The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  They would call people to meetings: something common in such a hierarchical and well-organized society. The soldiers would deploy in a semicircle, open fire, and slaughter everyone; or sometimes order people into a church and set the building on fire with the help of grenades; or separate people into groups and kill them with machetes in the bush. They would hunt down escapees in the swamps and banana plantations. The army then went from village to village conducting mop-up operations. Machetes were preferred because they were silent. All of the murders were done by uniformed RPF soldiers.

  May and June were the big kill months, before the population widely understood what was happening and hid or escaped over the borders. One hundred percent of the victims were Hutus. The original genocide against the Tutsis had begun in early April and lasted through the end of June, so this second mass killing occurred both in the immediate aftermath and also somewhat parallel to the genocide.

  Gersony estimated that May and June saw a minimum of 20,000 murders of Hutus in Butare and Kibungo, with a minimum of 10,000 in July and August. In sum, the Tutsi RPF committed a minimum of 30,000 murders in order to create a Hutu-free strategic rear base in the south and southeast of the country: to counter the genocidalist center of gravity for the Hutus in the west and over the border in Zaire.

  * * *

  —

  Despite the safety and luxury of Nairobi, Gersony was in a foul mood during the whole week there. He admits, “I was ungrateful, very unpleasant with Cindy and Tony. I was always snapping at them.” Cindy remembers: “When Bob gets worried and nervous, he lashes out. It was the worst I’ve ever seen his behavior in more than twenty-five years of marriage. All he did was question the results, blaming Tony and me. But he couldn’t escape from the evidence we had compiled.”

  Though the conclusions of the research were no real surprise to him, for the first time he was faced with the documented reality of it all. In the back of his mind he had kept hoping that the accounts would add up to a more muddled outcome: revenge killings that had gotten way out of hand. But here in the neutral, antiseptic environment of a Nairobi luxury hotel, the awfulness of his predicament nakedly stared him in the face.

  “I knew no good would come of this for me,” he says, still full of intensity. It was hardly the truth he wanted to share with the world. “There was this genocide in which close to a million people had been murdered only weeks and months ago and the West had done nothing to stop it, so that the immensity of the guilt was overpowering. The Hutus were the Nazis and the Tutsis were the Jews in the minds of concerned and influential people in the outside world. And now I’m the one bringing them news that the very victims of the genocide were killing the perpetrators of it, on a large scale, in an organized and premeditated way. No one would make the distinction between the RPF and the innocent Tutsis, I knew. The messenger of this news would be reputationally ruined, I thought. No one is going to be happy to get this information. I knew our report was going to be attacked and taken apart,” he continues, “and that I would be the one assailed personally: since I am accusing the Tutsis of mass murder right after a genocide against them. It doesn’t get any worse than that. I have always made the distinction between the mass murder of tens of thousands of people and the genocide of hundreds of thousands. But no one attacking me will make that distinction. I really thought this was going to be the end of my career.”

  In bed at night he was plagued by racing thoughts. He took an extra Xanax, a prescribed medication against anxiety, which he had been taking since the mid-1980s.

  He arrived at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in Geneva healthy but in psychological turmoil. Pierre Gassmann came over the first night for drinks with him, Cindy, and Tony in the hotel bar. Gersony, sipping juice, poured his heart out to Pierre. Pierre will never forget the meeting. “Bob was a complete wreck, paranoid, biting his fingernails. I simply told him: ‘All you can do is give them the facts.’ ”

  The meeting with Mrs. Ogata took place September 12, 1994. Beside her around a small table in the corner of her vast office were Gerald Walzer, the deputy high commissioner; François Fouinat, her chief of staff; Kamel Morjane, UNHCR head of Africa; and three other officials.11 Gersony spoke in dense detail, aided by a frayed, dirt-stained, cruddy map of Rwanda: a real map. He began with his positive impressions of Ruhengeri in northwestern Rwanda, in order to build credibility, and then as he narrated his travels around to the south and southeast, his briefing gradually turned darker. After three hours he still hadn’t finished. A second meeting of the same group was scheduled for the next day. At the end of the second briefing, he made clear the distinction between the genocide of the Tutsis and the mass killings of the Hutus that followed soon after.

  He was in no way diminishing the magnitude of the former crime because of the latter, he said.

  Mrs. Ogata spoke.

  She said she would immediately halt organized repatriations of Hutus to Rwanda from neighboring countries. “Mr. Gersony, you’ve done a great job, but this problem goes higher than me.” She then asked him to brief Kofi Annan, the U.N. undersecretary-general for peacekeeping, a Ghanaian, and more importantly a leading candidate to be the next U.N. secretary-general.

  But before he left the room, Mrs. Ogata, explaining that she had nothing on paper regarding this staggering report, asked Gersony for a copy of his briefing notes. He hesitated, then handed them to her reluctantly. His notes were full of all sorts of points of emphasis and personal comments, as these things often are. She has given me her trust and so I will give her mine, he thought. “Don’t worry, I’m putting your notes in my safe, no one will see them,” she said.12

  With Cindy and Tony flying back to Nicaragua, Gersony next traveled to London, where Kofi Annan was at the moment. Gerald Walzer accompanied him there for the sake of support from the head office.

  The two-hour meeting with Annan on September 14, at a hotel near Heathrow airport, went well. After all, Gersony had been recommended by the house. Annan didn’t appear particularly surprised or even perturbed by what Gersony had to say. Annan’s own “moral charisma,” in the words of one journalist, emanated from his self-awareness of the United Nations’ own limitations in such a tragic world,13 though this very attribute could also make him a fatalist. At any rate, Annan already seemed to be strategizing about how to handle the information Gersony had given him. Annan had to be very troubled at this moment, or he should have been. It was Annan, who as head of U.N. peacekeeping, was in the main bureaucratically responsible “for assuring that the UN Mission to Rwanda remained small and weak,” and thus did not do nearly enough to prevent the genocide of the Tutsis.14 Redemption for Annan in conventional terms had to mean standing up for the new Tutsi government. But here was this American contractor telling him that the new Tutsi leaders were themselves guilty of killing a large number of people.

  Both the United Nations and the Americans were backing Kagame’s new government in the face of no other alternative, and Annan was also Washington’s emerging candidate to be the next U.N. secretary-general. However, by this time Mrs. Ogata had sent to him and other top U.N. officials cables that had come from UNHCR’s own field offices at refugee camps in Tanzania and elsewhere, which corroborated Gersony’s findings. Thus, Annan asked Gersony to immediately brief U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali’s inner circle in New York.

  Gersony told officials at U.N. headquarters in New York that he needed several hours for the briefing. There was no pushback. The meeting took place September 16, 1994. It was a Friday, he remembers. The meeting was chaired by Marrack Goulding, the U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs, a truly formidable British presence in U.N. circles who apologized to Gersony for the absence of Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, who was away in Japan. Goulding sat opposite Gersony. Packing the table on all sides were six others, including the legendary Algerian negotiator Lakhdar Brahimi; the Peruvian diplomat and Boutros-Ghali’s s
enior political adviser, Álvaro de Soto; and the Tunisian diplomat Hédi Annabi.15

  Gersony, with the aid of his frayed map, spoke for two hours without interruption. At the end, Hédi Annabi, who would later be killed in an earthquake in Haiti, said, “Nothing Mr. Gersony has said surprises me. I have heard these kinds of reports.” There were no challenges, just requests for clarification. There was never a question of whether, only a question of the protocol for taking action. Goulding immediately wrote to Boutros-Ghali that Gersony would be instructed to return to Rwanda to brief its effective leader, Paul Kagame. Without explicitly endorsing Gersony’s findings, the United Nations would use his report to demand “that if such killings are indeed taking place, they be immediately stopped.”16

  Kofi Annan, who was in Burundi by this time, would be diverted to Rwanda in order to accompany Gersony to the meeting with Kagame. The United Nations was playing it straight at this point in the Rwanda crisis. But as with many international crises, the United Nations was not really in control of the policy to the extent that the United States was.

  Before the meeting ended, Gersony asked Goulding’s permission to brief the USAID administrator Brian Atwood in Washington, merely as a courtesy since it had been Atwood who originally initiated his reporting trip to Rwanda. Goulding consented. Gersony called Atwood to ask if he could meet alone with him the very next morning. Atwood agreed.

  Though it was a quiet Saturday morning, Atwood ambushed him. While Atwood remembers meeting first alone with Gersony, Gersony remembers entering Atwood’s large, intimidating office and being met by a large group. Gersony had a quick decision to make: Should he give them all the long, no-holds-barred brief? He decided he had no choice.

  At the meeting were eight others besides Atwood, including the deputy USAID administrator, Carol Lancaster; George Moose, the assistant secretary of state for Africa; and Donald Steinberg, the director for Africa at the National Security Council.17 This group’s reaction to Gersony’s brief was quite different from that at the United Nations the day before. Here no one was pleased with Gersony. The reason: Kagame was more of an American-supported ruler than a United Nations one. The United States, having failed to take action to prevent the original genocide against the Tutsis, now embraced the new Tutsi regime as a means of moral self-absolution; moreover, Kagame was a close ally of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, another U.S. client. Gersony was being driven crazy by the constant need of American officials to simplify a complex situation and put into neat semantic categories what was going on. George Moose in particular, according to Gersony, delivered a rambling, semi-coherent monologue, criticizing minor aspects of the brief.

  Gersony rolled his eyes, and was blunt: “I don’t see your point.”

  Gersony longed for the days when Chet Crocker and Hank Cohen had held that same job in the Reagan and elder Bush administrations.

  But there was a lot more going on than that. Gersony, for all his attributes (and precisely because of his attributes), could also be, in the words of a colleague, “annoying, persistent, and somewhat over-powering.” Moreover, “it was the very nature of his work that required a ‘trust me’ element. For there was always the possibility that he didn’t get it all right.” This came to a head in Rwanda, where an early presumption of absolute truth had existed that Gersony exploded with his methodology. And yet as impressive as his methodology was, being a methodology that dealt with human experience in the midst of war and chaos, he was dealing with Shakespearean elements that even the best methodology could not quite capture.

  Maybe some of his interviewees had lied to him; maybe some were genuinely confused. He clearly got the big picture right, but beyond that, there could have been nuances that he missed. It’s possible that he also didn’t have the full story.

  “A lot of people lost it over Rwanda. Rwanda led to a lot of soul-searching, which often results in bad analysis,” one State Department official says.

  Margaret McKelvey, a veteran of the Africa desk at the refugee bureau, adds: “The skepticism about Bob’s analysis was somewhat ironic. Six months earlier Kagame’s RPF had been our enemy, its representatives not even allowed to enter the State Department building. Now, after the Hutu-led genocide, the RPF went suddenly from being bad guys to being heroes. So the RPF was the enemy until they weren’t. But Gersony brought us back to reality about the RPF.”

  In any case, Arlene Render, office director of central African affairs in the State Department, sent two cables to all U.S. embassies the following week about Gersony’s Saturday morning briefing, stating that “the team found that systematic killings by the RPA [RPF] were taking place…and the team will inquire what steps Kagame plans to take to halt these abuses.” The entire matter, the cable said, would be taken to the U.N. Security Council.18

  Gersony, thoroughly tense and exhausted, having gotten little rest since he had originally left for Africa from Pierre Gassmann’s French villa two months earlier, flew back to New York and then on to Nairobi, where he met up with Kofi Annan and Kamel Morjane, the very sympathetic Tunisian deputy to Mrs. Ogata. From Nairobi, the three flew to Kigali, a place that Gersony now dreaded, where he was to deliver the same briefing of several hours’ duration to one hostile audience after another. It was September 20, 1994.19

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  —

  The first such briefing he gave at Annan’s insistence was to Shahryar Khan, Boutros-Ghali’s special representative to Rwanda and a former Pakistani foreign secretary. Also in the room was Major General Guy Tousignant, the latest in a line of French-Canadian officers who had led UNAMIR, or the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda.20 Both Khan and Tousignant were uncomfortable with Gersony’s findings, which put them on the spot. In such a small country, how could they not have known what was going on? But Gersony was blunt with them, telling his audience exactly what he had told every audience thus far:

  “I stake my twenty-five-year reputation on my conclusions which I recognize are diametrically opposite to assumptions made by U.N. and other observers on the ground here.”21

  Major General Tousignant simply remarked when Gersony had finished: “Now I understand why the Rwandan government wouldn’t let UNAMIR into Kibungo.”22

  Paul Kagame was at this time in South Africa meeting with the recently elected Nelson Mandela. In fact, Kagame might actually have extended his visit there by a day or two in order to avoid seeing Annan and Gersony. Thus, Gersony ended up briefing Faustin Twagiramungu, the figurehead Hutu prime minister in the Tutsi-controlled state. At the rectangular table Twagiramungu sat at one end and Gersony at the other. Annan and Morjane sat on the side closer to the prime minister. The room was packed with RPF military intelligence figures and soldiers who spoke English: all allies of English-speaking Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni. Twagiramungu was probably the only Hutu in the room, and he also spoke French. The scene was testimony to the political distance that this former Francophone colony had traveled away from its Belgian and French roots.

  Gersony felt like he was at the wrong end of a firing squad.

  As with all his briefings, Gersony had his map and began with the positive developments in Ruhengeri that he had observed at the start of his field trip and his conflicted appraisal of Gisenyi, which helped build credibility for a comprehensive, balanced analysis. After all, no one at this date had randomly interviewed as many people in as many locations as he had. Ninety minutes later, after he finished, there was a moment of quiet.

  The prime minister said: “I myself am a Hutu and I don’t believe these reports are true.” But he then proceeded to ask softball questions. What emerged was a non-denial denial of what Gersony’s research showed. Twagiramungu would flee Rwanda into exile in Belgium the following year.23 Cutting off the prime minister, a member of the Tutsi military intelligence team asked Gersony:

  “How can you be sure the people you interviewed were Hutus?”

  “Why
would hundreds of Tutsis, selected randomly and interviewed alone in different locations, all pretend to be Hutus and then give false information?”

  The prime minister asked: “How did you arrive at the figure of thirty thousand killed?”

  Indicating the figure was “an order to magnitude,” Gersony explained his methodology. Crucially, the killings were large-scale and systematic.

  At the end, Annan privately signaled to Gersony some concern over the numbers question.

  Kamel Morjane told Gersony, “You did fine.”

  Next, Gersony went to the home of Roman Urasa, head of the UNHCR office in Kigali, to brief him. Urasa told him at the end, “You’ve made our life very difficult.” The truth seemed to affect Urasa less than the political complications that the truth would cause for the local office. Gersony was by now getting reactions from two types of people: the protection-oriented officials, who concentrated on the truth and its implications for innocents still at the mercy of the RPF; and the politically oriented officials, who jumped immediately to what it meant for their own positions, and those of their governments and organizations.

  The U.S. ambassador to Rwanda, David Rawson, had helped Gersony enormously and heaped praise on him during the Mozambique and Somalia episodes of his life. But Rawson was now a different man: he must have been because of what he had witnessed. The son of medical missionaries in the region, he had grown up a speaker of Kinyarwanda. He was one of the State Department’s exemplary Africa hands, akin to the Arabists and China hands of old. But because he had played a significant role in the diplomatic process that forced political concessions on the Hutus, just prior to the genocide they committed against the Tutsis—and because he had personally witnessed the piles of bodies along the roadsides—Rawson may have been seeking atonement by championing the new Tutsi regime. At the end of the Rwanda tragedy, Rawson would seem to have no friends, only detractors. Gersony, who was no stranger to personal trauma, recognized the turmoil Rawson was in.