From booksunlimited/the guardian
*********************************************************Continental rifts
Victoria Brittain laments the west's failures of nerve in Africa
Saturday May 20, 2000
Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda
Scott Peterson
Routledge, £14.99, 357pp
Across the Red River: Rwanda, Burundi and the Heart of Darkness
Christian Jennings
Orion, £18.99, 256pp
Buy it at BOL
The United Nations humiliation in Sierra Leone last week was a disaster
almost as inevitable as the UN experience in Somalia almost a decade ago.
Twenty-five Pakistani UN soldiers died on one day of that mission, while
2,000 Somalis and 18 US 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. Sierra Leone, well before the world woke up and looked in recent
weeks, had become another, ahead of the precarious states of Democratic
Republic of Congo, Liberia or Congo-Brazzaville.
The best part of Scott Peterson's book is on Somalia, where he describes the
miscalculations and stupidities of the key US 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 US 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 General Aidid.
Glaspie authorised the June 5, 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.
However, Christian Jennings's book on war in Rwanda and Burundi makes
Peterson's seem restrained and carefully researched. This must surely be a
candidate for the worst book ever published by Victor Gollancz. Jennings has
filled his pages with the love affairs, diarrhoea attacks and sweating
moments of terror of himself and his friends - journalists and aid workers
who like plenty of beer, sex and expletives with their Africa. He places
Fidel Castro fighting in the Congo when he means Che Guevara, and the Angolan
army fighting on the side of Rwanda and Uganda in the period when in fact
they were on opposing sides.
The tragedies of imploding countries like Sierra Leone have complex economic
and political roots. Hasty western interventions, like these gung-ho books,
only serve to confuse the issues and postpone the day when western
politicians and their electorates will understand that Africans, from the
region, are the only ones to solve the problems.
hkanteh
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