“I’ll be ready to go to Uganda tomorrow,” Gersony told Williams.
But first he went to Washington to see his old gang at State for advice: Bob Houdek, the former ambassador and chief of mission in Uganda and Ethiopia, who by now was the State Department’s go-to expert on Africa; Margaret McKelvey, the longtime Africa hand in the refugee bureau; Rick Ehrenreich at Intelligence and Research; and USAID veteran Bill Garvelink. They all had lots of questions, but very little information. That was the problem. Regarding the Lord’s Resistance Army, everything was just so sketchy.
It was their very questions that essentially gave Gersony his marching orders and expanded his universe of known unknowns:
What were the specific issues that had provoked LRA attacks on villages? Was security in northern Uganda still good enough to support development projects? Was the Ugandan government in a state of denial about the war in the north? Was the national army’s ethnic makeup a factor in how it acted? Was the conflict limited to the ethnic-Acholi lands in the north, and if not, could the LRA link up with various tribal groups to expand its influence? What percentage of the Acholis really did support the LRA? Was the feeling of abandonment among the Nilotic northerners (Acholis and others) deep enough to tempt secession from the Bantu-dominated capital of Kampala and the south of the country? Following from that, how severe was the resentment among the Acholis toward the Ugandan leader, Yoweri Museveni, a Banyankole (an ethnic subset of the Bantu speakers)?
Gayle Smith, who would go on to become the administrator of USAID under President Barack Obama, wanted Gersony to find out if the conflict was limited to LRA cattle raids and other criminal acts, or was Acholi society itself actually disintegrating? Since Gersony had last been in Uganda thirteen years before, Museveni had rescued the country from the war-torn hellhole that it was, one that was given to mass murder. But Uganda was still a long way from being at peace in its far-flung regions, which were afflicted still by tribal conflicts.
Remember, these were the late 1990s, the glory days of America’s worldwide imperial influence, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and yet before 9/11, when Washington—having taken America’s own security for granted—believed it could benevolently deliver democracy and stability literally throughout the planet. And the desire of the USAID bureaucracy to know everything about a place like northern Uganda reflected that. Bob Gersony was the chosen instrument for finding out—though, as usual, he was nervous as could be about the daunting task of answering all these questions. But he knew that it all boiled down to one question, really:
What did the Acholi people themselves think?
In the course of finding out, he would reveal in detail for the first time to the outside world the facts about the Lord’s Resistance Army and its exotic, frightening leader, Joseph Kony, who had been leading the LRA since the late 1980s in a bizarre, obscure, and barbaric struggle against the Ugandan regime. Because it was both bizarre and obscure, Gersony himself, even after weeks in the region, wouldn’t understand it all until he put his notes together afterward. Like many writers, he didn’t really know what he thought until his conclusions emerged through the act of putting them on paper.
* * *
—
Gersony arrived at the Mayfair Hotel in Nairobi on March 6, 1997. He paid a visit to his old friend from his 1993 Liberia assignment, Amos Wako. “I don’t understand the LRA myself, and nobody here does,” he told Gersony.
Gersony thought: “Wako is the Kenyan president’s right-hand man, and even he doesn’t know much about the Lord’s Resistance Army. I’m really going into the unknown this time.”
Gersony settled in at the Shanghai Hotel in Kampala, the kind of two-star establishment to which he was accustomed from his days in Kampala thirteen years before. He was now fifty-two and his career had not witnessed the kind of vertical progression that is the normal definition of success. He had not graduated to better hotels and flying business class. But he still felt entirely fulfilled by what he did.
The U.S. Embassy was no longer the makeshift barracks-style arrangement from 1984. It was now a proper building with a cafeteria even. But the atmosphere wasn’t good. The USAID mission director, Don Clark, a former Peace Corps volunteer, and the ambassador, E. Michael Southwick, a generalist who had worked all over the world, were barely on speaking terms. “What fresh hell is this!” Joe Williams, who worked under Clark, exclaimed whenever he went into a meeting, quoting the writer Dorothy Parker. This was not good for Gersony. It meant that whatever he discovered in northern Uganda might get shredded in the grinder of embassy politics. Furthermore, some USAID people in Kampala at first resisted Gersony, believing his presence there was unnecessary—“as if they were going to take the risk of traveling for weeks in northern Uganda, where the LRA was pulling people out of vehicles and disemboweling them at roadsides!” Joe Williams exclaims. But in any case, because of cables sent from Houdek, Brian Atwood, and others in Washington, at least Ambassador Southwick greeted Gersony as though a conquering hero.
“My first impression of Gersony was of someone clear, purposeful, motivated. When he described to me his research methods, I said to myself, ‘He’s going to get himself killed in this region of child soldiers and a drunken national army,’ ” Southwick recalls in his soft, laid-back voice.
The other key character in the U.S. Embassy was George Colvin, the political counselor, one of those area specialists from an earlier age (his specialty was the Acholis of northern Uganda) who brought a genuine love of subject to his job. Colvin was a portly look-alike of Hercule Poirot in the 1974 film Murder on the Orient Express, starring Albert Finney. “Colvin was a real eccentric, unusual for the Foreign Service, which prizes conformity,” a colleague says. Colvin practically put his arms around Gersony and told him in his typical, memorable way, “The Acholis provide what little yeast there is in a slack-doughed Ugandan parliament.” Colvin immediately liked Gersony simply because Gersony was hungry to understand and willing to travel for weeks in the place under question. He wasn’t the ninetieth person doing a study on some subject, but the first. And he would be doing it firsthand, like a newspaper reporter. The Ugandan foreign minister, Martin Aliker, an ethnic Acholi, confided to Gersony that the average white person in an embassy in Africa only gets to know three Africans: “his houseboy, his driver, and office messenger.”
Joe Williams and George Colvin arranged meetings with everyone in the Ugandan capital relevant to Gersony for his trip north, whether humanitarian aid workers or Ugandan military and security officials. Gersony was told the heroic story of Sister Rachele (Raquel) Fassera of St. Mary’s College Catholic boarding school, who, the previous October, had confronted the Lord’s Resistance Army after its soldiers had abducted 150 girls (ages eight to sixteen), and got the LRA to release 120 of them. But outside of a spotlight on an event here, or an insight about the Nilotic Acholis there, nobody in Kampala had a comprehensive picture of the state of battle and the human rights situation in the entire north of the country. Once again, despite the illusion of knowledge, there is no substitute for being there.
“I was going north alone. I absolutely needed a top-flight person to travel with,” Gersony explains.
“Joe, I need a long meeting with the head of the embassy motor pool,” Gersony told Williams. It was something that no American FSO usually does. For FSOs, the embassy motor pools represent minimal, transactional business. Most FSOs viewed drivers as servants practically. But Gersony was aware that this would be his most important meeting in Kampala, and he treated the motor pool chief like a high official, a true expert, addressing him very politely and formally. “This is what my work is all about, this type of one-on-one,” Gersony observes. After all, the condition of the roads in northern Uganda, the prevalence of land mines—nobody knew.
“Here’s what I need in a driver,” Gersony began the meeting. “I need an expert mechanic, also someone who inspire
s confidence at roadblocks, someone who can react instantly, someone who can be my own security officer, preferably with a military background. The actual driving is the least important thing.”
Gersony interviewed a number of drivers. He finally settled on Ben Bamulumbye. Ben was tall, with a shaved head. He was on the thin side, but sinewy and very strong, with a deep, authoritative African voice and a military bearing. He had been a driver in the Ugandan army: not the kind of person you wanted to fool around with. He and Gersony would cover three thousand miles together in a silver Mitsubishi Pajero.
“I was curious about him,” Ben says of Gersony. “I never met someone from far away who said matter-of-factly that he needed to go to this very dangerous region where even government soldiers were afraid to go. And I never met someone like him again.”
* * *
—
Before leaving Kampala, Gersony called his mother from one of those bulky satellite phones in an empty room in the embassy.
“I will never forget you. I love you. I love you. I love you,” his mother told him three times.
It was the end of his mother’s struggle to remember anything: the last real conversation they ever had together.
* * *
—
The next day Gersony and Ben left for the unknown.
Going north, they first passed through the Luwero Triangle, which Gersony knew in the bad old days of mass murder in 1984, thirteen years before. Now the place was teeming with people bringing produce to market, with bustling fertilizer and hardware shops everywhere. “Everyone was buying and selling. The ghost towns had had a rebirth.” There were walls of guinea bananas on tall stalks, which the pair stocked up on. Gersony, with his weak stomach, practically lived on them, along with the rice and potatoes that he and Ben bought locally. “Bob only ate once a day anyway,” Ben recalls.
When six hours later they reached Gulu in northwestern Uganda, they stayed at the Acholi Inn, an old-fashioned British establishment with columns, a vast lawn, and shade trees, for $23 per night. In Kitgum, to the east of Gulu, they stayed at Sarah’s hotel for $9, and in Moyo, to the west of Gulu, at the B Complex for $4.50. These places, all relatively close to the Sudanese border, were the height of luxury. Elsewhere they slept in huts equipped with a cot or two. In Gulu the paved road had ended, and they realized that no place was safe. The Lord’s Resistance Army, the most sadistic of African guerrilla bands, had patrols everywhere. There was no security, no communications. Their single side band (SSB) radio didn’t even work. You could be at the wrong place at the wrong time anywhere on this trip.
The payoff was that every word Gersony heard was fresh. These were not people who had spoken to other visitors and NGOs beforehand—there hadn’t been any. When you’re out on the edge, the encounters are that much more rewarding. “And Bob was such a good listener. He never showed fear. He was always writing in his notebook, and each night he was planning whom he wanted me to find in order to interview the next day,” Ben explains.
During six weeks of travel through a sprawling region that the Ugandan government neither controlled nor had specific information about, Gersony interviewed roughly three hundred people in twenty-four towns, half of them in Gulu and Kitgum, and the rest in the villages of West Nile Province, on the other side of the Albert Nile, the far northwest of Uganda where Idi Amin had come from. His main source of help was the Uganda branch of the American relief charity World Vision: a thoroughly efficient, tightly run outfit staffed completely by Ugandans.
“I felt a real explicit trust, a bond, with the people I spoke to,” who were mainly all Acholis. “They hated the Ugandan leader, Yoweri Museveni [who was a Bantu southerner]. But they also hated the Acholi-dominated Lord’s Resistance Army. They were caught in the middle between an unsympathetic government and crazed mass murderers. That was the anguish of northern Uganda.”
But, as Gersony learned, there was a ghost that haunted Acholiland: the atrocities that Acholi soldiers themselves knew they had committed under former Ugandan leader Milton Obote in the Luwero Triangle, which Gersony had documented more than a decade earlier, when over 100,000 civilians were killed.2 To wit, in a 1987 Easter homily, Msgr. Cipriano Kihangire, the Catholic bishop of Gulu and Kitgum, admonished his own Acholi parishioners:
Many [of you] joined the army with the hope of getting rich overnight, and were used by unscrupulous political leaders who sent you to carry out “operations,” which involved atrocious acts of violence against civilians, including children and women…3
Collective guilt was tied in with internecine tribal politics. The Acholis had wantonly killed their southern enemies, and nobody in Acholiland could deny it. Yet, as Gersony found out, it was easier to get individual Acholis to talk about the crimes of Museveni or even the Acholi-led Lord’s Resistance Army than about their own sins, as though their sullen hatred of Museveni and the LRA were indirect ways to excuse their guilt.
Yet there was a very specific ghost now exacting revenge upon the land: the ghost of a brutally raped and mutilated woman, whose fetus had also been torn out of her. It was a crime that happened by the Karuma Bridge at the Victoria Nile in southeastern Gulu province, perpetrated in 1986 by Acholi soldiers fleeing north from Museveni’s newly victorious army. When the woman’s relatives found her, according to the story, they sacrificed a black cow or bull at the site, burning it, then deliberately blowing the ashes all around, and vowing revenge.4
This specific ghost was the face not just of guilt, but of humiliation. The Acholis constituted a legendary warrior class under the British,5 and yet they had been defeated in the 1980s by Museveni’s Maoist-style army consisting of hordes of child soldiers. Museveni, by delaying his entry into Kampala month after month, had captured the Ugandan capital only when his forces became overwhelming. He had outsmarted the Acholis as well as outfought them, and they knew it.
Then there was economics. Losing control of the army to Museveni meant losing thousands of jobs, so that a third of Acholi families lost the bulk of their cash income. The defeated Acholi soldiery escaped to Sudan seething mad, warning people throughout northern Uganda that Museveni’s forces were coming to kill them.
“But the hundreds of people I interviewed in isolation all gave me a different story!” Gersony exclaims while recounting all this history—a history I also knew well as a reporter in Uganda. “I found little evidence that Museveni’s army had committed atrocities.” Gersony goes on, now delving into the minutiae of Ugandan history and tribal politics. He periodically looks toward the ceiling to make a point, as though in prayer. I have to remind myself that he could also go into such excruciating detail about each of the literally dozens of other countries where he has worked around the world. His knowledge base is both horizontally vast and vertically profound.
Listen to him:
“In all my interviews I could extract only one incident regarding a crime committed by Museveni’s army: Namu-okora in northeastern Kitgum. Acholi forces had been sweeping into the area in August 1986. There was a group called FEDEMU [Federal Democratic Movement of Uganda], a southern Baganda, anti-Obote group temporarily aligned with Museveni—which a few months earlier had actually been aligned with the Acholis themselves,” Gersony explains, pumped with excitement. “Armed FEDEMU troops had captured forty-four civilians and mowed them down when they escaped off a truck. Museveni then had these soldiers arrested.”
He continues:
“ ‘What atrocities has Museveni committed?’ I always asked the people I interviewed. ‘Namu-okora,’ they always responded. ‘What else?’ I asked. They just held their chins and shook their heads. They couldn’t name any. But all these Acholis in the north still hated Museveni, who was a southern Banyankole.”
Above every other fear he had in northern Uganda was the fear of encountering the Lord’s Resistance Army, which throughout the area set the model for mindless
cruelty, with a distinct Khmer Rouge element. In Lokung, near the Sudanese border in Kitgum in January 1997, the LRA hacked and clubbed to death over four hundred civilians, purposely leaving a few survivors to tell the story. Bob and Ben were always within several miles of LRA patrols, especially when they traveled along the Sudanese and Congolese borders.
Indeed, in all of these six weeks of reporting and traveling in the LRA-ravaged north of the country, there was the fact of Gersony’s own fear. He remembers how his driver, Ben, once noticing an LRA patrol in the flat distance, quickly executed a U-turn back to Kitgum town. “For someone from the outside like me—the only white face in the region—you never really knew who was who—who you could trust. People would come with their blankets to sleep each night outside the ramshackle hospitals out of fear of what might happen to them back in their villages. The tension never ceased. There were a lot of nights of not sleeping, of hearing what seemed like suspicious noises. Never mind the actual danger, you scared yourself to death.”
Except that, according to Ben, Gersony never once expressed or emanated fear. He always kept his roiling emotions buried, making them that much worse.
Gersony recalls Father Carlos Rodriguez, a Spanish priest of the Comboni missionary movement, who lived alone without security on the outskirts of Kitgum. Gersony spent hours with him, speaking in Spanish about the Acholi past and mindset. “Missionaries often know what is going on. They can be the best people to talk to, and get information from. They have a knowledge base missing in world capitals and even in foreign embassies.” Observing the selflessness of the young Father Rodriguez, Gersony felt a momentary pang of guilt: for being a parasite among people who made in a month less than what he made in an hour interviewing them, earning a living on the back of their suffering.
The Good American Page 39