The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Alas, two years after Dayton, New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges and Washington Post correspondent Lee Hockstader were able to report that Croat returnees to Muslim villages and Muslim returnees to Serb villages were being killed with impunity, or having their houses destroyed.22 After a long study on the possibilities of minority returns in Bosnia, Cambridge University research fellow Marcus Cox concluded:

  “Ethnic separatism is not simply a matter of the misbehavior of local nationalist leaders. There are deep-rooted social and political forces which resist integrated governance and living conditions….The path to genuine reconciliation must begin with the normalization of living conditions, easing the insecurity of ordinary people.”23

  In other words, here was a complete vindication of Gersony’s analysis of Bosnia.

  In fact, Gersony understood that, as one scholar put it, when people are forcibly displaced, “they lose more than their houses. They lose their social and economic networks,” their friends and neighbors, “all of which comprise their sense of ‘home.’ ”24 And you just can’t snap your fingers and instantly reverse that process. Rebuilding may have to begin elsewhere.

  Of course, by the late 1990s and after, when all these reports and studies appeared, the media spotlight had already shifted away from Bosnia. Thus, in the memory of the elite mainstream media, Dayton was enshrined as a great achievement, pure and simple—when, in fact, like all brave and arduous efforts, Dayton was imperfect. It was all its architects could do just to get some kind of agreement that would stop the bloodshed, and consequently they made compromises along the way.25 Gersony’s work was one useful corrective to Dayton, something that helped save it actually, rather than a repudiation of it.

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  Yet the harshest critics of Gersony’s report charged that he was, in effect, sanctioning ethnic cleansing as a fait accompli, rather than coming up with a plan to create a new order in the Balkans built on minority rights. The whole point, in their view, was not to accept the record of the past as a guide to the future. For that, after all, constituted fatalism. The other way to look at it was to say that Gersony has always been a sort of idealist, but just one without illusions.

  Though the former Yugoslavia disappointingly regressed into ethnic cantons in the years and decades since the fighting—something Gersony’s recommendations helped facilitate, charge his critics—at least it has remained relatively peaceful, thus far. And so Holbrooke still gets the credit for ending that war. Gersony may not have accomplished much, but at least he helped accomplish something, by working to help stabilize the region in the wake of Dayton. More than that was always a long shot, given the ethnic animosities that are simply impossible to deny, and that certainly did not evaporate the moment that Dayton was signed.

  “Dayton,” Tim Knight says, “was a very, very fragile peace agreement. And it would not have taken very much to restart the fire.” Yet human rights visionaries will always believe that the animosities, so raw in early 1996, could still have been surmounted. It remains an unknowable, but all the minority ethnics that Gersony interviewed told him they had no intention of returning to majority areas in any case. They scoffed at the notion that they could ever be protected by international troops 24/7 indefinitely, which is what it actually might have required in order to keep them safe.26

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  Gersony did not have a philosophically developed worldview per se. At the end of the day, he was a fieldworker. Yet he had read The Last of the Just as a young man in Guatemala, and therefore believed in the responsibility-to-protect long before it was popularized as a human rights term. That belief led him to develop a particular methodology, so that his reports of human rights abuses in Africa and elsewhere would be trusted by skeptics in Washington. But that same methodology instilled a practicality in his mind that went along with the responsibility-to-protect: the practicality of allowing the facts of a situation to emanate from the ground up. The result was his exposure of mass murder in Uganda’s Luwero Triangle and of ethnic cleansing in eastern Chad and in pro-American Somalia. It was a methodology that led to a solution to the murder and rape of Vietnamese boat people and to a recommendation not to arm the white South African–supported RENAMO guerrillas in Mozambique. And on and on.

  Now his methodology, built on hundreds of interviews in the field, made him frankly skeptical about the prospects for the immediate implementation of Dayton’s Annex 7. Gersony would have liked to believe the same thing as his critics on Bosnia. But the evidence he had compiled just made it impossible for him to do so. Gersony was a humanitarian throughout, but one who never withdrew into theory, ideology, or social engineering, since to force an impractical principle—no matter how worthy it seemed—on people might only lead to more of them being killed, and more chaos.

  As the saying went, Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. It was such practicality, in addition to his thoroughness and intensity, that was the key to Gersony’s influence in Washington.

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  In fact, there was little inspiring about Bob Gersony, no great idea that he could propound. Gersony was great-souled without being a moral absolutist. He wasn’t burdened by political philosophy not only because he had never studied it, but because he had a surer guide to the world: the experience of having listened to thousands of ordinary people on the ground in the far-flung corners of the earth.

  Gersony was a plodding fieldworker without further ambition, with no desire to be an assistant secretary of state or a normal FSO even, who only wanted to interview people and use his background as a commodity trader to understand the economic realities of relief and development. While others in this story—Fred Cuny and Pierre Gassmann, for example—had their youthful rite-of-passage experiences in the humanitarian nightmare of Biafra, Gersony in that rough time frame was in the commodity business, in the army in Vietnam, and starting a language school in Guatemala. His life experience was radically different from others in the humanitarian field. Gersony wore you down with facts and figures—buttressed by individual human accounts—always based on firsthand research, that’s all. And thus he always came back to Washington with news, as Elliott Abrams had first noticed after Gersony briefed him about atrocities in Uganda in 1984.

  CHAPTER 14

  Northern Uganda by Way of Nicaragua

  1996–1997

  “Never Mind the Actual Danger, You Scared Yourself to Death.”

  In the mid-1990s, the face of the post Cold War was the former Yugoslavia: a violent conflict inside Europe itself that had been kindled organically from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the Cold War security structure, which had kept the Balkans dormant for decades. But the earth is vast, and in most parts of it the end of the Cold War registered only modestly or not at all. Thus, while the media remained sucked into the vortex of the former Yugoslavia, and even as lightheaded proponents of globalization were proclaiming a new era of universal peace, democracy, and prosperity, Gersony headed back to the world as it actually was: namely Nicaragua and northern Uganda. “We ignore these marginal areas at our own peril,” he says.

  Within the same month that Bob Gersony completed his work in Bosnia, he was called back to Nicaragua. Violeta Chamorro’s only term in office was ending and there would soon be a national election. Bob and Cindy flew to Managua to help in monitoring voter registration in the hinterlands.

  The pro-American Nicaraguan government had issued cedulas, or permanent voter identity cards, valid for ten years, in 119 of the 145 municipalities. But the electoral commission, which was still controlled by the left-wing Sandinistas, had not issued these cards in the 26 municipalities that happened to have been the base areas of the contras during the war. Consequently, Senator Jesse Helms put the entire USAID program for Nicaragua on hold, alleging that anti-Sandinista elements of the population w
ere being denied the right to vote. USAID and Helms, which hated each other and came from opposite ends of the political and philosophical spectrum, both agreed to allow Bob and Cindy to investigate.

  The pair divided up the work. Cindy went to the remote region of Jinotega in north-central Nicaragua, traveling all the way down the Coco River along the Honduran border, a lush and yawning landscape reminiscent of central Africa. Bob went south, to the equally remote Rio San Juan region adjacent to Costa Rica. They both set out on May 8, 1996, to observe preparations for the early-June registration campaign. Between the two of them, they interviewed 650 people in addition to 70 officials, all individually or in small groups. They found that people often had to walk as much as ten to fifteen miles in order to register to vote, and many people had lost their documents, or never had them in the first place, so they were not allowed to register. But if you brought witnesses, you would be issued a temporary card, a libreta cívica, permitting you to vote. But sometimes there were no registration centers at all. So rather than Sandinista treachery, it was more a matter of confusion over the entire process in somewhat chaotic rural areas that accounted for the problems. Gersony, having returned to Managua, explained all this to Helms’s aides visiting the Nicaraguan capital. Consequently, the North Carolina senator set May 31 as the date to lift the hold on USAID’s development program in Nicaragua.

  In late May, Cindy again traveled down the Coco River to monitor the actual registration, while Bob returned to the remote south of the country to do the same. Cindy was accompanied by former contra commander Gato Negro (“Black Cat,” a nom de guerre).1 The boatman was Andres Pao. She had traveled with both on her earlier trip and trusted them. In fact, this was Cindy’s sixth trip down the river. Commander Gato and Pao had already spent a week together on the Coco distributing election flyers and checking on security in advance of Cindy’s visit. They had found no problem.

  On May 30, the three proceeded downriver from the frontier town of Wiwili in Pao’s panga boat with its 65-horsepower engine, arriving at the village of Somotine on the Nicaraguan side of the river several hours later. Somotine was the last Spanish-speaking village on the Coco before one reached the territory of the Miskito Indians. The scenery along the way was bare and sculptural on the hilly Honduran side, where the trees had been cut down for cattle grazing, and deeply forested on the Nicaraguan side. The river traffic consisted of canoes that men steered by long poles. Along the way Cindy saw wooden structures on stilts without electricity, half swallowed by the tall pea-green grass here in the rainy season. It was real jungle, connected to the outside world only by radio communications.

  Cindy Gersony, Bob’s wife (right), doing research for USAID by the Coco River on the Nicaraguan-Honduran border in 1996.

  As soon as Cindy’s boat arrived at Somotine, a group of young men with uniforms and guns jumped out of the tall grass and surrounded her.

  “Why don’t we go somewhere to talk?” one of them asked, in a tone that was barely polite, indicating that she had no choice in the matter.

  They guided her and Gato to meet the local “peace commission,” essentially the community leadership. Now there were thirty-two armed and ragtag former contras, led by a Comandante Pajarillo (“Little Bird”), who subsequently did all the talking.

  For several hours he interrogated Cindy about her mission, all the while expressing his political grievances. He was in his midtwenties and had been a soldier most of his life. It was the only life he knew. He said the whole electoral system and power structure were unfair. Cindy tried not to disagree with him.

  “We’re detaining you, until we are guaranteed the right to vote,” Comandante Pajarillo said.

  When Cindy, who spoke Spanish, asked why she was being held “hostage,” given all that the U.S. government had done for the contras, he objected. “You see that gun against the wall? If you were a hostage, I would point that gun to your head. But you are only being detained.”

  Cindy was relieved that they weren’t bandits, and there was no alcohol in sight. Moreover, Comandante Pajarillo seemed to have control over his men. This was not the worst thing that could happen, she told herself. Nicaragua had never been as murderously violent as Guatemala or El Salvador.

  It was dark. Night falls quickly in the tropics. They gave Cindy a cot in the village headman’s shack in the midst of the jungle to sleep in. There was no phone, no communication at all with the outside world. She had a flashlight and a mystery novel to read in her backpack.

  Very early the next morning the former contras sent Pao upriver in his boat to Wiwili (where there was intermittent radio communication) in order to broadcast their demands to the government. By the end of the day, Cindy’s “kidnapping” was on the front page of the Managua newspapers. The word spread, and hours later television crews were camped out on the lawn of Cindy’s parents’ home in Sarasota, Florida. Ambassador John Maisto was momentarily away and Gersony, in southern Nicaragua, phoned the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, Heather Hodges, in Managua, speaking to her as both a concerned husband and a Central America area specialist.

  “Tell the Nicaraguans, no heroics, no commando-style raid. We will resolve this problem through negotiations,” he told her.

  He was less afraid of what the former contras might do to Cindy than the possibility of a raid gone wrong, with bullets flying all over the place. And while Chamorro’s government was pro-American, the Sandinista-dominated army would have the political incentive to kill those former contras.

  Chamorro’s government sent a team from the Organization of American States (OAS) down the Coco River to talk to the former contras. The team was under the direction of Diego Beltrand, a Uruguayan lawyer who was the OAS human rights representative in Managua. Beltrand had been a friend of Bob and Cindy for a few years by now, having gotten to know them during their Atlantic coast development work, so the kidnapping was personal for him.

  Beltrand’s OAS team traveled down the Coco River, spending the night in Wiwili and continuing at dawn to Somotine. It had a challenge on its hands, not unusual in hostage situations. “It had to make complex political arguments to unsophisticated men isolated in the jungle,” as he explains. The team let Pajarillo and his men vent: about access to good land, the need for fair elections, and so forth. The team assured the former contras that the OAS would advocate for their demands with the Nicaraguan government. But first the former contras must produce and then release Cindy, otherwise they would harm their own cause in the outside world, particularly in Washington, which had supported them. Pajarillo and his men talked among themselves for a while. Finally they agreed. Cindy arrived, very calm, after about half an hour.

  There was a hand-over ceremony at 11:30 a.m., June 1, 1996, in true Central American style, with speeches and the singing of the national anthem after a guitar had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, all in front of twelve people in Somotine. Afterward, Cindy traveled in Pao’s boat to Wiwili, where an AP reporter had come to take her picture, and then by vehicle to Jinotega town, where she was reunited with Bob.

  She had spent all of three days and two nights detained in Somotine, talking to the villagers to pass the hours. She was alternately bored, intellectually stimulated, and full of anxiety the entire time, not knowing if her ordeal would last days or weeks.

  The Nicaragua chapter of Gersony’s life was finally over. Or at least it seemed so.

  Bob reunited with Cindy after Cindy’s kidnapping on the Coco River in 1996.

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  Home from Nicaragua for several months in late 1996, the autumn was beautiful on West 72nd Street in Manhattan, with the leaves turning in Central Park, which Bob and Cindy’s apartment overlooked. Bob would take walks in the park with his mother and father, who lived nearby, his father in a wheelchair by this time. As lovely as the season was, it was worrisome that the phone in the Gersonys’
apartment never rang with a call from Washington. Maybe Bob’s luck had run out. Maybe the notoriety of Cindy’s kidnapping had a chilling effect on the State Department and USAID bureaucracy. Even if it was not your fault, and even if you were a hero for a brief moment in the media, the bureaucracy had a way of blaming you for anything that draws too much attention to itself.

  Then on October 31, 1996, the day of Bob and Cindy’s fourth wedding anniversary, Bob’s father died at ninety-two. November and December were somber months for Bob, full of reflection and self-doubt.

  Finally, after Christmas, the phone rang. It was Joe Williams calling from Kampala, Uganda. His slow Tennessee drawl was unmistakable.

  Joe Williams had worked in the USAID mission in Managua when Gersony was managing his Atlantic coast project in eastern Nicaragua. Williams was another devotee of Janet Ballantyne. He was a real Tennessee character, slow and quiet while he was checking you out, then he became a real raconteur, a Fred Thompson kind of guy, charming and engrossing without pretensions, with ideas pulsing out of his brain.

  “We have this situation in northern Uganda with a group called the Lord’s Resistance Army [LRA]. Nobody knows what in the hell is going on there,” Williams told Gersony over the phone. “If the army suddenly defeats the LRA, USAID will have to be able to move in quickly with a plan.” Joe always knew what he didn’t know, Gersony thought. Actually, Joe had been storing in his mind a wealth of stories told by travelers in northern Uganda. “But they were just anecdotal, there was no rigorous analysis to put them together,” Joe now recalls.