* * *
—
The Horn of Africa was where my scattershot relationship with Gersony had begun in 1985. We met in Khartoum, when the Sudanese capital functioned as the principal listening post for the wars that racked Ethiopia and the Somali borderlands next door. The Horn, much of whose landscape was like the forbidding, inhospitable surface of a distant planet, a place for only nomads and camels, had been for many years in the 1970s and 1980s ground zero for the Cold War.
The Cold War may have started and ended in Europe, but the blood was shed in the Third World. And outside of the Korean peninsula and Vietnam, where Americans themselves had fought in large numbers, the Horn of Africa may arguably have been the most dramatic and clear-cut case of strategic positioning and competition for the two superpowers.
The strategically located Horn, at the confluence of the Indian Ocean and the mouth of the Red Sea by the Strait of Bab el Mandeb, formed one of the world’s most critical and vulnerable shipping lanes, as vessels going to, and coming from, the Suez Canal had to practically hug the coastlines of Djibouti, Somalia, and Ethiopia. For decades, until 1974, the United States had a firm ally in Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, the small bearded man with a pith helmet and bedecked with medals who was larger than life, and who ruled a country of 32 million people back then; the Soviet Union had a firm ally in Somalia’s president Mohamad Siad Barre, a tough desert warlord who ruled a much poorer and much less urbanized population of only 3.6 million at that time.
Courtesy of Haile Selassie, Ethiopia had granted the United States permission for a crucial military communications complex near Asmara, the capital of the province of Eritrea. The evils of Haile Selassie’s reactionary misrule certainly were well known to U.S. policymakers, and generous economic aid was designed to mitigate the backbreaking poverty of the Ethiopian masses. Haile Selassie’s downfall began with the 1973–74 famine in the regions of Tigre and Wollo, news of which filtered back, despite local censorship, to radicals in Addis Ababa. And so in early 1974 the “creeping coup” began, starting with a strike by taxi drivers in the capital. Events soon cascaded. It wasn’t as if Haile Selassie’s picture was abruptly removed from the city’s ubiquitous high walls; rather, the image imperceptibly changed, day by day, a line at a time, until the emperor’s face was wiped out and the face of Mengistu Haile Mariam, a remorseless, thirty-two-year-old army captain, emerged out of the dim background.
By the end of 1974, as Ethiopia came under the rule of the shadowy clique or Dergue and Mengistu methodically eliminated his rivals, students were being forcibly dispatched to the countryside to revolutionize the masses. The Soviets were duly impressed, and dispatched East German security advisers to help Mengistu plan his next moves. Mengistu was now emerging as the most lethal sort of dictator: the kind with stores of ascetic discipline and therefore not distracted by greed.
In May of 1977, the Red Terror began, when soldiers gunned down hundreds in the streets of Addis Ababa, including university students and children. The new U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, washed his hands of Ethiopia, cutting off arms deliveries, because of its human rights violations. Mengistu responded by flying to Moscow for a weeklong state visit. It was then that the Soviets began one of the most massive arms transfers ever in the history of the Third World. Castro sent soldiers direct from pro-Soviet Somalia to Ethiopia, and tanks and armored personnel carriers began arriving from Marxist South Yemen, as Moscow orchestrated a brazen and dramatic switch: trading up from an alliance with empty and impoverished Somalia to one with the far more populous and consequential empire of Ethiopia. Late in 1977, the Somalis expelled their Soviet advisers and came running to the United States for help. The great superpower flip-flop of the Cold War was under way.
Moscow got a better ally in Mengistu than Washington had had in Haile Selassie. Mengistu turned out to be not merely a pro-Soviet African leader, but a full-fledged Marxist who turned Ethiopia into an African version of an East European satellite, as the Ethiopian countryside became a version of Ukraine during the terror famine of the 1930s. As in Ukraine, untried, theoretical principles of collectivized agriculture were inflicted on a peasantry burdened by centuries of feudalism. The result was the death and starvation of tens of thousands.2
Meanwhile, the war between Ethiopia and Somalia—two perennial enemies—dragged on for years and years, leaving hundreds of thousands of refugees on each side of the border in the Ogaden Desert. In 1981, Somali exiles of the Isaaq clan, living in Ethiopia, established the Somali National Movement with Soviet help, in an effort to topple the pro-American Somali government in Mogadishu. Siad Barre responded with a directive to his army to utterly destroy all Isaaq communities and their watering holes in northwestern Somalia. Seven years later, in April 1988, the Ethiopian and Somali leaders finally signed a peace agreement. Consequently, Mengistu told the Isaaq-dominated Somali National Movement, which had been using eastern Ethiopia as a rear base to attack Siad Barre’s ethnic-Ogadeni forces in northwestern Somalia, to leave and go back home. The Somali National Movement, loaded with guns and ammunition, decided to make a last stand and launch a full frontal attack on the towns of Hargeisa and Burao in the northwestern end of the bent vertical hot dog that is Somalia on the world map. The upshot was a mass movement of refugees crossing into Ethiopia in the late spring and summer of 1988 to escape the fighting. While Gersony was in Honduras, Mengistu and the other members of the Ethiopian Dergue were complaining that UNHCR was doing an inadequate job ministering to the new hordes of refugees now flooding into Ethiopia from Somalia.
It was as if the African Horn were a giant table that had just tilted ever so slightly with all of the marbles (Isaaqs and Ogadenis both) rolling down onto one side.
At this juncture Jonathan Moore dispatched his deputy, Kenneth Bleakley, to travel to the affected region and investigate. Bleakley was the real deal of an FSO (foreign service officer), a former president of the American Foreign Service Association, in fact. But with all of his operational and diplomatic skills, he and the U.S. mission in Addis Ababa could not convince the Dergue to give him permission to travel outside the Ethiopian capital to the Ogaden region, near to the border with Somalia: just as Siad Barre would not let the ICRC and the other NGOs travel to northwestern Somalia to investigate the situation from the other side of the border.
With nobody in the international community having any idea what was actually happening on the ground in this vast desert no-man’s-land, famous for Dervish revolts against the British and one of the world’s largest camel populations, Moore and Bleakley decided to send Bob Gersony out there, in the hope that he could break through.
So from Honduras, Gersony traveled through Washington and New York to UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, where he met up with Gene Dewey, as well as with International Red Cross operations director Jean-Pierre Hocke, whom he knew from his work on the Luwero Triangle. They promised to send messages to the UNHCR offices in the capitals of Addis Ababa and Mogadishu, saying that Gersony should receive all possible assistance. But neither they nor their colleagues in Geneva had any idea about what was really happening on the ground in the Ethiopia-Somalia border region, in this pre-Internet, pre-social-media age.
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Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The name is Amharic for “new flower,” a city built by Emperor Menelik II in 1889. Though occupied by Mussolini, Ethiopia was never actually colonized by Europeans, and was always less a state than a sprawling empire of different peoples—Amhara, Tigrean, Eritrean, and Oromo. At eight thousand feet in altitude, Menelik’s new capital lacked wood. In 1900, the introduction of the fast-growing eucalyptus tree from Australia solved the problem. Consequently, the first sensation one felt in 1988 upon arrival was of bodily well-being, brought about by the invigorating mountain climate and the shade and ubiquitous fragrance of the eucalyptus trees. After the blinding sunlight and leaden heat of other African capitals,
“Addis” was like a godsend, as though arriving at a hill station in the Himalayas after weeks on the steamy plain of the Indian subcontinent.
Surrounding Addis were broiling desert badlands and Lord of the Rings–style mountains. In the African Horn, only Addis and Asmara, also at a high elevation, were truly pleasant. Gersony has no recollection of any of this. As usual, he was intent on getting his embassy and NGO briefings, and then heading out into the field to start listening to refugees.
He put up at the Hilton, which with its bar, swimming pool, and the ambience of a large, enclosed compound had been a famous hangout for journalists and relief workers during the great Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s: you would fly up to the famine zone for the day, and fly back at night to file your story by telex and eat at the Hilton. When Gersony arrived there a few years later, there was no official ambassador because of the tense relationship between Washington and the Marxist regime. The American chargé d’affaires was Bob Houdek, whom Gersony knew from his work on Uganda. Gersony’s Mozambique report was fresh not only in Houdek’s mind, but also in the mind of the Marxist Dergue, which liked the fact that an American official had exposed the abuses of an anti-communist guerrilla group. This helped Gersony to succeed where Bleakley had failed: getting permission to travel to the Ogaden border area.
But the Ethiopian regime insisted that Gersony travel with a minder, that is, a government security agent. It so happened that USAID had in mind a certain FSN, a Foreign Service National: an Ethiopian citizen who worked for USAID. His name was Ato Makonnen Ture, and he was dignified, professorial, in great physical condition, and with indefinable charm. The embassy convinced the Ethiopian authorities to deputize Makonnen as Gersony’s minder.
Gersony and Makonnen were outfitted with a four-wheel-drive vehicle bearing diplomatic plates, extra tires, fan belts, oil canisters, an industrial jack and chains, and a winch in front of the car. The driver was also a mechanic who had a full tool set. It was what you needed for a scrappy, dun-drab desert where barely a tree loomed, only anthills.
Gersony and Makonnen drove east to Dire Dawa, entering the forbidding territory that the French poet Arthur Rimbaud and the British traveler Richard Francis Burton had explored in the nineteenth century, Rimbaud as an arms merchant and Burton as a heathen in the Muslim bastion of Harar. In 1930, the British traveler Wilfred Thesiger and the novelist Evelyn Waugh would also pass through here, having attended Haile Selassie’s coronation. Waugh would have an acute attack of boredom in these parts, spending days reading a French dictionary and old weekly magazines cover to cover.3 But Gersony knew little of these literary associations until much later.
At Dire Dawa, the regional capital, Gersony and Makonnen went to the government security office with Gersony’s letter of introduction. That was the way he always did things, formally and transparently. Then they went on, through Harar, to Jijiga, where he visited the UNHCR office to announce himself. Finally, another few hours eastward—the vehicle got stuck in black cotton soil on the way—brought him to the vicinity of the Somali border and the refugee camp of Hartesheikh, the largest of five camps in the region, which would become his base for the next three weeks.
He and Makonnen ate all their meals together and shared a hut, where they slept on the desert floor. Every day constituted twelve to fourteen hours of work, of interviewing and typing.
Gersony conducted 120 separate interviews with Isaaq refugees from Somalia in five camps. There was Hartesheikh, where half of the refugees were located, and the satellite camp of Harshin, literally right on the border; roughly a hundred miles to the east lay the three camps of Cam Aboker, Rabasso, and Daror. In typical Gersony style, he began the painstaking documentation, broken down into villages and time frames, of rapes, lootings, shootings, knifings, beatings, regardless of age and sex—what would later become known on the Internet as the Isaaq genocide between 1987 and 1989, conducted by Siad Barre’s nominally pro-American Somali Armed Forces, in which up to 100,000 people died.
Gersony wasn’t briefed on any of this, but discovered it interview by interview, breaking down the percentages of how many had witnessed a violent incident, where and when, and extrapolating from there. Yet after twenty-one days he still didn’t know all this. For by then all he had was raw data in one region that he hadn’t as yet analyzed, though he did have a rough awareness of what had transpired.
On March 29—he will never forget the day, as he kept a diary—Gersony was interviewing a man in Harshin into the early evening, something he tried never to do. His rule was to always get back to base camp before dark. But because of his obsession with detail he got caught up in the interview. This old shrunken man, a sixty-five-year-old Isaaq farmer with no education, huddled near a fire with two starving kids, was absolutely credible. He was good with figures, and when Gersony asked him, he guessed correctly the number of people in the camp. The man and his family had escaped from Somalia only five days before. The Somali army had arrived in his village of Beye Gure, he told Gersony, and herded people into trucks without their belongings. He was taken to Berbera on the Gulf of Aden to do forced labor for four months, unloading cargo at the port. The women were made to sew food bags. They were surrounded by soldiers. It was difficult to escape. He told Gersony that he saw many people killed and many dead bodies lying about. He gave the names of seven people he saw murdered. His seven-year-old son died of starvation, as did ninety others, mainly children.
Finally, the story ended.
Gersony and Makonnen headed west back to Hartesheikh. Again, they got stuck in black cotton soil: he was tired and hadn’t been paying attention to the road. They found themselves stranded in the middle of an Ogaden Desert security area in utter darkness. It took hours for the driver-mechanic, working with flashlights, to drag the car out of the pit. In the process, the underside of the vehicle hit a rock and the oil case snapped, springing a leak. The driver entered Hartesheikh with his lights off but with his interior lights on. Gersony and Makonnen held their hands up in the air: all this was to reassure the Ethiopian soldiers guarding the camp, since a curfew was in force. Nevertheless, the soldiers began firing their AK-47s in the air, and one bullet hit the car. The soldiers moved in and pointed their assault rifles at Gersony’s head. He was almost weeping with fear. Makonnen, talking fast and diplomatically, quickly managed to clear things up.
In April, their last day in the field after the better part of a month, they headed back to Addis Ababa late in the day from Cam Aboker. Again, he had gotten caught up in an interview. They should have spent the night in Hartesheikh, but Gersony was restless to get back to the capital and the comfort of the Hilton, so he stupidly insisted on leaving before dark. Just before arriving in Jijiga, Makonnen told Gersony, “You and the driver sit in the car with the door locked. I will look for a place for us all to stay this night in Jijiga.” Gersony, as usual, worried. At last, after about half an hour, Makonnen returned and directed the driver to a stone gate with a wall and double iron door, not quite wide enough for the car. They walked into the compound in the pitch-black and Gersony was shown a room in the back that smelled of perfume with a dirty mattress and a twisted sheet.
“This place is a brothel,” Makonnen told him. “But no one is going to bother you.”
Left alone, Gersony looked up at a rotted ceiling that he was afraid was about to collapse on him. It had been another fourteen-hour day and he was twitching with fatigue. He had never learned how to relax and pace himself. He took his red Kipling bag with his notebooks inside and used it as a pillow, like he always did, and fell asleep. A cat rubbed against his leg, and he snuggled with it between his legs. (He has always loved animals, and in his home today there are two dogs and two parrots.) But he felt no fur on the tail and wondered what kind of cat has no fur on the tail. It must have been a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. He was filthy and drenched in sweat. He slowly grabbed his flashlight beside him and looked.
&nbs
p; It wasn’t a cat. It was a rat!
He must have levitated a foot in the air and so did the rat. He gasped in terror. He couldn’t sleep the rest of the night. He packed up and counted the minutes till dawn.
They left at six a.m. and were back at the Hilton in Addis Ababa that night after three weeks in the field. He may have taken the longest shower of his life and washed all his gear in the bathtub, had his laundry done, and ordered sandwiches from room service. He never appreciated a hotel as an extraterritorial life-support system so much.
* * *
—
At this point Gersony had a good sense of what had happened to the 300,000 Isaaqs from Somalia who had fled to the camps in Ethiopia that he had just visited. But in Somalia there were hundreds of thousands of Ogadenis who had escaped from Ethiopia during the fighting between the two countries. In fact, Siad Barre was propping up his government with UNHCR money stolen from these refugees in his country. Just like Siad Barre, the Ogadenis were Marehans, a subclan of the Darods. But rather than put them in southern Somalia close to his base and the capital of Mogadishu, Barre put these Ogadeni refugees, his kinsmen, among the Isaaqs in northwestern Somalia. He had recruited these Ogadeni refugees for his army and used them to fight and terrorize the Isaaqs. It was this factor that had led the Isaaq-controlled Somali National Movement, sheltered in Ethiopia and aided by the Dergue and the Soviets, to invade Ogadeni refugee camps in northwestern Somalia. With the cache of weapons given to them by Mengistu as a severance package before kicking them out of Ethiopia in 1988, the Somali National Movement also attacked the towns of Hargeisa and Burao in Somalia.
The Good American Page 24