The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  There was nothing Tim Knight would not do for Bob and Cindy Gersony. He had first met Bob in Piura in northern Peru in 1983, when they both were doing fieldwork for USAID there. “Bob’s energy was unmatchable, always taking copious notes with his pen that hung from his neck. He never tired of interviewing people. I’ve always been good at noticing inconsistencies in what people tell me, but Bob was a master at it. So there was an obvious professional attraction between us. Bob avoided huge, grand programs that could never be implemented in the real world. His approach was methodical, commonsensical, anthropological. As for Cindy Davis,” Knight goes on, “I met her before she knew Bob. She was a whiz in the disaster assistance community. The two of them together constituted the greatest synergy.”

  Knight found Bob and Cindy an apartment in Sarajevo. He convinced the regional security officer (RSO) to allow them to travel wherever they wanted, something RSOs generally hate to do. With the help of Galbraith, he got them a “soft-skinned” (unarmored) vehicle to give Bob and Cindy the latitude of doing what they needed to do. He essentially put his whole office at their disposal.

  From Zagreb, Bob and Cindy drove southwest and then south along the great lower jaw of Croatia for several hundred miles, parallel to the Adriatic coast, all the way to Mostar, the famous old Ottoman town tucked inside Herzegovina, with a historic arched bridge destroyed in the 1990s fighting. On the Adriatic, they found refugees and displaced persons with whom to conduct their first sample interviews in peaceful, secure settings: getting their feet wet, so to speak. From Mostar, they struck northeast and inland over the mountains to Sarajevo.

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  Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. Fog-strewn streets with neo-Gothic and neo-baroque facades, exuding the subtle colors of a dying autumn leaf, overseen by Ottoman-style domes and pencil-thin minarets—a place where you could admire Islamic architecture while nursing a plum brandy at one of the many local cafés. There is the cozy intimacy of Austro-Hungarian Central Europe enmeshed with the vivid flavor of the Ottoman Near East, all overlooked by mountain fastnesses. The rash of socialist-era concrete does not quite defeat the thrilling sense of a civilizational fault zone. But by the late 1980s, as Yugoslavia entered an economic death spiral and the cosmetic improvements necessitated by the 1984 Winter Olympics here had faded into near oblivion, graffiti began to be ever present in Sarajevo, and the once-intimate town looked mean for a visitor like myself in the late 1980s who had known it in the early 1980s. “What a difference a half decade made!” I thought in 1989. Of course, the wars of the Yugoslav secession a few years later turned this urban jewel into a free-fire zone, with all of the attendant wreckage. It was in the wake of that horror that Gersony first set eyes on the city.

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  The apartment that Tim Knight had found for Bob and Cindy had no central heating, but it did have a potbelly stove that Knight had had installed for them. The previous occupant had worked for the United Nations and left behind massive stacks of out-of-date U.N. situation reports (sitreps). Bob and Cindy kept warm by feeding the sitreps, one page at a time, into the potbelly stove. Inside the apartment, they never took off their long underwear and gray knee socks. Knight had a similar apartment and situation in Sarajevo: “I slept in my full-sweat outfit,” Gersony says. “It was so cold that the first thing I saw in the morning was my own breath. I took spit-baths and subsisted on MREs [military meals-ready-to-eat]. It was absolutely miserable.” Cindy adds, “Even indoors we were walking around in our coats much of the time.”

  That apartment became Bob and Cindy’s base for visiting more than seventy towns and villages in Bosnia over an eleven-week period, from Thanksgiving 1995 until early February 1996. Bob drove the Nissan Patrol that Knight had obtained for them. This was one of the few times in Gersony’s career when he drove himself, since with all the roadblocks manned by different militias and militaries from different ethnic groups that were still in operation in the immediate aftermath of Dayton, any local driver—even an embassy driver—ran the risk of being abducted. Local people all around Bosnia were generous in the extreme to Bob and Cindy. They gave them rooms to stay in and food to eat. But the rooms usually had no heat and no hot water. Bob and Cindy slept always in sleeping bags. Bob often couldn’t sleep because of the Turkish coffee his hosts kept offering, which it was impolite to refuse. Because they were constantly on the move, they had trouble doing laundry. At the beginning of their eleven weeks of journeying the weather was freezing but at least the countryside was dry. Then it began snowing with a vengeance. Bob sweated constantly out of nervousness. He hated driving: he feared the roadblocks, the banditry, the possibility of flat tires and of getting lost in the snow. Yet he was always shivering, too. Alternately sweating and shivering without a change of clothes, he began to smell really bad. Finally he had no choice but to take an occasional bath in cold water. For him, who had always done better in heat than in cold, it was sheer torture. He longed for the warmth of the West Bank, Gaza, Nicaragua, Rwanda, anywhere but Bosnia in winter.

  By the time Bob and Cindy finished their work, they had interviewed 400 people give or take a handful, 250 of whom were Bosnians. And of those 250, 150 were displaced persons and the remaining 100 were local Bosnian relief workers. Beyond those 250 Bosnians, Bob and Cindy interviewed 100 expatriates, Europeans and Americans, who worked on the ground in Bosnia for UNHCR and the other NGOs. This was all in addition to the 50 experts they interviewed in Washington, Geneva, and Brussels on their way out to Bosnia.7 In other words, on the ground throughout Bosnia, they interviewed approximately 350 individuals, each in isolation for an average of two hours: 700 hours’ worth of interviewing using 14 different translators.

  In each interview, Bob followed every detail of the methodology he had perfected in western Sudan, Mozambique, and elsewhere: noting down the person’s village, ethnic group, distinguishing characteristics, and so on, but never their name, all the while assuring the person of anonymity. “Bob wanted to know not just the facts, but what people sincerely believed in their own minds the facts were. Bob was a truth-teller, not a pleaser, so those who disagreed with him and were upset by his truths found him a little hard to take,” explains Brunson McKinley, who was with Gersony for a stretch in Bosnia.

  In particular, Bob and Cindy would ask:

  What specifically happened to you during the fighting? What did you learn from it?

  What kinds of programs have worked here? What kinds haven’t?

  Can you go home? Why or why not? And if not, what’s stopping you?

  What do you intend to do next with your lives?

  People simply exploded with comments when asked these questions. These people were not African or Central American peasants who in a significant number of cases could literally not count above ten, but Europeans, albeit from a poor and war-torn corner of Europe.

  As for the Bosnian fieldworkers and the expatriate NGOs, “they were literally the best and the brightest of the international relief community,” Gersony exclaims. “Unlike a place like Rwanda, where the violence had erupted suddenly only a few months before, Bosnia had been at war for nearly four years already by the time we arrived. And thus there had been quite a weeding-out process, so that only the sturdiest and most talented NGO workers had remained. These people were not theorists,” he goes on. “They had been setting up emergency centers for the elderly, hiring contractors, doing all the essential work of dealing with displaced persons on an individual basis every day.” Truly, they were a ground-level brain trust: basically the RAND Corporation of Bosnia in terms of what they knew. And with the ink not quite dry on Dayton, no one had yet asked them their opinion of it; no one had asked them about things like conditionality and cross-ethnic return in a comprehensive and methodical way.

  As necessary and admirable as it was, Dayton was generally a top-down, elite-driven agre
ement, embodying the hopes and assumptions of its authors, notably Richard Holbrooke (if not of all its signatories),8 and Gersony was asking the dozens and hundreds of experts living for years on the ground in Bosnia what they thought about this diplomatic coup, in which Holbrooke essentially locked up the leaders of the warring ethnic and religious factions at a military base in the American Midwest until they came to terms.

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  Of the approximately 250 Bosnians Bob and Cindy interviewed (in addition to the 150 foreigners and expatriates), virtually all of them either did not want the minorities in their villages—whether Muslim or Croat—back, or at least felt it was not viable for them to return, fearing that they would be killed or beaten and their houses burned. The wartime atrocities were still only a few months old at this point. People’s minds were still concentrated on what had happened during the war. The most moderate voices told them that “if you push, violence in one place will trigger violence in other places.” The Bosnian NGOs said that Dayton’s Annex 7 was “a decent goal but unfortunately not possible and dangerous to implement at this time.” Bob and Cindy encountered differences in reasoning, but the conclusions were always the same. Reconciliation and cross-ethnic return were unthinkable at the moment.

  What did the displaced persons who had been ethnic minorities in their home villages say to Bob and Cindy?

  Listen.

  “Would you like to return to your original domicile?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Will you do it now or in the near future?”

  “Not a chance. If I go back, who will protect my house from being firebombed? Who is going to protect my children? What school am I going to send them to? [The schools were often controlled by the ethno-nationalists.] My children are going to be bullied and beaten. How am I going to get a job when there is already high unemployment in my home village? Who will protect my family at night?”

  Moreover, potential cross-ethnic returnees feared they would have “limited success competing with demobilized combatants and others of the majority ethnic group” for scarce jobs. They feared minority businesses “may continue to be subjected to discriminatory…taxes imposed by the majority.” An experienced economist for a multilateral organization told Bob and Cindy that he had observed a “natural tendency [by the majorities] to complete ethnic cleansing through nonviolent [economic] means.”9

  The first step, in the opinion of all the interviewees, was to get the majority populations back home: that is, whole Muslim villages had been driven out of their houses by the Serbs, so get them back in place, and only then worry about getting the minority Croats back into those villages. After all, almost everyone was a victim who had lost his or her home, including those of the majority groups. Each group had its own perpetrators and victims. So the vast reconstruction effort should not be held hostage to conditionality and cross-ethnic return. Dayton’s Annex 7 was beautiful and necessary as an endgame. But it was premature. At least that’s what virtually all the people on the ground in Bosnia, Bosnians and expatriates, had told Bob and Cindy.

  As the mayor of Tuzla, Selim Bešlagić, a progressive icon and hero of the international community, who protected minorities in the northeast of the Muslim sector, told them: “Get people home who can go home. Targeting cross-ethnic returns right now heightens resentment and diminishes reconciliation.”10

  A Soros foundation fieldworker told them: “We can’t give one more year for the people to suffer while awaiting cross-ethnic returns.”

  Cindy says, “People didn’t want to hear about ‘civil society’ and ‘conflict mitigation.’ They wanted houses and stoves and toilets, tangible things.”

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  Armed with these ideas, Gersony was fortunate in identifying a concrete program to test them against. USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), whose task it was to move war and disaster zones beyond the emergency phase, was in the midst of completing twenty-five projects in Bosnia designed to leverage conditionality and cross-ethnic return. The head of OTI in Bosnia was Frederick Barton. Tall, gracious, and commanding with a slightly gravelly voice, Rick Barton had first encountered Gersony in Washington during a long briefing that Gersony delivered on Nicaraguan reconstruction. “When I first saw and listened to Bob Gersony, I thought: Columbo meets Indiana Jones,” Barton says. It was a powerful, formative experience for Barton, and deeply affected his own methodology.11 Barton introduced Gersony to Ray Jennings, a PhD with expertise in reconciliation, and Mike Stievater, a practical operations guy. “Their projects had lit a candle in the darkness, and therefore gave me something to focus on,” says Gersony.

  Ray Jennings gave Gersony a list of what he thought were his ten most successful projects and Gersony looked at seven of them. The projects were not overly ambitious; one could categorize them as mild forms of ethnic reconciliation.

  One project was a school where both the Muslim and Croat joint mayors had signed a contract to admit children from both communities. Gersony walked into the school. There was a giant Croatian flag in the entranceway, using the colors and proportions of the World War II–era fascist Croat Ustaše flag. There was not one Muslim child in the school.

  Another project in a predominantly Muslim town was a reconstructed health center that the two joint mayors had signed off on. No Croats were allowed inside.

  In the town of Vitez in central Bosnia, OTI had appropriated $30,000 to repair a locker room next to a soccer field. The mayors had signed off on it, and both the Muslim and Croat communities were expected to provide volunteer labor. No volunteers showed up. Contractors were paid to repair it. A Muslim-Croat soccer game was scheduled. It was canceled due to political pressure from Zagreb and Sarajevo. Even when local officials cooperated, national capitals intervened to pursue ethnic agendas. When Bob and Cindy visited the locker room, it had been completely vandalized and destroyed.

  In the Croat town of Busovača, surrounded by Bosnian Muslim territory, the mayor’s rhetoric was so hateful that Gersony’s translator walked out of the meeting.

  In the town of Gornji Vakuf in central Bosnia, the Swiss charity CARITAS offered $10 million for cross-ethnic return. The money was refused.

  One OTI official admitted: “When you press too much, people get stubborn. Feelings get inflamed. USAID gives the hardliners a platform. They say, ‘We’re standing up to the Americans, we’re not going to let them dictate to us, we’ll defend you.’ ”

  The OTI program, in Gersony’s mind, was a useful failure. Mike Stievater, who was according to Gersony “the most honest fieldworker” he had ever encountered anywhere, admitted as such, even though he himself had personally tried to implement each OTI project. “We set the simplest criteria we could find and we failed,” Rick Barton says unflappably. “My attitude is, if it doesn’t work, try something else.”

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  Further buttressing Gersony’s findings was a November 1995 diplomatic agreement, a supplement to the Dayton Accords, stipulating that 600 minority families should be allowed to immediately return to four majority-controlled pilot towns. Subsequently, 0 families returned to Stolac; 47 to Travnik; 11 to Jajce; and 2 to Bugojno—for a total of 60 families, one-tenth of the agreed-upon number.12

  “It was pure fantasy to think that cross-ethnic return would generally work at this moment,” recalls Tim Knight.

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  Bugojno, in the far western sector of Bosnian Muslim control, near the border with the Croat-controlled sector, was among the pilot towns selected by the architects of Dayton for fast-track reconciliation. A dignified old man, Mesud Durnjak, told Gersony that the mayor, Dževad Mlaćo, wanted to meet with him and invite him to dinner. The old man apologized in advance, telling Gersony that the forty-two-year-old mayor “can be a little direct” in his pronouncements. The mayor was sho
rt and stocky, very muscular, with a permanently reddened face.13 He met Gersony in the small one-room dining hall of the local hotel.

  Throughout the meal, the Muslim mayor shouted at Gersony, threatening him often, as if Gersony was the personal embodiment of the international community that he so despised.

  “Who do you people think you are? We’re not going to trade our interests and our actual experience in the war just for the sake of getting new toilet seats put on our latrines! We can’t be bought off so easy! Given what people here have gone through, we would be crazy to do the things you are telling us now to do! Everything you’ve done is a waste of time.”

  The mayor’s fist kept pounding on the table, his face a few inches from Gersony’s. Gersony was more terrified than at any time since he had been screamed at almost two decades earlier by General Lucas Garcia in Guatemala, a man who would go on to commit war crimes.