The Good American Page 10

  Gersony interviewed the refugees and NGO workers in both refugee camps, and in the towns. The atmosphere in this red laterite landscape was hot, dusty, and tense, but stable for the moment. People, especially those working for the foreign NGOs in the area, seemed especially pleased that someone from the U.S. Embassy had actually driven this far out and had the time to listen to them. Gersony was all eyes and ears. He knew what he didn’t know, meaning that while his fluency in Spanish and years spent living in Latin America had made him a regional specialist, he knew little about Africa and used this and future trips as an excuse to build up knowledge. “These people were poorer and had a lower educational level than in Latin America, but they were lovely, nevertheless, and I was glad to be there.” In Africa he began the lifelong habit of eating once a day, often alone in a cheap hotel room, a pattern he had picked up on his own, since the fewer people who saw him in public—and poking around—the less suspicion he would draw. Also, as I’ve said, he had a sensitive stomach. In this and other ways, he was not a natural traveler or explorer (quite the opposite, in fact), and so the less he ate, the less likely he was to become sick. A favorite snack became the small, delicious guinea bananas prevalent throughout much of sub-Saharan Africa.

  The trip had its tense moments: at some of the dozens of roadblocks, late at night, he was forced to dismount at gunpoint from the car. Then there was the swarm of angry bees that chased him out of the bathroom of one seedy hotel.

  He next went to the far-off West Nile region, Idi Amin’s home turf, site of the Ombachi massacre, and drove along the borders with Zaire and Sudan at Uganda’s extreme northwestern point, interviewing NGO staffers and Ugandan refugees who had returned from those countries. Again, it was dry, hot, and on edge, yet momentarily stable. Finally, he drove to the far-off northeast, by the border with Kenya. Here lived the Karamojong, cattle keepers and rustlers, who lived off the meat and milk of the cattle. It was said that they could ride under the belly of their beasts across the border where they stole from other herds, and were a constant source of tension between Uganda and Kenya. When Amin was toppled, his loyalists abandoned stores of weapons in the area, and the Karamojong thus acquired AK-47s, adding a sinister nature to their cross-border cattle raids. “I hated it there—oh, was it hot and remote!” Gersony whines, as if still there. “AID wanted the Karamojong to settle in farming communities—dumb idea, given their culture.”

  He was learning, and as a consequence sending cables, even though nothing much was going on at the time in these border regions. But he was quickly making an enemy of the feared Chris Rwakasisi, the minister of state for security, who hated some of the very groups Gersony was reporting on. Says Robert Houdek, at the time the political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, who was starting to see copies of Gersony’s cables: “I was so impressed with what Gersony had to say, and how well documented it was. But I was so afraid for him. Rwakasisi wanted him dead by now.”

  Gersony next decided to write what would become a bound, massively detailed sixty-seven-page report—like he had done in Lima—about everyone he met and interviewed during his forays, in order to leave a record behind for his successor, “so he or she wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.” The report included maps, tables, chronologies, and contact lists. After all, because of his six-month assignment, he knew he was only going to be in Kampala till midsummer, and no refugee coordinator at the U.S. Embassy had ever written such a thing before. Bennett, who was also anal and well organized, absolutely loved it.

  Because May 31 was the deadline for submitting country human rights reports to Congress, Gersony wrote night and day, and sent off to Washington a half-inch-thick dossier about his Uganda travels only four months after he had arrived in country.

  Now, after writing up three field trips, he felt he could relax and coast a bit—not that he knew how to relax. Nevertheless, he felt he had made his impression on his superiors.

  But something intervened.

  * * *

  —

  While Gersony had been rushing to complete his refugee reports, Obote killed about a hundred Christian pilgrims at the Martyrs Shrine in Namugongo, only ten miles north of Kampala, because he thought a priest had been collaborating with Museveni’s National Resistance Army. The massacre got Ambassador Davis’s attention.

  Davis had recently been to Nakasongola, at the northeastern extremity of the Luwero Triangle, where he visited a displaced persons camp with three thousand people. But when Davis returned to the site several weeks later, there was not a soul left in the camp. What had happened to these people? he wondered. The ambassador suspected something bad, especially as the North Koreans were known to be advising Obote’s troops on how to eliminate the peasants backing Museveni. Davis went to see Obote and Rwakasisi. They assured him that these people “all went home.” Davis didn’t believe that people would just go back to their villages in the midst of the war. Davis wanted an accounting, since the United States was providing Obote’s government with aid. The ambassador made himself a pain in the neck to Obote. He refused to stop badgering the Ugandan leader about what had happened to the displaced persons in Nakasongola. Both Davis and Bennett saw Obote as someone who was very smart, but also under a great deal of pressure, because he was so in over his head with criminal types like Rwakasisi. Between Rwakasisi’s own bloodthirstiness, the massacre at Namugongo, and the disappearance of thousands at Nakasongola, Davis knew he was in the midst of something awful.

  Davis needed a thorough report about what was happening in the Luwero Triangle. But Irv Coker, the USAID director, whose job it technically was to handle internally displaced persons, was unavailable. So Davis went to Gersony and said, “You’re just going to have to do it, and add it to the refugee report you did.” Bennett interjected, “Sorry, Bob, that you got stuck with this.”

  On the advice of Bennett, Gersony went to see the Swiss troubleshooter in Uganda at the time, Pierre Gassmann, the local head of the ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross. Somewhat short, stocky, a bit gnomish, and perfectly fluent in French, German, and English, like so many Swiss, Gassmann provided Gersony with the lay of the land. Gassmann was also passionate about human rights, but from a business and private-sector perspective. He and Gersony liked each other right away. Gassmann was practically the same age as Gersony, and had gotten his start in the ICRC in the Biafran war in the late 1960s and the Angolan war in the mid-1970s. Pierre smoked, was sophisticated in a very European way, yet was taken with this humble Jewish sufferer who was obsessed with human rights, and always wanted details and—later on in Uganda—numbers, and more numbers.

  They became close friends, meeting every Sunday at the American Club in Kampala with its comforting extraterritoriality, where beside the swimming pool and tennis courts, over hamburgers, French fries, and Coca-Colas, Gassmann gave Gersony a long-running tutorial about Uganda and the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. One of the missions of the ICRC is tracing, and years later, after Gassmann became famous within the humanitarian community for his service in trouble spots like American-occupied Iraq,8 he got the ICRC to trace the fate of Gersony’s family in Nazi-occupied Latvia. Gassmann would fly to New York from Geneva to attend the funeral of Gersony’s father in 1996. Today Gassmann and Gersony get together annually in New York to attend the Metropolitan Opera and dine at the Russian Tea Room. Gassmann explains his lifelong friendship with Gersony this way:

  Bob Gersony with Pierre Gassmann, the Swiss relief expert, in the mid-1980s.

  “In the early years, I entertained the notion that Bob might be a kind of CIA guy. After all, he was always popping up in war zones with a slightly different affiliation, USAID, State Department, UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees], and the like. But as each assignment was completely humanitarian, and Bob remained so humble, he became a real person to me. I don’t have many close friends. But Bob is just different.”


  Gassmann told Gersony that Obote was “tightening the screws” on the Luwero Triangle, especially at the choke point of Bombo Barracks, the only vehicular entrance to the area at its southern corner, fifteen miles north of Kampala, in order to extinguish popular support for Museveni’s rebellion. There, an extensive torture facility had been set up, where soldiers applied hot plastic to the skin of the victims. There were documented stories of molten tire rubber dripped onto a victim’s face from a burning tire suspended above, administered by East German– and North Korean–trained military police. In addition to the masses of skulls later found throughout the Luwero region, skeletons would be discovered of small children with their hands tied behind their backs.9

  Ambassador Davis sent Gersony to see the papal pro-nuncio in Uganda, Karl-Josef Rauber. Rauber, from Nuremberg, Germany—who would go on to become a cardinal—was a modest, decent man with a soft, whispering voice. “We hear confessions,” he told Gersony inside the Spanish-style nunciature in Kampala, with its painted tiles, paintings, and ornate desks. “So we know that a lot of bad things are going on. You’ve got to look at the situation, and if you need our help, come back to me.” Obote’s supporters were generally Anglicans from the northern tribes while the victims were the southern tribal Catholics, making Rauber especially concerned. Gersony knew that there were approximately 160,000 internal refugees or “displaced persons” in the Luwero Triangle who could be reached by aid workers. Those who could not be reached numbered 300,000. This was out of a total population in Luwero of three-quarters of a million. But though he nosed around in the diplomatic community, he had no way of getting inside the no-go zones. And he had never written a long report without visiting the affected area.

  * * *

  —

  Then one day Bill Kirkham bounded into Davis’s office, to check on what the Americans were up to. Kirkham, even by the standards of the mid-1980s, was a throwback, and a deep one at that: a white former British colonial officer, a big bear of a man, maybe six feet two inches tall, built like a marine with a loud voice, with an army visor cap over his short black hair, silver crowns pinned to his khaki uniform, khaki shorts, and high woolen socks, and with an erect military manner and brandishing a swagger stick. Kirkham, sixty-one, was a drinking buddy of Milton Obote and Chris Rwakasisi: he had been a deputy commissioner of prisons during the colonial era, and was now Obote’s chief relief administrator. Kirkham vaguely reminded one of the infamous Bob Astles, or “Major Bob” as his friend Idi Amin used to call him. Astles, another former British colonial officer and veteran of the Indian Army, who became one of the most hated men in postcolonial Africa for advising Obote and then Amin—and financially prospering from the latter’s misrule—was alleged to have been complicit with Amin’s barbarous crimes. These were white men of empire who had gone native in the most extreme and most perverse way. Though Bill Kirkham would turn out somewhat different than Bob Astles.

  “Kirkham is the key to everything going on in the Luwero Triangle,” Gassmann had told Gersony. “Kirkham was a bit naïve,” Gassmann now remembers, “but determined to make something out of the figurehead appointment that Obote had given him.”

  Davis formally introduced Kirkham to Gersony. Nothing much transpired. But on Kirkham’s next visit, Kirkham suddenly asked, “Bob, how would you like to go along with me inside the Luwero Triangle?”

  Gersony was dumbfounded and terrified at the same time. He had desperately wanted to visit the Luwero Triangle, but now that the opportunity had presented itself he was worried. He wondered about Kirkham’s motive, since Kirkham had to know that as an embassy officer, he would have to cable back to Washington what he saw. Maybe Kirkham wanted the facts reported to the outside world. Maybe Kirkham thought that his friend Obote, famously immersed in alcohol, didn’t himself know what was going on and was being manipulated by the Ugandan army. Gersony wasn’t sure, and never would be. Neither would Pierre Gassmann, who also could not completely figure out Bill Kirkham. But the fact that Gersony was willing to go with Kirkham into the Luwero Triangle deeply impressed Gassmann. It was at this point that Gassmann began looking at Gersony as someone way out of the ordinary for a low-level American official.

  The choke point and torture facility of Bombo Barracks was officially closed to foreigners and NGOs. No food or water was allowed into the Luwero Triangle. Kirkham drove up to the gate in his shiny beige four-wheel-drive Land Rover bearing a Ugandan presidential license plate, dressed in full military regalia. Gersony’s stomach was in his mouth. Rough, disheveled soldiers surrounded the car, poking their rifle butts at it. They kept shouting. Kirkham sprung from the car, strutted forward with his swagger stick, full of braggadocio, like a character out of “Gunga Din.”

  “Do you know who I am?” Kirkham screamed at the soldiers. “Do you see this presidential license plate?” banging his swagger stick on it. The dressing-down continued. The soldiery was more like a mean, swaying, and explosive mob around the car. There was the smell of dust filtered by a blazing vertical sun. Gersony thought he had reached his end. The soldiers finally let the pair go through and on their way. Gersony’s fear only intensified. The deeper you got into these places, the harder it was to get out, as if doors were closing behind you the further you went.

  They drove on all day. Lone houses and little towns with shops began to appear. Everything was completely abandoned. Nobody! Not a soul! In the middle of the day! Only stray dogs, many of them. Two years later, on my own drive inside the Luwero Triangle, I saw a scrawled sign on a wall of a deserted hotel in the town of Nakeseke, where soldiers had been quartered: “A good Muganda is a dead one. Shoot to kill Muganda, signed the Soroti boys.” (A Muganda is a single member of the Baganda group. Soroti is an area in the north inhabited by the Iteso, who helped form the backbone of Obote’s army.10) After a while, Kirkham decided to leave the main road and go left off the tarmac. Another choke point with soldiers, another dressing-down by Kirkham, and then they continued on the bumpy dirt path. “What have I gotten myself into?” Gersony thought. More doors seemed to slam shut.

  Suddenly they came upon a clearing, about the size of a soccer field, surrounded by thick vegetation, without any trees cut down or other signs that it had been prepared for something in advance.

  They got out of the car.

  “Laid out on the ground, in neat rows, were literally hundreds of stick people: emaciated, dying, their skeletons protruding through their skin almost, civilians of all ages and sexes, guarded by rough soldiers, angry and yelling at them,” Gersony recalls.

  “I began writing a cable in my head. I realized that my life might depend on me showing no emotion now.” He did not dare to take notes, though he desperately wanted to. Looking around, his mind paralyzed for the moment, his next thought was “This is probably what happened to the three thousand displaced persons at Nakasongola that Ambassador Davis couldn’t get out of his mind.”

  Kirkham barked at the soldiers: “What’s going on?”

  “No food, no water, no medical care, nothing is allowed for these people,” one soldier answered.

  Kirkham and Gersony noticed two young girls, one with a leg severed above the knee and the other girl with a leg severed above the ankle.

  “What happened?” Kirkham asked them. In a country of so many tribes with different tongues, many people spoke English. The girls explained that they had been gang-raped by soldiers, who afterward cut their legs off.

  “How many other places are there like this?” Kirkham continued to bark at the soldiers.

  They gave him a list. Kirkham’s motive seemed more mysterious than ever.

  Gersony: “At that moment I realized I was at a turning point in my life. I was seeing a concentration camp in this day and age, though one without barracks and barbwire. I understood, in a way I never could before, what had happened to my relatives.”

  Yet it was starting to get dark. Near
the equator, night falls fast, since the sun does not spill across the curvature of the earth as it does the closer you get to the polar regions, causing dusk and dawn to linger. Gersony was scared. He knew he had momentous news. He just wanted to leave this place and get back to Kampala.

  Suddenly Kirkham barked again to the soldiers: “We’re evacuating these girls.”

  “Nobody leaves,” a soldier responded.

  A long argument ensued. “I would not have done that. I would have been a coward. I don’t have that kind of courage,” Gersony says. “I never saw an act of courage like Bill Kirkham arguing with those soldiers while night began to fall. I felt ashamed.”

  Kirkham put the two girls in the back of the Land Rover and they drove off.

  They made it back to the tarmac. The sky was now yellow and blood red. A fifty-man Ugandan army unit was mustering out by the road.

  “Attention. About face…”

  Kirkham bounded out of the Land Rover, walked off the road, deeper into the base, leaving Gersony and the girls in the car. Gersony asked one of the officers, “What are your orders?”

  “We are going to a village. Not a dog is to be left alive there.”

  “Carry on,” Kirkham responded when he got back, stone-faced.

  Gersony had real trouble interpreting Kirkham at this point. Was Kirkham acting the part of the Obote loyalist, while at the same time exposing to a U.S. Embassy official what was really happening in Uganda?

  Later they found a shed held together by wooden sticks under a cloth, where someone sold them some guinea bananas, which they gave to the girls.

  It was long past dark when they arrived back at Bombo Barracks with the girls. Again, the Land Rover was surrounded by soldiers. More shouting. Another dressing-down. Gersony couldn’t swallow. Finally, they were allowed through, and soon were driving past the northern suburbs of Kampala. The adrenaline drained out of him, Gersony found himself suddenly overwhelmed with fatigue. After taking the girls to the hospital, Kirkham dropped Gersony off.