The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  About two dozen excited local journalists greeted the panel members upon arrival at Roberts International Airport in Monrovia. They shouted questions. Wako handled it expertly, Gersony thought. Wako told the reporters in a stentorian tone that the panel would have nothing to say about the investigation until it was all completed, then the findings would be made public.

  * * *

  —

  Monrovia. A mishmash of shanties and corrugated iron roofs covered in orange rust, vegetation bleeding out of the gaps between the shanties; piles of trash in the middle of the roads, the “slapping, striding press of people”; teeming markets, mildewed modern buildings, all patrolled by jumpy soldiers.12 The whole place oozed incipient chaos and insecurity. A place that could be safe in one instant might be a murder scene the next. Little electricity unless you owned a diesel generator. No streetlights, no mail delivery, a telephone system covering only a few blocks of downtown. The panel members were driven to the United Nations compound at the edge of the city, secured with armed guards and gates. They slept and ate most of their meals there.

  After dinner the first night they met with Trevor Gordon-Somers, the local U.N. official who had already conducted his own, quick investigation. Gordon-Somers acted annoyed by the very creation and presence of the panel. Gersony asked Gordon-Somers if he had worried that interviewing survivors in front of the Harbel townspeople might affect their answers. Gordon-Somers became more annoyed.

  The next morning Gianni Magazzeni drove the panel members in a U.N. car to Harbel, a small market town of wooden shacks with corrugated iron roofs. There was no damage to the structures, no spent cartridge shells or any other sign that a battle had been fought here, as one of the government investigations claimed.

  They walked to Carter Camp. It was littered with spent cartridge shells. They ordered a collection: the shells with their serial numbers could tell them what type of weapons were used. They also ordered a diagram made of the camp. The next day they split up into two teams to interview survivors. Wako and Gersony constituted one team, Kassem and Magazzeni the other.

  Wako and Gersony trusted each other at this point, and they agreed to conduct interviews according to Gersony’s methodology. They found every survivor, interviewed in isolation, to be authoritative and detailed in their answers, provided in excellent English by these native Bassa speakers. They could even identify and name the perpetrators.

  Gersony thought that such people, if only given a chance, could do well anywhere. They just happened to have been born in a place without any institutional base, so that thugs and liars ruled. In a world of no real government like Liberia, there was no right and wrong, because there were no consequences for any act.

  According to the eyewitnesses, the timeline of what had happened was the following:

  On May 27, almost ten days before the massacre, the World Food Programme began to stop food distributions to government soldiers. Some days after this, government soldiers, now furious and threatening, began confiscating food from the Carter Camp residents. In the days immediately prior to the massacre, an Armed Forces of Liberia private, twenty-three-year-old Zarkpa (pronounced “Zagba”) Gorh, who ran the camp as the commandant—and who had taken one of the girls in the camp to live with him—began showing a new group of government soldiers wearing black berets all over the camp. The government army then ordered a tight curfew for the night of June 5. That afternoon, one of the new soldiers, a Lieutenant Kollie, had told a gathering of camp residents:

  We suspect you people in the camp of being NPFL [Taylor’s] soldiers because we don’t know the difference between you people and the NPFL soldiers. So if anything happens, we’ll come and kill everyone here….You people will die, but we military people will know how to save ourselves.13

  Another government soldier said, “You are feeding and keeping the rebels…we shall deal with you tonight.”14

  The differences in what would turn out to be thirty-three individual survivor accounts (in addition to fifty other interviews conducted in the vicinity) were based solely on where exactly in the sprawling camp of tiny wooden and iron dwellings the eyewitnesses happened to be at the time of the violence.

  There was considerable moonlight the night of June 5. Camp residents were awakened near midnight by the rumble of arriving vehicles and the sound of gunfire, which soon became deafening. Krahn-speaking soldiers—more corroboration that it was the government army—began ordering people out of their houses. Six witnesses said they saw or heard Private Zarkpa Gorh leading the soldiers from house to house and ordering people outside to their deaths. One witness reported seeing Zarkpa himself killing a camp resident. The soldiers did most of their killing with machetes. No rapes were reported. Not a single survivor identified the perpetrators as members of Taylor’s army, the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. In any case, there was no possibility of NPFL vehicles being able to drive through ECOMOG and government lines—the only way for them to get to the camp. One survivor, who was ordered to carry a heavy bag of rice to the nearby government army camp, gave this account:

  “Come outside!” the soldiers shouted. They said, “Why do you need this cap, this belt, these shoes?” and took them from me. I saw two of my children and seven others dead in front of my house. There were many, many dead all around the camp. I saw a baby with the head cut off….There were many soldiers in the camp, the same army soldiers that always came to the camp….They put a whole bag of rice on my head….“If you put this down, we’ll kill you.”15

  Gathering all this information with Wako through one interview after another, and learning that the other team of Kassem and Magazzeni was hearing the very same stories, Gersony kept wondering: What about those intercepts that Washington said it had, and which he had been briefed on? Something was not adding up.

  Walking back from Camp Carter to Harbel after another day of interviewing, Gersony let Wako, Kassem, and Magazzeni get ahead of him, so that he could quietly slip off by himself into an area of shacks just before the town, a tactic he had used in eastern Chad and other places. Gersony saw an old man and asked him, “Was there ever a battle here between government and rebel soldiers [like one of the previous investigators had claimed]?

  “No, there was no battle. The government soldiers just moved into the camp.”

  He spoke to two other people. Same answers. These people were under the protection of the government army, yet corroborated the survivors’ accounts that government troops had committed the massacre.

  It was time to interview Charles Taylor.

  * * *

  —

  Gianni Magazzeni drove the group in their U.N. car over a hundred miles inland through some of the wettest, densest forests in West Africa, in a northeasterly direction to Gbarnga. Now there was roadblock after roadblock manned by “these creatures,” in Gersony’s words: young men bearing assault rifles and practically naked with wigs and paint all over them, stimulated by drugs and alcohol. This was all Taylor-controlled territory.

  Gbarnga was a sprawling encampment. There was no electricity and they had to use flashlights. Charles Taylor’s house was at the top of a hill. He kept the group waiting for many hours until he received them at one in the morning. His office was a vast room filled with ornate, overstuffed furniture in the French style, dripping with gold leaf, a monument to bad taste given the milieu.

  Taylor was very direct. He again categorically denied any role in the Carter Camp atrocities. “I’ve done many bad things in my life. But I did not do that massacre.” This rebel leader, who would later be convicted of war crimes in Sierra Leone, appeared urbane and rational. “You can walk around here all you want, for as many days as you want, and interview anyone you want, unescorted. No one will follow you.”

  Taylor was as good as his word. There was no interference. Out of sight and out of hearing, they interviewed one displaced person after anoth
er who had fled Carter Camp to come to Gbarnga. It was the same story that they had heard from survivors on the other side of the battle lines. One man cried about his lost son. When Gersony told him that his son was alive and he had interviewed him in Carter Camp, the man cried again. Every detail of Trevor Gordon-Somers’s conclusion was contradicted by everyone.

  The conclusion was becoming inescapable.

  “The four of us were talking to each other all the time in intimate conditions for days, probing each other’s thoughts and opinions, and the stories we kept hearing were highly credible,” recalls Gianni Magazzeni. “Bob, especially, was gathering every single thread of information and sequencing them. And his typing was amazing.”

  But what about those intercepts?

  They went back to the coast near Monrovia, this time headed to ECOMOG headquarters. It was not an easy trip. They got stuck alongside a river in the rainy season and had to radio Monrovia for another vehicle. But they never felt unsafe. “These were still the days before the Iraq War when the U.N. flag really protected you,” Magazzeni says, referring to the attacks on U.N. personnel in Iraq. Reaching the ECOMOG camp, they met a Nigerian general. He was all British-style spit and polish, a universe removed from the Liberian soldiery. He casually mentioned that Taylor’s men must have committed the massacre; after all, he said, “We have the [transcribed] conversations.”

  “Can I see them?” Gersony asked.

  “Of course,” the general answered.

  Gersony read them carefully. He could not believe his eyes. The cables were dated days after the massacre had already taken place. All they contained was a mention of a lack of food for the soldiers of Taylor’s NPFL and the possibility of having to kill a few people.16

  Gersony felt relief. The panel was on the right track and the State Department had gotten it wrong. Because by Foggy Bottom standards Liberia was a secondary matter, probably nobody in an upper-level position had read the intercepts and compared the dates with those of the massacre. It was nothing that the bureaucracy was paying close attention to. Once again, he thought, the situation on the ground was opposite to what officials in Washington believed. As for the opinion of the ECOMOG general, the panel assumed that because ECOMOG was now allied with the Armed Forces of Liberia, it had no incentive to blame government soldiers for what had happened at Carter Camp.

  The last day of the investigation they interviewed Private Zarkpa Gorh at the U.N. compound in Monrovia. Sullen, looking down and away, disdainful of the panel’s purpose, he denied everything, even that he had lived in the camp.

  * * *

  —

  They flew back first-class. Only with the United Nations would Gersony ever do so. In the cabin they began the drafting of the report, with Gersony doing the typing and essentially the writing, too. He was always meant to be the workhorse of the panel, with Wako and Kassem there to provide the expertise, as well as a ceremonial imprimatur. “I always thought of the U.N. investigation as the ‘Gersony report,’ ” remarks Jeff Drumtra, the Africa policy analyst for the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants at the time. “Bob’s strength, when it was all said and done, came down to his exhaustive methodology, which was like that of the best journalists on steroids.”

  The panel members met with Boutros-Ghali in New York. A few days later, on September 10, 1993, the United Nations published the executive summary of the report blaming the Liberian government army for the massacre; however, the full, seventy-five-page document, again written by Gersony and Magazzeni, was never actually released. The New York Times and The Washington Post gave it prominent coverage.17 The State Department, in a reversal of its previous view, endorsed the findings, backed by the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia. The Liberian interim government of Amos Sawyer challenged the findings but removed the government army from the Harbel area. Neither ECOMOG nor a single NGO disputed the report.

  Charles Taylor was later vanquished and his ragtag murderous army dissolved. As a tenuous peace took hold, one task of the Liberian establishment was to absolve themselves and their political predecessors of any responsibility for past actions. Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, funded by international donors, became a vehicle for this. In a report riddled with vast amounts of plagiarism of the U.N. report’s own language—where blame was merely shifted to Charles Taylor—the Truth and Reconciliation Commission absolved the Armed Forces of Liberia of any wrongdoing. Once the plagiarism was pointed out, the commission’s report on the Camp Carter massacre disappeared from its website. Charles Taylor was guilty of legions of crimes, but not this particular one.

  “And the guilty went unpunished, bringing shame on themselves and their enablers,” Gersony concludes, shaking with anger decades later, his voice cracking. He still refuses to accept the Hobbesian state of affairs in Liberia, in which, because there were no responsible institutions to enforce order, there was no practical way to separate right from wrong and thus erect a moral community, however rudimentary.

  Liberia was, in a way, the saddest place he would ever go because while people went on suffering, there were never any consequences for the perpetrators. There was no higher authority to appeal to.

  CHAPTER 11

  Rwanda

  1994

  “You Told the Truth….Let Me Worry About the Rest.”

  The genocide against almost a million ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda in east-central Africa, perpetrated by the majority Hutus in the spring of 1994, was one of the most important events of the twentieth century; and constituted an additional, monumental piece of evidence that the world had not changed nearly as much as American triumphalists and other starry-eyed proponents of globalization and democracy believed following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.

  Perhaps no one understands better how the Rwandan genocide transpired and how it was misunderstood than the French expert on Africa, Gérard Prunier. Prunier’s classic work, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide, published in 1995, contains a sharp criticism of Bob Gersony’s field research in post-genocide Rwanda. But in a postscript, copyright 1997, Prunier disavows that earlier criticism and praises Gersony. What happened to change Prunier’s mind and make close friends out of intellectual enemies is its own epic story, which involves Gersony in a controversy reaching up to the highest officials in the United Nations. But this saga must begin with the genocide itself, and Prunier’s interpretation of it.

  * * *

  —

  The Rwanda genocide, writes Prunier, was not a factor of biology: of tall and thin people with sharp features from some vague Semitic extraction (the Tutsis) and shorter, stockier ones of Bantu extraction from east-central Africa (the Hutus) predestined “to disembowel each other” like “cats and dogs.” It was the result of a process rooted in specific human choices that can be studied and analyzed. Nor, for that matter, is Rwanda as a landscape some dense, interminable jungle like Liberia. It has beautiful vistas and four seasons, so that the whole country looks like a “gigantic garden,” with very few tsetse flies and malarial mosquitoes. This engendered, as Prunier explains, “centralized forms of political authority” and a “high degree of social control,” the very opposite of the sort of chaos often associated with Africa.1

  Belgium, the colonial power, created a modern Rwanda that was efficient and brutal in the 1920s, with the native population under constant mobilization for the purposes of construction and working in the fields. Rwanda, it emerges in Prunier’s telling, was more a place of plans and systems and hierarchies than of spontaneity. And by favoring one group over the other—the Nilotic Tutsis over the Bantu Hutus—the European colonialists, in particular the Belgians, fostered at every dimension of the church and state an attitude of resentment and inferiority on the part of the Hutus, thus lighting a very deliberate, slow-burning fuse.

  It was precisely because of the many years of Belgian harping on the superiority of the Tutsis that the let
hal idea of “race” came to define the differences between one part of the Rwanda population and the other part. Consequently, in 1959, the Hutus toppled the Tutsi monarchy and over 100,000 Tutsis fled to neighboring countries. This intercommunal violence continued into the early 1960s.2 In 1963, writes the journalist Philip Gourevitch, “a band of several hundred Tutsi guerrillas swept into southern Rwanda from a base in Burundi and advanced to within twelve miles of Kigali before being wiped out by Rwandan forces under Belgian command.” In response, Hutus massacred tens of thousands of Tutsis in southern Rwanda.3

  In the decades that followed, the Tutsis formed their own invasion force in exile. Now that the Belgians were long gone, the French, particularly the French army, became deeply invested in supporting the Hutu regime against this Tutsi invasion force, which had originated in the violence begun by the Hutus themselves. The French army justified its strategy by telling itself that the Hutu regime was democratic. But with the Hutus making up 85 percent of the population, what really existed was not the spirit of democracy but merely the tyranny of the “tribal” majority, wrapped up in a phony moralism against the so-called feudalistic Tutsis. Prunier does not use the word “tribal” in a pejorative sense, by the way. As he writes, “if tribes did not exist, they would have to be invented.” In a world of illiteracy and parochial interests, where philosophies are abstract inventions restricted to intellectuals, “solidarity is best understood in terms of a close community.”4

  This close community brought together the Nilotic Tutsis with the Banyankole of southern Uganda, Ugandan leader Yoweri Museveni’s tribe, which helped make allies of Museveni and Tutsi leader Paul Kagame. This is how Kagame’s RPF (Rwandan Patriotic Front) was able to utilize Uganda to invade Hutu-led Rwanda from the north. In fact, when Museveni was in the bush fighting the Ugandan government of Milton Obote, Paul Kagame acted as Museveni’s chief of military intelligence. Thousands of Museveni’s fighters were actually Rwandan Tutsis. This is how the Tutsi RPF came to be formed in Uganda after Museveni came to power there in the 1980s, sending shivers down the spine of the Rwandan Hutus next door. They knew back then that sooner or later they might be invaded by the very people who had oppressed them for so many years. Another thing that terrified them was the 1972 slaughter of many tens of thousands of fellow Hutus by Tutsis in neighboring Burundi to the south.