The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  But as soon as Gersony got back home to Washington from Bolivia, his mind still immersed in this bureaucratic infighting over assistance to Andean Latin America, the phone rang.

  Gene Dewey was on the line. The significant part of Bob Gersony’s life was finally about to begin.

  BIG PLAYS

  CHAPTER 4

  Uganda, Luwero Triangle

  1984

  Hundreds of Stick People

  “Come to the office. I have something for you,” Gene Dewey said over the phone. “We have a gap in the embassy in Uganda. Would you like to be acting refugee coordinator there for six months?”

  It was January 1984. Gersony was almost thirty-nine years old. “This was it,” he thought. The door was finally open for him at the State Department. “My heart was pounding,” he remembers. Moving from USAID to the Bureau of Refugee Programs meant moving inside a more politically prestigious realm—from a sister agency to Foggy Bottom itself. It also meant the chance to define himself beyond the Latin America circuit, where people spent their lives in obscurity. He wasn’t becoming a careerist; he was just a bit bored, the way journalists become when they have covered the same story for too long. From Dewey’s perspective—and that of the Foreign Service officers at the U.S. Embassy in the Ugandan capital of Kampala—Gersony was merely filling a routine assignment. There was no controversy, no drama.

  Gersony’s plane swept over Victoria Nyanza (Lake Victoria) into Entebbe airport on the northern shoreline of one of Africa’s great lakes, the same airport where only seven and a half years earlier Israeli commandos had freed hostages from a plane hijacking in one of the most daring rescue raids in military history. The road from Entebbe, inland and north, to Kampala was lined with rustic snack bars and restaurants, and many auto and tire repair shops. Tire repair shops are ubiquitous throughout sub-Saharan Africa, like shoe repair shops used to be in an earlier, industrial age America, an indication of constructive frugality in the face of limited supplies and the expense of always buying something new. There were also mounds of garbage, shanties, and one-hut establishments that serviced truckers.

  The residential areas of Kampala that he passed through were leafy, vine-covered, manicured, with stately mansions featuring wooden wraparound verandas. There was a quiet colonial ambience to this garden city, with sidewalk restaurants open and crowds of people drinking Tusker beer. Anglican and Roman Catholic cathedrals topped two hills. Police and soldiers were not much in evidence. “No war, no problem,” Gersony thought momentarily. The dramatically diaphanous sunlight was such a pleasure: “such a contrast to grim and rainy Lima,” he thought. This only contributed to his hopeful mood. He checked in at a modest, two-star hotel. In the weeks and months ahead he would house-sit for various members of the embassy staff. It would take time, months, in fact, but Gersony would come to see Kampala to be as deceptive as San Salvador, in regard to what was happening in other areas of the country.

  A self-starter, without the pedigree of having graduated from a good school and joining the Foreign Service almost as an entitlement, Gersony knew this posting was one of life’s handful of pivotal opportunities that had to be utilized to the fullest. Anxious as he was to make a good impression, the U.S. Embassy became his life. He worked twelve-hour days, from eight a.m. to eight p.m. Whereas the British High Commission in this former colonial protectorate was a spacious, multistory palace with a large staff that consumed all of the oxygen in the diplomatic community, the U.S. Embassy was a simple, wooden barracks-style building, practically in the stables of the British High Commission, with only a few diplomats. Most of the offices faced a parking lot and a fence, on which ungainly Maribou storks would come to rest every late afternoon. But to Gersony it didn’t matter, since for the first time in his career he had a big office with three desks and a safe.

  The U.S. ambassador was Allen C. Davis, a courtly, smiling, unflappable Tennessean, who underneath his diffidence was absolutely passionate about human rights. In the Foreign Service of the 1980s still, you had to hide or at least moderate such emotion. Davis had joined the Navy from middle Tennessee in order to see the world, and had the steely nerves to land planes on aircraft carriers. He later graduated from Georgetown, and served in so many posts on different continents that his career constituted a world geography lesson.

  The deputy chief of mission, or DCM (the number two person at the embassy), was John E. Bennett: balding and bullet-headed, somber, humorless, he measured every word he spoke, and often traveled around with a police radio scanner, an interest acquired from his father, who had mastered high-speed Morse code. Bennett, who had been a sergeant in U.S. Army Intelligence, was born in the far north of British Columbia, and had immigrated to the United States by way of Whitehorse in the Yukon territory to Nome, Alaska. The crisp exactitude of his voice, with the faint trace of a Canadian accent, spoke to his character. In fact, there was a stiff, formal sense of foreboding about Bennett. Yet he was one of the best, most thoughtful cable writers and editors in the business, and taught Gersony how to translate his talent for delivering good briefings to writing good cables.1 He also taught Gersony about the Foreign Service culture in general. Bennett, like Ambassador Davis, was a quiet and committed humanitarian. As U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the 1990s, he would often publicly rebuke by name the dictator Teodoro Obiang and all his associates for human rights abuses.2

  Bennett and Davis both believed deeply in the Foreign Service as an institution, but they were willing to press at the edges to better defend American values. I encountered Bennett twice in my own reporting career: in Uganda not long after Gersony had left, and in Karachi, Pakistan, in 2000, where he was posted as U.S. consul general. On both occasions he delivered among the most tightly structured, detailed, and rigorous analytical seminars I ever got from an American diplomat. It is through such cables and briefings that the Foreign Service communicates internally. Bennett and Davis, spending their lives in tough postings as they did, registered in their very persons the understated greatness of the American Foreign Service during the Cold War decades, when reporting from the field and knowledge of culture and languages were the coins of the realm. Gersony was lucky indeed to have the opportunity to be mentored by them.

  The USAID director was Irv Coker, tall and stately, superficially affable, who became one of the first African Americans to have risen so high in the organization. He inadvertently would change the course of Gersony’s career.

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  —

  Gersony found himself responsible for a country that, because of its weak borders and the tendency for war among its neighbors, was perennially plagued by refugees. On the map it was a rather small country, but with a vast terrain as far as refugees were concerned. And it was a highly complex country of many ethnic groups, as I will shortly explain—all with significant humanitarian implications, and poised on the brink of catastrophe.

  * * *

  —

  Things did not begin well. Just after his arrival, still jet-lagged, Gersony was forced to put on his Brooks Brothers summer suit and go to a formal reception in the garden of the British High Commission. “I just hated those events,” he says. “I was the perfect idiot. There was a man with an ill-fitting tweed jacket and rumpled manner resembling Elliott Gould. I called him by his first name in front of Davis and Bennett. He was the British high commissioner, Colin McLean, the most important foreigner in Uganda. I worried all that night that I had made a terrible first impression.” As it turned out, neither Davis nor Bennett cared, especially after Gersony went to work in his usual obsessive way, starting with learning about the country’s history and geography, which is where I came into the picture.

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  Uganda, which is the size of Great Britain, and whose arbitrary borders are the result of the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference of European powers, is, because of its numerous tribes, more like a loose
association of many nations than like one. It is as culturally diverse as India, and was in the 1980s as politically fragmented as civil-war-torn Lebanon. “Tribalism isolates you and is part of your identity,” Grace Ibingira, a former Ugandan cabinet minister and ambassador to the United Nations, told me in 1986 during my own visit to the country. Tribalism, as Ibingira and other Ugandans explained to me, is an amplified form of sectarian conflict, existing in places where people of different languages, traditions, features, and occupations live in physical, but not psychological, proximity. John Bennett, still the DCM in 1986, told me, “There are no horizontal linkages here—no unifying elements of history, ethnicity, or even religion. Nation-building can only start with particular groups and work upwards from the grassroots.”3

  Because civilization in Uganda was so far advanced prior to the arrival of the British, the colonial legacy was that much more controlling and therefore intense. In 1862, when John Hanning Speke became the first European to locate the source of the Nile at Ripon Falls on the northern shore of Lake Victoria (east of Entebbe), the area now known as Uganda already boasted several substantial Bantu kingdoms, each with its own army, law courts, administrative system, and unambiguous sense of identity. During the years of the protectorate, beginning in 1894, the British sharpened these divisions within the Bantu community by favoring the Baganda, whose kingdom was the most advanced, for posts in the colonial civil service. However, for the colonial army the British chose what in their minds were the tall, fine-featured Nilotic nomads from the north—Iteso, Langis, and Acholis—because they were considered by the British to be more warlike than the supposedly sedentary Bantus. Meanwhile, the activity of Catholic and Protestant missionaries from Europe led to religious cleavages accompanying the tribal ones. It was a shattered polity that emerged at independence in 1962, exactly a century after Speke’s arrival.4

  The Baganda soon deserted the coalition of Uganda’s first prime minister, Apollo Milton Obote. Obote, a member of the Nilotic Langi tribe, was forced to rely more and more for support on his own kinsmen and the closely related Iteso and Acholis in the army. When his commander in chief, Idi Amin Dada, staged a coup in January 1971, one of Amin’s first acts was to slaughter Langi, Iteso, and Acholi soldiers who had been loyal to Obote in their barracks. Bodies soon started floating down the Nile and turning up “by the hundreds” in the Mabira and Namanve forests.5 Though a Nilotic northerner like Obote, Amin was a Muslim from the minor Kakwa tribe, which inhabits a sliver of territory on the other side of the Albert Nile bordering Zaire (Congo) and South Sudan, in the extreme northwest of Uganda. With a much narrower base of tribal support than his predecessor had, Amin turned out to be far more brutal in his tactics. Most of his soldiers were recruited from Sudan and Zaire, and the few indigenous Ugandan soldiers were Kakwas and others from the northwestern border region. For the Bantu especially, loyal to the memory of their great southern tribal kingdoms, and the most educated of Uganda’s peoples, it was as if their country had sustained another foreign invasion.

  During his eight-year rule, from 1971 to 1979, until his clumsy attempt to annex part of Tanzania resulted in an invasion that deposed him, Idi Amin soaked this lush, sylvan country of 10 million with the blood of several hundred thousand people. Several hundred thousand more were made homeless. The suffering was widespread, but not completely indiscriminate. All Langis and Acholis were in danger. So was any Bantu with a house, car, or another possession that one of Amin’s thugs might covet.

  Amin expelled the South Asian business community in 1972 in humiliating fashion, decimating the nascent middle class and thus precipitating a steep economic decline from which Uganda had yet to recover by the time of Gersony’s arrival. However, the basic machinery of state, including public services such as water and electricity, remained intact. To the outside world, Amin’s physical bulk and buffoonery lent a bizarre, comic-book quality to his atrocities. The international press dubbed him Big Daddy, and in sub-Saharan Africa for a time he became “a sort of perverse folk hero,” wrote the Los Angeles Times correspondent David Lamb.6 Amin promoted himself to field marshal and was called Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth. (The Israelis humiliated him with their hostage rescue operation at Entebbe, carried out right under his nose, after he had colluded with Palestinian and Baader-Meinhof Gang hijackers.) Though, as Gersony’s work would reveal to the outside world, even worse was to come after Amin, though there would no longer be a colorful madman to draw the world’s attention to the slaughter.

  Two ineffectual Ugandan exiles handpicked by the Tanzanian government, Yusufu Lule and Godfrey Binaisa, followed Amin in quick succession. Next came a military commission headed by Paulo Muwanga, a loyalist of former prime minister Milton Obote. Muwanga, by all accounts, rigged the December 1980 election that returned Obote to power. Bennett described Obote to me as “an amoral tactician without a strategy.” From the moment of his return from exile, Obote played tribal politics to the fullest in order to hang on to power, but he never really got control of the army, which was disintegrating into a rampaging mob. The army reverted to the old British pattern of Iteso, Langis, and Acholis, which Obote had relied on at the end of his first, ill-fated attempt at governing Uganda. Amin’s Kakwa soldiers deserted over the border to Sudan and Zaire, making cross-border forays against Obote’s army in the West Nile region of Uganda’s northwest. In mid-1981 came Ugandan army reprisals against the civilians of West Nile, including a June massacre of sixty people, among them women and children, at the Verona Fathers’ Ombachi mission, sparking an exodus of 100,000 Kakwa, Madi, and Nubi tribesmen into Sudan and Zaire.

  But the real challenge to Obote’s rule would come not from the far-flung border region of West Nile, but from the traditional Baganda homeland just to the north of Kampala, in an area called the Luwero Triangle, a highly populated area more or less defined by two main roads: one leading straight north from Kampala and the other leading northwest out of the capital, forming two sides of a rough triangle between them. Here Yoweri Museveni, one of the losers in the disputed 1980 election that brought Obote back to power, set up the National Resistance Army, or NRA. Museveni was a radically different kind of Ugandan leader. Unlike Idi Amin and Milton Obote, he was a southern Bantu-speaker, of the Banyankole tribe. Whereas Amin was uneducated and Obote never finished college, Museveni had a degree from University College in Dar es Salaam, the Tanzanian capital, and had taught economics. Also, having led a guerrilla struggle against Amin in the 1970s, Museveni had political and military experience that the former transition leaders, Lule and Binaisa—both highly educated men—had not had. But what really distinguished Museveni from almost every other political personality in postcolonial Uganda’s history was ideology—the fact that he had one. He spoke persistently and with conviction about democratic rights, the dignity of women, and the triumph of nationalism over tribalism. Consequently, he created an authentic movement. Peasants soon began switching their allegiance to the NRA located inside the Luwero Triangle, as they fled government troops.

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  This was the situation at the beginning of 1984, when Gersony got down to business at his desk in the U.S. Embassy as the acting refugee coordinator. Whereas the military situation in the Luwero Triangle was producing internally displaced persons, the purview of USAID and Irv Coker, Gersony’s marching orders were to pay attention to Uganda’s outlying regions, where movements across international borders had produced refugees. Though travel was not required of his job, he immediately decided to make an extended, three-pronged tour of the country’s borders. “Nobody sent me out [of Kampala]. I sent myself out.” He got nothing but encouragement from Ambassador Davis and John Bennett.

  Gersony secured a four-wheel-drive vehicle with air conditioning and every spare part imaginable. Gersony, early on in his African forays, would always insist on three spare tires, chains or winches, a toolkit, and so forth. The driver, Joseph, wore a whi
te shirt and tie, a bit out of place given where they were headed. Joseph would be the first of many embassy drivers—Foreign Service Nationals—that Gersony would work with in the course of his career: all, without exception, were highly skilled, dedicated, and utterly essential to Gersony’s work, and most were quite brave.

  The two traveled first to the Mbarara region of southwestern Uganda, near the borders of Rwanda and Tanzania. The area had been in turmoil since the autumn of 1982. Obote’s minister of state for security, Chris Rwakasisi, himself from Mbarara, had wanted the Banyarwanda to get the hell out of Uganda. The Banyarwanda were Rwandans from over the border who had settled in Uganda twenty years earlier because of tribal disturbances in their own country. These refugees were mainly though not exclusively Tutsis, with a reputation for being a smart and dynamic commercial people, who took up territory with their cattle. Hatred of them was widespread. While Gersony was preparing for the trip in Kampala, one Ugandan told him: “I long for the day when there are no more straight-noses” in Uganda, a reference to the Rwandan refugees.7 Moreover, the Tutsi Banyarwanda were cousins of the Banyankole, rebel leader Yoweri Museveni’s people—another reason why Rwakasisi wanted to get rid of them.

  About fifteen months before Gersony arrived, Rwakasisi had organized a “chasing” of the Banyarwanda. It was a low-calorie version of Kristallnacht, in which troops and local sympathizers beat up and terrorized the Banyarwanda and chased them back over the border and into two refugee camps, Oruchinga and Nakivale, just north of the Rwandan and Tanzanian frontiers. But the Tutsi Banyarwanda had started filtering back from Rwanda and in December 1983, a few weeks before Gersony got there, Rwakasisi repeated the process all over again.