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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