Janet Ballantyne’s orders to Bob Gersony were “Go down there and figure out what we need to do to stabilize the area. I don’t want any more assessments or bureaucratic studies. I want a plan of action.”
Gersony literally spent forty days and forty nights hiking through a bush veined with rivers where people lived and farmed out of their canoes. Because of his Spanish fluency, he was more adventurous in Nicaragua than in other parts of the world. But he, being Gersony, still had his limits. His adventure had begun at Managua airport, where the flight to Puerto Cabezas on the Atlantic coast departed from the most ramshackle and distant part of the terminal. All the other passengers on the plane were peasants with “bundles of crap tied up in bolts and all sorts of rope.” He found Puerto Cabezas practically cut off from the outside world, rickety and magical in those days, composed of wooden houses on stilts except for a concrete center. Using Puerto Cabezas as his base, he would visit thirty-five villages and interview literally hundreds of residents. He had to be thorough with each one. It was an altogether boring and yet useful exercise, since everyone told him the same things, proving the truth of the situation: everyone needed rice seed, simple tools, and ready cash.
It took him twelve hours to traverse sixty-five miles of one deeply rutted road. There were several feet of mud in many places. He traveled a hundred miles on a river against the current. Bam, bam, the canoe slapped against the surface of the water in a storm. He was nauseous. He felt like his back was going to collapse. “It was raining frogs and razor blades,” he says. “At least that’s how it felt.”
He discovered banditry, instability, zero employment, no currency in circulation, insufficient food (since farmers had been dislocated by armed conflict), and bridges and roads in catastrophic conditions. Eastern Nicaragua was so close to the United States, but it might as well have been in the most underdeveloped part of Africa.
He began zeroing in on the details. As always, it was about understanding the situation at the granular level. He knew from his interviews that he couldn’t give the peasants just any kind of rice seed, it had to be cica-ocho, a miracle seed from Colombia. And not just any machete would do. It had to be the twenty-eight-inch corneta. He was also formulating a plan to repair all the roads and bridges by hand without heavy equipment, in order to create mass employment.
He had nothing to do one day in Puerto Cabezas, since the flight back to Managua wasn’t until the next morning. So he wandered into the office of the local forestry commission. In the dingy, ratty, tumbledown office he saw two crusty middle-aged men sitting at a table chain-smoking. They were both hard and lean, without a muscle wasted. The two dark-skinned old-timers, along with the dusty, grimy brown and lava-colored surroundings, reminded Gersony of the scene in Cézanne’s The Card Players.
Gersony began asking one of the taciturn men about his plan to import cica-ocho seed and create mass employment in eastern Nicaragua. The man’s answers were sharp, direct, and without any dissembling. To be sure, some of the man’s comments were downright inappropriate. The man seemed ignorant about how to be a diplomat with a stranger. He also seemed a man accustomed to authority, who understood the region down to the smallest detail; he knew the name of every bridge, it would turn out. Gersony recognized him as a fellow like himself, with realism ingrained in his bones. “He was our guy,” Gersony thought. The man’s name was Rodolfo Jaentschke, a former boxer, and he was a forestry engineer of mixed German, Spanish, Creole, and Miskito extraction: a character straight out of Conrad’s Nostromo. His sidekick was Miguel Abella, an accountant who also knew all about the region.
“Would you run my entire project here?” Gersony asked Jaentschke. As incredible as it seems, he had instantly decided he could trust this man with millions of dollars. It testified to his ability to spot talented people in random encounters without going through conventional channels.
Paul Cézanne’s The Card Players, which reminded Gersony of a critical memory from Nicaragua.
“Yes,” Jaentschke answered.
“I don’t know why, but I had a firm instinct that I could have faith in this man,” Gersony says.
Gersony returned to Managua the next day and recommended to Ballantyne a labor-intensive transportation infrastructure program to go along with a reforestation project to plant eight million trees. There would also be the purchase of twenty thousand machetes to clear the bush—and put even more people to work—as well as the importation from Colombia of cica-ocho rice seed for planting.
“The international community is still dividing up aid among the warring groups,” he told Ballantyne. “With my plan, everyone who wants a job will get one, reducing criminality and repairing the underlying causes of dissent.”
Ballantyne hired Gersony for six months to start the project, and Gersony promptly hired Jaentschke to be his foreman. The $5 million project was all done on a handshake. Only someone as self-assured and charismatic as Janet Ballantyne could have pulled it off. It would have been altogether impossible to do in today’s Washington.
The six months would stretch into four years, with Tony Jackson soon brought in as Gersony and Jaentschke’s assistant. Tony settled into a wooden Miskito house on stilts in Puerto Cabezas, where he worked together with a relief worker for MSF-Holland, Rose-marie de Loor, with whom he would fall in love and adopt two malnourished children. Every visiting international journalist wanted to meet and be briefed by Tony, partly on account of his charming theatrical manner and British accent.7
Gersony, as usual, stayed in the background. Ballantyne shrewdly got Cindy Davis a job helping in the demobilization of the contras, so that Gersony would be, for personal reasons, stuck in the country. Cindy, fresh from studying in Antigua, Guatemala, now spoke passable Spanish. Bob and Cindy would later be married on Halloween 1992, at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center, with Janet Ballantyne in attendance, presiding as the virtual godmother of the festivities.
In effect, Violeta Chamorro, Nicaragua’s new leader, had subcontracted the eastern half of her country to Janet Ballantyne, who in turn subcontracted it to Bob Gersony, who then further subcontracted it to Rodolfo Jaentschke and Tony Jackson. Chamorro and Ballantyne had instantly liked each other, and Ballantyne had instantly liked Gersony. With only a small overhead in emergency relief, crime dramatically decreased and commerce blossomed in eastern Nicaragua while Gersony was there. Thanks to Tony and Jaentschke, everything was accounted for with receipts. By the end of the project, Tony would become Jaentschke’s virtual factotum, as though they were brothers in the womb.
The project, which employed over three thousand people, received the highest USAID audit rating: “no findings, no recommendations.”
By the time the project was completed four years later, 500 miles of road would be repaired with picks and shovels, and 411 wooden bridges would either be built from scratch or rebuilt using eight-foot saws. Gersony forbade chain saws, which encourage clear-cutting and would have led to fewer people being employed. Six million pine trees and one million hardwoods, including mahogany, teak, and oak, would be planted. For a moment in time there was a visceral identification on the part of the people of eastern Nicaragua with the United States of America. The United States had supplied the money, but the indigenous people built everything with their own hands. At the ceremony marking the end of the project in January 1995, Ambassador John Maisto’s wife would operate an enormous tractor to officially open a road, a photo op that would run in the national newspapers back in Managua.
One of the bridges that Bob, Tony Jackson, and Rodolfo Jaentschke had built on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast.
“It all grew out of the methodology,” Gersony explains, “listening, in interview after interview, to the felt needs of the people themselves. We never imposed our values on them.”
* * *
—
During these four years in Nicaragua—the first half of t
he 1990s—Gersony, with Ballantyne’s approval, got called away for urgent assignments in Liberia and Rwanda, which, like Nicaragua though in radically different ways, demonstrated how the fall of the Berlin Wall in Europe carried little meaning elsewhere. Gersony’s base in Central America and his forays to Africa put him completely outside the mindset of those describing a new world order.
* * *
—
It was the end of July 1993. Gersony was sitting in his large and well-appointed USAID mission office offering a panoramic view of Managua, the nicest office he had ever had. But he was bored out of his mind with the Nicaraguan project, which, thanks largely to Rodolfo Jaentschke and Tony Jackson, was essentially running on autopilot.
The phone rang.
A woman was on the line, an assistant to United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, inquiring about Mr. Gersony’s availability to be on a three-person panel investigating a recent massacre in Liberia.
Gersony was interested.
“Does the job pay?” he asked.
The woman said it shouldn’t be a problem. The next day she called back. A fee with expenses was arranged.
Gersony left Tony and Cindy in charge of the eastern half of Nicaragua, and flew to New York to meet the U.N. secretary-general. It turned out that Melissa Wells, who had supported Gersony’s work in Mozambique as the American ambassador there, was now the U.N. undersecretary general of administration and management, and she had recommended Gersony to Boutros-Ghali. Gersony’s meeting with Boutros-Ghali was perfunctory. Boutros-Ghali barely knew who Gersony was. But with the meeting began Gersony’s engagement with a massacre in Liberia that defies polite description; which involves realities about people and places that Western elites have trouble dealing with, unless they can twist them into a simple morality tale of good and evil.
For in Liberia, as V. S. Naipaul once wrote about an imaginary African country, “To talk of trouble was to pretend there were laws and regulations that everyone could acknowledge. Here there was nothing. There had been order once, but that order had its own dishonesties and cruelties…We lived in that wreckage,” since without law of some kind, there was no meaning to anything.8
* * *
—
It had all started in April 1980, when Master Sergeant Samuel Doe, an ethnic-Krahn tribesman, led a group of disaffected soldiers into the presidential mansion in the Liberian capital of Monrovia and stabbed to death President William Tolbert, Jr., in his bed. Tolbert was an Americo-Liberian, a descendant of American and Caribbean slaves, a group that had ruled the country since independence as a back-to-Africa movement. Doe’s rule was the first to introduce indigenous West Africans into the top of the power structure. But Charles Taylor, a leading ally of Doe, had a falling-out with him and, after some years in exile, involving an escape from a Massachusetts correctional facility, reentered Liberia from the Ivory Coast in 1989 in order to lead an insurrection with his newly formed National Patriotic Front of Liberia.
Soon a certain Prince Yormie Johnson broke away from Taylor to form his own militia group to topple Doe. It was Prince Johnson who captured Doe in September 1990 and immediately tortured and mutilated him. There is a video on the Internet showing the entire spectacle, in which Johnson is sipping a beer while one of Doe’s ears is cut off. Doe’s naked body was then carried through the streets of Monrovia, while his limbs and other body parts were hacked off, to prove to the population that he wasn’t protected by black magic, as the late leader had claimed. The macabre event ended with Doe’s decapitation.
While Taylor’s and Prince Johnson’s forces then vied for control, a conference of Liberian notables, meeting outside the country, anointed Amos Sawyer as an interim president. Nevertheless, Doe’s ethnic Krahns still dominated the Armed Forces of Liberia, the semi-official national army. Meanwhile, Taylor’s forces of ethnic Gios and Manos absorbed Prince Johnson’s little army, with Taylor forming a base of operations in Gbarnga, inland in central Liberia. Keeping Taylor’s troops from overrunning Monrovia on the Atlantic coast was the Krahn-dominated Armed Forces of Liberia, which had been subcontracted to do so by the Nigerian-led ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group, a regional peacekeeping force. Prince Johnson was now out of the picture.
Charles Taylor’s territory in central Liberia was a ghoulish hell of armed, drug-crazed teenagers with bizarre wigs, painted faces, and decorated, semi-naked bodies, who had mutilated and dismembered their victims. Stalking the area was General Butt Naked, a nom de guerre, who wore only a loincloth and was associated with child sacrifice and cannibalism: he worked for an allied warlord, Roosevelt Johnson. As a reporter in the region the same year, encountering such forces, I learned that the most controversial thing you could put in your story was merely describing what you saw in front of your face. Joan Didion had described the frontier territory of war-torn El Salvador as hovering close to the “cultural zero.”9 Well, Liberia, along with neighboring Sierra Leone in the 1990s, was closer still to that baseline.
Unlike Taylor’s soldiers, the Armed Forces of Liberia were dressed normally. They wore battle fatigues but were more systematically brutal than the rebel groups. On the evening of July 29, 1990, in Monrovia, they murdered several hundred men, women, and children with knives, guns, and machetes—people they assumed were Taylor supporters, because they were members of the Gio and Mano tribes.10
Carter Camp, where another massacre occurred—the one Gersony would investigate—was located just outside the town of Harbel, forty miles east of Monrovia along an excellent tarmac road by the coast. Carter Camp was at the edge of the Firestone rubber plantation, the biggest employer in the country. ECOMOG troops, with the help of the Armed Forces of Liberia, had cleared Taylor’s soldiers from the area. But the Krahn-dominated Liberian government army believed that the local inhabitants remained Taylor sympathizers, and had therefore moved them into work camps, of which Carter was one. The people in Carter Camp were harassed constantly by government soldiers, who accused them of passing information to Charles Taylor. The government troops, only nominally controlled by Amos Sawyer, warned the camp inhabitants of a day of reckoning.
At about midnight on the night of Saturday–Sunday, June 5–6, 1993, armed soldiers systematically massacred and mutilated nearly six hundred Carter Camp residents, mainly women, children, and elderly persons. Some forty-five bags of rice and beans were removed from the camp, apparently carried by a hundred or more survivors abducted by the attackers. Roughly a thousand other survivors escaped and fled in several directions.11
Three days later, Trevor Gordon-Somers, a Jamaican, the special representative in Monrovia of the U.N. secretary-general, decided to personally conduct an investigation. He set up tables in the market square of Harbel, using soldiers from the Armed Forces of Liberia as a security detail. He interviewed a few dozen survivors in front of a large crowd. The survivors all said it was too dark to identify the perpetrators. Within days Somers, along with the national coroner, Dr. Isaac “Skeleton” Moses, and several other investigators, formally announced that Charles Taylor’s forces were guilty of the massacre. But there were enormous contradictions in each of their reports. One report said there had been a pitched battle near the town, another said there had not been. There was no crime-scene work: no photos taken or maps made, and no one had picked up the spent cartridge shells for analysis.
Meanwhile, Charles Taylor, in his base in Gbarnga, sent a message to James Jonah, the U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs (and a native of Sierra Leone), categorically denying guilt. The United Nations had little choice but to conduct a full-bore investigation, instead of the deeply flawed charade that the U.N. official Gordon-Somers had casually conducted.
* * *
—
Gersony was officially made a member of the investigative panel on August 4, 1993. The first thing he did was fly to Washington to ge
t his own briefing at the State Department. A desk officer there matter-of-factly told him that Charles Taylor was guilty, since the department had “intercepted radio messages” to prove it. Gersony figured that Taylor was no angel, the State Department had intercepts, it was a foregone conclusion, this would be an easy assignment.
In Geneva at the Palais de Nations, Gersony met the other two members of the panel, S. Amos Wako of Kenya and Mahmoud Kassem of Egypt. Amos Wako was of medium height, stout, strong, always smiling, but beneath the smile lay a very serious countenance. He was the attorney general for Daniel arap Moi, the veritable dictator of Kenya. He was essentially Moi’s private lawyer: someone who, as the cliché went, “knew a thing or two because he had seen a thing or two.” Kassem was an Egyptian diplomat, natty and well-coifed, who seemed very protocol-oriented and process-driven. He had been Boutros-Ghali’s colleague in the foreign ministry in Cairo. Rounding out the team was the “secretariat,” that is, the secretary and fixer, Gianni Magazzeni, a career U.N. officer from Italy whom Gersony instantly liked.
The first decision was where to conduct the investigation. Kassem, the natty diplomat, said they should summon the witnesses to Monrovia. Gersony said no, the whole team should go out to the field, to Harbel and Carter Camp. Wako, the chairman of the panel, agreed with Gersony.
En route to Monrovia from Geneva, they all fell into conversation. Gersony wondered aloud, Why would Taylor murder his own supporters? Kassem suggested that maybe Taylor killed his own people to embarrass the government, to show that the government could not protect civilians. If that was the case, Gersony thought, why not kill other civilians rather than his own people? And then Gersony added, Why did many of the survivors flee to Taylor’s lines, in the direction of Gbarnga, rather than toward Monrovia? In truth, though, Gersony only half believed what he was saying. His main thought was that the State Department had intercepts that implicated Taylor: this is a cut-and-dried affair.
The Good American Page 27
