Victoria Brittain ME AGAINST MY BROTHER: AT WAR IN SOMALIA, SUDAN, AND RWANDA by Scott Peterson (Routledge) ACROSS THE RED RIVER: RWANDA, BURUNDI AND THE HEART OF DARKNESS by Christian Jennings (Orion) T he United Nations’s recent humiliation in Sierra Leone was a disaster almost as inevitable as the UN experience in Somalia a decade ago. Twenty-five Pakistani UN soldiers died on one day of that mission, while 2 000 Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed later in the Americans’ vengeful manhunt. “Somalia” became the shorthand for subsequent UN failures in Africa that were really failures of American intelligence and nerve – the key ones being in Rwanda and Angola. Somalia, still without a central government a decade after the world lost interest, is also shorthand for the collapsed nation-state in Africa. The best part of Scott Peterson’s book is on Somalia, where he describes the miscalculations and stupidities of the key American players. President George Bush’s special envoy to the country was Robert Oakley, a retired ambassador and veteran of Cold War years in Vietnam. His preoccupation in Somalia was to ensure the safety of the 25 000 United States forces sent to “save Somalia” as part of the 38 000 troops of the unified task force who were intended to cut the circle of famine, warlords and undeliverable food mountains. But, as Peterson puts it, Oakley made the initial decision “to leave the warlord arsenals intact and to make no concerted attempt to disarm Somalia”. The warlords’ prestige actually increased during the early days of the US involvement. But the mission mandate changed between the Bush and Clinton presidencies. Another American figure from the past then played a key role. April Glaspie – the US foreign service officer notorious for having given Saddam Hussein the signal of US ambivalence on the eve of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990 – was made the UN number two in Somalia. Petersen reveals that Glaspie went well beyond the UN mandate in her involvement in the political and judicial systems, and in working openly to marginalise the powerful warlord General Mohamed Farah Aidid. Glaspie authorised the 1993 mission by a Pakistani UN unit to inspect Radio Mogadishu, source of anti- UN propaganda and a known weapons site. When Aidid’s men were notified of the impending inspection, the message “this means war” came back. The Pakistanis were not given that message, and went to their doom with minimal security precautions. Peterson sums it up: “The result of this American- approved ‘inspection’ was the largest single-day massacre of UN peace-keeping troops since 1961, when 44 Ghanaians were killed in the Congo.” The book details how, in early 1994, American pressure to avoid “another Somalia” allowed the genocide in Rwanda to continue. The UN force was actually cut back, “sending a clear message to Rwanda’s murderers that they could act with impunity”. But Peterson, a reporter for the Daily Telegraph and photographer with Gamma, Time and Newsweek, has neither the reflective depth nor the golden pen of Philip Gourevitch, whose We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families remains the only bearable book on the genocide. Gourevitch had a secret: he listened to Africans.
Peterson attempts to distance himself from the macho, Boy’s Own style of journalist usually found in African war zones. But he has brought into his book too many stories of tempers lost on air strips, narrow escapes and bad behaviour for the distance to be convincing. Western journalists, like the UN, have a bad reputation in Africa for arrogance and for not understanding much. This book is not going to change that.
Yet Christian Jennings’s book on war in Rwanda and Burundi makes Peterson’s seem restrained and carefully researched. Jennings has filled his pages with the love affairs, diarrhoea attacks and sweating moments of terror of himself and his friends. He places Fidel Castro in the Congo when he means Che Guevara, and the Angolan army on the side of Rwanda and Uganda in the period when in fact they were on opposing sides. Hasty Western interventions, like these gung-ho books, only serve to confuse the issues and postpone the day when Africans, from the region, can solve these problems on their own.