By the second day in the border area southeast of Harare, observing one interview after another in a miserable, dusty place, the CIO agents were bored stupid, wasting away their own per diem. Gersony was deliberately asking questions about the availability of water, the quality of the soil, and so forth, both in order to fulfill his original mandate from the refugee bureau and to demonstrate to the CIO that he was doing nothing of interest to them. On the second day the CIO agents excused themselves and went back to Harare. Gersony and his translator then continued their journey to several other refugee camps strung along the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border, interviewing people about why they had fled.
He was by now getting reports from people in areas not in communication with each other, but who had experienced the same or strikingly similar events. RENAMO…RENAMO…Matsanga. There would be the shooting at dawn by RENAMO in the undefended villages. People would run. The atrocities included rape, disembowelment, mutilations, forced portering, and beatings to death while on long marches, with single-file lines of hundreds of people bearing heavy loads for the right-wing guerrillas. People showed him their cuts and bruises as proof. RENAMO organized their areas in concentric circles of trust, with the inner circle a slave encampment. Gersony’s mind was beginning to work like an old-fashioned calculating machine, with each of the columns-slash-categories filling up on his mental charts. He couldn’t sleep. The hundreds of data points had to be sorted out.
Back in Harare, he typed up all his notes verbatim, spending days in the embassy and his hotel room. Over and over again, he thought, his professional life was an assault on the Washington way of doing things, with its executive summaries, which dangerously simplified situations: enemy number one in his mind.
In such a lonely life, Gersony was probably never more lonely than in that Harare hotel room. He had nobody to talk to about his information. He forced himself to tell no one at the embassy about what he had found, which was that RENAMO—about to be included as a large recipient of military aid as part of the Reagan Doctrine—was the real culprit in this brutal war.
Then Roy Stacy suddenly showed up, stuck in Harare for a few days, because of a problem with a plane connection. Stacy was the new deputy assistant secretary of state for Africa, number three in the bureau after Chet Crocker and Chas Freeman, specializing in humanitarian and refugee affairs. More importantly, Stacy had the softest and sincerest of bedside manners.
Gersony couldn’t hold back.
“Can I confide in you?” he asked Stacy.
“Sure.”
Gersony told him what he had discovered in the refugee camps along the Mozambique borders with Zimbabwe and Malawi.
“Do you have any idea how important this is?” Stacy said to Gersony calmly. They migrated to the nearby botanical gardens where they could talk out of earshot of anyone. Stacy added that nobody in Washington had any notion of what was going on. Therefore, Gersony’s reporting would ignite a big debate in a city gearing up to add RENAMO to the list of pro-Western guerrilla groups receiving weapons and funding.
“What can I do to help?” Stacy then asked.
“I need to go everywhere inside Mozambique, and then to the border areas of Swaziland, South Africa, and Tanzania.”6 Gersony knew that if there was going to be a big debate about his evidence, he needed to have all his ducks in a row, so to speak. Mozambique, because of the thousands of miles separating its border areas, could offer differing refugee accounts depending upon where he was. He still wasn’t convinced that he was anywhere near having a complete picture.
Roy Stacy immediately called Chet Crocker by secure embassy phone. Crocker immediately called Jonathan Moore. They all gave Gersony carte blanche. Moore, who loved a good fight in order to do good, was especially delighted with Gersony’s plan of action. Crocker instinctually trusted Stacy’s advice because the latter had so much credibility owing to his previous work for USAID. Stacy, in turn, recalls Gersony’s news from the vantage point of three decades later as a “game-changing ray of sunshine” amidst the confusion of the southern African wars.
* * *
—
Gersony flew to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, formerly known as Lourenço Marques, after the Portuguese explorer who sailed into the bay there in 1544. Gersony stayed at the Polana Hotel, where his father used to go to play bridge while he was stuck in Lourenço Marques for several months after jumping a ship bound for Shanghai, and waiting for another ship that would take him to the United States. His father always talked fondly about the Polana. This fact gave Gersony quiet pleasure.7
In 1988, the Polana, with its cagelike elevator redolent of the Pera Palace in Istanbul, was in a state of real dilapidation. It was thirteen years after the Portuguese left and almost two decades before an international luxury chain would renovate it. There was not even air conditioning, and so Gersony kept both the room door and the door to his balcony open to let in the wonderful Indian Ocean breeze: the architecture and the vast panel of sea bore all the suggestive ambience of Africa, India, Persia, and the Arab world. Moreover, there was a fancy veranda facing the Indian Ocean where excellent seafood was served. Still, he worried constantly. RENAMO was tied to the South African clandestine services, which he assumed had to have informants in the Mozambican capital.
Maputo was as modern as Harare, but far more cosmopolitan, in the way of all port cities. It was also, in addition to the great heat, a more humid place because of the Indian Ocean. In a cultural sense, Maputo was Portuguese, that is, Latin, with a smoky, beguiling mestizo culture, and a soft and gracious atmosphere that the former capitals of British Africa lacked. A lot of white South Africans came over the border to vacation in Maputo, for an edgy experience in racial mixing. In fact, the U.S. Embassy was located on the second floor of a building in the red-light district where security was virtually nonexistent, the roof leaked, and electricity cuts were common.
Because his mother was Viennese and his formative professional years had been spent in Latin America, Gersony was very polite and old-fashioned for his generation: Be indirect, don’t contradict was his motto. He felt at ease in Maputo, despite its bad roads, shanty towns, intermittent squalor, shuttered restaurants, and beaches littered with land mines. But he didn’t know the lingua franca as he did in former British Africa. Portuguese reads as quite similar to Spanish. But when you hear Portuguese spoken, with the consonants elongated and the vowels quickly swallowed, it might as well be a Slavic language.
The DCM at the American embassy was Mike Ranneberger, an intense, hyperactive guy who was constantly in motion. He put people off, but not Gersony.
“What can I do for you?” Ranneberger said over and over. He and Gersony became fast friends.
The ambassador was Melissa Wells, tall, stately, with beautifully coifed salt-and-pepper hair. Jesse Helms had held up her nomination for ten months until she came around to mouthing words of support for RENAMO. During that time she played the proverbial game of twenty questions with the folksy and infamous North Carolina senator, who long presaged the neo-isolationism of Donald Trump: she would answer a set of his questions, then he would give her another set to answer, and so on. Like Ranneberger, she was as supportive as could be. Both were top-of-the-line FSOs and Africa area experts. Gersony felt at home with them, as if he were back with Allen Davis and John Bennett in Uganda.
Wells and Ranneberger were then working hard to move the FRELIMO government from the left to the center left, a distinction often missed in the black-and-white political and media bubble of Washington. The U.S. Embassy’s efforts were being helped by FRELIMO’s own realization that it had made blunders during its thirteen years in power, and with a civil war still on its hands. Furthermore, Mozambique’s president, Joaquim Chissano, the former foreign minister, was a relative moderate within FRELIMO ranks who had replaced the hardline Samora Machel, after the latter was killed in a plane crash in 1986. “Chissano wa
s like Gorbachev after Machel. The plane crash, which could have led to chaos, turned out to be fortuitous,” Ranneberger says.
Ranneberger sent Gersony to see the USAID director, Julio Schlotthauer, who, like Ranneberger and Wells, could not have been more cooperative. This friendliness wasn’t just a matter of instructions from Crocker and Moore at the Africa and refugee bureaus. The truth was, Gersony was fast gaining a reputation throughout Foggy Bottom as someone who would always find the truth about a situation.
Julio Schlotthauer put a small two-engine charter plane and a Tanzanian pilot at Gersony’s disposal, since the roads throughout the country were potholed and full of land mines and ambushes. Suddenly the whole magnificent geography of Mozambique opened up for Gersony: stretching 1,500 miles along the Indian Ocean and half as far inland in places, blanketed with extremely lush jungle—excellent guerrilla country. Julio also gave him two translators from the AID pool. “Now let’s go for a drink tonight,” Julio said. Julio drove Gersony at high speed throughout the city in his Cadillac with fins. Gersony hated it. He was afraid of an accident and the police, and late-night drinking was his idea of hell. But he said nothing. “The guy is laying on a plane for me, so don’t complain,” he said to himself.
Gersony made the rounds of the NGO community, asking their advice on where to go and what to see in the country, while not telling them what he had learned in the Malawi and Zimbabwe border areas. He was well aware that Maputo wasn’t the real Mozambique. Mozambique beckoned inside, in the towering bush with its sluggish brown rivers, swirling through the green monotony like a lazy knife. In this matter there was one man in the NGO community who had the aura of knowing everything about it. That man was Peter Stocker, the Maputo office director of the Swiss-run International Committee of the Red Cross, or ICRC.
Peter Stocker was an old-time ICRC type: mysterious, deeply knowledgeable about culture and landscape, with a commanding presence, and armed with Scotch and cigars. Stocker wasn’t cynical since he was beyond cynicism, as well as completely uncommitted. He reminded Gersony of Kurtz, the ivory trader in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Pierre Gassmann had vouched for him, and so Gersony decided to trust him. Gassmann recalls, “Stocker had trouble getting along with his superiors, but he had excellent relations with truck drivers and every manner of person who could actually get things done in a place like Mozambique”—a bit like Jerry Weaver in Sudan, in other words.
Stocker sat at a simple spare table with two of his field guys, facing Gersony. Stocker was a devotee of feng shui, and thus his office had an unusual harmony to it. Gersony unloaded on them with his preliminary findings, emphasizing that he had so far only interviewed refugees in two border areas and had yet to meet any displaced persons within Mozambique itself.
Stocker turned to his two field guys and asked, “What do you think?”
“Identical,” they said cryptically.
Stocker said that the ICRC had people all over the country and their accounts matched Gersony’s. Few aid officials were focusing on the atrocities, though. It was all about sending in assistance, not about root causes. And of course, the ICRC, as part of its mandate, had to remain neutral.
* * *
—
Gersony, along with his two translators, flew to Beira, Mozambique’s third-largest city, located several hundred miles north along the Indian Ocean. In Beira there was an important Roman Catholic archbishop. Gersony wanted to see him, since it was assumed that the Catholic Church was backing RENAMO.
Archbishop Dom Jaime Pedro Gonsalves received Gersony after dinner in his private book-lined quarters. Clearly, the discussion would be off the record. The setting, the archbishop’s demeanor, all manifested a studied elegance. Like an embassy or an NGO office, there was an aura of extraterritoriality about the place, as if Gersony had left the squalor of a Third World country behind. Gersony wanted from the archbishop a letter of introduction to priests around the country. He was also desperate to hear the other side’s point of view, which he assumed he would get from the archbishop. But to get the other side’s point of view, he had no choice but to confide a bit in Archbishop Gonsalves about what he had learned in the field. “Was I hearing all those refugees’ stories right?” he asked.
Archbishop Gonsalves was quiet for a moment, then said: “Unfortunately, you’re not wrong. That’s what I’ve been hearing from parish priests around the country.”
Gersony thought: “The most pro-RENAMO institution in Mozambique is telling me, with sadness and disappointment, that I am basically right. I have real political dynamite that could blow up in my face.”
He saw Gonsalves as an African version of papal pro-nuncio Josef Rauber in Uganda, who also had a soft, whispering voice, and was also deeply committed to human rights.
It wasn’t as if reports of RENAMO atrocities were completely new. The details that Gersony was gathering did not exist in a vacuum. For example, the year before, on July 18, 1987, there had been a massacre of almost four hundred civilians in the coastal town of Homoine, north of Maputo, almost halfway to Beira. A FRELIMO detachment had been wiped out and several hundred civilians were, according to reports, subsequently murdered by RENAMO. But nobody could reach a definitive, investigative conclusion about what exactly had happened. And so the incident became politicized, as had others. Because RENAMO’s behavior had not been comprehensively studied, its supporters both in Washington and Pretoria could always claim that criticism of the group was a mere tactic of the Soviet bloc and the American Left. In Washington, in particular, not only Jesse Helms but other right-wing stalwarts such as Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson were beating the war drums to support white South Africa and arm RENAMO. This further incentivized Gersony to be thorough in his research.
* * *
—
For three weeks following the meeting in Beira, he flew all over Mozambique, staying at every displaced persons camp he could possibly find, amid the green sameness of a tropical landscape that was both grim and beautiful. Much of his energies were taken up with logistics: finding the next camp, finding a place to sleep, obtaining fuel for the onward plane journey. Usually he shared a bare room or shack with his two translators. He quickly filled up his handwritten notebooks. When he finished typing up the notes from each book, he triple-sealed the notebook in a manila U.S. government envelope with clear packing tape over which he signed his name, so there would be evidence if the seal was broken. He would later put it in an embassy safe for classified documents and subsequently send all the packages by diplomatic pouch to the refugee programs bureau in Washington.
Even with a plane, the journey was harrowing, since it was precisely the displaced persons camps that RENAMO liked to attack, along with schools, health centers, and villages that the refugees had returned to from camps in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In one village Gersony actually saw smoldering grass as well as huts on fire: RENAMO had just been there and set fire to the place. The guerrilla group was sending a message to the rural population: The government can’t protect you.
He would conduct lengthy interviews with 196 refugees and displaced persons in all, throughout his travels in Mozambique and the border areas of neighboring countries. As in so many other places where he had worked and would still work, his documentation and analysis was deeper than that provided by almost any journalist. It is possible that no journalist or relief worker ever equaled his output.
Though all the people he interviewed touched him, naturally a few stood out.
* * *
—
There was the very dignified, quite “self-possessed” Sena-speaking lady with the black kerchief and blue blouse. She had been a farmer in Chemba district, Sofala province, near the great Zambezi River and a tributary she called the Tunga in central Mozambique. She had seen her niece and other villagers executed by RENAMO soldiers before RENAMO closed in on her, her seven-year-old daughter, and mo
re villagers, forcing them all into the rough waters of the Zambezi, in the direction of which the soldiers began firing. She told Gersony that “she tried as best she could,” but in the panic of a split-second decision to save herself, she let go of her daughter, “who was swept away by the current and drowned.” The moment she told me of letting go of her seven-year-old daughter’s hand in the great river, “her hand slowly waved in the air, as if she were letting go again, and again.”
Gersony says, “That woman was a turning point for me in this assignment. I said to myself that I’ve really got to do a good job to put all this across for the people in Washington. The seal of detachment in my mind was broken then and there. I became a human being for a moment. This is a task that has been given to me to do.” She was the 143rd person he interviewed out of 196.
* * *
—
Another refugee, this one a man, from the village of Sekwa, also in Sofala province (his 123rd interview), told Gersony how the Matsanga came into his village, took people’s “clothes, goats, sorghum, and burned the houses.” He said, “The only job I did was carrying loads for the Matsanga,” who always beat him. Once the Matsanga stole a car, dismantled it, and made people carry many of the parts to a RENAMO base. He also carried guns, ammunition, and sewing machines. The trips were sometimes as much as six days each way. He estimated that he portered two or three times a month. “You had to serve as a porter unless you hid in the bush. There would be no food and almost no water given on the journey. When there was a stop, you had to find your own food. People I met along the way would sometimes give me maize and water.” He saw two porters beaten to death. Once the Matsanga found a FRELIMO soldier living with a family. “They cut the FRELIMO soldier’s ears off and made him eat them. Then they put him in a sack and beat him.” It was one of the few cases of mutilation that he heard about. He was always careful not to exaggerate.
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