The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Nevertheless, history is not only a matter of large impersonal forces, but of contingency—of unpredictable incidents that can ignite such large forces. To wit, in the beginning, two personalities vied for control of the Tutsi RPF, Paul Kagame and Fred Rwigyema. Rwigyema was a moderate whose vision was to employ the Tutsi force not to invade Hutu-dominated Rwanda at all, but merely to use it as a means of leverage for concessions from the Hutu regime in Kigali. The hardliner here was Paul Kagame, who always envisioned a full-scale invasion. Rwigyema was killed in 1990 in a military operation during a dispute over tactics, and thus it would be Kagame’s vision that prevailed, without which the genocide of 1994 might simply not have happened, or not have happened in the way that it did.

  The French military was now fiercely backing the Hutu regime in Rwanda with the Americans, a bit more vaguely, backing Kagame’s Uganda-based Tutsi force (the upshot of America’s alliance with Museveni, which Bob Gersony had an indirect hand in forging in 1984). By 1993, Kagame’s RPF had pushed deeper into Rwanda. The United Nations sent peacekeepers to occupy the space between the Tutsi RPF forces in the north and the Hutu government forces just to the south. The head of that U.N. force was General Maurice Baril, a French-Canadian: a name that will come up prominently later in this story about Gersony’s Rwanda odyssey.

  At this point the Americans, especially the U.S. ambassador in Kigali, David Rawson (Gersony’s cheerleader from some years back in Somalia), were promoting a power-sharing agreement between Hutu and Tutsi elements in Rwanda; even as diplomats were making increasing demands on a Hutu regime terrified over the prospect of an RPF invasion. In this beehive of an overpopulated country, the bees were humming louder and louder, and the Hutus, angry at concessions made by their own regime, began organizing their militias to slaughter the minority Tutsis.

  The country was on edge, and the Rwandan genocide was sparked by another unpredictable contingency: a Falcon 50 corporate jet carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira (both ethnic Hutus) back from peace talks was shot down over Kigali the evening of April 6, 1994, at almost the same moment that the Tutsi RPF was about to march on the capital.

  Thus began the killing of the minority Tutsis by the majority Hutus, both of whom were emboldened and petrified by both the plane crash and the RPF invasion. What made the Tutsis particular objects of hate was the fact that they were wealthier and better educated, a consequence of having been favored by the Belgian colonial system. In Rwanda, Prunier writes, “all the pre-conditions for a genocide were present: a well-organized civil service, a small tightly-controlled land area, a disciplined and orderly population, reasonably good communications and a coherent ideology containing the necessary lethal potential.” The remnants of the Hutu regime and the militia authorities set up roadblocks, ordered house-to-house searches, drew up detailed lists, and closed off neighborhoods, with the killers using AK-47 assault rifles but mainly machetes (pangas in Swahili). Pogroms multiplied. The relative absence of wild country, unlike so much of Africa, made it harder for people to escape. It was a cascading tsunami of bloodshed. Mutilations and rapes were common. Corpses and limbs were heaped in separate piles. Radio Mille Collines (“a Thousand Hills”), an extremist Hutu media network, exhorted the Hutus to keep murdering. In Washington, Chas Freeman, by now assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, pleaded with the U.S. military’s joint staff to jam all fixed and mobile radios inciting racial violence in Rwanda: but to no avail.5 Roughly 800,000 to 850,000 people—11 percent of the total population, mainly Tutsis—were killed. Around 2 million fled across the border to Tanzania, Burundi, and Zaire, and another 1.5 million or so became internally displaced.6

  In the same time frame in Kigali, the RPF Tutsi invasion force managed to topple the Hutu-led regime that had been perpetrating the genocide, with General Paul Kagame installed as the de facto head of government by July. Moreover, the RPF’s 157th mobile division, commanded by General Fred Ibingira, was quickly moving in a clockwise fashion through the Rwandan provinces of Byumba, Kibungo, and Butare, pacifying the eastern, southeastern, and southern parts of the little country. The Hutu perpetrators of the genocide had by now fled into refugee camps in Zaire, Burundi, and Tanzania.

  In sum, the majority Hutus had committed genocide against the minority Tutsis, but the Tutsis themselves were now on their own warpath as they took over the country from the terrified Hutus. Yet in the outside world it was still a black-and-white situation: the Hutus were like the Nazis, plain and simple, with no mitigating circumstances.

  As for Paul Kagame, he was technically only the vice president under a Hutu president, making the character of the new Rwandan regime somewhat ambiguous. Yet it was he who was really in charge. Kagame is “a cold fish, about as cheerful as a kamikaze pilot,” according to one expert observer. Kagame was good organizationally, but without a moral compass: a bit like Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former Marxist dictator of Ethiopia, himself a passionless, ruthless killer. All Kagame ever had to offer was efficiency and results.

  Kagame had been in charge, and RPF general Ibingira had been sweeping clockwise through Rwanda for several weeks already when Bob Gersony and his three-person team, consisting of himself, his wife, Cindy, and Tony Jackson, touched down in Kigali in a German cargo plane from Nairobi on July 30, 1994.

  * * *

  —

  Bob Gersony’s own involvement in the Rwanda crisis would not have happened at all without a great coincidence.

  He and Cindy had been married for almost two years in July 1994, yet they had never really gone away together. Bob and Cindy found themselves alone in a house in the French village of Chens-sur-Léman, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. Pierre Gassmann, Bob’s old ICRC friend from his Uganda assignment, had lent them his place. It was late morning, Bob and Cindy had just woken up and were settling down to their first exquisite breakfast, sampling the hot bread, fresh butter, and pâtés from the village, amid the vines, trellises, and the expectation of rich coffee and fine wines for Cindy, as Bob eschewed caffeine and alcohol.

  Then the phone rang.

  It was Bill Garvelink, Gersony’s old traveling companion in the Bolivian highlands who now worked for J. Brian Atwood, the administrator of USAID. Atwood had just returned to Washington from Goma in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), where a million refugees from the Rwandan genocide and political crisis had fled.

  In fact, Cindy had been with Atwood in Goma and traveled to this French village by way of Nairobi and Geneva for their vacation. Cindy was on a temporary duty assignment in East Africa for the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, and actually had not been invited to accompany Atwood from Nairobi to Goma, when suddenly the regional director for Africa in OFDA, Katherine Farnsworth, learned that her father had died. So at the very last minute, Cindy was asked to travel with Atwood to Goma on July 18, 1994, in place of Kate Farnsworth.

  Cindy mentioned to Atwood that her husband, Bob Gersony, had once briefed him on Nicaragua. Indeed, did Atwood ever remember that briefing! Gersony had spent literally hours informing Atwood about all the issues involved in reconstruction on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Not only was this news, but the manner of the brief itself had inspired Atwood. This Gersony, Atwood thought, wasn’t just another bureaucrat. When Atwood had asked him whom he respected most, Gersony answered, “Agronomists, because agronomists know how to relate to peasants.”

  For the first time in some years, Bob Gersony was at the forefront of Brian Atwood’s thoughts, thanks to Cindy being accidentally on the plane to Goma and seated next to him.

  Atwood was appalled at the situation in Goma, where there was widespread cholera, little potable water, and Hutu genocidalists mixed in with the mainly Hutu refugees. “Kids with dead eyes mobbed the runway. The water was so dirty it was as dark as Coca-Cola. Hutu military vehicles were still patrolling the r
efugee camps. Hell, it was worse than hell,” Atwood recalls. Though the Hutus had perpetrated the genocide, the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front had meanwhile taken power in the capital of Kigali at roughly the same time, driving Hutus out of the country en masse. In one sense it was a case of good and evil; on another level it was messy and complicated. The messy and complicated part would be something Gersony was destined to discover on his own, to his great horror, interview by interview.

  Atwood, Garvelink said over the phone, wanted Gersony to go immediately to Geneva, the headquarters of UNHCR, and meet with Sadako Ogata, the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about the situation in Goma. Atwood then wanted Gersony to travel to Goma and “straighten things out there.”

  Gersony thought to himself, “Straighten things out! Is he crazy?”

  Goma was a vast conflagration of human suffering and the United Nations and other agencies were doing all that they could just to cope with the mess.

  U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata, who sent Gersony to investigate the situation in Rwanda in 1994.

  “If I go to Goma, I would only be a fifth wheel, a busybody parachutist telling the U.N. and the NGO workers what to do. I would be worse than useless. I would be a distraction.”

  Gersony told Garvelink in no uncertain terms that if he did go to Rwanda as well as Goma and the other refugee camps over the border in whatever capacity, he would only do so accompanied by Cindy and Tony Jackson: this was Francophone Africa, and Jackson spoke fluent French. Jackson was also Gersony’s lifetime “ambassador to the left-wing,” as he always liked to put it, someone particularly useful in an international emergency with so many NGOs on the ground.

  “Whatever you want,” Garvelink answered. (“Negotiating a contract with Bob Gersony had always been a nightmare,” Garvelink recalls.)

  It so happened that Gerald Walzer, the deputy U.N. high commissioner for refugees, the number two person in UNHCR under Mrs. Ogata (it was always “Mrs. Ogata” or “Madame Ogata”), was a friend of Gersony’s from Bangkok, when Gersony had worked on the South China Sea piracy problem a decade earlier. Walzer was a charming Austrian from Vienna just like Gersony’s mother. Gersony decided he would make a day trip to Geneva to see Walzer.

  In Geneva, Gersony told Walzer about Atwood’s idea to send him to Goma. Walzer rolled his eyes. Nevertheless, Gersony advised that the most important thing to do now was to get the refugees home as soon as possible. He remembered the reconciliation-without-revenge strategy of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda in 1986, which had helped bring peace to that country after years of mass killing, a formula that the new Rwandan government might follow.

  “We need to pull hundreds of thousands of Hutus back into Rwanda from camps in Zaire, Uganda, and Tanzania, in order to deprive the Hutu genocidalists of their population base in the camps. Even though the Tutsi RPF controls the new government,” Gersony went on, “Rwanda is simply not viable without the Hutus who make up 85 percent of the population, many or most of whom are not murderers.”

  That was Gersony’s “optimistic thesis” at the moment, a moment when many assumed that the genocide was simply a case of the Hutus killing the Tutsis, sort of like the Germans killing the Jews: the Tutsis being totally innocent and the Hutus totally guilty, in this case. And thus it was not a bad thing that the Tutsis had taken effective power away from the Hutus.

  Of course, the situation was full of far more twists and turns—and of far more tragedy—than that. It was the process of discovering, bit by bit, just how much more convoluted and just how much more tragic the Rwandan catastrophe actually was—how naïve his original thesis was—that Gersony’s greatest professional and personal crisis would begin to unfold.

  Walzer liked Gersony’s thinking and immediately took him in to see Mrs. Ogata, someone as diminutive in size as she was towering in willpower and the ability to make tough decisions. Indeed, she had a very un-Japanese way of saying, in impeccable English, exactly what she thought.7 Mrs. Ogata instantly liked Gersony’s idea of a three-person repatriation force, given that she was under pressure from the new Rwandan government and other parties to stop spending money on genocidal Hutus in refugee camps when Rwanda itself was suffering.

  Gersony, by this time, was well known, and positively so, in the UNHCR family.8 In fact, he was referred to as “a friend of the house.” This most important of U.N. agencies knew of his work in Uganda and Mozambique, and also in Sudan, where he had repaired the relationship between the U.S. government and UNHCR following the rushed departure of Jerry Weaver from Khartoum. There was also Colomoncagua on the Honduras–El Salvador border, where Gersony had kept that refugee camp from being moved and thus ended the State Department’s threat to cut funds to UNHCR.

  The arrangement would be thus: USAID was engaging Gersony to work for—and only report to—UNHCR, so that Tony, Cindy, and Gersony would be completely under United Nations supervision, even as USAID paid Bob’s consulting fee.

  A few days later Bob, Cindy, and Tony got U.N. passports in Geneva as well as UNHCR survival kits: small trunks filled with basic necessities for three weeks in the field.

  * * *

  —

  There was no passport control at the airport when the three of them arrived at the end of July. Kigali was littered with broken glass. Many buildings were without windows. Electricity and water were uncertain. The city constituted a war zone just beginning to rebuild.9 Roman Urasa, the UNHCR representative in Kigali, gave Gersony a hard stare upon meeting him at his office. He had made no plans, no sleeping arrangements for the new arrivals, even as he cautioned them not to stay at a hotel. Urasa, a Tanzanian, bore a grudge against Gersony dating back to Mozambique. It was Gersony’s report criticizing the human rights record of RENAMO that had spoiled Urasa’s carefully laid-out plans to repatriate Mozambican refugees from neighboring countries. At over 5,000 feet in altitude, the nights could be chilly in Kigali. The three slept on the cold stone floor of UNHCR headquarters that first night without their survival kits, which were supposed to have been sent ahead but which never actually arrived. No matter, Gersony thought. With Atwood, Mrs. Ogata, and Walzer all behind him, “I had juice.”

  The next day they moved to the Hôtel des Mille Collines, the famous hotel that had served as a sanctuary for hundreds of Tutsis during the genocide. But the place had been trashed. The toilets were clogged. There was no power or water. Cindy and Tony talked by flashlights with other humanitarian workers at the hotel.

  The three sought help at the USAID office, which they also found in a state of disarray: looted, with furniture toppled, and a calendar page still turned to April, the month the genocide began. But it would be USAID that eventually provided them with a vehicle, driver, and supplies, to which they attached U.N. logos with magnets.

  Gersony figured he needed a very impressive-looking official letter, or laissez-passer, from the Rwandan government in order for the trio to travel throughout the strife-torn country and conduct interviews. He learned that only Jacques Bihozagara, the minister of rehabilitation and a co-founder of the RPF, could provide such a letter. He asked Urasa to arrange a meeting with the minister. Urasa said sullenly that he would work on it.

  Gersony was having dinner one evening in the UNHCR dining room when the UNHCR protection officer for the southern Rwandan province of Butare, Kofi Mable, came over in a frantic state, insisting that he had to talk to Urasa. Mable, a Togolese, told Urasa that a report had come in of hundreds of Hutus being slaughtered in a field by a church. Gersony suggested that, in this case, maybe his team should start their investigations in Butare to the south. But Urasa recommended that Gersony not change his original plan to drive first to the northwest. Gersony was not particularly surprised by what Mable had told them. He had always figured that there would be a certain amount of revenge killings after the genocide. As for Urasa’s lack of interest in the report, Gersony said
nothing.

  Days went by, as Gersony waited for Urasa to arrange a meeting with the Rwandan government minister. Gersony used the time to talk with as many NGO workers as he could.

  Finally, Gerald Walzer phoned UNHCR’s Kigali office from Geneva, and was surprised to learn that Gersony’s team was still not in the field.

  “I can’t go,” Gersony told him. “I need a letter and Urasa has been unable to get me an appointment with the minister.”

  “Put Urasa on the phone,” Walzer said.

  Urasa took the call alone in his private office. Gersony asked no questions. But before the end of the day, Urasa told Gersony that they would meet with Rehabilitation Minister Jacques Bihozagara the next morning, August 9, at eight o’clock.

  The minister appeared unfriendly and skeptical.

  Gersony assured him that his team was only interested in the best way to handle the repatriation of refugees, and he promised that nothing would be made public until the minister and others in his government were briefed on what the repatriation team had found. Gersony wore an extra-earnest expression, something that was easy since that’s how he looked most of the time anyway.