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He has a funny look on his face; he wants to tell me something. 'Hey, Ken, you know why your boss was so insistent to open the courts and have judges paid salaries, right?' His eyes are twinkling like the sun off the Indian Ocean on the other side of this hard-scrabble court.
I'm trying to think. The boss pushed and cajoled and even put an ad in the fucking paper in the middle of the most violent days of the mission, but I can't guess the answer. 'No, Abdi, why?' I can't help but smile at the leprechaun Somali judge.
He's enjoying himself somehow. 'Because we must to give him fifteen percent of our salaries.' He shows me his pocket and pulls out the lining, big grin, eyebrows and eyes shooting sparks.
He thinks it's funny. I want to kiss him.
And I want to kill the boss. I want to drag him out into the line of fire headfirst and watch his body buckle and jerk as the bullets hit him. I want to watch him bleed to death.
Mogadishu, Sept 27 1993
I've been seeing a Swiss girl who works for the Red Cross. It's their job to collect the bodies those big Malaysian guns cut down when we returned fire. The next day she comes stomping into the mess hall looking for me, wild-eyed, dripping with sweat, seething, 'You killed twenty Somalis just to open your stupid American court!'
I hadn't thought of that yet. How many we killed.
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.
Kigali, Rwanda, January 1995
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.
Butare, Southern Rwanda, April 1995
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.
Butare, Southern Rwanda, April 1995
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. [...]
November 1995, Port au Prince
I'm just now starting to realise how much this book affected the way I see the world. My MUN resolution (at THIMUN Singapore?) on accountability within the UN was almost entirely based on what I learned from this book, and it provided the basis of my focus on institutional/structural issues (which I feel leads nicely into understanding capitalism)
We actually set out to save the world. That is what was insane — not ten-year-old warlords with bad breath and voodoo fetishes in Liberia, not Matt's assassin, not the boss in Somalia who set us up for an ambush in exchange for a fifteen percent kickback on the judges' salaries, not the Hutu militias who butchered a minority who had repressed them or the Tutsi survivors who executed the suspects — but me, for thinking I could enter a war and personally restore order.
So that's the easy answer: forswear idealism; resign myself to a sad maturity; put away the things of youth; be thankful I survived and move on. But that's horseshit too, a craven capitulation. I'm not ready to let the youthful part of myself go yet. If maturity means becoming a cynic, if you have to kill the part of yourself that is naïve and romantic and idealistic — the part of yourself you treasure most — to claim maturity, is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? If everyone resigns themselves to cynicism, isn't that exactly how vulnerable millions end up dead?
When the Cold Was ended, the power of freedom, democracy and hope weren't abstract concepts; they were palpable in the Iraqi desert, across the Berlin Wall, in Tiananmen Square, atop Yeltsin's tank. That hope crescendoed for us in Cambodia. So we piled into Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia — missionaries, mercenaries, and madmen with no understanding of the history, politics, or culture but with Land Cruisers, military-issue radios, malaria pills, and the sure knowledge that we were on the right side of history.
What a feeling. Andrew wanted to bind the wounds of innocent war victims, hoping to find grace. Heidi embraced the freedom-born-of-emergency determined to liberate herself and, in the process, as many women as she could touch. I planned to harness the power of an ascendant America to personally undo the Holocaust. Don't laugh. We were young. We weren't the first, and won't be the last, to venture forth overseas with grand ideas.
Then eighteen Rangers fell in Somalia and suddenly history started moving in the wrong direction. Rwanda, Haiti, and Bosnia were all in flames, burning the remains of our innocence. One million civilians we promised to protect died on our watch. There are many competing versions of this story — U.S., UN, NATO, EU. But we were there and capital letters always lie and our version has no meaning if no one renders it.
So I make the conscious choice to believe again: we did not misspend our youth. At least we can bear witness. I did save lives and I did earn my way into Dr. Andrew's club. The act of rendering is therefore mine. l won the right, I am the owner of that privilege.
There is a plaque in the Garden of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum In Jerusalem, which reads, 'The Jewish people will never forget the righteous among the nations who endangered their lives in order to save Jews from the Nazi murderers and their collaborators. In their praiseworthy deeds they saved the honor of mankind.' I have a copy of these words over my desk and I look at them every day on my way out. Who saved the honor of mankind in Rwanda? Or Bosnia? Or, God help us, Liberia? But I have another quote from the exit of Yed Vashem over my desk, which reads, 'Son of man, keep not silent, forget not deeds of tyranny, cry out at the disaster of a people, recount it unto your children and they unto theirs from generation to generation.'
I don't know who saved the honor of mankind during my time in the field, but I do know that an ancestral memory of tyranny commands me to keep not silent.
There is no ambiguity here. I am a witness. I have a voice. I have to write it down.
this passage hit me at a pivotal moment in my self-development as a writer and I can still feel its influence even today