The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  If the reader is overwhelmed by all of this, he or she is supposed to be. Gersony had never been so confused in his life. Nobody in Addis Ababa, not even Houdek, the consummate Africanist, could explain much of this to him. He had to learn all of it by himself, piecing the story together from the individual refugees he had already interviewed on the Ethiopian side of the border, and those he would soon interview on the Somali side. It was a classic case of how only the victims knew the story, and he was required to hear them out and tell it to the world. Whereas from a distance it carried the complications of theoretical physics, up close it was pure Hobbes: anarchy, the war of all against all.

  As he put it: “By the time I had returned to the Hilton I knew what I didn’t know. I had made a start.”

  He was, in effect, writing history from the original source material: refugee accounts. Thus, he needed to know more about such things as the role of the Ogadeni refugee camps in Somalia before the conflict had intensified, the details about Somali army recruitment, how food was diverted from the camps by the Somali government, the exact sequence of all the events, and so on.

  He decided that before leaving Ethiopia for Somalia he would travel southeast into the ethnic-Oromo area of the country to interview more Ogadeni refugees, who were not in the border zone and were consequently less scared. He hoped that they could explain more to him. But Makonnen told him that the Ethiopian authorities insisted on his traveling with a security accompaniment. This baffled Gersony. The Dergue had just let him travel to a sensitive war-torn border area with only Makonnen, but now they wouldn’t let the two of them travel alone into the heart of Ethiopia, far from the border. Perhaps it was because the authorities were genuinely curious about him, owing to his recent Mozambique report and his foray into Isaaq refugee camps near Somalia. So he and Makonnen traveled southeast with a security detail, and Gersony consequently filled in more pieces of his emerging story by listening to more refugees.

  They were away in the southeast almost a week: more twelve- to fourteen-hour days, dealing with refugees and the overbearing hospitality of people met along the way. He was exhausted. Getting shot at in Harshin, the incident with the rat near Jijiga, and the nervousness of the government security detail had all worn him down. He headed back to Addis Ababa with a massive amount of typing to do. There were not only the refugee accounts to work on, but “thank-you” letters to write to diplomats and NGOs as he prepared to leave the country. He was a real obsessive-compulsive, always forcing himself to finish all the preliminary work and formalities before he departed anywhere, which often was simply not possible.

  After a long day working at the embassy, he went back to the Hilton at night to pack for his flight to Nairobi, Kenya, at ten the next morning. He overslept, waking at nine. He rushed to the airport without properly washing, but missed the flight. There wouldn’t be another one until the next day and he had already checked out of the hotel. All of a sudden his spirit was broken, completely broken.

  Like an automaton, he took a cab back to the U.S. Embassy. It was a Saturday and the grounds were deserted, without the security of the post-9/11 era. He sat down on a bench with his bags on either side of him, like a homeless person, on the brink of tears. He didn’t know what to do. Most anyone else would simply have gone back to the Hilton, checked in again, relaxed, and rebooked his flight. But anyone who has experienced a nervous breakdown of even a mild sort knows how the simplest tasks loom insurmountable and overwhelming.

  Gersony just sat there, his mind vacant. The whole world had gone dark for him. Then Bob Houdek walked by in shorts. It was his day off and the chargé d’affaires’ residence was right on the compound.

  “I’ve had it,” Gersony announced tearfully.

  “You come home with me,” Houdek said.

  Houdek and his wife, Mary, took care of him. They showed him to a room with a private bath. They told him to stay there, rest all day, and come down only for dinner. They rebooked his flight, and arranged for an embassy car to drive him to the airport the next day.

  And so Gersony flew south to Nairobi. He was no fearless explorer like Wilfred Thesiger, who always sought out so-called barbaric splendor. Yet Gersony was like other travelers in one profound way: at difficult moments he required the sympathy and hospitality of others.

  * * *

  —

  He spent only a day or two in Nairobi enjoying the many conveniences that this urban crossroads of sub-Saharan Africa had to offer. He soon felt physically and psychologically renewed. It was time to fly northeast, to Somalia, to immerse himself once again with refugees, in order to fill out the other half of the picture of this overwhelmingly complicated border war—which he barely understood, even though he probably understood it better than anyone else at this point.

  * * *

  —

  Mogadishu, Somalia. Crenellated lemon-and-white bastions, rocketlike minarets, all leprous; rotting fruit in alleyways; a silent white sand beach without a breeze where sharks gathered, on account of a slaughterhouse that discharged entrails into the ocean; air so thick and hot that it could light a match. Ebony, wraithlike, fine-featured people in flowing multicolored robes. There is an insubstantiality to everything here, as if the whole ratty town could be blown away in a dust storm. For this is a country of nomads where the city has no place. A feeling of insecurity everywhere, and this was years before the actual chaos. (Indeed, Somalia was a place where the term “failed state” originally came into vogue.) At the Croce del Sud, the hotel where foreign relief workers stayed, amid the bougainvillea and geraniums, they served warm Italian white wine with the lobster. Gersony did without the white wine.

  As usual, Gersony began with the U.S. Embassy. The DCM, David Rawson, and the USAID mission director, Lois Richards, were especially friendly. Rawson was an enthusiastic fan of the Mozambique report, and acted at the time like Gersony’s best friend. Richards, a tall and imposing woman who swore like a truck driver, reacted similarly to Gersony’s arrival. She assigned him an FSN, Ashur Warsangali, a Darod in his sixties, who had ulcers and, because it was Ramadan and he couldn’t eat during the day, was especially irritable. The two would travel for weeks together.

  Somalia is a sprawling country with a particularly ungainly shape because it was composed of a former Italian colony in the south and a former British protectorate in the north. Even during the years of Siad Barre’s supposedly iron rule, large swaths of the country were unsafe and given to semi-anarchy, and transport from the formerly Italian part to the formerly British part usually meant hitching a ride on a U.N. plane.

  Gersony and Ashur flew from Mogadishu directly to Boroma, tucked into the northwestern corner of the country right on the border with Ethiopia, where there was a cluster of refugee camps that the United Nations was active in administering. At Boroma, a car and driver awaited them. Gersony had dozens of lengthy interviews to conduct with a largely non-Isaaq population: fifty-seven interviews, as it would turn out. It was grueling work. He forced himself to start from scratch, to empty his mind of everything he had learned so far, and to see in Somalia if he could both corroborate and put in context what he had been told by Isaaqs in eastern and southeastern Ethiopia just across the border, regarding Somali leader Siad Barre’s depredations.

  The eleven refugee camps clustered around Boroma, which included Tug Wajale (where I had interviewed refugees three years earlier), contained inhabitants from a variety of clans, only 18 percent of whom were Isaaqs. These people formed a cross-section of the hundreds of thousands who had fled Ethiopia for northwestern Somalia. They spoke to Gersony of mass roundups and systematic executions that began only days after the Isaaq-led Somali National Movement (SNM) forces crossed the border from Ethiopia and penetrated to an area southeast of here. SNM soldiers attacked Ogadeni refugee camps; and in the towns of Hargeisa and Burao, where Somali government troops were lodged, deliberately put civilians in the crossf
ire. One Isaaq refugee told him that her brother, who was mentally disabled, had been executed by a rival clan in retaliation for SNM predations. It was always the individual incident that rescued the statistics from inhuman abstraction.

  Almost two weeks went by. In the early afternoon of May 8, Gersony and Ashur were packing inside their guest house in Boroma, shaking out the dust from their gear and preparing to leave, when they heard shooting outside. They walked out into the devastating heat. A group of young men with assault rifles, hopped up on khat, the mild narcotic that everyone in the region chewed after the midday meal, demanded the keys to the car from Ashur. Ashur hadn’t eaten because it was Ramadan, and he was in a foul mood. He screamed at the young men. They pointed their guns at him. Ashur threw the keys in the dirt, and screamed again:

  “You want these keys, pick them up like dogs.”

  The young men drove off with the car.

  Gersony, very shaken, was awestruck at Ashur’s courage.

  Ashur stormed into the office of the local commissioner and demanded that the commissioner find the young men and get the car back: cleaned and gassed up. A few hours later the car was returned in good condition. But the day was lost.

  The next day they drove fifty miles southeast to the town of Hargeisa, where the SNM attacks had been concentrated, and which contained another cluster of refugee camps. (They were shot at twice en route.) In the Hargeisa region, Gersony conducted twenty-two interviews over four days. Since leaving Mogadishu he had been eating one meal per day: fried camel liver with onions, which he considered the safest food. The onions, desperately needed for flavor, were particularly hard to obtain and he was constantly searching local markets for them.

  In Hargeisa, he and Ashur literally wandered amid the rubble. The year before, SNM troops had dispersed into Hargeisa, fighting government forces. Then Siad Barre retook the town, using Rhodesian mercenary pilots who bombed Hargeisa into smithereens. Barre wanted to send a message to the Isaaq inhabitants.

  Thousands were killed in Hargeisa and Burao, another camp fifty miles to the east. But Gersony in his report did not consider these people “murdered” in cold blood, as in the case of individual shootings and executions. Thus, his death estimates for human rights purposes were low. He always deliberately worked to have the lowest possible numbers in order to maintain his credibility. He was interested in premeditated human rights crimes, as a category separate from the habitual cruelty of war, in which civilians were targeted as well as killed in the crossfire. He didn’t excuse the latter. He just dedicated himself to the former, since it provided a more precise motivator for the U.S. government to act.

  * * *

  —

  Getting from Hargeisa northeast to the port city of Berbera required several hours of driving. There Gersony came upon a single runway, the longest in sub-Saharan Africa at the time, which U.S. military aircraft had used for surveillance of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean ever since the Soviets departed. It was that runway and where it was located that constituted the main U.S. interest in Somalia, and why Washington was putting up with the depredations wrought by Siad Barre’s government. Alas, another Cold War contingency.

  At the edge of the runway were several one-story, air-conditioned shacks where a handful of American nationals—buttressed by imported food, cold soft drinks, and back issues of Sports Illustrated—maintained radio contact with the outside world, even as the desert right behind them was now a land of mass executions and utter anarchy, as Gersony was finding out, interview by interview.4

  Stepping into one of the shacks, after a few weeks away from Mogadishu, the air conditioning hit Gersony like a benediction. Then there were the hot shower and the cold American soft drinks. Whatever the absurdity of this outpost and its situation, he felt revived. Over the coming days, based in this luxury hotel-of-sorts, he and Ashur conducted seventeen interviews with Ogadenis and Oromos at four displaced persons camps to the southwest and the southeast. Here he reconfirmed that while the Isaaq-dominated Somali National Movement never actually attacked Berbera, it had attacked Hargeisa and Burao, and so Siad Barre’s government army conducted a mass roundup of Isaaq civilians in Berbera, torturing and executing them by the hundreds, accusing them of being Somali National Movement sympathizers. The army buried the victims by the dozens in different places; one burial place was at the end of the runway used by the American military. Gersony confirmed this not only by interviews with displaced persons, but by speaking with one of the American military contractors who saw the trucks filled with bodies being unloaded.

  Gersony and Ashur now left the comforts of Berbera and drove for a few hours to Burao, thereby making a triangle formed by their journey from Boroma east to Hargeisa, then northeast to Berbera, and finally southeast to Burao. In the Burao region, fifteen separate interviews with displaced Ogadenis informed Gersony that forces of the Isaaq Somali National Movement entered the town, rounded up all the local officials—representatives of the Barre regime—and simply executed them. In other words, there were no good guys here. The Somali National Movement was not executing and bombing civilians on the scale of Siad Barre’s modern army, but while the scale was not comparable, the manner of the killing was.

  “This was intense, altogether brutal, total warfare, even if the numbers were not that great—not enough to garner front-page news worldwide, I mean. And it was all so complicated, my head was spinning. Though I had filled up several notebooks, I could barely explain it to myself,” Gersony recalls.

  To see it through a Cold War filter, this is what it was all about:

  The Soviet Union was backing the Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, which, in turn, was backing the ethnic-Isaaq Somali National Movement, so it could attack the American-backed regime of Siad Barre over the border in Somalia. The Somali National Movement invaded the northwestern Somali towns of Hargeisa and Burao and killed Somali government officials there. Siad Barre’s response was to commence a mass killing of Isaaqs. But because the Somali National Movement dispersed its fighters in civilian areas of Hargeisa and other towns, even more droves were killed in the chaotic, house-to-house fighting between the Somali National Movement and Barre’s forces. Meanwhile, the Americans kept flying their surveillance planes, with Siad Barre’s permission.

  * * *

  —

  Gersony and Ashur drove back to Mogadishu, covering the seven hundred miles east and then south in several days, gaining an appreciation of the flimsy, sprawling polity that was modern-day Somalia, where everything seemed to vanish in clouds of wafting and horrendous dust, rendering you almost blind. By now Gersony had been on the road for 11 weeks and had conducted 302 interviews with refugees and displaced persons in 31 locations in three countries (including several interviews in Kenya). The DCM in Mogadishu, David Rawson, instantly became Gersony’s biggest cheerleader, and later on, when Gersony’s Somalia report was released, the State Department would refer to Gersony’s “long and excellent record” as a human rights investigator. This would prove of great significance in the coming years, when Gersony came under fierce and widespread attack over his reports regarding Rwanda and Bosnia, including attacks from David Rawson himself about the Rwanda report.

  All that lay in the future, however.

  For the moment, Gersony was just thankful to get home. He had a case of amoebic dysentery, which he alleviated by eating cans of sardines from Zabar’s in his Manhattan apartment.

  Partially recovered, in late July 1989 he flew to Washington and went straight to the State Department, where, as in the case of the Mozambique report, he begged Cindy Davis for help in organizing all the statistics he had gathered. Soon the two of them were dating. (He had recently broken up with Ann Siegel.) It began with drinks at the Watergate, and continued afterward back at the Howard Johnson’s hotel across the street, the place where five years before he had spilled his story about Uganda’s
Luwero Triangle to Caryle Murphy of The Washington Post. Inspired by him, Cindy soon went to Antigua, Guatemala, to study Spanish.

  Of course, he also went immediately to the Bureau of Refugee Programs, where Ken Bleakley, the bureau deputy who had himself failed to get permission to leave Addis Ababa for the field, invited Gersony back to his house, where Gersony briefed Bleakley and Margaret McKelvey, the head of the bureau’s Africa office. They sat out on the back deck of Bleakley’s house in northwest Washington. “I can’t do this in an hour,” Gersony began. The briefing would last several hours. By now, of course, Gersony was in a position to demand whatever time he needed. That was followed by another interminable brief to the new assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Herman (“Hank”) Cohen, who had replaced Chet Crocker. Everyone was impressed, overwhelmed, and baffled by what Gersony had told them.

  Uganda and Mozambique may have constituted epic chapters in Gersony’s professional life, but the story lines in those other places were relatively simple: mass atrocities where there was a single culprit. Somalia, to the contrary, had multiple culprits and story lines that were both complex and opaque. What had begun as a binary, Cold War struggle between a Soviet-supported regime and an American-supported regime had started to crumble into obscure fissures. And Gersony had to put it all together for his colleagues based purely on refugee and displaced-person accounts.

  The result was “Why Somalis Flee: Synthesis of Accounts of Conflict Experience in Northern Somalia by Somali Refugees, Displaced Persons and Others.” It was sixty-five pages long, an exhaustingly detailed analysis involving tribes and languages and places. Gersony “conservatively estimated” that in 1988, Siad Barre’s Somali Armed Forces had killed five thousand ethnic Isaaqs, while the Isaaq Somali National Movement executed at least several hundred ethnic Ogadenis and others. But while Gersony was briefing people up and down the bureaucratic food chain at the State Department and the National Security Council, back in Mogadishu, U.S. ambassador Frank Crigler was taking weeks to decide whether the report should be released at all. And the State Department did not want to move without the approval of the ambassador of the country in question.