The History of the Times
Page 80
The Bosnian Muslim soldiers were advancing into formerly Serb-held territory and in the autumn Anthony Loyd joined one of their elite brigades as it set about securing a narrow twelve-mile salient to turn the Serb flank. It proved a stretch too far. The brigade had been fighting for three weeks without relief and was exhausted. It was at this moment that the Serbs counterattacked. When he had joined the Green Jackets, Loyd had found many of his comrades were partly motivated by a desire to find out what killing was like. Now he tried to convey to Times readers sitting comfortably in their homes what it was like almost getting killed. ‘Fear overtakes us like a sudden fever. My heart is about to pump itself out of my chest cavity and my brain is emptying of rational thought. My only urge is to run,’ he wrote. The unit was collapsing around him and under attack on three sides. ‘The air is shrieking with flying metal and whizzing shot.’ Desperately he tried to scramble for cover:
There are 600 yards of open ground to the nearest treeline, and it is being raked with anti-aircraft fire. Speed is our only hope and in our fear we throw down whatever equipment we can. Even a flak jacket is ditched in the grass: 25lb of body armour is little use against the shells exploding round us.
I know the rules of this battlefield: I know what happened to the Croats who surrendered in Vukovar and to the Muslims who gave up in Srebrenica. They are dead, and I do not believe for a moment that a press card will save me from a shallow grave. My fear turns to dread at the thought of the captors’ mutilating knives. I envy the soldiers running beside me for their pistols. One of my three comrades has prepared a grenade in case one of us should be too badly wounded to go on.
The Serbs were at the edge of the hamlet, rounds were cracking out from through the trees. Loyd could not conceive how he was going to evade death:
I think of my mother and sister, of a group of close friends, of people whom I have loved and who have loved me. Some stillness comes to me. It has been a good life and I accept that I am ready to die. But I don’t stop running.
In the trees I am surprised to find myself alive. We gather our breath, sprawling occasionally on the ground as shells whine overhead. Although in cover at last, we are still about ten miles from the Bosnian lines that are holding firm, and the Serbs are closing in. Our thoughts begin to gel. We are together again; four journalists and 14 Bosnian soldiers. What happened to the others, I do not know. Across the plain, artillery is ripping into the ground around the route taken by most of the fleeing group.
Loyd spent the next four hours moving ‘through an empty landscape of deserted hamlets, dead livestock and fallen crucifixes, growing more confident in the silence around us’ before eventually reaching the safety of the Bosnian lines in the darkness.26
For the Bosnian Serbs this was a minor victory in a campaign suddenly filled with reverses. With sanctions being lifted from Serbia, Milosevic had decided to pressure the Bosnian Serbs into ending the struggle. What was more, from their perspective the strategic position was deteriorating. The Croat and Muslim offensives drove the Bosnian Serb control of the country back from 70 to 50 per cent. Suddenly, the Contact Group’s 1994 offer of 49 per cent no longer appeared so demeaning. What was more, from Belgrade Milosevic acted to undermine the Bosnian Serbs’ room for manoeuvre by subsuming their position within a negotiating team that he led. He met Croatia’s Franjo Tudjman and the Bosnian Muslim leader, Alija Izetbegovic, for peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, in the first three weeks of November. After days of unrelenting bargaining, an agreement to end the Bosnian war was reached. Bosnia-Herzegovina would become a nominally united entity with central authorities but divided between two autonomous regions, a Bosnian Serb republic and a Muslim – Croat federation that included Sarajevo and Gorazde. A sixty-thousand-strong NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) would keep the peace. ‘The fact that the toughest disputes at Ohio were over territory would seem to spell one word: partition,’ noted The Times’s leading article when the deal was done. While war weariness might help the situation, ‘If Nato merely patrols buffer zones, it will do no more than put this conflict on ice … Bosnia will be stable only when the internal frontiers erected in Ohio cease to matter to Bosnians of all persuasions. However precariously founded this agreement may be it must, after such atrocious suffering, inspire hope. It cannot yet inspire confidence.’27
It was unclear how many people had been killed in the wars that dismembered Yugoslavia between 1991 and 1995 although the figure of a quarter of a million was the most frequently cited estimate. More than three million people had been uprooted, many with their homes destroyed. Having pontificated about ‘the hour of Europe’, the EU had failed in its first real attempt at a unified foreign policy. In truth, it could not even police its own back yard. The UN had proved incapable of directing operations and had, in the end, effectively ceded power to NATO. The latter had, itself, been rent asunder by its members’ different notions of how much military risk to take. Two hunderd and fourteen soldiers had been killed and a further 1500 wounded trying to represent the UN’s divided will in Bosnia. The lessons The Times drew were that, ‘As we have long argued, this was a war that could be halted only when mediation was backed by effective firepower … Had the West been much more decisive, much earlier, this would not be such an unsatisfactory peace.’28
III
In the new year, twenty thousand United States soldiers arrived to join their NATO partners to help keep the Bosnian peace. The Times was convinced that the Dayton accord would not hold unless Washington showed itself to be firmly committed with troops on the ground. The American reticence was, however, understandable. President George Bush’s commitment to a new world order had met with a terrible reversal in one of its first tests – the war-torn state of Somalia. Backed by a UN Security Council Resolution, in December 1992 Bush had dispatched US forces there, the first wave of what would be a total deployment of more than 37,000 UN-backed troops sent in order to try and save Somalia from itself. There, rival warlords presided over bloody anarchy. Into this instability other organizations, including al-Qaeda, would come to insinuate themselves, but the original American invasion was a peacekeeping mission whose primary motivation was humanitarian. With famine gripping much of the country, one and a half million Somalis faced death through starvation. Only the deployment of troops appeared to be any guarantee that the foreign aid would reach those in need and not be looted by the warring militias.
Watching the US deployment was The Times’s Africa correspondent, Sam Kiley. He had been born in Kenya, the son of a journalist who had been exiled from South Africa because of his reporting. After a brief stint on the Johannesburg Star, Kiley went up to Oxford, becoming president of the OUDS – the dramatic society. Along with his student contemporary Boris Johnson, he was one of the first graduates Peter Stothard selected for The Times’ trainee scheme. Ever eager for a challenge, by August 1991 he was the paper’s man in Nairobi. It was a post to which he was temperamentally suited: ‘Africa Correspondent for The Times of London is the best job bar none in English language journalism’, he concluded after he had spent eight years in the position. The paper had maintained a South Africa bureau but had not covered the rest of sub-Saharan Africa adequately for decades. Despite this, Kiley found that he enjoyed the best of all worlds, with ‘the prestige of The Times and a continent to cover with foreign editors who let you pursue your story’. Single-handedly, he transformed the paper’s coverage without ever becoming jaded or losing his sense of intrepidness. Indeed, he could hardly believe his good fortune, noting of his daily toil, ‘You get paid to have adventures and go to amazing places and meet bizarre people.’29 He had none of the starry-eyed idealism of the gap-year backpacker, admitting he preferred his own culture ‘to the primitive world of tribalism’ and the odiousness of most African leaders. What he loved was the heroism of individuals and the continent’s ‘Monty Pythonesque sense of the absurd. A well-timed joke can secure your life, or an interview with a president.’30 For an enterprising journalist, these
were ideal conditions in which to establish a reputation.
Staying alive was the first prerequisite. Somalia was so dangerous that even Kiley, an imposing figure, travelled with a bodyguard at all times. As he passed round the stalls of a Mogadishu arms bazaar, he was tossed primed grenades to catch while a drug-crazed child fired a shot at him from behind. ‘There is nothing like the cold terror one feels when coming close to being killed in a part of the world for which the rest of the planet has little sympathy,’ he confided.31 Yet it was thanks to the information coming from him, and the small cadre of other reporters like him, that the world got to hear anything at all about what was happening to their fellow human beings in a country whose glorious beaches had once be promenaded by wealthy Italians. What worried him about the dispatch of US troops was that they soon showed themselves nervous about taking casualties and, in doing so, advertised to the Somali warlords their weakness. A possible opportunity to use overwhelming force and to disarm the groups was missed in favour of a minimalist strategy of using troops to guard the relief convoys and each other. Even the self-defence was ineffective. When the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros Ghali, arrived in Mogadishu to see the aid distribution for himself, he quickly had to turn on his heels and flee the country, surrounded by a stone-throwing crowd.
There were at least thirteen major warlords of which General Muhammad Farrah Aidid was considered the most important. By the middle of 1993 it was clear that Operation Restore Hope was going badly. The Americans were supplemented by smaller forces from twenty-two other nations acting under a UN mandate. In June, 23 Pakistani UN peacekeepers were killed. US gunships responded by launching attacks on what they identified as Aidid targets, yet the occupiers (as many chose to see the UN presence) could not even gain mastery of Mogadishu and by July, the UN mission had succeeded in killing more than two hundred civilians in its botched attempt to smash Aidid’s compounds. Kiley stayed close to the action. He had established contact with Ali Hassan Osman, one of Aidid’s key aides, and observed the fire fights, one bullet coming within an inch of smashing through his bald dome. The American bungling was spectacular – on one occasion they absailed into a UN development programme building which they mistook for one of Aidid’s hideouts, arresting UN employees within. Worse was to follow. On 3 October, an attempt to drop around 120 elite US forces into a bustling sector of Mogadishu to abduct senior Aidid associates went badly wrong. Two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down, eighteen Americans were killed and a further seventy-eight wounded. By December, the Americans were ferrying Aidid to peace talks in Addis Ababa rather than into custody. In March 1994, President Clinton pulled American troops out of Somalia. Several hundred of Aidid’s ill-disciplined thugs had beaten 37,000 troops dispatched by the ‘international community’, backed by helicopter gunships and AC130 bombers. A year later, the rest of the UN mission, which had been cowering in its heavily fortified compounds, was called home. They left behind a country in as bad, or possibly worse, a condition as they had found it. In return, they had lost more than one hundred peacekeeping troops (thirty of them US troops) and spent billions of dollars in the process. Washington’s preparedness to take the fore in UN operations where there was no clear national self-interest was diminished. The Bush doctrine for the ‘new world order’ had not even lasted three years.
Worse atrocities took place in central Africa. In April 1994, a ceasefire between Rwanda’s two main tribes collapsed when the small country’s president was killed when his plane was shot down. It triggered an outbreak of genocide by the majority Hutu on the Tutsi who, although a minority, had not been forgiven for exercising disproportionate influence during Belgian colonization. The revenge exceeded imagination. By June, around 800,000 Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) had been murdered. The killing was led by Hutu militias, known as the Interahamwe. In turn, Hutu villagers rose up and murdered their Tutsi neighbours on pain of being themselves killed if they refused to partake in the act of collective madness. What was especially astounding was that, unlike the Nazis and their industrialized methods of annihilation, the Interahamwe relied on machetes and bashing skulls against tree stumps. The only break in their productivity came when tired or aching arms had to be rested.
The genocide lasted one hundred days and was brought to an end not by the intervention of the international community but by an invasion of Tutsi forces from Rwanda’s neighbouring countries. This, in turn, precipitated the flight of two million Hutus out of the country, fearing vengeance. From his base in Burundi, Kiley had begun driving in and out of Rwanda (it was too dangerous to spend more than several days at a time there) in May. Driving up to the front line, he had to abandon his car in the middle of a minefield and walk his way out – in the darkness. On other occasions, he made his way into the areas where the Hutus were running amok. To his horror, he discovered that the French – who led Operation Turquoise, the humanitarian relief expedition – were flying supplies to the Interahamwe. Furthermore, he believed that the relative ease with which he was able to move around Hutu-controlled areas was because he physically resembled a French commando and was thus assumed to be helping Hutu operations. ‘Vous êtes sur une mission?’ the Interahamwe asked at checkpoints. ‘Oui,’ he replied confidently and marched on. He witnessed at first hand massacres in a concentration camp.32
Kiley believed culpability was widely shared among all those who did too little. The Clinton administration had fought shy of even employing the word ‘genocide’. Kiley believed that ‘well-trained and armed Western soldiers could have stopped the slaughter in a matter of days’. His greatest fury, though, was directed at the Hutus’ chief patron, France. French policy makers were obsessed with the notion of the threat to Francophone Africa if the partly English-speaking Tutsi forces took power. Some French units were genuinely engaged in relief – indeed, Kiley had helped direct one officer to a scene of slaughter where there were still Tutsis hiding among the dead and in urgent need of help – but he surmised that other French officers had arrived believing they were there to shore up the Hutu government from Tutsi rebels.33 Not only were the Hutus supplied with French arms (in breach of the UN embargo) but, even more brazenly, French forces rescued one of the genocide’s prime organizers, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, and ferried him over to Cameroon where they thought (wrongly) he would be safe from extradition. Partly for his reporting on Rwanda, Kiley won the 1996 What The Papers Say award for best foreign correspondent.
Regardless of the debate over whether prompt action could have prevented the hundred days of madness in Rwanda, it was not in dispute that the international community had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. The failure to intervene to stop the murder of 800,000 Rwandans appeared to be of a piece with the failure to prevent the slaughter of perhaps 200,000 or more Bosnians. Tony Blair assured the 2001 Labour Party conference that if another Rwanda happened, ‘we would have a moral duty to act there’.34 Problematically, there was no shortage of other claimants for direct intervention. African countries whose natural resources ought to have made them rich instead discovered that the fount of wealth watered little but corruption and warfare. Kiley witnessed the anarchy of Zaire in the last years of President Mobutu’s rule. Mobutu and his cronies had run a kleptocracy, plundering the wealth of a country rich in copper, cobalt, zinc and diamonds. The President’s own wealth was estimated at £6 billion. Kiley toured Kikwit, a city of 300,000 that had been without running water for two years. The tarmaced streets were breaking up under the force of nature beneath and the bush was reclaiming suburban gardens. The city, like Zaire itself, was returning to the jungle.35 This did not prevent covetous looks from its neighbours. Most of them invaded. One of the first was Rwanda. It used the excuse of crushing Interahamwe rebels who had crossed into Zaire as its reason for occupying a diamond-rich sector of the country. Clearly, the scramble for Africa had not ended with the lowering of European flags over the continent. In 1997 Mobutu was toppled by Laurent Kabila and Zaire was renamed Democrati
c Republic of Congo. It was no improvement. Kabila was assassinated in 2001. The country continued to be exploited and fought over, not least by its neighbours. In the four years after 1998, aid agencies estimated that the death toll – direct and indirect – from war in Kabila’s country was heading towards three million.
Part of the international community’s problem was that the African states proved unable to police their own region effectively or without self-interest. Even well-intentioned interventions were mishandled. Covering South Africa’s inept 1998 attempt at restoring order by invading Lesotho, Kiley was stopped at a checkpoint, mistaken for one of the invaders and shot. The bullet entered his right shoulder; his face was peppered with fragments of windscreen. Despite his injury and loss of blood, he managed to swing the car into reverse and retreat – under a hail of gunfire – before making it to a South African medic at the border. He lived to tell the tale: ‘I have always wondered what it would be like to be shot. It hurts. It is like being hit with a sledgehammer.’36 Patched up, he soon found far worse atrocities in Sierra Leone, a once prosperous British colony whose democratic government in Freetown was under pressure from Foday Sankoh’s coalition of guerrillas and gangsters who raped and maimed those who stood between them and the country’s diamond mines. Kiley wrote a commentary in The Times, appealing for Britain and the UN to lead a rescue mission. If humanitarian reasons were not considered sufficient, he asked whether the prospect of a new regime in Freetown being ‘able to shop their arms, drugs, and knocked-down nuclear warheads under Sierra Leonean flags of convenience’ was a good enough reason to intervene.37 The following year, Tony Blair committed British troops to shoring up Freetown’s embattled democrats against their homicidal opponents. The operation was unquestionably one of the Blair government’s major foreign policy successes. It came on the back of another effort to intervene in the affairs of an increasingly lawless province. Once again, war had come to the Balkans. Over Kosovo, Blair was not prepared to offer the same half-measures that had failed the peoples of Bosnia.