Sometimes he cries, sometimes he just sighs, but always he looks up into my face in panicked bewilderment and says, 'Monsieur Ken, eh la, comment?!' I don't know exactly what the eh la means, but it punctuates everything; he says it in exasperation and passionate disbelief, exhaling, a low growl. But I understand 'Comment?' How, Mr. Ken? How did you people let it happen?

The UN was here when the massacres started, twenty-five hundred troops. UN Headquarters in New York knew it was being planned, they had files and faxes and informants and they sat in their offices, consulted each other, and ate long lunches.

Most UN forces ran to the airport, they couldn't get out fast enough. This is not a case in which the UN failed to send troops to stop genocide. An armed, predeployed UN force evacuated as soon as it started. All those signatures on the Genocide Convention, dozens of rapturously celebrated human rights treaties, a mountain of documents at UNHQ on the subject of genocide, law professors all over the world making a living talking about this, and we evacuated. Tanks and supply planes and helicopters and soldiers sat useless and stationary for six months in Somalia, two hours away by C-130, and then drunk peasants armed with machetes and lists of names killed 800,000 civilians in Rwanda. And we evacuated. Eh la, comment?

So I'm here a little late. My job is to help collect evidence for the UN War Crimes Tribunal, the biggest genocide investigation since the Holocaust. There are 800,000 bodies rotting under the African sun. The entire country smells of decomposing flesh. The sickly sweet smell is nauseating and trips the gag reflex. It gets onto your clothes, into your hair, onto the bed sheets, the kitchen utensils.

The next step will be harder. In the morning I go see Jean-de-Dieu's boss, Lieutenant Alex, at the gendarmerie. The RPA officers hate us. I understand, I kind of hate as too. A drunk Hutu militia with machetes killed 800,000 humans in ninety days. The UN evacuated and the only action Clinton took was to block other countries from intervening. Don't cross the 'Mogadishu line.' Let them kill each other this time. So the Tutsis died a thousand deaths for our cowardice. Every three hours for ninety days.

But Rwanda is a tiny country with only a few paved highways. The Hutu militias were undisciplined, lightly armed, and they fought badly. It was the opposite of Somalia; it would have been easy to intercept them and stop the massacres, and everyone knows it. Lieutenant Alex knows it because the RPA did it. When the massacres started, they broke out of their enclaves in the north, smashing weak, drunken, undisciplined enemy positions everywhere they made contact. But they had no airlift, so it took three months to move overland all the way south and west, and by then it was too late.

What is the value of American power if we don't use it? We didn't stop genocide here because we failed in Somalia. They said it at the White House, they said it at the State Department, even the cooks and maids here know. To me, that means if we had succeeded in Somalia, we would have intervened here. Historians can write a mountain of books and politicians can give a thousand speeches disputing that, but a million civilian corpses are decomposing right now in unmarked graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. And the dead read our books and the dead listen to our speeches.

I think I'm actually starting to understand. I was hell-bent on being an effective humanitarian in Cambodia and Somalia. But a naïve fog is finally lifting. Revealed is a train wreck of illusions, the depravity of someone else's war, the futility of a competence still-born there. To understand this you have to become this.

Two weeks later the Haitian government announced election results from this region, with UN blessing: government wins 62 percent of the vote, opposition parties 38 percent. I watched all the ballots burn before anyone had counted them; they were still bound in boxes. I wrote a memo to UNHQ detailing the fraud. They answered that because my memo was transmitted without the signature of my boss, it was not an official communication, so therefore headquarters could not officially respond to my memo. [...]