens. Relevant contemporary history in Nicaragua begins in 1934, when the forces of National Guard commander Anastasio Somoza García, who went on to establish a despotic dynasty, assassinated the revolutionary Augusto César Sandino, who had led a seven-year rebellion against the local oligarchic order and American imperialism, symbolized by the presence of U.S. Marines. Thus began the decades-long struggle between the Somoza family, supported by the United States, and the political heirs of Sandino, known as Sandinistas, which was made more intense by the insularity and inbred nature of politics in a former colonial backwater where every dispute was personal.
Somoza family rule was famously disrupted by a series of earthquakes that hit Managua in December 1972, destroying or damaging about 80 percent of the capital’s buildings and killing ten thousand people. The inadequate response would undermine the rule of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, the second son of the dynasty’s founder. The election of Jimmy Carter as U.S. president in 1976 convinced Somoza to liberalize and lift the state of siege. But by 1978, the assassination of a prominent newspaper publisher convinced the local elite that Somoza could no longer protect them, a view encouraged by a successful Sandinista siege of the National Palace. Following heavy fighting and the failure of the Carter administration to forge a political compromise, the Sandinistas took power in 1979.3
Despite Sandinista promises, as New York Times correspondent Shirley Christian reported at the end of 1979, “A government that had been put together to look civilian, moderate, and pluralistic just six months earlier…now looked far less that way.” The media was politicized and many hundreds of Cubans poured into the country to perform military, security, and public health functions. Indeed, as the first successful leftist insurrection in Latin America since Castro had come to power in Cuba twenty years earlier, the Sandinistas galvanized the attention of both official Washington and leftists throughout the Western Hemisphere. Still, just as Somoza was not particularly repressive compared to other autocrats, the Sandinistas were not particularly repressive compared to other leftist dictatorships. Nicaragua, partially through sheer disorganization, was supremely ideological without being overwhelmingly oppressive.4
In 1981 the Reagan administration received information that the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were involved in east bloc arms shipments to the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador. The following year, the so-called contra war against the Sandinistas began. In truth, the contras were mainly highland mestizo peasants, with a smaller contingent of Black Creoles and Miskito Indians, who had turned against the lowland, urban Pacific españoles, whom these highland peasants roughly identified with the Sandinistas. In the eyes of the peasant contras, the Sandinistas were trying to control their way of life, whereas the Somozas had to a larger extent left them alone.5
It turned out to be “the strangest of wars,” according to New York Times correspondent Shirley Christian, in which human beings fought for specific reasons of belief, personal experience, and geographical turf divides, but whose portrayal in the outside world was dominated by public relations hacks of both the Left and Right in Washington who helped turn it into a binary Cold War saga.6
Gersony in 1988–89 came to the same conclusion about the contra war soon after Shirley Christian did. USAID had tasked him to visit the Yamales salient of Honduras, surrounded on three sides by Nicaraguan territory, where the contras occupied a rear base. Because the Reagan administration was supporting the contras, USAID had a feeding program for fifteen thousand contras and their family members there. He found the camp as neat as a pin, with properly dug latrines and drainage, and people washing their clothes: what guerrillas around the world do when in a safe place. Having done the routine assessment, Gersony decided to interview the contras themselves, to get underneath, as it were, the ideological battles raging in Washington and learn who these people really were.
He interviewed sixty-two combatants randomly, breaking them down according to age, education, religion, and so on: his usual method. He learned that because of the introduction of state farms, work brigades, state-run agricultural co-ops with fixed prices for tools and fertilizers, and involuntary military service, these peasants had simply had it with the Sandinistas. Gersony became frustrated. It wasn’t only the Left, which considered the contras mercenaries, that bothered him, but the Reaganite Right, too, which had not adequately told the true story, obsessed as they were with the fight for democracy. These contra peasants had little particular interest in democracy. “For
them,” he explains, “democracy meant only a tangible memory of what had happened to them and wanting just to be left alone. They never once mentioned elections to me.” It was again a case of subtleties that became rigid black-and-white nostrums in the imperial capital of Washington.
* * *
—
Yet in February 1990, in the immediate wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nicaragua indeed did hold national elections and the opposition candidate, Violeta Chamorro, won a surprise victory over the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega. Chamorro was now taking over a country wrecked by east bloc socialist ideas, and the elder Bush’s administration wanted her to succeed. USAID mission director Janet Ballantyne was spurred on by Fred Schieck. He, in turn, was worried about latent Cuban influence in the sparsely populated, riverine eastern half of the country, which was populated by Miskito Indians in the northeast and Blacks in the southeast. He wanted something done immediately. The Cubans had built an airstrip and had sent in all manner of relief experts and political agents over the years under the cover of the Sandinista regime. Now the area was filling up with returning war refugees from Honduras: mixed in were returning Miskitos who had fought the Sandinistas, rubbing shoulders with other Miskitos who had supported the Sandinistas. Then there was the disbanding of displaced persons camps that were leftovers from the contra-Sandinista conflict. The Cold War was officially over, but its aftershocks would go on for years.
The Good American Page 26
