The Good American

by Robert D. Kaplan

  38 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, pp. 323–24.

  39 On October 18, 1994, in an op-ed in The Washington Post, Democratic congressman Tony Hall, the head of the Congressional Hunger Center, defended Gersony, writing that senior officials “who are familiar with the author’s track record, would stake their lives on the [Gersony] report’s veracity and his methodology.” Two days later, an Amnesty International report was issued, detailing significant numbers of “deliberate and arbitrary” RPF killings of Hutus. And two days after that, on October 22, both the London Independent and The New York Times wrote of “systematic revenge killing” by the RPF throughout Rwanda. In 1999, in her definitive 789-page book on Rwanda, Leave None to Tell the Story, the Yale-educated expert on East Africa, Alison Des Forges, would write that Gersony’s team, “although few in number…covered more RPF territory and spoke to a wider number and variety of witnesses than any other foreigners working in Rwanda during this period.” Sources: Tony Hall, “Cycle of Revenge in Rwanda,” Washington Post, October 18, 1994. “Rwanda: Reports of Killings and Abductions by the Rwandese Patriotic Army, April–August 1994,” Amnesty International, October 20, 1994. Richard Broadbent, “UN Urged to Halt Rwandan Violence,” The Independent, October 22, 1994. Editorial, “Again, Killing in Rwanda,” New York Times, October 22, 1994. Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story, p. 127. See, too: Howard W. French and Jeffrey Gettleman, “Dispute Over U.N. Report Evokes Rwandan Déjà Vu,” New York Times, September 30, 2010, and Howard W. French, “How Rwanda’s Paul Kagame Exploits U.S. Guilt,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2014.

  40 Years later, Hank Cohen, who replaced Chet Crocker as assistant secretary of state for Africa in the elder Bush administration, would write that Gersony had “shamed the U.S. Government” and others into acknowledging the hard-to-admit, complicated truth about Rwanda. Email sent by Cohen, June 11, 2014.

  41 Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis, p. 360.

  42 Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 355.

  THE WORLD IS WHAT IT IS

  Chapter 12. Gaza and the West Bank, 1995

  1 Chris Hedges, “A Gaza Diary,” Harper’s, October 2001.

  2 Saddam would increase the payments to $25,000 per family after 9/11. “Iraqi Ties to Terrorism,” Council on Foreign Relations, February 3, 2005.

  3 “Arafat’s Costly Gulf War Choice,” Al Jazeera, August 22, 2009.

  4 Ami Ayalon, The Middle East Contemporary Survey (1990), vol. 14 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), pp. 226 and 265.

  5 An Israeli commando unit assassinated Abu Jihad on April 16, 1988, at Sidi Bou Said, north of the Tunisian capital of Tunis.

  Chapter 13. Bosnia, 1995–1996

  1 Robert D. Kaplan, “Europe’s Third World,” The Atlantic, July 1989.

  2 Robert D. Kaplan, “Balkans’ Fault Line: Yugoslavia Starts to Feel the Tremors,” Wall Street Journal/Europe, November 30, 1989. Though my reporting depressed an American president regarding the possibilities of military action, I supported military action from the beginning. In the March 1993 issue of Reader’s Digest, the same month that Balkan Ghosts was published, I wrote: “Unless we can break the cycle of hatred and revenge—by standing forcefully for self-determination and minority rights—the gains from the end of the Cold War will be lost. All aid, all diplomatic efforts, all force if force is used, must be linked to the simple idea that all the people of Yugoslavia deserve freedom from violence.” Soon after I appeared on television (CNN, C-SPAN) to urge intervention. I unambiguously urged military intervention on the front page of The Washington Post Outlook section more than a year before we intervened (“Into the Bloody New World: A Moral Pragmatism for America in an Age of Mini-Holocausts,” April 17, 1994). There is no contradiction between my early support for military action and the dire record of religious and ethnic conflict I described in Balkan Ghosts, since it is only the grimmest human landscapes where intervention is required in the first place.

  3 The twin categories of “refugees” and “displaced persons” could appear somewhat confusing in the Yugoslav context, since if you accepted the continuation in some form of the Yugoslav state, then an overwhelming majority of people were displaced persons rather than refugees who had crossed an international border. But if you accepted the facts on the ground—the emergence of new and formal geographically based entities—then there were obviously many more refugees.

  4 Knight’s cable went out under the name of the ambassador, Peter Galbraith. Daniel Williams, “Grim Balkans Outlook Affected U.S. Position,” Washington Post, August 19, 1993.

  5 Galbraith had been an influential staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was a world-renowned expert on the Kurds, as well as on the brutality of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. He also spoke several languages.

  6 Galbraith would later use Knight’s cable about Sarajevo as an example of how an individual action had the power to change events.

  7 Thirty-three interviews were conducted in Washington, fourteen in Geneva, and three in Brussels.

  8 Daniela Heimerl, “The Return of Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons,” International Peacekeeping 12, no. 3 (2005).

  9 Robert and Cindy Gersony, “Summary of Findings and Recommendations: Bosnia Reconstruction Assessment,” U.S. Agency for International Development, Bureau for Humanitarian Response, Washington, DC, April 1996.

  10 Bill Egbert, “A Noble Act of Harmony in the Balkans: Maverick Mayor Who Protects Minorities Won Reelection in Bosnia Last Month,” Christian Science Monitor, October 9, 1997.

  11 Barton would go on to praise Bob and Cindy as “the premier conflict researchers of the era.” Rick Barton, Peace Works: America’s Unifying Role in a Turbulent World (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), p. 104.

  12 The scholars Gerald Toal and Carl T. Dahlman have somewhat different figures. They also report that Stolac took no families, but say that 44 families instead of 11 returned to Jajce. However, they report that around six months after Dayton, the Muslim houses in outlying villages that had not yet been destroyed were firebombed. In 1997, two years after Dayton, Jajce police ordered those Muslims who had returned to leave. In sum, the pilot town project was a failure. Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 196–97.

  13 Mayor Dževad Mlaćo, a former math teacher, would be implicated in covering up the disappearance of twenty-one Bosnian Croat men from Bugojno in 1993. Letter from Carlos Westendorp and Norbert Klingler, Office of the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, February 12, 1999. “Unsuccessful Reconciliation of Federal Partners,” AIM, Sarajevo, January 30, 1997.

  14 “Menzies loved” Gersony’s report. “He was very supportive as the report represented progress and movement forward,” Tim Knight confirms.

  15 Dine, in an email, said he has no memory of ever meeting Gersony, and none of working to delay the implementation of his plan. This is in contrast to the memories of Atwood, Mahdesian, and Gersony himself. Carol Lancaster and Doug Stafford are deceased.

  16 Barton, Peace Works, pp. 61–62.

  17 Jerry Hyman, internal USAID email, February 14, 1996.

  18 Neal Keny-Guyer, letter to Brian Atwood, March 25, 1996.

  19 John Pomfret, “Rivalries Stall Reconstruction of Bosnia,” Washington Post, October 13, 1996.

  20 General Accounting Office, Progress Toward Achieving the Dayton Agreement’s Goals, Washington, DC, May 1997. See as well Vesna Bojicic-Dzelilovic, “The Politics, Practice and Paradox of ‘Ethnic Security’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 4, no. 1 (2015): 1–18.

  21 Rebecca Brubaker, From the Unmixing to the Remixing of Peoples: UNHCR and Minority Returns in Bosnia (Geneva: UNHCR Policy and Evaluation Service, 2013), p. 4.


  22 Chris Hedges, “At Home and Under Duress with Bosnian Croats,” New York Times, November 16, 1997. Lee Hockstader, “Bosnia Not Sold on Multiethnic State,” Washington Post, December 7, 1997. Moreover, the International Crisis Group, reversing its optimistic stance of the year before on the possibility of minority returns, reported that such returns were rarely occurring and were limited to elderly people. Bosnia: Minority Return or Mass Relocation? Brussels: May 14, 1998. A later BBC report echoed the same observation: “Bosnia Refugee Policy Failure,” BBC, December 13, 1998.

  23 Marcus Cox, Strategic Approaches to International Intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina, War-Torn Societies Project, Center for Applied Studies, Sarajevo, October 1998.

  24 Brubaker, From the Unmixing to the Remixing of Peoples, p. 5.

  25 These compromises, such as rewarding the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing by creating a Serbian republic within Bosnia, led quite a number of academics and intellectuals to criticize Dayton, and blame it for all the problems in the former Yugoslavia ever since.

  26 The visionary view was most elaborately presented by John Fawcett and Victor Tanner, two prominent members of the NGO community, in a 242-page report. Early on in this report, they honestly lay out what they see as a stark philosophical difference between people like themselves who believed that the Bosnian war was a matter of specific actions taken by political leaders and those like Gersony who apparently believed that it was the result of long-standing communal divides and passions. Of course, the complex truth of it all can easily encompass both beliefs. Fawcett and Tanner did not request or receive the full multihour oral brief that Gersony delivered to 80 officials in 18 separate sittings; they relied instead on Gersony’s more condensed written report, which was clearly marked as a “summary.” Whereas Gersony interviewed 250-odd Bosnians on the ground in wintry, wartime conditions, Fawcett and Tanner interviewed 54 in easier circumstances. Whereas 70 percent of all the people Gersony interviewed and consulted for his findings were Bosnians, 40 percent of the people Fawcett and Tanner spoke with were Bosnians (the rest were international aid officials and experts). Gersony had several months to conduct all of his interviews, to prepare and deliver his many oral briefings, and to write a condensed report; Fawcett and Tanner had several years to work on their more extensive written project. Fawcett and Tanner complain that Gersony’s Bosnia work lacks the detail and rigor of his other work, such as on Somalia and northern Uganda. Yet Somalia and northern Uganda were long-term assessments with only soft deadlines, whereas Bosnia was an emergency action report. John Fawcett and Victor Tanner, The Political Repercussions of Emergency Programs: A Review of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Former Yugoslavia (1991–1996) (Washington, DC: Checchi Consulting, April 2000).

  Chapter 14. Northern Uganda by Way of Nicaragua, 1996–1997

  1 His real name was Antonio Blandon.

  2 Some, including the International Committee of the Red Cross, reported over 300,000 people killed in the Luwero region. Thomas Ofcansky, Uganda: Tarnished Pearl of Africa (1996; Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), p. 54.

  3 Robert Gersony, The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-Based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda (Kampala, Uganda: USAID, 1997), p. 9.

  4 Kevin Ward, “ ‘The Armies of the Lord’: Christianity, Rebels and the State in Northern Uganda, 1986–1999,” Journal of Religion in Africa 31, no 2 (May 2001).

  5 Richard J. Reid, The History of Modern Uganda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 67.

  6 The Economist would later contradict the French ambassador, reporting that Gersony did in fact criticize Museveni’s army, “which has not demonstrated the capacity and commitment” required to end the war, leading to a rebuke of Gersony from Museveni’s media adviser, John Nagenda. “Uganda: A Dirty War That Can’t Be Won,” The Economist, October 4, 1997.

  7 Gersony chose post-apartheid South Africa for its moral authority, Switzerland for its well-respected leadership in the humanitarian field, and Italy because of the presence of the Comboni missionaries in the region.

  8 Embassy Kampala, cable 1741, July 7, 1997.

  9 One of the people Gersony briefed in State’s Africa bureau was April Glaspie, who he remembers was “straight-forward,” “supportive,” and “friendly enough” throughout. Glaspie is known to the outside world only through her ill-fated meeting with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein prior to his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But she had a long career before that meeting and a significant career afterward.

  10 Gersony, The Anguish of Northern Uganda, p. 30.

  11 Prunier, Africa’s World War, pp. 81–82.

  12 Gersony, The Anguish of Northern Uganda, pp. 38, 48, and 59.

  13 Ibid., pp. 97–100.

  14 Michael Harris, retired director of Oxfam and the Anti-Slavery Society, wrote in his 1997 Christmas letter, “I have never seen an official document that ensures such an understanding to its readers.”

  15 Tim Allen and Koen Vlassenroot, eds., The Lord’s Resistance Army (London: Zed Books, 2010), pp. 113–31. Lawrence E. Kline, The Lord’s Resistance Army (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2013), p. 17.

  Chapter 15. From El Salvador to Ecuador and Colombia, by Way of Africa, 1997–2002 and 2008–2009

  1 The project that Gersony designed would be completed in December 2001, with over 2,000 kilometers of roads and 2 kilometers of cement and steel bridges rebuilt or repaired. A U.S. government audit would reveal that there was no corruption involved, even though Honduras at the time was rated as one of the most corrupt countries on earth.

  2 “Bambi” Arellano, like other Gersony admirers in USAID, such as Janet Ballantyne and Chris Crowley, would rise to the top ranks of the organization. She would run the missions in Egypt and war-torn Iraq before becoming counselor to the administrator, the third-highest position in USAID.

  3 Regional Inspector General’s Office, Audit of USAID/Ecuador’s Northern Border Development Program, Number 1–518–04–010-P, San Salvador, September 3, 2004.

  4 Coincidentally, I was at the Colombian military base of Larandia near Putumayo, researching a book, on February 13, 2003, when the three contractors were captured by the FARC close by.

  5 Richard Chacon, “Target Coca: Officials Try to Break Drugs’ Deadly Grip on Colombia,” Boston Globe, February 20, 2000.

  Chapter 16. North Korea, 2002

  1 Andrew S. Natsios, The Great North Korean Famine: Famine, Politics, and Foreign Policy (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001). For his research, Natsios drew partially on Fred Cuny’s own posthumous book, Famine, Conflict, and Response: A Basic Guide (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1999).

  2 Not every interviewee was between the ages of 25 and 55. Some, like this woman, turned out to be older.

  3 Grossman was an aide to Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead at the time.

  4 Doug Struck, “Aid Used as Lever with Pyongyang,” Washington Post, December 4, 2002.

  5 Steven Weisman, “Threats and Responses: U.S. in No Rush over North Korea’s Food Aid,” New York Times, January 6, 2003.

  6 James Dao, “U.S. to Resume Food Aid to North Korea at a Reduced Level,” New York Times, February 26, 2003.

  7 Choe Sang-Hun, Gi-Wook Shin, and David Straub, Troubled Transition: North Korea’s Politics, Economy, and External Relations (Palo Alto, CA: Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2013), pp. 136–37.

  8 Nicholas Eberstadt, “The Most Dangerous Country,” The National Interest, September 1, 1999. Andrei Lankov, discussion at the Cato Institute in Washington, October 2017.

  9 In 2008, though, CNN’s Mike Chinoy wrote in a book, quoting a few unnamed sources, that Gersony’s North Korea report was flawed. It alleged that Gersony interviewed only “dozens” of refugees, when in fact he had interviewed 86 for several hours each. It claimed Gersony said that the P
yongyang regime “could be close to collapse,” even though Gersony had said no such thing, and even said the opposite in his report; indeed, a major theme of his briefings was that the diversion of food aid succeeded in helping to keep the regime out of danger. Chinoy appears to obscure the fact that Gersony’s interviews in 2002 documented individual accounts of what had happened in North Korea since the mid- and late 1990s, almost a decade and a half before Chinoy published his book. Mike Chinoy, Meltdown: The Inside Story of the North Korean Nuclear Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008), pp. 139–40.

  Chapter 17. Nepal, 2003

  1 Alex Perry, “Return to Year Zero,” Time, Asia edition, May 8, 2002.

  2 Robert Gersony, Sowing the Wind: History and Dynamics of the Maoist Revolt in Nepal’s Rapti Hills (Portland, OR: Mercy Corps International, 2003), pp. 7–8.

  3 Ibid., pp. 14 and 53.

  4 The British never outright colonized Nepal, even though they recruited soldiers from there.

  5 Gersony, Sowing the Wind, pp. 25, 28, 38–39, and 71.

  Chapter 18. Micronesia by Way of Iraq, 2003–2008

  1 Cuny’s blinding, seminal insight was that if the hundreds of thousands of Kurds did not return to their homes, protected by U.S. airpower, they would linger in refugee camps along the Turkish border and become a long-term international humanitarian problem like the Palestinians.

  2 Greene, The Quiet American, pp. 17, 23, 29, 52, 85, and 86.