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The forty-page report begins and ends with statistics. The author states that he visited 42 locations in five countries, which included 25 refugee camps separated by as much as 1,500 miles. The 196 refugees and displaced persons interviewed came from 48 different districts of Mozambique, each of which Gersony names. “The relationship between RENAMO and the population,” he writes, “appears to revolve solely around the extraction of resources, strictly by force, without explanation, with no tolerance for refusal, and without reciprocation.” He adds that “the possession of new clothes, a radio, any type of army issue apparel such as a belt or cap—perhaps even a bag of salt—may be enough to trigger torture or death.” There were, too, reports of “targeted retribution against small children,” involving “mutilation and subsequent killing…in retaliation against parents who fled a RENAMO visit or attack against their homes.” The overwhelming majority of the refugees and displaced persons “cited RENAMO actions as the reason for their flight.”14 Forty percent said they had personally witnessed the murder of civilians by RENAMO. Ninety-one percent said they had a “very negative” impression of RENAMO; 7 percent had a “very negative” impression of FRELIMO, and 2 percent were undecided.
The refugees observed that RENAMO appeared to have no ideology or program. There was “almost no reported effort to explain” the purpose of the insurgents’ actions or the nature of their goals, or to enlist the loyalty of the population. “The only reciprocity the captives appear to receive or to expect is the opportunity to remain alive.”
Gersony writes that the refugees and displaced persons he interviewed lacked two basic skills that hindered their own observations. They could not identify the month and year of an incident. Therefore, the author had to work back through “seasonal agricultural thresholds” like rainy and dry seasons to establish rough timelines. And most could not accurately count above the number 10. Beyond the number 10, the only word used was “many.” Thus, in quantifying casualty reports the term “many” was assigned a maximum value of 10 by Gersony. Deliberately lowballing casualty rates by this and other means, Gersony said that RENAMO was responsible for the deaths of at least 100,000 Mozambicans. “I knew the figure was low,” he says. “But I did not want anybody to undermine my analysis with an even lower number.” Nobody ever did. UNICEF would later put the figure at 600,000.15
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The State Department’s refugee bureau could not print up several thousand copies fast enough, given the demand within and outside the building. Once the news circulated that Shultz and Maureen Reagan had met with Gersony, everyone wanted to be briefed, from Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Michael Armacost on down. It was his briefing on Mozambique to Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Morton Abramowitz that permanently anchored Gersony’s friendship with Mort and his wife, Sheppie.
Mort had been ambassador to Thailand in the late 1970s, when there were hundreds of thousands of refugees in the country, and a future ambassador to Turkey during the First Gulf War. He would help found the International Crisis Group, committed to ending deadly conflicts. Abramowitz had not only a deep heart but a ready sense of humor. “Boy,” he said, laughing during Gersony’s briefing, “is there going to be a shitstorm with Helms over this.” Abramowitz tells me thirty years later, “Gersony always had fascinating information about how high policy was affecting ordinary people’s lives. He knew many things that people at the high levels missed. Every time I talked to him I learned something vital. And he wasn’t a pain in the ass.”
Of course, the right wing as well as military circles were in an uproar as word spread that one lone contractor helped upend pending administration support for RENAMO. At a Pentagon briefing, attended by uniformed personnel and civilian defense bureaucrats from the building and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Gersony had barely got started explaining his methodology when a DIA official, Steve Weigert, interrupted, saying, “We’ve all read the report and know what’s in it,” before tearing into Gersony and assailing his motives. It appeared that elements of the defense community had gotten ahead of the policy: that is, they were leaning too far over the handlebars and had already begun the planning stages for how to assist RENAMO when Gersony’s report suddenly landed on their laps. (Indeed, the year before, the DIA had already downplayed the RENAMO massacre of hundreds of civilians in Homoine, noting that “damage to buildings was limited.”16) The DIA had been relying considerably on the CIA’s directorate of operations for its information about RENAMO, and the CIA’s directorate of operations was relying on information provided by the South African security services, which wanted the Americans to believe that RENAMO would eventually win against FRELIMO troops.17
But it was more than that. Weigert, who admits “the extraordinary quality of Gersony’s accomplishments over the course of an exceptional career,” had an intellectual disagreement with him on this particular issue. Weigert and his colleagues genuinely thought that FRELIMO bore an equal share of the blame for the flight of Mozambican refugees, despite what the refugees and displaced persons had told Gersony. Moreover, RENAMO represented an authentic “nationalist movement,” making it more than just a bunch of thugs and killers. Clearly, FRELIMO forces were not angels, being brutal and incompetent in their own right. The few journalists who were able to visit the parts of Mozambique held by RENAMO during the war all reported a more ambiguous human rights situation than the one portrayed by the refugees that Gersony had interviewed. It was a messy and confused war, and Gersony knew only what the victims of it had told him.18 Still, even if instead of 90 percent of the atrocities in Gersony’s report were attributed to RENAMO, the real number was only 70 percent, the policy implications would be unchanged. RENAMO was clearly not a group that the U.S. government should support.
By this time, Helms and the conservative Washington Times were aiming their cannons in Gersony’s direction.
The Washington Times published an editorial accusing the State Department of mounting a “guerrilla war” against the Reagan Doctrine. The editorial called out Gersony by name, as a tool of Crocker’s “propaganda blitz.” The editorial quoted longtime RENAMO advocate and analyst at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, William Pascoe, as saying that Gersony’s report “should be dismissed by those concerned with understanding the true nature of the conflict in Mozambique.” Pascoe, who, like the Washington Times editors, had never called Gersony for a briefing, claimed that Gersony did not speak the “language” of the refugees. Of course, there was no such “language,” but rather eighteen different languages and dialects, often mutually unintelligible, necessitating eleven translators from vastly different regions, unknown to each other, that Gersony employed in order to get a cross-section of viewpoints. Pascoe also accused Gersony of interviewing only refugees guarded by FRELIMO soldiers, forgetting the many interviews Gersony conducted in five countries bordering Mozambique, where obviously no FRELIMO troops were present. The lengthy editorial lamented that “President Reagan himself may have swallowed” Gersony’s analysis and the “illusions” of Crocker and Foggy Bottom.19 As it would turn out, though, others much closer to The Washington Times would soon swallow those so-called illusions as well. The editorial was a case of ideology and rank partisanship slandering meticulous reporting and fieldwork, something that would only become more typical in Washington in the decades following.
In Washington, even during the Cold War, having the president and the secretary of state behind you only created more enemies. Gersony knew he needed help. He called Robert Hunter, a born-again Christian active in the national prayer breakfast circuit, whom he had met at one of his briefings about the Luwero Triangle in Uganda. Hunter arranged for Gersony to speak at a prayer breakfast attended by Helms’s staffers and other followers.
The prayer breakfast was held at t
he beginning of May at Fellowship House in Washington, later described by New Yorker writer Peter J. Boyer as a “frat house for Jesus.”20 Gersony arrived in the sumptuous, flower-bedecked dining room, decorated with paintings and religious books, at 6:30 a.m., half an hour early as usual, always terribly insecure throughout his life about being late. Roughly twenty people filed in without introducing themselves or shaking his hand. The atmosphere was noticeably hostile. Everyone held hands and squeezed their eyes shut to pray before beginning to eat their bacon and eggs. Hunter introduced Gersony as “a friend” on matters relating to Africa, whom he hoped everyone would listen to with an open mind.
Gersony related his methodology to the group, the numbers of people he interviewed and how he had interviewed them. Then he spoke about the gratuitous murders, the killing of children, the forced portering, and so forth. Silence. Finally an old portly gentleman stood up, seconded by others, and said: “I want to apologize to you on behalf of everyone in this room. I had no idea you were so serious. We are going back to talk to the senator.” Everyone walked over to Gersony and shook his hand before departing. Helms soon abruptly withdrew his support for RENAMO. It may have been the only time Jesse Helms reversed himself on a major symbolic issue for the right wing.
It still wasn’t quite over, though. A number of congressmen, notably Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, then running against Vice President George H. W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination, announced that if elected he would immediately fund the RENAMO “freedom fighters” against communism. Gersony phoned Elliott Abrams, telling Abrams’s secretary that he needed to give her boss a briefing about Mozambique. Abrams agreed, knowing that if Gersony insisted on talking to him, it must mean that there was some trouble. Abrams was still the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, but because he was so immersed in directing the contra war in Nicaragua, he had a lot of influence among movement conservatives throughout Washington.
Gersony ended his briefing for Abrams by saying that Dole didn’t know what he was talking about. Abrams briefly smiled, then called Dole’s chief of staff while Gersony was still in his office, announcing into the phone that “we’ve got to walk this one back up the branch, or else there could be a big problem for the senator.” Dole henceforth dropped the subject of RENAMO. Gersony marveled at how Washington worked. He himself would have had to deliver at least an hour-long briefing to convince anyone of what to do about an issue, whereas if you were trusted in the right circles one sentence without any specifics would do.
Abrams’s trust in Gersony was absolute. He had recently written a letter to Gersony’s father, saying: “Your son Bob is a national treasure, and for years now, we have been relying on him for courageous and absolutely straightforward analyses of some of the most difficult humanitarian problems our country faces.”21
Abrams explained his thinking to me this way: “For years we [conservatives] had made heroes out of Jonas Savimbi and the anti-communist resistance in Angola. Helms, Dole, [Pat Buchanan, U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, CIA director William Casey] were all supporting RENAMO, which was viewed as an analogue of UNITA, Savimbi’s force.22 So we all assumed that published attacks on RENAMO were merely propaganda from the Left. Then Bob shows up, and guess what: we learn that the Left is right on this one!”23
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Crocker immediately sent Gersony back to southern Africa, accompanied by the principal deputy assistant secretary, Chas Freeman, to brief the leaders in the region about what the United States had learned about RENAMO, and to drive home the point that the United States, contrary to assumptions, had no intention now of backing RENAMO. Rather than fly directly home, Gersony flew from southern Africa to Portugal to link up with Jonathan Moore.
After briefing Portuguese officials, who were formally backing RENAMO but were not surprised by what Gersony told them, Moore insisted on taking Gersony out for a celebratory dinner, now that Gersony’s report had raised the status of the refugee bureau. Moore got pleasantly loaded on Portuguese wines, whose quality he extolled, while Gersony drank ginger ale. Moore would later tell his wife, Katie, that Bob Gersony was the finest of all fieldworkers he had come across. “This man was it.”24
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History pivoted in southern Africa thanks to Bob Gersony.
If you accept the fact that Gersony’s figure of 100,000 dead because of RENAMO’s war against the FRELIMO government was a lowball estimate, then his report probably saved the lives of hundreds of thousands more civilians, who would have been killed had the Reagan Doctrine been applied to Mozambique as it had been to the Afghan mujahideen, the Nicaraguan contras, and other groups, perhaps dragging out the war in Mozambique for another fourteen years, as in the case of Angola, where half a million people perished. Instead, because of the political effect of the Gersony report in Washington, Crocker and his counterpart on Africa at the National Security Council, Herman Cohen, were immediately able to move into high gear facilitating peace talks between RENAMO and FRELIMO, which culminated successfully in 1992.
In turn, dramatically calming and then ending the war in Mozambique—which perhaps constituted Crocker’s fiercest interagency battle—helped facilitate the demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa, with Nelson Mandela elected as the country’s first black president in 1994. For suddenly the white rulers in Pretoria did not have a hot guerrilla war on their hands right on their border that they were promoting, and consequently they felt less besieged in regard to their overall strategy. The end of the Mozambique conflict made it easier for Chet Crocker, in Chas Freeman’s words, “to rearrange the strategic geometry in southern Africa.”25 By moving closer to apartheid South Africa, while also pressuring it by opening peace talks with Cuba over Angola, Crocker’s high-wire diplomacy resulted in an end to the civil war in Angola and the end of white South African colonialism in Southwest Africa (Namibia). Both developments would help catalyze the end of apartheid itself.
Crocker, along with Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, James Baker III, and Richard Holbrooke, was one of the great diplomatic masters of the age, however underappreciated he remains compared to the others. And he received a stroke of luck with the Gersony report. In Crocker’s diplomatic memoir, he writes that a significant reason “why we prevailed was the outstanding humanitarian research undertaken by…Gersony,” whom he goes on about at some length.26
On October 2, 1992, the government of Mozambique and RENAMO signed a formal peace treaty. One of the two chief negotiators, the Italian diplomat Mario Rafaelli, called the Gersony report a “fundamental turning point in the peace process.” Because of Gersony, “Mozambique remained an internal conflict and did not become internationalized.”
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There is a fitting coda to Gersony’s work in Mozambique.
One of Gersony’s interviewees was a woman, a farmer, whose left hand was deformed and who spoke Shangani. She told him that in late December 1985, the people of her village had dug a network of tunnels to hide from the Matsanga. When they heard RENAMO was coming, they would disappear into the tunnels and would cover the narrow entrances with a carpet of leaves and dirt. The ploy worked a couple of times. But RENAMO found out about the tunnels by interrogating a boy who showed them the entrances. The soldiers then suffocated the occupants by lighting stacks of bush and throwing them down every hole. When the villagers burst out of the holes to escape, RENAMO shot them. Hundreds of villagers died, the woman claimed. Gersony could not use the story in his final report because it was based on a single source and strained credibility.
But after Gersony had left the region, the DCM at the U.S. Embassy in Maputo, Mike Ranneberger, who was traveling around the country at the time in a small plane, met a woman in a displaced persons camp who told him the exact same story. Ranneberger went to the village in question with her and saw the tunnels himself.
“This is why you must always believe refugees,” Gersony says. “Their stories have a literal truth that is hard to replicate.”
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In fact, as the Cold War went on and reached its later stages, the issue of refugees increasingly penetrated the sanctums of top policymakers, helped by the likes of Shepard Lowman, Lionel Rosenblatt, Mort Abramowitz, and Elliott Abrams, to say nothing of Jim Purcell, Gene Dewey, and Jonathan Moore. And most of these men had been, in turn, dramatically sensitized on the subject by the fieldwork of Bob Gersony. Indeed, the humanitarianism of the 1990s did not emerge out of a vacuum, a product exclusively of the end of the Cold War and the consequent liberation from realpolitik. It had important roots in the Cold War itself, of which Mozambique was a prime example.
CHAPTER 9
Ethiopia and Somalia
1989
A Giant Table That Had Just Tilted Over
With Mozambique behind him, Gersony’s methodology and place in the world was fully established and articulated. So it is a good moment to pause and take another, deeper look at him—and at myself, too.
The Good American Page 22