The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  “We didn’t spend the night in Bugojno because I was so scared of what the mayor might do to me. Cindy and I packed our bags and left at nine p.m., right after the dinner. The mayor was a murderer and I wanted to make a statement that this kind of behavior was not on.” The dignified old man, accompanying them to the car, kept apologizing for the mayor.

  Of course, by the time he got to Bugojno, Gersony had heard the essence of what the mayor told him many dozens of times already in the interviews he had conducted. But he had never heard it in a tone anywhere near as angry, vulgar, and visceral. The mayor’s outlook was the crude, very impolite condensation and culmination of many of the interviews Bob and Cindy had conducted.

  * * *

  —

  The last place Bob and Cindy visited was Jajce, in the east-central area of Croat control, another Dayton pilot town. Gersony, now utterly exhausted, was on the brink of another one of his nervous and physical breakdowns. Jajce was nice and charming, and Gersony could use his rudimentary German there. But there was just something about the atmosphere that smelled, he felt. The mayor had told him that there was no chance of a Muslim population return. Bob and Cindy were warned not to leave because of a coming snowstorm. Bob impulsively insisted on leaving anyway. So they headed northwest to Bihać, inside a Muslim enclave. Within an hour of their leaving it began to snow. Six inches must have fallen in no time, golf balls of snow. They had to put chains on the tires. He had never put chains on tires before, but he somehow managed to do it. They were driving maybe five miles an hour. They gave up and entered a local police station at two a.m. “Can we stay here overnight?” they asked. The police replied no, even after Bob and Cindy explained that they had diplomatic papers. They tried to sleep in their sleeping bags inside the car. The car metal only magnified the cold. Every quarter-hour or so, Bob started the car to warm it up. At daybreak they drove on to Bihać, where they found a hotel that had hot water. They took baths, slept, and had their laundry washed.

  “I’m done,” he told Cindy, still cranky, on the brink of tears. He called the USAID mission in Sarajevo and stupidly said he did not want to return there, but would continue on to the comforts of Zagreb and then to Washington in order to brief Brian Atwood. But his request was rightly refused. He was ordered to drive back to Sarajevo to brief the U.S. ambassador to Bosnia, John Menzies.

  John Menzies was the ultimate, solidly grounded, bread-and-butter Foreign Service officer: nothing fancy on his résumé, just supremely smart, with years of experience; a product of non-elite colleges across America’s heartland, who would go on to become an educator at start-up universities in the Balkans and the Middle East. He gave Gersony over two hours of his time.

  Gersony ran through his methodology, breaking down the categories of interviewees and what they had told him. Then he presented his recommendations:

  Drop or postpone conditionality. It is a gift to the extremists, who consider it demeaning and claim the return of the hated minorities is part of an American and international plot.

  Postpone cross-ethnic return. It is premature.

  Start with fifty of the worst, war-ravaged villages and build or repair fifty houses in each village, raising them to a winterized standard of habitation.

  Fix these 2,500 houses within six months, putting in new roofs and new foundation structures where necessary, and make sure at least two rooms in each house are insulated.

  These 2,500 houses will form anchor communities of fifty families in each village. Because people are too afraid to come back home alone, they will only do so in groups of the same ethnicity. The cost for all of this will be only $30 million.

  If it is done mostly right, international donors will pitch in and build community centers and so forth.

  After all of this is completed, conditionality and cross-ethnic return can kick in.

  Menzies considered this a breath of fresh air and “commonsensical.”14 He sent a cable back to Washington, slugged for Atwood.

  Bob and Cindy returned to Washington.

  * * *

  —

  Atwood called a Saturday meeting, February 10, 1996, that lasted from nine a.m. to one p.m. Besides the USAID administrator, in the room to listen to Gersony’s brief were Carol Lancaster, Doug Stafford, Tom Dine, Barbara Turner, and Mike Mahdesian: every one of them a powerful personality and a high official in the AID bureaucracy. Tom Dine, for example, had run the feared and influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) for many years. Dine, one of the sharpest lobbyists in Washington, was “direct, acerbic, self-confident, and effective,” according to Atwood, who had brought him onto his team. Barbara Turner, Dine’s deputy in USAID/Europe, was an intimidating career FSO, who was not at this point intimate or very knowledgeable about Gersony’s work in the developing world (although she would later warm up to him). Mike Mahdesian was a major Democratic Party donor from California who had worked on the Clinton campaign.

  Gersony, as usual, wore everyone down with details garnered from the field. Actually, it was rare that the USAID administrator would make the time for such a long, mainly factual briefing from anyone; as the man at the top, Atwood generally convened people to ask their opinions.

  Deep into the brief, with Gersony emphasizing how necessary concrete things like new housing were to preserve Bosnia’s fragile peace, Atwood asked Gersony, playing the devil’s advocate:

  “What would you say if I told you that housing was not an option?”

  “I’d say, pack up and leave.”

  “That’s how important you think housing [for the victims of ethnic cleansing] is?” Atwood asked back.

  “That’s how unimportant everything else is, compared to housing and what goes with it,” Gersony answered.

  At the end, Doug Stafford and Mike Mahdesian said, almost in unison, “I’m sold.”

  Mahdesian felt, after listening to Gersony, that because feelings were still so “raw” in Bosnia, it would be “dicey and dangerous” to insert minorities back into majority areas right at this moment. Thus, what Gersony was proposing constituted “a necessary and doable first step.” Atwood himself didn’t need much convincing, since he already knew Gersony’s work firsthand in Nicaragua and Rwanda. And the USAID administrator was frankly skeptical of “the kumbaya approach to the Balkans immediately after such a vicious civil war.” Moreover, they had all gotten Ambassador John Menzies’s cable from Bosnia about Gersony’s briefing to him. But Dine and Turner at USAID’s Europe bureau may have felt that Gersony had invaded their territory with all of his specific conclusions and suggestions. They, according to others at the meeting, were still somewhat doubtful and “less than pleased” regarding Gersony’s proposal.

  At least according to Gersony’s recollection, Dine remarked in an offhand aside, “You and Fred Cuny are the cowboys.”

  Gersony exploded: “What are you running down Fred for? He is dead [in Chechnya] and can’t defend himself.”

  Gersony knew better than anyone how Cuny could, in fact, behave like a cowboy. But he suddenly felt defensive. He was not about to allow any outsider or Washington operator to make such a charge against one of the greatest and bravest of fieldworkers.

  Dine mentioned that the situation in Bosnia might merit another assessment, to see if Gersony’s analysis held up. The discussion was descending into nasty bureaucratic politics, in Gersony’s view. But Dine had a good point. He may have been a Washington operator, but he was also someone with a Peace Corps background who had traveled several times through the war zone in Bosnia over the previous two years. And he also believed, like everyone else in the room, that new housing was the answer to Bosnia’s post-conflict dilemma. He just was inclined at this point to have USAID deal directly with the housing issue, rather than go through Gersony and Tim Knight’s disaster assistance response team, as Gersony was pro
posing: a very reasonable argument.15

  Brian Atwood kept calm. He realized that Gersony’s proposal amounted to practically a U-turn in American policy, just at the time when Richard Holbrooke—the towering, formidable architect of Dayton—was about to leave government in order to write a book about what he had accomplished in Bosnia. We’re on very sensitive ground here, Atwood realized. But he wasn’t worried. Atwood was almost every bit as much the big-time Washington operator and player as Holbrooke. Atwood was a former FSO and assistant secretary of state, a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton and of Vice President Al Gore, with excellent ties to both the Democratic Party and Capitol Hill. And everybody knew all these things. In Washington, perception is everything. It had been Atwood who stood down powerful forces that had wanted to fold USAID into the State Department’s own bureaucracy: a move Atwood knew would kill USAID.

  Atwood sent Gersony around USAID and State to give the same brief to as many officials as he could. Gersony delivered eighteen briefings to groups of four or five people each. The small audiences meant more eye contact and the give-and-take of questions throughout, which Gersony was very good at.

  But Bob Gersony never did get to brief—or even argue with—Richard Holbrooke over Bosnia, since Holbrooke left government just as Gersony emerged with his findings.

  My own view is that Holbrooke might have screamed at Gersony early in their imaginary meeting, and then listened intently as Gersony wore him down with details just like he did everybody else. At the end, Holbrooke, who was operationally brilliant, would have quietly incorporated at least some of Gersony’s recommendations into his plan of action, perhaps without ever giving Gersony credit for them: sort of what had happened to Gersony with Rwanda, when United Nations and State Department officials used his report to pressure Paul Kagame’s government in Kigali, while trying to bury the report at the same time. Admit the truth only to yourselves, not to the outside world: since the essence of many a situation in the developing world (and especially in war zones) is what nobody can state openly and what nobody wants to hear.

  Rick Barton, USAID’s head of the OTI, which had overseen all the projects that Gersony judged abject failures, was actually impressed with Gersony’s briefing. Barton considered Gersony “more like an anthropologist than a political analyst,” and one who had convinced him that “our policy was premature.”16 A very smooth political type in the manner of Atwood himself, Barton told Gersony: “Of course, cross-ethnic return is a straw man. No one really believes it will take place.”

  Gersony thought this a clever sleight of hand that could ease the bureaucratic deadlock. In this way of thinking, cross-ethnic return was a decent goal, that just by working in its direction—even by beginning with ethnic majority returns as he had recommended—might lead eventually to a better Bosnia: something Holbrooke’s team should welcome.

  But then Gersony had to brief Gerald Hyman, who worked in USAID promoting democracy abroad. Hyman was a progressive liberal Republican (yes, that type actually once existed) who had dedicated four years of his life to working the humanitarian issue of Bosnia from Washington. He was frankly uncomfortable with Gersony’s analysis. His argument was succinct and insightful in its way.

  Hyman admits that “much of what he [Gersony] said about the divisions and hatreds in Bosnia are unfortunately well-known…It should hardly be surprising after the rapes, eviscerations, expulsions, murders…that these are people who hate one another. Nevertheless,” he goes on, “rightly or wrongly, the U.S. government has taken the position that we will side with those who do not agree to the ethnic partition. That may be futile, naïve, impossible. But that is our position. Thus, channeling our reconstruction assistance to ‘same ethnic returnees,’ as Gersony suggests, will result in the reaffirmation, indeed the reconstruction with our assistance, of ethnically pure areas: we become the instruments for solidifying ethnic cleansing and ethnic cantons.”17

  Nevertheless, Gersony did convince Hyman that if cross-ethnic return was ever going to be attempted, “we should at least do it with our eyes open,” in Hyman’s words.

  Hyman clearly saw Gersony’s own particular quality as a humanitarian unburdened by naïve optimism, even as he saw the difficulty in agreeing with Gersony completely in this case. Therefore, Hyman is worth listening to for a moment about Bosnia and the intellectual debate it spawned.

  Jerry Hyman, a small, thin, voluble dynamo of a man, full of memories and perceptions, was a product of rough Chicago public schools where inner-city Blacks sat alongside poor whites who had migrated from Appalachia—a real petri dish of group interaction—and so he was never naïve himself about racial and ethnic feelings. Hyman took that experience to the University of Chicago, where he got a PhD in anthropology. He thus understood the Bosnian dilemma in many of its human dimensions, perhaps better than his colleagues.

  “While Dayton has been interpreted as a constitutional document, that’s not what it really was,” Hyman explains. “It was about ending a bloody, intractable war, pure and simple. And Holbrooke made the compromises necessary to do just that. Holbrooke succeeded and is now unfairly criticized for Dayton’s imperfections. Holbrooke was a bulldozer by necessity at Dayton,” Hyman goes on, “whereas Bob Gersony came at the subject of Dayton with hours of nuance and massive detail. Both approaches were justified by the circumstances. As for ethnic-minority return, you’re not going to instantly get people to overcome communal scars and bitterness by giving them rolls of plastic sheeting and other help.”

  Meanwhile, Gersony was sweating logistics. Plaster didn’t dry in winter, he knew. Thus, construction had to start in April in order to be completed by late October, the onset of winter in Bosnia. Villages and beneficiaries had to be selected for majority return. If the bureaucracy did not act soon, it was possible that USAID would be nowhere in Bosnia the following winter, and one year after Dayton.

  Also at this time, in late February 1996, Mike Mahdesian—part of Atwood’s inner circle—reached out to the NGO community in New York, informing it that USAID was leaning toward opposition to cross-ethnic return. The New York–based NGOs, unlike those Gersony had interviewed in Bosnia, went wild with anger. On February 22, the influential CEO of Mercy Corps, Neal Keny-Guyer, wrote to Brian Atwood with an urgent personal appeal to reject outright Gersony’s recommendations.

  Gersony and Atwood urged Keny-Guyer to make a trip to Bosnia.

  Keny-Guyer came back from Bosnia near the end of March, having himself interviewed refugees and local NGOs there. Gersony was right, he realized.18 It proved the replicability of Gersony’s methodology.

  Keny-Guyer explains his turnaround:

  “We were originally on the side of being bold and positive with incentives to help people collaborate across ethnic lines. So we were disappointed when USAID retreated from inter-ethnic reconciliation. But after focusing on Bob’s analysis he made us rethink it all. You know, he’s one of the great human rights characters of the age, who comes at you relentlessly with situational awareness. He made us opt in favor of concrete, tangible things that we could really accomplish on the ground right at that moment—things we might later build upon.”

  As it turned out, Atwood was able to get unanimous USAID approval for Gersony’s plan.

  * * *

  —

  On March 8, 1996, Bob and Cindy flew back to Sarajevo, where Tim Knight had permanently relocated from Zagreb in the aftermath of the Dayton Accords. Knight, an amazing whirlwind of organization, had already sent out Gersony’s plan of action for home building to forty NGOs, of which six were selected to do the actual construction work. Bob, Cindy, Tim Knight, and Knight’s assistant Lisa Doughten split up to visit thirty villages each in order to prepare the logistics. One NGO was insistent about allowing a small number of cross-ethnic returns in a village, Donji Zezelovo, west of Sarajevo, which it deemed promising for inter-ethnic reconciliation. Gersony and Knight agreed
to go along. But the Bosnian Croat authorities in Donji Zezelovo immediately threatened to burn down any of the repaired houses if Muslims were allowed to return. So the idea was dropped. The argument for cross-ethnic return—the return of minorities to majority areas—was dying by the day in Bosnia itself, however fine it was in principle.

  The six NGO groups chosen by Knight and Gersony hired 175 contractors who built or repaired 2,548 houses in 48 villages: 80 percent of the houses were for Muslims and 20 percent for Croats, each group constituting the ethnic majority in the respective villages. Knight and Gersony ran roughshod over the NGOs, forcing them to take before-and-after photos for everything they built, arranging for electricity and water projects, and so forth. Knight completed the project on time and under budget.

  The prewar local construction industry was reactivated, as roughly four thousand jobs were created. In the process, USAID provided cover and legitimacy for NGOs to start their own building projects in the targeted villages. The sound of guns was replaced by the sound of hammers in Bosnia. The Knight and Gersony building program became the go-to project for congressional delegations and other official visitors to see on their trips to Bosnia. The Washington Post called it “one of the best aid projects around.” As for the argument that the project was reinforcing the outcome of ethnic cleansing, The Washington Post quoted Kevin Mannion, a key NGO official in Bosnia, as saying: “Returns of [minority] refugees to [majority areas] are not going to happen, so why set impossible goals.”19

  Indeed, a year later, the U.S. Congress’s General Accounting Office reported on not only the lack of cross-ethnic returns, but of the continued expulsion of ethnic minorities from majority areas, with over three hundred homes destroyed by locals to discourage returnees.20 In many cases, as discovered by the Rhodes scholar and Oxford PhD Rebecca Brubaker, “most minority returnees sold or rented their properties, after reclaiming them, to members of the majority group.”21