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Finally, Gersony returned to Kampala.
In the two-star Shanghai Hotel, he had one of the longest hot showers of his life. He had his laundry done and enjoyed spaghetti Bolognese in the hotel restaurant. Then he went to the U.S. Embassy to see Joe Williams, more as a friend from the outside world than as someone he had to brief. Nevertheless, Gersony had come back after six weeks in the field with a wealth of insights and information. A few years later the Lord’s Resistance Army would constitute a cottage industry for a subculture of academics and human rights workers, some of whom would critique Gersony’s eventual report at the edges. But he was virtually the first inside the region.
Rested up, he went around Kampala trying to get dates, times, and all sorts of other factual backup for the stories he had heard in the field. “Now I had questions to ask that I didn’t have before.” The next stage was to brief the FSNs, the Foreign Service Nationals, at the U.S. Embassy: these were some of the smartest Ugandans around, and their memories were long-term; they were the most likely to catch his mistakes. Finally, he briefed Ambassador Michael Southwick and political counselor George Colvin for four hours. Colvin, the Hercule Poirot look-alike, though the resident expert on the Acholis, did not feel threatened by Gersony’s newly acquired knowledge: he was thrilled, in fact. They both arranged for Gersony to brief the entire diplomatic corps in Kampala. This was not the 1980s, Gersony’s first foray in Uganda, when the British High Commission dominated the local diplomatic scene. Now the United States Embassy was it.
The local diplomats responded well to the brief, except for the French ambassador, François Descoueyte, who kept challenging Gersony, accusing him of exaggerating the crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army and minimizing Museveni’s own bad behavior.6 The French, keep in mind, as backers of the genocidal Hutu regime in Rwanda up through 1994, were opponents of the Anglophone Tutsi leader Paul Kagame and Kagame’s former comrade in arms, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda. Gersony’s worldview was different. He saw Museveni as a flawed dictator who nevertheless had to contend with grotesque butchers and mass murderers within his own country, making for a moral distinction that the French didn’t see.
Ambassador Southwick thought Gersony’s report was “terrific.” On Friday evening, June 28, 1997, Gersony, accompanied by Southwick, went to a government lodge outside Kampala to deliver the entire multihour brief to Museveni.
Museveni sat on a slightly raised platform, facing the two chairs arranged for the American visitors. “You are the one who worked on the Luwero Triangle with Mr. Elliott [Abrams],” Museveni said, very pleased, as he greeted Gersony. It had been Gersony’s reporting on the Obote regime’s atrocities in the Luwero Triangle that played a part in bringing Museveni to power.
Gersony’s brief included criticisms of Museveni’s own national army in northern Uganda. Museveni interjected, “I have not done a good job of stopping the stealing [by the army], but I have stopped the [army’s] killing.”
When Gersony followed up, saying that the national army was insufficiently motivated to go after the LRA and related bandit groups, Museveni said, “Must I move up to Gulu full-time [to encourage my forces]?”
Museveni’s problem was typical of the developing world, where institutions were either nonexistent or didn’t function well, so that the leader in the capital gives orders that are not followed through on. It is the very failure of institutions that encourages strongmen to emerge in the first place, even as such strongmen can inhibit the growth of institutions: a classic dilemma.
When Gersony told Museveni that “people in the north blame you as much as the LRA for the chaos,” Museveni responded, “I need peace there. I do not need their votes.”
Gersony recommended that South Africa, Switzerland, and Italy form a panel of inquiry to investigate the violence in northern Uganda.7 Museveni agreed. However, the panel would ultimately never be formed because of bureaucratic slow-rolling in Europe. “Dealing with the Europeans can be like jumping into a pot of glue,” Southwick observes. As Gersony recommended, though, Museveni did sponsor an amnesty for all LRA soldiers who willingly gave up their fight for control and power in their region.
In a cable sent to all African and European posts, in addition to U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson and USAID administrator Brian Atwood, Ambassador Southwick wrote that “Gersony has stripped away much of the cant, disinformation, and distortion which has accompanied” discussions of the situation in northern Uganda.8
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Back in Washington, Gersony briefed everyone at high levels at State, USAID, and the National Security Council.9 The National Security Council wrote to Southwick on July 25 that Gersony’s northern Uganda briefings “have been the stuff of legends.”
Finally, Gersony paid a courtesy call on the Washington-based vice president for World Vision, Andrew Natsios, whose humanitarian organization had been so helpful to Gersony in his field research. Natsios already knew and had a high opinion of Gersony from the latter’s assessment of a slum neighborhood in Panama in the early months of 1990, in the wake of the U.S. invasion to depose Manuel Noriega. Natsios drank up Gersony’s information like few in Gersony’s experience had done. He found Gersony methodical in the extreme, analyzing large numbers of interviews in a way that filtered out all ideological and philosophical assumptions, whether good or bad. “Too many contractors tell you what you want to hear, but this guy was someone you could actually trust,” Natsios explains, adding that “in place of the bohemian leftists who often populate NGO ranks,” Gersony appealed to his own sensibilities, which were skeptical, somewhat right of center, and internationalist.
Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development in the George W. Bush administration, who used Gersony to investigate crises in North Korea, Nepal, and Iraq.
Natsios would go on to become the go-to guy on the Lord’s Resistance Army in the NGO community. Gersony could not have known it at the time, but after George W. Bush became president in the wake of the Florida recount, he would appoint Andrew Natsios as the new USAID administrator to replace Brian Atwood, a Clinton appointee. Gersony had just set himself up for continued employment in the younger Bush era.
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The result of Gersony’s efforts was a 107-page study, The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-Based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda, submitted to the United States Embassy and the USAID Mission in Kampala in August 1997. It was the most comprehensively detailed and richly textured piece of analysis and area expertise that Gersony had written to date in his career. The “Gersony reports” about Mozambique and Rwanda may have been far more famous because of the controversies they stirred up, but it is the lesser-known reports, about Ethiopia and Somalia, and especially about northern Uganda, that were the gems of his particular self-invented genre at this point. They reveal an indefatigable willingness to travel for weeks at a time, covering over three thousand miles, in some of Africa’s most dangerous and rugged areas, while producing a dry, dispassionate analysis about the complexity of what was going on there. Journalists can regularly outdo him when it comes to the style and drama of the writing, but no journalist can surpass him when it comes to the clinical objectivity and sheer strength of the research, in which, in this case, he interviewed hundreds in the field.
The Gersony report about northern Uganda begins with detailed maps covering the area’s population, topography, and ethnicity, buttressed by tables and historical timelines, all of which he drew and assembled on his own. Then comes an encyclopedic backgrounder on the landscape and history of the Acholi-dominated districts of Gulu and Kitgum, including such things as rainfall and cattle production, which concludes with a description of the fighting in the Luwero Triangle to the south, that Gersony had reported on thirteen years earlier, in 1984; and how the Ni
lotic Acholis from northern Uganda, who had made up much of Milton Obote’s forces, never really got over their defeat at the hands of Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army (NRA), made up of Baganda, Banyarwanda, and Banyankole from southern Uganda. For the younger Gersony, the Luwero Triangle had been strictly a human rights issue. Now that he was older and on a different assignment, he explored how the military defeat of Obote’s forces in Luwero meant the loss of power, money, and status for the Acholi fighters and their families. Rather than feeling depressed about the fact that he was back in the same country doing the same sort of granular research, still as a freelance contractor for the U.S. government, he exulted in it, happy to be in the field instead of behind a desk. He was like the best foreign correspondents in this regard, the kind who consider coming back to the home office in whatever capacity a demotion.
From an empathetic study of the Acholi predicament, he introduces the exotic character of Alice Auma, the spirit medium or messenger—hence “Lakwena.” He describes Alice Lakwena’s miraculous conversion during forty days spent in the Nile waters near Murchison Falls, and how she introduced magic into the Acholi cause—using shea oil against bullets, transforming stones into grenades, singing Christian hymns before battle—in a respectful rather than a condescending manner. He writes about how she led her forces south on a long march all the way to the shores of Lake Victoria, close to Kampala.
For Alice in Gersony’s telling is merely a symptom of how desperate and demoralized the Acholis had become, especially given the almost total loss of their cattle herds because of raiding from NRA forces and NRA-aligned Karamojong rustlers, which constituted an economic devastation. “For the Acholis,” Gersony explains, “the cattle herds were their milk, their meat, the dowry for their daughters, their health and retirement insurance, their identity. They talk about the Karamojong raids, with tears in their eyes, in a way that they don’t even talk about the machete-inflicted slaughter of children in the course of the chaos in the north.”
Here Gersony introduces a cousin of Alice, Joseph Kony, who also claimed to be a spirit medium and who revived her movement when it was close to collapse after she was wounded in a battle and took refuge in Kenya. “It is sometimes reported that Kony is a former Catholic catechist,” Gersony writes. “An authoritative source indicates this is inaccurate. Kony’s father was a Catholic catechist, his mother an Anglican. His brother is believed to have been a witch doctor; upon his brother’s death, Kony believed he inherited his brother’s powers.”10 (Gersony remains this nuanced and detailed throughout.)
Kony, who in the late 1980s began fighting and leading the Acholis against the southern-based Ugandan regime of Yoweri Museveni, formed the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which came into its own following a breakdown in negotiations with the Museveni regime in 1994. But it was also the end of the Cold War that in an indirect way helped Kony. The collapse of communism and the Soviet Union removed the ballast from Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Marxist regime in Ethiopia. This weakened the Mengistu-allied Sudan People’s Liberation Army in southern Sudan, a feared enemy of Joseph Kony.11 Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army henceforth began the massive abduction of youngsters, whom it forced to fight in its ranks, all the while using land mines and other weapons to destroy schools and other civilian facilities. This soon became a war of the Acholis against the Acholis, in which Museveni’s regime in Kampala, employing brutal realpolitik, was deliberately hesitant to intervene. Kony was, in part, motivated by rage: the rage of being deserted by his own ethnic constituency, which was less militant than he was. Gersony separates the LRA attacks into different categories of horror, and provides exhaustive descriptions of “signal incidents” in its campaign of terror, with large numbers of women and children shot, hacked, and clubbed to death—hundreds, thousands of them. To save themselves, northern Uganda’s civilians began sleeping in underground holes and caves, a practice called alup in the Luo dialect. Gersony next provides a table of displaced families by region and circumstances for their displacement. He writes that the war is “hopeless,” since the Lord’s Resistance Army is fighting in isolation and has no possibility of attaining power; nor does it have a political program or ideology.12 It was an expression of pure anarchy, in other words.
Gersony’s report arrived fourteen years before the name of Joseph Kony and the atrocities of the Lord’s Resistance Army became infamous in the United States, with social media all of a sudden in 2011 demanding Kony’s capture.
But while the war in northern Uganda appeared hopeless in 1997, Gersony was not. He ends his report with page after page of proposals for providing “seeds and tools for agricultural reactivation,” for “school reconstruction,” for “short-term cash employment,” for improving unsurfaced farm-to-market roads, undertaking dam repairs, and so forth.13 He would never succumb to fatalism.
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Gersony’s report fundamentally shifted the moral responsibility of the northern Uganda conflict from Museveni to Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, where it henceforth stayed.14 Kony would later deny all charges against him in an interview in 2006 with the German journalist Mareike Schomerus, conducted near the border of Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.15 But the interview revealed a figure given to incoherence and gibberish, unable to articulate a specific program for the people he claimed to represent. As Gersony points out, nearly all of the displaced persons ran to Museveni’s lines, as much as they distrusted him, while none of the displaced Acholis ran across the Sudan border to the LRA’s side. The Acholis truly voted with their feet.
Some academics continued to criticize Gersony for supposedly demonizing the Lord’s Resistance Army. Gersony responds:
“Cutting people’s ears off and forcing children to kill their parents cannot be justified even indirectly as a political statement. Doing that takes cultural relativism to an extreme. If the Lord’s Resistance Army does not constitute barbarism, what does?”
CHAPTER 15
From El Salvador to Ecuador and Colombia, by Way of Africa
1997–2002 and 2008–2009
The Beakless Chickens
Gersony returned to New York from Uganda in September 1997 and his immediate concern was his mother, who could not hold a coherent conversation. Nevertheless, he went for a walk with her every day in Central Park, as well as regularly taking her out to lunch. But he was back home only a few weeks when Bill Garvelink called from USAID with a bread-and-butter assignment for Bob and Cindy.
Africa was exploding with crises, both man-made and climate-related. Bill wanted to decentralize decision-making by setting up a regional office in Africa, quasi-independent from Washington. USAID’s Office for Foreign Disaster Assistance simply had to evolve from being a mom-and-pop shop in Washington dealing with plastic jugs and tents for refugee camps to a more efficiently managed bureaucracy pivotally improving countries in varying degrees of chaos: this was the mindset at a time when the United States was still in a position of unchallenged power worldwide, and thus felt a particular responsibility to better the condition of humanity as a whole.
Everyone knew that there was only one place to locate such a regional office: Nairobi, Kenya, because of its level of development and excellent air connections. But this was the U.S. government. Thus, Bob and Cindy still had to justify such a decision for the bureaucracy and figure out what such an office would specifically do and how it would be staffed. They traveled to Geneva, Nairobi, and several other African capitals, interviewing upwards of 150 diplomats and humanitarian field staffers. “It helped pay the bills,” Gersony says with a shrug, admitting that this was one of those big-picture assignments where the bureaucracy wastes the public’s money. However, Bob and Cindy did eventually recommend the establishment of a cadre of Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs) for the entire continent, locally employed Africans stationed at U.S. embassies who could serve as experts and continuity points for
the revolving door of American officials who would be coming and going for years to come.
The Nairobi office was eventually established, but not the FSN corps. Many USAID officials in Washington did not want to cede any central control, and especially balked at giving local Africans any kind of real influence over U.S. assistance policy in Africa. It was a frustrating, “nothing” assignment.
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By March of the next year Bob and Cindy had completed all the reports related to the Africa assessment. In November, Garvelink phoned again. Could Bob and Cindy leave immediately for Central America?
From October 22 through November 9, 1998, Hurricane Mitch had moved through the region, the second-deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record. The damage from high winds was actually minimal, but because the storm moved so slowly, it dropped seventy-five inches of rain—the height of a six-foot-three-inch person—on Nicaragua and Honduras. There were thousands of fatalities. Once on the ground, Bob and Cindy split up. She was assigned to Nicaragua and he to El Salvador, where there was comparatively little damage. Nevertheless, after a week in the field, Gersony reported that thousands of wells had been contaminated by dead animals floating in the debris. By December he had gotten a project started for under $1 million, administered by CARE, to decontaminate wells and build low walls around them to prevent future storm damage.
Cindy’s experience in Nicaragua was more dramatic. She had witnessed multitudes of people with barely any clothes: huddled in abandoned schools, wet, shivering, with no blankets or any kind of cover. However, Paul Bell, the head of the USAID disaster assistance response team based in San José, Costa Rica, believed that the hurricane emergency was nearly over and therefore Nicaragua did not require more substantial assistance. Bell was all about building up national capacity in each country, rather than dissipating money on emergencies, and was actually ahead of his time in this regard. He had a reputation as an outspoken, somewhat eccentric, quasi-religious character in humanitarian circles (he was the son of missionaries), and his word mattered. He was known as Don Pablo (“Don Paul”) and El Jefe, “the boss” in Spanish, “a dense planet around which many moons circled,” in the words of one USAID official. Bell knew almost every head of state in the greater Central American region and had semi-independent status within USAID, by virtue of the success of his many training programs. He, Fred Cuny, and Bob Gersony were “the three iconic figures in relief assistance,” according to James Fleming, the USAID division director for disaster response. Yet the Clinton administration, nervous about the Hispanic vote, dispatched First Lady Hillary Clinton to Honduras and El Salvador in mid-November, where she promised $621 million in continuing emergency aid and reconstruction funds for Central America, to include the use of American troops and helicopters. When Paul Bell and others persisted in wanting to scale down the emergency mission despite what the first lady had publicly promised, USAID administrator Brian Atwood—a friend of the Clintons—reportedly stormed into the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in the State Department building, demanding acquiescence.
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