The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  Chapter 8. Mozambique, 1987–1988

  1 Ian Martin, eulogy for Jonathan Moore, June 3, 2017.

  2 Freeman, oral history, April 14, 1995.

  3 Ken Flower, Serving Secretly: An Intelligence Chief on Record, Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, 1964 to 1981 (London: John Murray, 1987), pp. 300–302.

  4 For a complex, blow-by-blow description of the entire war, see Stephen A. Emerson’s The Battle for Mozambique: The Frelimo-Renamo Struggle, 1977–1992 (Warwick, UK: Helion & Company, 2014).

  5 Malyn Newitt, A Short History of Mozambique (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 12, 19, 161, and 164.

  6 Gersony left Zambia out of his proposed itinerary because its border was the most marginal to the conflict zone, and it had the fewest Mozambican refugees.

  7 The Polana plays a crucial role in Graham Greene’s emotionally deft, late-career thriller The Human Factor (1978).

  8 Cape Town is the legislative capital and Bloemfontein the judicial one.

  9 Actually, there were different factions within the South African clandestine services and not all of them were enthusiastic about helping RENAMO. In truth, South African support for RENAMO was not always as clear-cut and wholehearted as it seemed. Paul Moorcraft, Total Onslaught: War and Revolution in Southern Africa Since 1945 (Philadelphia: Pen & Sword Books, 2018), pp. 256–96.

  10 According to the Reagan Library’s records.

  11 www.youtube.com/​watch?v=jnhpjP4teqQ. Others at the meeting included Gary Bauer, Rebecca Gernhardt Cox (née Range), T. Kenneth Crib, Frank Donatelli, William Pascoe, Paul Stevens, and Paul Weyrich. Frank Carlucci, a fluent Portuguese speaker and experienced Africanist, had been suspicious of RENAMO for some time already, and Gersony’s report confirmed his suspicions. Carlucci was an important Crocker ally in denying RENAMO Reagan Doctrine support.

  12 David Ottaway and Lou Cannon, “Conservatives Oppose Afghan Peace Accords,” Washington Post, April 13, 1988.

  13 Quote supplied by sources close to the White House. For further background, see Gus Constantine, “Report by State Discredits Rebels in Mozambique,” Washington Times, April 21, 1988.

  14 Notre Dame anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom observed a village shortly after a RENAMO attack: “Every structure had been carefully burned to the ground. Acres upon acres of charred circles extended in all directions, the only testimonial to the fact that a village…had recently stood on the site.” Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 98.

  15 Karl Maier with Ben Penglase, Conspicuous Destruction: War, Famine and the Reform Process in Mozambique (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1992), p. 104.

  16 William Mintner, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (1994; North Charleston, SC: BookSurge Publishing, 2008), p. 3.

  17 The CIA’s directorate of operations was separate from its directorate of analysis, which supported Gersony’s findings.

  18 This view is also maintained in Emerson’s The Battle for Mozambique, which pins part of the blame for civilian atrocities on FRELIMO, pp. 153–82 especially. See also Moorcraft’s Total Onslaught, pp. 256–96.

  19 “Mr. Crocker’s Propaganda Blitz,” Washington Times, April 29, 1988.

  20 Peter J. Boyer, “Frat House for Jesus,” The New Yorker, September 13, 2010.

  21 Letter on State Department stationery to George Gersony, dated February 10, 1988.

  22 Some right-wingers were even calling Savimbi the “black George Washington.”

  23 While the conservative Washington Times was blasting Gersony’s report, the liberal establishment media had rushed to his defense. A lead editorial in The New York Times, entitled “The Killing Fields of Mozambique,” a reference to the Khmer Rouge, stated:

  “Rarely does a State Department document evoke a nightmarish Conrad novel….Civilians have been shot, knifed, axed, bayoneted, burnt, starved, beaten, drowned, and throttled….So writes Robert Gersony, who spent three months interviewing hundreds of refugees….Incredibly, the rebels of RENAMO are depicted as ‘freedom fighters’ by Senator Jesse Helms and a vociferous lobby that now includes Senator Bob Dole. The Reagan Administration has shown greater honor and sense, not least by detailing the truth in the State Department report….” (“The Killing Fields of Mozambique,” New York Times, April 23, 1988)

  A few days later, on April 28, a Washington Post editorial chimed in:

  “One of the troubles in a place like Mozambique, which is going through hell, is that it lies just outside the perimeter of international attention…This condition of obscurity has now been banished by a thoroughly documented report by an experienced refugee consultant, Robert Gersony. He makes it next to impossible for anyone to ignore further the atrocities committed by RENAMO, a guerrilla organization sponsored by the apartheid regime in South Africa….” (“Pretoria’s Victims in Mozambique,” Washington Post, April 28, 1988)

  There was still a rear guard of conservatives supporting RENAMO, led by Republican congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, who even in late May told The New York Times that RENAMO guerrillas were the only “freedom fighters” in the world that the Reagan administration was still not supporting. Robert Pear with James Brooke, “Rightists in U.S. Aid Mozambique Rebels,” New York Times, May 22, 1988. Yet the South African government itself changed its policy two weeks after Gersony’s report was issued. Pretoria announced that it was shifting alliances, and would begin to train and equip Mozambican government troops against RENAMO. (By late July, right-winger Paul Weyrich was still trying to convince vice president and Republican presidential candidate George H. W. Bush to publicly back RENAMO. But Bush, aware of the Gersony report, wrote to his aide, Don Gregg, that “I am not in accord” with Weyrich’s “suggestions on Mozambique. Please be sure that whoever is representing me at the Platform Committee does not go overboard on Mozambique.” Memo: the Vice President to Don Gregg and Dennis Ross, Washington, July 26, 1988.)

  24 At the end of it all, Secretary of State George Shultz wrote to Gersony: “On behalf of the Department of State, I would like to express my profound thanks for your exhaustive work…under difficult and often hazardous conditions….I was particularly struck by your meticulous methodology and the clarity of the briefings you gave me and other senior government officials.” Private letter dated July 26, 1988. Shultz repeated some of this in his diplomatic memoir: George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), p. 1111. Furthermore, in a May 2, 2019, letter to key members of Congress considering budget cuts to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, the ninety-eight-year-old Shultz wrote, “The refugee bureau…digs into root causes and resolves problems before they become disasters at our doorstep. It stopped mass murder in Uganda; used intelligence assets to stop piracy against Vietnamese boat people; and played a crucial role in stopping the war in Mozambique, avoiding tens of thousands of deaths, short-stopping the flight of millions more refugees….” In every one of these cases, Gersony had played a leading role.

  25 Chas Freeman, “A Rusting Tool of American Statecraft,” February 7, 2018. Based on lectures at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and American University, unpublished.

  26 Chester A. Crocker, High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in a Rough Neighborhood (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), p. 250.

  Chapter 9. Ethiopia and Somalia, 1989

  1 Robert D. Kaplan, Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea (1988; New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 137.

  2 Ibid., pp. 15, 20–25, 27, and 169–71. See all of chapter 3, “The African Killing Fields.”

  3 Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (1931; New York: Penguin Books, 1985), pp. 89–91.

  4 Robert D. Kaplan, “No Dilemma in a U.S. Blast at Somali Ruler,
” Wall Street Journal, October 23, 1989.

  5 Sidney Waldron and Naima A. Hasci, State of the Art Literature Review for Somali Refugees in the Horn of Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Refugee Studies Programme, 1995).

  Chapter 10. Liberia by Way of Nicaragua, 1990–1993

  1 Lyman would go on to become ambassador to South Africa and be involved in the negotiations that led to the collapse of the apartheid regime, thus representing the United States at the highest level in sub-Saharan Africa’s two most important nations.

  2 See James N. Purcell, Jr.’s We’re in Danger! Who Will Help Us? Refugees and Migrants: A Test of Civilization (Bloomington, IN: Archway Publishing, 2019).

  3 Shirley Christian, Nicaragua: Revolution in the Family (1985; New York: Vintage, 1986), pp. 4, 35, and 188.

  4 Ibid., pp. 158 and 169.

  5 Timothy C. Brown, The Real Contra War: Highland Peasant Resistance in Nicaragua (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), pp. xv–xvii, 3–4, 11, and 199.

  6 Christian, Nicaragua, p. 368.

  7 One example of news coverage of the project appeared in The New York Times, written by Shirley Christian: “Back Home, Miskitos Can Sing Again, but Face Daunting Job of Rebuilding,” April 3, 1992.

  8 V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 63.

  9 See the El Salvador section of chapter 3.

  10 Reuters, “Liberia Troops Accused of Massacre in Church,” New York Times, July 31, 1990.

  11 “Executive Summary: The Carter Camp Massacre; Results of an Investigation by the Panel of Inquiry, Appointed by the Secretary General into the Massacre Near Harbel, Liberia on the Night of June 5/6, 1993.” Panel Members: The Honorable S. Amos Wako, chairman; Robert Gersony, member; Ambassador Mahmoud Kassem, member. Secretariat: Gianni Magazzeni. September 10, 1993.

  12 William Powers, Blue Clay People: Seasons on Africa’s Fragile Edge (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), pp. 15–16.

  13 “Executive Summary: The Carter Camp Massacre.”

  14 Ibid.

  15 Ibid.

  16 “Full Report: Liberia; Panel of Inquiry Appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali. The Carter Camp Massacre,” pp. 57–58.

  17 Associated Press, “UN Blames Liberian Army Troops for Massacre,” New York Times, September 20, 1993. “Liberian Massacre Blamed on Army,” Washington Post, September 18, 1993.

  Chapter 11. Rwanda, 1994

  1 Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995 and 1997), pp. xi–xii and 2–3.

  2 Ibid., pp. 9, 35, 39, 46, and 61. Moreover, Philip Gourevitch writes that in the precolonial era, “The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals.” Later on, in the colonial period, “Tutsi elites were given nearly unlimited power to exploit Hutus’ labor and levy taxes against them.” We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998), pp. 49 and 56.

  3 Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, pp. 64–65.

  4 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 111–12, 140, and 226–27.

  5 Pentagon Document Number I94/16545, May 5, 1994.

  6 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 237–38, 265, and 312–13.

  7 Blaine Harden, “At 81, Japan’s Outspoken Force for the World’s Poor,” Washington Post, September 30, 2008.

  8 Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), p. 190.

  9 Ambassador Robert and Kathleen Tobin Krueger, From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi: Our Embassy Years During Genocide (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), p. 109.

  10 Ogata, The Turbulent Decade, pp. 190–91.

  11 They were Augustin Mahiga, Leonardo Franco, and Sanda Kimbimbi.

  12 See Ogata, The Turbulent Decade, pp. 190–95, for a brief description of the high commissioner’s account of Gersony’s work, which she said “forced a necessary policy review for UNHCR.”

  13 James Traub, “Kofi Annan’s Tragic Idealism,” New York Times, August 20, 2018.

  14 Stephen Kinzer, A Thousand Hills: Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), p. 270.

  15 The others were Iqbal Riza, Ismat Kittani, and Hans Correll.

  16 Cable from Marrack Goulding to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, September 16, 1994. Goulding later wrote that “practical peacemaking depends on establishing” facts, and not ignoring them. Kevin M. Cahill, ed., Observation, Triage, and Initial Therapy: Fact-finding Missions and Other Techniques (New York: Basic Books, 1996), p. 213.

  17 The others present were Doug Stafford, Arlene Render, Margaret McKelvey, Doug Bennet, and John Hicks—the same John Hicks who had been so helpful to Gersony in Malawi six years earlier.

  18 The RPA, or Rwandan Patriotic Army, was officially the military wing of the RPF, the two being mainly synonymous. Arlene Render, September 20, 1994, cable number 254232. There was also a second cable, 200310Z, describing Gersony’s whole trip and indicating that both the United Nations and the State Department would take the matter up with the Kagame regime.

  19 About this time, U.N. Emergency Office head Charles Petrie and a USAID disaster relief specialist visited the Byumba region in northeastern Rwanda, one area not visited by Gersony’s team. But this new investigation also found that information collected by interviews with local inhabitants “strongly suggests that [the] RPA has carried out systematic reprisals against Hutu populations…the team heard similar stories as those recounted to the [Gersony] UNHCR team by refugees who came from the northeast….”

  20 Holding this job between Maurice Baril and Guy Tousignant was Roméo Dallaire, who, having been witness to the genocide of the Tutsis, and having gotten no help in the outside world to stop it, went home disillusioned and suicidal. See Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003).

  21 Luc Reydams, International Prosecutors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 34.

  22 According to a September 22, 1994, cable (number 001588) from the U.S. Embassy in Kigali to Washington, Tousignant admitted “he did not know what was happening in the southeast region and other areas where UNAMIR was not present.”

  23 Twagiramungu would years later admit that the Gersony team report was “congruent with lists he had compiled of thousands of Hutu civilians killed by Tutsi forces.” Howard W. French and Jeffrey Gettleman, “Dispute Over U.N. Report Evokes Rwandan Deja Vu,” New York Times, September 30, 2010.

  24 Frederick Ehrenreich, August 5, 1994, State 214379 101516Z.

  25 American Embassy, Bujumbura, August 11, 1994, 02708 111704Z.

  26 Rawson later told Atlantic writer Samantha Power that he was “looking away from the dark signs….We were naive policy optimists….” Though this was in reference to his actions before the original genocide, it may be indicative of his troubled state of mind through Gersony’s visit. Samantha Power, “Bystanders to Genocide,” The Atlantic, September 2001.

  27 “Human Rights Watch and the FIDH Condemn Assassination of Seth Sendashonga,” Human Rights Watch, May 18, 1998.

  28 Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 146.

  29 One factor weakening Assistant Secretary of State for Africa George Moose was that Secretary of State Warren Christopher, focusing on Arab-Israeli peace negotiations and other matters, had relatively little interest in Africa.

  30 Embassy Kigali to Secretary of State, September 23, 1994, 01606 23132222.

  31 As it happened, the joint team, which included Ambassador Shahryar Khan, left Kigali late the next day, traveled for two hours, and found no evidence except a mass grave dating back several months. The Gersony team had spent more
than a month visiting close to a hundred sites and interviewing 300 witnesses. Luc Reydams, Let’s Be Friends: The United States, Post-Genocide Rwanda, and Victor’s Justice in Arusha (Antwerp, Belgium, and South Bend, IN: University of Antwerp and Notre Dame University, 2013), p. 27.

  32 Meanwhile, back in New York, Annan pinned back Shahryar Khan’s ears in a September 29 cable, voicing “dismay” at public statements made by U.N. officials in Kigali “impugning” UNHCR and the Gersony report. Source: U.N. Cable Number 3172. Kofi Annan died just as I was engaging his staff for an interview with him.

  33 Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 137.

  34 Letter from François Fouinat, chief of staff for Sadako Ogata, to B. Molina-Abram, secretary to the commission of experts on Rwanda, Geneva, October 11, 1994.

  35 UNHCR Document Number R0002907.

  36 To be sure, the report was suppressed, even if the details of Gersony’s findings became known. According to a Wikileaks cable released many years later, Boutros-Ghali and George Moose told the Rwandan government “that if the killing of Hutus stopped, then a detailed report [the Gersony report] about the Tutsi massacre of approximately 30,000 Hutus would be swept under the rug.” Source: Embassy/Madrid confidential cable number 00000201. Wikileaks: February 22, 2008.

  37 Gersony had warned that if the United Nations and the Clinton administration did not take firm action against the RPF, “in a few months they will be murdering people right in front of your eyes.” To wit, on April 22, 1995, in the largely Hutu refugee camp of Kibeho in the southwestern corner of Rwanda, RPF soldiers fired into crowds of people, killing about 4,000 and wounding 650, according to the Australian blue-helmeted peacekeepers in the vicinity who used clickers to count the bodies. Source: Terry Pickard, Combat Medic: An Austrian’s Eyewitness Account of the Kibeho Massacre (Wavell Heights, Australia: Big Sky Publishing, 2008), pp. 80–81. Stephen Buckley, “At Least 2,000 Refugees Die in Rwandan Violence,” Washington Post, April 24, 1995. David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (2002; New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), p. 188.