The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Rawson insisted on seeing Gersony alone, without any other embassy officers present. Gersony was very wary, afraid of a “he said, she said” report of their meeting. After listening to Gersony and praising him for his work elsewhere in Africa, Rawson suggested that the Hutus he had interviewed may have been victims of a collective hallucination.

  “We interviewed hundreds at random in ninety-one locations in several countries. Are you saying they all had the same hallucination?” Gersony asked him.

  A quarter century later Rawson recalls to me:

  “While I thought Gersony’s sampling technique somehow captured the story of Somalia’s nomadic clansmen, who are independent and difficult to pin down, I wondered if his sampling technique worked in Rwanda with its dense population, and history of outward conformity to expected behavior. In Rwanda, stories quickly spread, and became internalized and repeated as one’s own.”

  Gersony shoots back:

  “Rawson had no problem with our sampling technique in northwestern Rwanda—Ruhengeri and Gisenyi—where he liked the results: the sampling technique in his mind was only flawed in southern and eastern Rwanda—Butare and Kibungo—where he didn’t like the results.”

  Rawson may have been less than candid with Gersony when they met in Kigali in 1994. It was late September and the previous month, August 5 to be exact, he had been one of those officials receiving a secret cable from Frederick Ehrenreich of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which stated:

  Despite RPF professions of support for human rights, it will take “justice” into its own hands…There have been numerous recent reports of systematic killings of Hutus by the RPF…The continuing flow of thousands of refugees into Tanzania suggests that significant human rights violations are occurring in eastern Rwanda, an area which has been under RPF control for several months…24

  More significantly, on August 11, Rawson’s ambassadorial colleague in Burundi, Robert Krueger, fired off a secret five-alarm cable mentioning a “conscious [RPF] policy of terrifying Hutus in southeastern Rwanda, encouraging their exile….” Krueger wrote of “intentional cruelty” of the RPF, and added:

  There are repeated reports…made by Hutu refugees from Rwanda that: after having occupied a certain area, the RPF had called together a “peace meeting” at which many men were taken away who subsequently disappeared. At times it is said that all participants at such meetings, including women and children, have been liquidated.25

  Then on August 17, Rawson met with Kagame himself and raised the issue of Hutus fleeing south into Burundi and Tanzania. When all this is taken into account, Rawson’s skeptical reaction to Gersony’s briefing appears somewhat inexplicable.26 But in another sense it doesn’t. As Rawson told a colleague who had raised the issue of RPF human rights abuses: “There is no path out of this mess except by helping the Rwandan RPF government,” even as he knew that the RPF couldn’t stand him, as they associated him with the diplomatic context that had led to the original genocide against the Tutsis.

  Undeterred, yet full of fatigue and a growing anxiety, the next day Gersony delivered yet another multihour briefing, this time to Seth Sendashonga, Kagame’s interior minister, a Hutu. At the conclusion, Sendashonga said, “I am already aware of all these killings. I have sent many letters to the vice president [Kagame] and haven’t gotten an answer. Your report is going to be a great help to me.” The following year Sendashonga fled into exile in Kenya after criticizing Kagame. In 1998, the RPF assassinated him in Nairobi.27 Before he was murdered, Sendashonga would tell the Africa expert Gérard Prunier that the repercussions of Gersony’s reporting had stopped the RPF killing machine in Rwanda’s south and southeast. (This would be confirmed years later by another scholar, writing that the diplomatic pressure initiated by Gersony’s report, in addition to other factors, led the RPF to order soldiers to stop killing civilians after late September.)28

  Following Sendashonga, Gersony, accompanied by Kamel Morjane, briefed Kagame’s chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Rwigamba.

  “Are you saying that these murders have been systematic?” Lieutenant Colonel Rwigamba asked Gersony.

  “Yes, they could not have occurred without senior officials of the army knowing,” Gersony replied.

  General Maurice Baril, the military adviser to the U.N. secretary-general, was also in the room. He remembers how “livid” Colonel Rwigamba became at Gersony’s remark. “The atmosphere was tense, with armed guards at the door,” says Baril. Speaking truth to power was not a mere phrase to Gersony. At this point he began to really worry about his safety. But Kamel Morjane didn’t blink.

  Gersony stumbled back to the UNHCR office, out of energy. Urasa wasn’t there. So he just sat alone, enjoying a moment of downtime. Then who walks in? Ambassador Rawson, along with Prudence Bushnell, a deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa (“the DAS” in Washington bureaucratic lingo), and Timothy Wirth, the former Democratic senator from Colorado and now the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs. Rawson had a deer-in-the-headlights look upon seeing Gersony. Gersony had the presence of mind to ask the three, focusing on Bushnell and Wirth, if they would like a briefing. Rawson hesitated but Bushnell and Wirth both said yes, the latter carefully so. A former politician and smooth operator, Wirth may have quickly calculated that he should never be on record as refusing such an important brief. In fact, Gersony’s report was a main purpose of Wirth’s trip to Africa.

  So Gersony performed yet again, with his map, and beginning with the good news from Ruhengeri in order to disarm them. Indeed, as he told this and every previous audience, Ruhengeri constituted incontrovertible proof that where the RPF permitted safe return and did not conduct mass killings, Hutu refugees streamed back into Rwanda in the tens of thousands. But it wasn’t happening elsewhere in Rwanda because of the actions of Kagame’s troops in more strategic areas, to which both the United States and the United Nations were turning a blind eye.

  Gersony directed his eyes throughout to the DAS, Pru Bushnell, a sparkling, intelligent, high-church WASP. Her father had been a career Foreign Service officer and she was viewed by some as the real brains and power in the Africa bureau.29 When Gersony finished talking, Wirth thanked him but was noncommittal. Bushnell knew, however, that everything Gersony said was true. This became apparent in a carefully worded confidential cable that the embassy sent out immediately afterward, on September 23, which also included Wirth’s assessment that there was “potential for serious damage to international support” for the new Rwandan government on account of Gersony’s report, which “could greatly complicate” American diplomatic efforts.30

  Indeed, three weeks later in Washington, Wirth would personally express doubts about Gersony’s reporting to a group of NGOs. Wirth, according to several people involved with the issue, was still acting like a senator, hard-charging for a policy of repatriation, which meant consciously undermining the results of Gersony’s research. Sheppie Abramowitz, representing the International Rescue Committee, would fire back at Wirth: “Some of us have known Gersony for years and we take his reporting seriously.”

  Wirth and ultimately the State Department would publicly have none of it, even as privately they used Gersony’s fieldwork to bring pressure on Kagame.

  * * *

  —

  Translation: The United States was behind the new Tutsi government in order to stabilize Rwanda and to atone for its own failure to prevent the genocide against the Tutsis. There appeared to be simply no practical alternative to Kagame’s RPF regime at this point. After all, who else was going to rule Rwanda if not Kagame? Kagame, it must now be said, went on to become an exemplary modernizing dictator, accomplishing wonders with the economy, infrastructure, and bureaucracy. There is no unity of goodness: a murderer can indeed go on to lead a nation out of conflict and underdevelopment, history shows. But nobody dealing with Rwanda k
new that then. Moreover, Gersony had upset this whole decision-making process and confused the narrative. He had, merely by methodically listening to people and writing down what they told him, inserted a moral complication into a raison d’état.

  “The last thing the donor countries and the United States wanted to hear at this juncture was that the victims of the genocide were taking large-scale, systematic retribution against the perceived perpetrators,” said an international official. “They preferred a morally black-and-white situation.” Moreover, since the RPF leaders were all English speakers and impressive as individuals, “some American officials in particular just ate it all up.”

  Pru Bushnell, looking back from a vantage point of twenty-five years, says that “Bob Gersony, like others in the aftermath of the Cold War, was intent on making human rights into a national security issue, whether or not it complicated things for us.”

  * * *

  —

  On his last night in Kigali before flying home, Gersony was dragged to a reception by Kamel Morjane at the residence of Shahryar Khan, Boutros-Ghali’s special representative in country, someone Gersony had instantly disliked and who he felt had been blindsided by his report. The reception was in honor of Kofi Annan, who everyone assumed would be the next U.N. secretary-general. Gersony’s fears and hatreds of these occasions proved accurate. In the house filled with United Nations and Rwandan government officials, no one wanted to talk to him, or even to be seen in his company. He wandered outside to the garden and sat down at the top of three flagstone steps alone: weary, upset, and scared for the security of his career, intending to take an extra dose of Xanax before bed. All along he knew intellectually that the evidence he and his team had accumulated would prove to be his undoing, but it was at this moment, with everyone else enjoying themselves over drinks inside, that the full force of it hit him emotionally on this cool, high-altitude tropical night.

  Suddenly, General Maurice Baril came over in his Canadian army summer uniform and sat down beside him. General Baril, after heading UNAMIR, had become a military adviser to Boutros-Ghali and was often at U.N. meetings with Gersony, but usually stayed quiet.

  “I know you’ve been telling the truth,” Baril said in his French-Canadian accent. “I was getting constant reports back in 1993 that the RPF in areas it controlled in northern Rwanda was acting identical as you describe. I should not worry, Bob. We all know you’ve done a great job.”

  Decades later, Baril would reiterate to me that “it was difficult for the rest of the world to believe the truth: that Kagame and his leadership could allow such horrors after what had happened from April to July 1994.”

  Gersony flew out the next day. With him at the airport VIP lounge in Kigali were Kofi Annan, Kamel Morjane, and Shahryar Khan. Annan called him over to a huddle with Khan.

  “There’s going to be a one-day [Rwandan] government investigation of what has been happening” in the southeast, Annan told him.

  Gersony called it a “whitewash.” Officials would drive out in a convoy of RPF vehicles, return the same night, and discredit him.31

  Annan snapped angrily:

  “You’re lucky there’s going to be an investigation at all!”

  “It’s a sham.”

  “That is not your concern!”

  “Okay,” Gersony meekly answered.

  Gersony wandered off alone next to a panoramic window and curled up into a Rodin thinker’s position, utterly dejected. According to Gersony, Annan then came over and sat beside him, saying in his trademark mellow, patrician voice:

  “Bob, I’m very sorry I snapped at you. You did the right thing. You told the truth, and I want you to continue doing that. Let me worry about the rest.”32

  Annan understood the politics of the situation in a way that Gersony, who took everything so personally, did not. Annan knew that merely by conducting an investigation, however phony, the Rwandan government was conceding a point to the United Nations and to Gersony. In other words, the RPF government had been put on notice. And without endorsing Gersony’s findings, Annan was already putting pressure on Kagame’s regime to stop the killings.33 Again, given how, over the decades, Kagame has both stabilized and economically developed Rwanda, albeit in an authoritarian fashion, one might defend the United Nations policy at the time as the wiser course to take. Simply because Gersony’s report was true did not mean that anyone was under any obligation to publicly praise him. The point was only to use his report toward a good purpose.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of September, Mrs. Ogata asked Gersony to write a long memo, a synopsis for her file only, of his investigation and the results, to “be treated as confidential.”34 The result was a drab yet succinct fourteen-page account, with the bureaucratic title of “Summary of UNHCR Presentation Before Commission of Experts: 10 October 1994; Prospects for Early Repatriation of Rwandan Refugees Currently in Burundi, Tanzania and Zaire.”35 It lacked the depth and complexity of his much longer published reports on Uganda, Mozambique, and elsewhere; or of the reports he was later to write about such subjects as the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and the Maoist revolt in Nepal. Yet precisely because his Rwanda report was never released by the United Nations, it attained a legendary aura over time as “the so-called Gersony report,” which many in the human rights community tried to get their hands on and henceforth proclaimed had been suppressed. Some even denied it ever existed, yet spoke about it in conspiratorial terms as if it did.36

  All in all, it was Gersony’s “biggest play,” in Gene Dewey’s recollection of Gersony’s career.37

  * * *

  —

  Finally there is the case of that French Africa expert, Gérard Prunier, with whom I began this chapter.

  In the fall of 1994, Prunier started hearing of a certain “Gersony report” that nobody had as yet seen, which only lent more power and mystery to it. Bizarre rumors abounded among journalists and the human rights community regarding its contents and its author. “When I heard that this so-called Gersony report attributed mass killings of Hutus to the [Tutsi-dominated] RPF, I immediately assumed French army manipulation in order to develop a pretext to topple the RPF, given the French army’s historic support of the Hutus. ‘Get me this report,’ I told people.” Going on, Prunier recalls, “Gersony became in my mind some ghost manipulated by French military extremists who only wanted to restart a war: a son of a bitch who was a disinformation tool of both the French security services and the CIA.” Prunier writes in his book The Rwanda Crisis, which would be published the next year, that the Gersony report, which he had not seen, nevertheless “tended to obscure rather than clarify the problem,” and that “there must be strong doubts about its reliability.”38

  It soon dawned on Prunier, however, that he already knew Gersony intellectually through the latter’s study of five years earlier, “Why Somalis Flee,” which Prunier had employed in the footnotes of his own research on the Horn of Africa. So he was at least prepared to listen to him. Through a mutual friend, Prunier and Gersony were able to meet at Gersony’s New York City apartment in late 1995. In the interim nothing had happened to allay Prunier’s suspicions of Gersony because Gersony himself had not been permitted by the United Nations to speak publicly. For after he returned from Rwanda, Gersony had gone immediately back to Nicaragua, and then on to other assignments in the West Bank, Bosnia, and elsewhere. And as for Prunier, he had not followed completely the vindications of Gersony that had begun to appear in the English-language press.39

  Prunier remembers a tiny apartment with a distinctive radical-bohemian air. This prepared him further to find a naïve and out-of-his-depth human instrument of larger forces. His first impression of Gersony-in-the-flesh was of “a total Anglo-Saxon, very rigid and grounded, in a good way, like an accountant.” Given the surroundings, Prunier couldn’t quite place him. “But within a few minutes I saw that
he was honest and had no hidden agenda.”

  As Gersony began to talk, first about his methodology, then about what he had found in Ruhengeri, Gisenyi, Butare, Kibungo, and the refugee camps across the border, and how he had originally been a supporter of the RPF (just like Prunier), and how he had, step by step, come to his conclusions, Prunier got “this horrible, nauseous feeling” that he and everyone else writing and talking in New York, Washington, and Paris had been wrong about the RPF up until that moment. For it turned out that “the good guys were really quite bad guys.”

  In a rush of revelation, Prunier went from disdain to compassion for Gersony, as he saw how full of tension the real Gersony—now sitting a few feet away from him—actually was: he could see vividly how Gersony had been psychologically crushed by the suave and intimidating politics of top U.N. operators swirling around him, only because he was simply being honest, and what he had to say was so shocking and inconvenient to the world’s political elite. Gersony was a blunt, truthful, very nervous man among these sly, high-class operators, educated at the best schools, on the diplomatic cocktail circuit.40

  Prunier, exactly like Gersony, had desperately wanted to find better people on the victims’ side. Prunier, defending Gersony later on, would write in 1997 that Gersony “was shocked at his own findings.”41 Prunier would also subsequently admit that it “was my sympathy for the RPF and my refusal at the time to believe” this organization “could be cold-bloodedly killing people” that blinded him to the dreadful truth that Gersony had uncovered.42

  It was all something that the liberal imagination, with its belief in the basic goodness of humankind, had difficulty contending with. Once it was proven that both sides were capable of mass killing (even if one side had killed many times more people than the other), then one confronted the horror of there being something intractable in the very human landscape itself, with all the determinism and essentialism that such thoughts bring to bear. Gersony was neither a determinist nor an essentialist: he never succumbed to fate and he didn’t stereotype people. He could not have done what he did over the decades if he were such a person. His personal bible had always been André Schwarz-Bart’s The Last of the Just. But he did have a great reverence for facts, unlike some officials at the State Department and the United Nations, who did not want him to write up and publish his report; who, indeed, would have found it more convenient had his research never come to light in the first place.