Michael Ignatieff (born 1947) is a public intellectual, academic, journalist and, at one point, back in his native Canada, a high profile politician. Back when I was a student in the 1980s he was all over the British media, fronting thoughtful documentaries and high-end discussion programmes on Channel 4.
Ignatieff’s written a lot – novels, memoirs, histories, countless articles. One consistent strand of his output has been a series of books meditating on the nature and meaning of contemporary warfare. This began in 1993 with Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism and was followed by The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience in 1998.
In the introduction to this volume, written in December 1999, Ignatieff says Virtual War is, in effect, the third in a trilogy about the nature of modern war – but this statement has been rendered redundant by the fact that he’s gone on to publish several more. As far as I can make out the sequence now runs:
1993: Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism
1998: The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience
2000: Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond
2003: Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan
2004: The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror
2017: The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World
His books contain extensive descriptions of contemporary conflict zones, fighting, wars and aftermaths. The first book in the series (‘Blood and Belonging’) contains riveting eye-witness reporting from the conflicts in former Yugoslavia; the second one has a chapter where he accompanies the head of the United Nations to Rwanda, Zaire and Angola; and the fourth one adds scenes from the conflict in Afghanistan. This one contains reportage from a Kosovar refugee camp and a description of a Kosovar village, Celine, where a disgusting massacre was carried out by Serb paramilitaries.
But Ignatieff is not a war reporter; there are plenty of those, filing daily reports from the front line of conflicts around the world. And similarly, he is not a military analyst; there are thousands of those, publishing papers in specialist journals analysing this or that aspect of the hardware or strategy involved in the world’s many conflicts.
Ignatieff stands aside from both those genres because his stance can perhaps best be summarised as ‘a moral philosopher considers modern conflict’. He goes into military and technical detail where necessary – for example, in this book he gives a detailed description of the command and control centres running the NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, an extended explanation of how targets were established, confirmed and then the complex bureaucracy planners had to go through in order to get permission to bomb them. Very detailed, very informative.
But that isn’t where Ignatieff’s interest lies. He is interested in what this kind of conflict tells us about the nature of modern warfare and, above all, about the moral and political attitudes of the West – what it tells us about ourselves and the modern societies we live in. He is interested in trying to unpick the complex moral issues which the conflicts he covers raise or have created or are evolving or distorting. His aim is:
exploring the new technology of war and the emerging morality governing its use. (p.7)
Maybe it’ll help if I summarise the short introduction in which Ignatieff unpacks the different senses of the word ‘virtual’ which underpin this book and give it its title.
(If you want to know the historic and geopolitical background to the war in Kosovo read the relevant section of my review of Anthony Loyd’s book, Another Bloody Love Letter. Ignatieff devotes a fascinating chapter, ‘Balkan Physics’, to a detailed account of the recent history and complex power politics which led up to the conflict, paying special attention to the failure of American diplomacy in the region and then to the change of tone brought by new Secretary of State, Madeline Allbright, pages 39 to 67.)
Virtual warfare
Ignatieff thinks the Big New Thing about the war in Kosovo was that it was a virtual war. What does he mean? Well, he uses the word ‘virtual’ in quite a few senses or contexts.
1. The public
It was a war which most people in the West watched on their screens, in which they had little or no investment or commitment. For Ignatieff this is a worrying new development. For example, will ‘war’ slowly morph into a particularly gruesome spectator sport? Does this mean that the populations of the West no longer believe in their causes enough to slug it out face to face? Will this, over the long run, weaken our resolve to mount wars when we need to?
2. Air force screens
It was a ‘virtual war’ in at least two further senses. The ‘war’ consisted mostly of NATO’s 78-day-long bombing campaign carried out against Serbian forces inside Kosovo and against crucial infrastructure in Serbia itself, especially in the capital Belgrade. No ground forces were sent into Kosovo and this, apparently, confused NATO’s air force, whose doctrine and training leads all of them, from air commodores down to pilots, to be expect to co-ordinate air attacks with ground forces, to be called in by radio to support ground attacks. They were unused to an army-less war.
Instead, the pilots, and their controllers back in control and command centres in locations in the West (Italy, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK) worked via computer readouts of target information and then by sharing the view of the in-plane cameras which the pilots were using.
Thus the people choosing the targets and guiding the pilots towards them had pretty much the same view as the viewers at home (who got to see selected plane or missile-based footage which NATO released to the press). Obviously they were deeply involved in actually making it happen, identifying, assessing, instructing and so on. But nonetheless, it was, for these technicians, also a ‘virtual’ war, fought or, more accurately, experienced, via screens.
3. No army
Let’s go back to that point about no army. There was no NATO presence at all in Kosovo during the 78-day bombing campaign. There had been Western observers and peacekeepers in Kosovo but overnight they became enemies of Serbia, liable to be arrested and used as hostages, and so they were all withdrawn. So there were no NATO soldiers on the ground at all. Which is why Ignatieff very reasonably asks, What kind of war is it which involves no army at all on our side?
And furthermore, no casualties. None of the pilots of the thousand or so NATO planes which flew nearly 100,000 sorties were lost. A couple were downed by ejected. So Ignatieff further asks, What does it mean that the West can now go to war without fielding an army and without risking the life of a single combatant? Surely this is the kind of war fought by people who don’t want any casualties, a kind of war without the physical risk.
Previously, wars have involved loss of life on both sides. Western leaders have been slow to commit to war (British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain being maybe the most famous example) because they knew the bloody horror it entailed. But now there is no bloody horror. There is no risk. What, Ignatieff asks, does that do to the very definition and concept of war?
How does that change everyone’s perception of what a war is? How does it effect:
1. Policy makers Does it make them more liable to intervene if they think they’re risking less – financially, but above all in terms of casualties, with consequent minimal damage to their domestic reputation and ratings?
2. The public in Western nations Will it teach the public to become so risk-averse that as and when a serious commitment of soldiers on the ground is required, it will be unacceptably unpopular? Will old-style fighting become less and less acceptable to a public acculturated to watching everything happen on a video screen? Will we refuse to countenance any conflict in which we lose soldiers?
3. The enemy On the face of it, the use of laser-guided precision weapons ought to scare adversaries so much that they are put off ever triggering the intervention of the West and its high-tech weapons. In fact, as he reports in detail, the reality in Kosovo turned out to be the exact opposite: President of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, cannily triggered the West and then, in defiance of all our best efforts, carried out his nation-scale ethnic cleansing.
Because Milošević knew that as soon as the bombing started NATO would withdraw its ground forces and so he would be free to do what he wanted to the Kosovar population. He intended to drive them right out of their own country using exemplary terror i.e. using his army and paramilitaries to massacre entire villages and burn them to the ground, thus terrorising populations nearby to flee across the border into Macedonia or Albania – and that is exactly what happened. Hundreds of thousands of Kosovar refugees were harried out of their own country, even as the NATO bombing campaign proceeded. According to Human Rights Watch, by early June 1999, more than 80 percent of the entire population of Kosovo and 90 percent of Kosovar Albanians had been displaced from their homes. Amnesty International estimated that nearly one million people were forced to flee Kosovo by the Serb terror campaign.
On the face of it, then, this new kind of hi-tech gee-whiz ‘virtual’ war let the bad guys get away with it, with genocide and ethnic cleansing. In other words, the first ‘virtual’ war undermined its own rationale: it seemed very much as if what was needed to force the Serbs to end their ethnic cleansing was precisely what had been so carefully avoided i.e. face-to-face clashes between NATO forces and Serb forces. In other words, traditional warfare.
4. No mandate
Lastly, Ignatieff claims it was also a virtual war in the sense that the forces involved weren’t technically atwar. The NATO forces who bombed the Serbs for 78 days never actually declared war on Serbia, no UN resolution was passed to justify this attack on a sovereign state, and none of the legislatures of the European countries who went to war were called on to vote for it.
NATO lawyers cobbled together a justification in law but, like everything to do with the law, it is subject to endless interpretation and debate. Even the outcome was unorthodox, a so-called ‘military technical agreement’ which didn’t settle any of the issues but merely allowed the entrance of NATO ground forces into Kosovo to protect the population while the diplomats went back to the negotiating table. But the fundamental issue is simple: Was NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia legal or illegal under international law?
I’m no lawyer but what I took from Ignatieff’s account was that the campaign was technically illegal but was morally and politically justified. NATO used force as a last resort, after all attempts at mediation and conflict resolution – mainly at the talks held between NATO, the Kosovo Liberation Army and Milošević at Rambouillet in France – failed to find a solution.
NATO’s aim was to save lives, to put an end to Serbia’s low-level policy of massacre and ethnic cleansing. But does a worthy aim – saving the lives of a defenceless population – justify breaking one of the fundamental principles of the UN and the post-war international consensus, namely that the integrity of the nation state is sacrosanct; that nobody has a right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another state. This is one of the central moral-political-legal questions which Ignatieff returns to again and again.
To intervene or not intervene?
Like its two predecessors and its successor, Virtual War is a) short and b) not so much one consistent through-written book, but a collection of articles, published at different times in different magazines, but with enough thematic unity to work as a book. And each article or chapter focuses on particular aspects of the Kosovo war which I’ve itemised above.
Thus the issue I just described – whether the West was justified in attacking Serbia – is dealt with in chapter three, which consists entirely of an exchange of letters between Ignatieff and the British lawyer and politician, Robert Skidelsky, three from each of them.
The chapter may be short (16 pages) but it gets straight to the point and is packed with argumentation on both sides. Skidelsky argues that respecting the integrity of states has (more or less) kept the peace since the Second World War. If we alter that fundamental premise, if – like UK Prime Minister Tony Blair – we argue that we are so convinced of our moral rectitude and our case that we are justified in intervening in other countries wherever minorities are threatened by oppressive governments – then the world will descend into chaos.
Ignatieff politely but firmly disagrees. He describes himself as an ‘internationalist’, meaning that he agrees that the basis of the international system is the integrity of the nation state, but he also believes in the human rights of individuals and of communities, and that this second principle can clash with the first and, in Kosovo, trumps it.
He’s our author, so the weight of evidence from the other chapters tends to bolster Ignatieff’s argument. But Ignatieff tries to present a fair fight, giving Skidelsky’s objections as much air time as his own views. I very much took Skidelsky’s point that the notion Tony Blair was promoting in various public speeches (particularly, apparently, one given in Chicago on 22 April 1999, pages 72 and 74), that the West not only has the power to intervene in rogue regimes, but is obligatedto intervene, is a terrible precedent. The road to hell is paved with good intentions (p.73).
And indeed, we know what happened next, which is that, after the 9/11 attacks, the US, under President George W. Bush, bolstered by Tony Blair and his interventionist stance, decided to intervene in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Overthrowing the absolutely awful dictator, Saddam Hussein, sounded like a great idea. Liberating Iraq and rebuilding it as a modern democracy sounded like a great idea. And how did those interventions turn out? Catastrophic wastes of time, money and lives, which left the region more unstable than before.
In this respect, Virtual War is a snapshot in time, capturing a moment when the interventionist mindset was new and still being explored and worked through. This is a fancy way of saying that quite a lot of it feels out of date. Ignatieff’s subtle premonitions about a new type of warfare have been completely superseded by subsequent events in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Content
As mentioned, the book consists of chapters which bear a strong resemblance to standalone magazine articles. In his previous books these had each been based around particular issues or countries. Here each chapter revolves around a central figure. These are:
Richard Holbrooke, impresario of the 1995 Dayton Agreement which ended the Bosnian War, architect of US policy in the Balkans, who Ignatieff follows and interviews as he mounts frantic shuttle diplomacy in the runup to the outbreak of hostilities (December 1998).
Robert Skidelsky, British economic historian, crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and vocal opponent of the bombing campaign against Serbia who Ignatieff debates the legality of the NATO bombing offensive with (May 1999).
General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) from 1997 to 2000, who commanded Operation Allied Force during the Kosovo War, and is profiled as part of an extended description of how the bombing campaign was managed, not only technically in terms of selecting targets etc but at a diplomatic level (June 1999).
Louise Arbour, a Canadian, who was Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, and of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. In this role she indicted then-Serbian President Slobodan Milošević for war crimes on 27 May 1999, the first time a serving head of state was called to account before an international court. Ignatieff interviews her at length on the tribulations of setting up the Tribunal and especially of getting enough evidence to prosecute Milošević (July 1999).
Aleksa Djilas, Yugoslav writer and dissident, friend of Ignatieff’s, opponent of the bombing campaign not only on general humane grounds but because he is a Serb and so imprisoned by the propaganda of the regime. He flatly denies that the massacres of civilians, whose bodies Ignatieff saw with his own eyes, were carried out by Serbs. claiming they must have been caught in the crossfire of battles with the KLA. He couldn’t accept the fact that his nation was carrying out a genocide using Nazi tactics. Refusal. Denial.
As in The Warrior’s Code, Ignatieff has fantastic access to the top dogs: he accompanies leading figures such as Holbrook and his cohort of other US negotiators (ambassador Richard Miles; liaison officer with the KLA fighters, Shaun Byrnes) in the fraught weeks leading up to the bombing campaign; he has lunch with US ambassador to Macedonia, Chris Hill; he is part of the press pack covering a visit of Arbour’s to the Kosovar village of Celine, scene of a typical Serb massacre of unarmed civilians (lined up and machine gunned in cold blood). He interviews Arbour at her headquarters in the Hague, a conversation he reports at length.
Ignatieff vividly conveys what life is like for these jet-setting international politicians and lawyers: 1) the hectic lives, the endless mobile phone calls, dashing for planes or helicopters, setting up meetings, taking more calls. He 2) acutely dissects the issues they have to grapple with. But where Ignatieff comes into his own is with his 3) insightful analysis of the themes or issues or moral problems arising from the challenges they face; the general issues which arise from trying to resolve ethnic conflict, from intervening in a sovereign state, from trying to achieve some kind of justice for the victims.
Critique
1. The idea of a screen war not so novel
For me the weakest part of the book was Ignatieff’s claim that watching a war via a TV screen was somehow a) new, b) morally degrading, c) fraught with perilous consequences. It shares the same tone of moral panic as the chapter in The Warrior’s Code about the ever-increasing power of television. Looking back from 2023 both concerns seem out of date and overblown. Since Ignatieff was writing (in 1999) screens have come to dominate our lives to an unimaginable extent, and this has had many social consequences which impact Ignatieff’s ideas and interpretations.
But I disagree that watching a war on the telly was something radically new in 1999. People in the UK had been watching war footage on telly at teatime ever since the TV news was established in the 1960s. I remember listening to punk songs taking the mickey out of it in the 1970s (5.45 by Gang of Four, 1979).
And, of course, in the UK we had a war of our own, in Northern Ireland, which was on the TV news almost every night for decades before Ignatieff started worrying about it. So I question Ignatieff’s claim that watching the Kosovo conflict on the telly was a radically new departure with worrying social implications.
2. Kosovo’s ‘virtual’ war in no way replaced conventional conflict
At a more serious level, the ‘virtuality’ Ignatieff wants to make such an innovation of Kosovo hasn’t changed the face of war as much as he claims. In his long final chapter Ignatieff claims the West is living through a revolution in warfare, and that the new technology of cruise missiles, laser-guided bombs, and remote control will change warfare for good, and he sets off worrying about the implications for all of us.
But it wasn’t true. The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 wasn’t carried out entirely by remote control, it required a conventional army with tanks and armoured cars and all the rest of it, and then degenerated into a counterinsurgency which was even less remote, very much requiring boots on the ground (as described in excruciating detail in Thomas E. Ricks’s two books about the Iraq War, Fiasco and The Gamble).
OK, so was Iraq just a blip, have other wars continued the radical new ‘virtual’ path worries about? No. Take the war in the Ukraine. A conventional army (accompanied by its disgusting mercenaries) has invaded a neighbouring country and is being repelled by an entirely conventional army and air force. No doubt lots of screens are being used by everyone involved, maybe drones are being deployed and maybe some of the missiles are cleverly targeted, but most are not, and the whole thing feels like a traditional boots-on-the-ground conflict.
So not only have a lot of his concerns about war and society been superseded by the events of the last 23 years, but his central concern about the perilous consequences of ‘virtual war’ can now be seen to be exaggerated and unwarranted. He worries that war via screens will end up being no more than a spectator sport, emptied of meaning, and lacking engagement or understanding by the wider population. That is not at all what happened with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Anticipations of ‘Empire Lite’
In scattered remarks through the book, and then more pithily in the introduction, Ignatieff draws the central conclusion which will go on to underpin the next book in the sequence, 2003’s ‘Empire Lite’.
It is based on the run of events during the 1990s in which the UN and the so-called ‘international community’ performed so abysmally. They let down the Marsh Arabs who revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991 and were very slow to support the Kurds who Saddam drove up into the mountains to die of exposure. They abandoned the mission to Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident in 1994; in the same year the member states of the UN failed to cough up enough troops to enable the peacekeeping force in Rwanda to prevent the fastest genocide in history. Then in July 1995 UN peacekeepers once again stood by helplessly while Serb militia rounded up some 7,000 boys and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica and murdered them all.
In his earlier books Ignatieff visited the sites of mass murder in Rwanda and of massacres in Bosnia. This book gives a stomach-turning description of the massacre of unarmed Kosovar women and children carried out by Serb paramilitaries at a village called Celine. Did those Serb soldiers think it was serving their country to shoot unarmed women and children point blank in the head? Did they think this is what soldiers do? That this is what makes you a man – murdering little children?
These experiences drive Ignatieff to his Big Conclusion, which is that the West needs to intervene more, more deeply, more extensively, with more troops and resources, and for longer, than it has hitherto done.
Sitting above the Stankovec 2 refugee camp, packed with Albanian Kosovars who have been hounded from their homes by the Serbian army, and reviewing the West’s dismal record of failing to prevent ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, Ignatieff’s conclusion is surprisingly blunt:
This must be stopped. Now. By persistent and precise military force. (p.45)
His humanitarian principles, his concern to protect the vulnerable, lead him to believe that the intervention of the West is vitally required, as here in Kosovo, to prevent yet another crime against humanity, and this is the nexus of his argument with Robert Skidelsky.
But he goes further. Ignatieff thinks that the only way to prevent these crimes happening in the first place is to help developing countries build stronger states. And the only way this can be done is by major intervention, supervisions and investment in failing states by the West. And that means, in practice, America. He shares the view he attributes to the roving American diplomat Richard Holbrook, that:
the Americans are the only people capable of replacing the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarians – the only people with the character required for an imperial vocation. (p.35)
America needs to be more imperial, more prepared to intervene to stop states failing, to prevent genocides, to create more stable polities. And it’s this idea which was to be the central theme of the book which followed this one, Empire Lite, arguing for greater American commitment to places like Afghanistan and written on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
In other words, Ignatieff’s fine and subtle humanitarian principles led him to support George Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq, support he later came to bitterly regret. Seen from this perspective, Ignatieff’s books on foreign affairs are almost like a tragic novel, about a highly intelligent and deeply philosophical man who argues himself into supporting Bush and Blair’s idiotic invasion of Iraq.
The scale of the waste
Alongside Ignatieff’s brilliant descriptions and fascinating insights, one aspect which comes over really strongly is how extremely expensive it is to wage this, or any kind, of conflict in the modern world. The cost of one jet. The cost of maintaining it. The cost of training one pilot. The cost of training the small army of technicians and engineers required to maintenance the jets. The cost of housing and feeding them all somewhere far from home. And then the cost of the munitions, up to a million dollars per missile.
One of the problems which the bombing campaign encountered was that the Serbs turned out to be very good indeed at hiding from the planes. They were expert at camouflage, deception and the use of decoys. They learned to turn off the radar on their anti-aircraft guns so as not to be detected. They hid all their real armour and created fake tanks and trucks made of wood and canvas. Hence the accusation that NATO was dropping million-dollar missiles to blow up ten-thousand-dollar decoys (p.105).
But stepping back, for a moment, from the geopolitical, historical, military and diplomatic contexts which Ignatieff explains so well…My God, what a colossal, colossal waste of money! If a fragment of what the war cost had been invested in the economy of Kosovo and its million-strong population it could have been rich as Luxemberg by now. I know the waste of war is a cliché but given the extortionate cost of modern equipment, arms and infrastructure, modern war amounts to the expense of hyperwaste in a sea of need.
Pleasure
Hopefully, by now you can see where Ignatieff is coming from. As I said above, he is not a war reporter or a military analyst or a commentator on international affairs. He is fascinated by the moral issues thrown up by conflict in the modern age and by the way our understanding of those issues and their implications were changing and evolving during the 1990s and into the Noughties.
He is also a really beautiful writer. Ignatieff writes a clear, deceptively simple prose which fluently embodies his continual stream of sharp observations and acute analysis. The combination of lucid prose with measured analysis and thoughtful reflection makes him a tremendous pleasure to read.
Credit
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 2000. References are to the 2001 paperback edition.
Raised by talkative women, my childhood perception of what it took to be a man had long before attached itself to the wartime experiences of my family’s silent males…
(Another Bloody Love Letter, page 45)
Although I am going to subject it to detailed analysis and criticism, this is a bloody good book. It is deeply readable and hugely enjoyable, predominantly, for me, because of Loyd’s confident insights into the political, military and cultural conditions of the four conflicts he reports on – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq – are profoundly interesting and illuminating. As in his first book, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, as well as the war reporting there are extended passages about his family and his drug habit which I find a lot less interesting, but every paragraph he writes, about more or less any subject, is instinct with intelligence, reefed with psychological insight and written in an often gloriously over-the-top, deliquescing prose. A real pleasure to read, I hope he publishes another volume soon.
My War Gone By, I Miss It So (1999)
Anthony Loyd is an award-winning war correspondent. He works mostly for The Times of London. He’s published two volumes of war reporting. The first one, 1999’s My War Gone By, I Miss It So, was a critical and popular success for several reasons. It contains blisteringly intense, visceral descriptions of the author’s experiences during the Bosnian War of 1992 to 1995, namely the sites of atrocities and massacres he visited. Then, emerging from these vivid scenes, are numerous insights and commentary on the reasons for the start and development of the war, which I found very useful.
Between 1992 and 1995 just over two hours flying time from Heathrow more than 200,000 people, the majority of them Muslims, were slaughtered. Set free by Europe’s stunning moral failure and refusal to intervene, the forces of nationalism and religious intolerance, emanating principally from Bosnia’s Serbs and Croats, were allowed to crush the more tolerant aspirations of the state’s Muslim community then reform them in their own mould. (Another Bloody Love Letter, page 48)
But what lifted it far among the usual run of war correspondent books were two further elements. One is the fact that Loyd was, throughout the period in question, a heroin addict. The book includes a surprising amount of material covering the origins and development of his addiction, along with frequent passages describing his struggles to give it up.
But the heroin sections fed into something even more unusual in a war correspondent book, which was the inclusion of a lot of autobiographical material, his unhappiness at boarding school then Eton (!) which he managed to get kicked out of; in particular describing his awful relationship with his father, who divorced his mother when Anthony was just 6 years old but continued to be a cold, domineering presence in his life.
As the book progresses it becomes clear that Loyd’s motivation to become a war correspondent was driven by the same compulsion as the drug addiction, and that both were ‘ways of escape’, ways to submerge, obliterate and repress the deep misery he felt if he found himself just living ‘normally’, in London. He tells us that trying to live the kind of everyday commuter life which he sees going on around him in London –
the clustering barnacle growths of life’s trivia and problems…my London world of rehab, relapse, routine normality and unutterable boredom… (p.22)
– drives him into deep despair at its futility and emptiness. At one point he discusses his descent into non-stop, all-day drinking and thoughts of suicide.
Only the effort required in a weekly visit to a therapist helped him at least partly emerge from his unhappiness, and it was out of this feeling of desperation that was born the idea of heading off to Bosnia as the war there started to kick off (in spring 1992) to busk it, to wing it, to see what happened. He went without a job, with no contacts, and with only a flimsy post-graduate qualification in photography to fib and bluster his way through. But on this basis (and with the kind of confidence which a top public school education gives you) he blagged a UN press pass, which he then used to travel to war zones, to get to know other correspondents, to prove himself as a man in the face of terrible suffering and real danger.
Eventually one of the journalists he was hanging out with was wounded enough to be sent back to England and he asked Loyd to temporarily replace him, giving Loyd the number of his editor in London. Again, Loyd’s posh bluffing paid off and he found himself a freelance war correspondent.
The rest of ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ alternates between 1) eye-witness accounts of the terrible atrocities he saw in Bosnia; 2) descriptions of his father’s illness and death, with the revelation of more upsetting family secrets which have clearly damaged him; and 3) his ongoing trials and tribulations as a heroin addict, whose addiction serves as an escape from normal life back in London – which he just can’t handle – and also as a substitute for the intense experience of life under fire in Bosnia.
He is quite frank and open about all of this, especially the way that the heroin high and the buzz of war are related, cousins, sisters, extreme experiences which both stop him falling back into profound ennui and despair.
For months at a time I had exchanged the abandonment of the drug for the fulfilment of the conflict, then come home for a break and swapped mistresses. War for work, heroin for holidays. (p.56)
Another Bloody Love Letter (2007)
So this is Loyd’s second and, to date, final book, and it very much carries on the theme and style of the first one. With the war in Bosnia concluded by the Dayton Agreement of December 1995 there followed a lull in opportunities to feed his war addiction. But the new book finds him in Kosovo in the spring of 1998 as the political situation there unravels and this is the theme and setting of the first hundred pages or so of this 300-page book.
Heroin
Loyd is still on heroin and the book describes the rehab centre in West London he visits (CORE), the other outpatients he meets there and delves extensively into the psychology of the junkie. It covers his relationship with his dealer, Dave (who dies, during the course of the book, but whose job is immediately taken over by his junkie wife, Cathy, page 65). More importantly, it contains extended passages on the mind-set of a junkie, continually trying to give up, continually failing, in an endless ‘Sisyphean’ cycle (p.71).
There is always more to lose as an addict (p.59)
The thrill of war
Again and again he compares the highs of heroin with the thrill of being in a war zone, hanging with his homies, a tight crew of super-cool war aficionados. He repeatedly describes the buzz and kick and fulfilment to be got from close encounters with extremes of human suffering and danger.
The sheer high-octane thrill I had got out of the war. It had taken me to peaks of excitement, life affirmation and sensory enhancement. (p.48)
In his seemingly endless search for kicks, highs and intensities, his life is ‘a quest for event and happening’ (p.133).
Hero-worshiping colleagues
If the third element of the first book was the extended passages about his wretched childhood and his terrible relationship with his father, there’s some of that here (in particular his mother’s tearful terror that he’ll be found dead on a toilet floor somewhere or she’ll get a call from his employers saying he’s been killed in a war zone) – but the really deep emotional/relationship content of the book derives from his close friendship with a superstar American war correspondent who he calls Kurt.
In my review of the first book I commented on the odd dynamic whereby Loyd’s unblinkingly honest reporting of the atrocities he saw in the war zone was accompanied, in a strange logic, by idealisation of other aspect of the narrative, namely the British Army – whose officers he tends to see in a rosy light – and encounters with a succession of women who all turn out to be beautiful, statuesque, intelligent, passionate etc etc. A very James Bond litany of gorgeous babes he keeps tumbling into bed with, impassioned fucking amid the bombs and bullets.
The same odd dynamic between super-real and super-idealised elements obtains here. On the one hand he describes children with their heads blown off, just-raped young women weeping, old men dying in the snow, burned-out houses containing incinerated human remains, with clear-eyed accuracy. Yet when he comes to describe his closest friends among the war correspondents, and especially Kurt, his attitude descends into gushing, schoolboy hero worship.
Kurt was a man unlike any other I have met, or ever expect to, a rare and inspirational comet who one way or another affected the lives of almost everybody who met him, and many who did not. He was a pure force in a tainted world, a beacon of integrity: brilliant. And such essence needs protection for the world crushes fast…
Difficult and uncompromising, as a war correspondent he was a one-man Zeitgeist to the small band of Balkan war reporters, the standard bearer to our values. His work was succinct, sincere and consistently credible, its power singly lifting the level of reportage throughout the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts. Innumerable journalists can crank out professional reports, observe and criticise. Kurt was different because of his vision and profound, Solomon-like sense of justice. Fuelled by an angry compassion, contained by common sense, this foresight and talent to discern righteousness beyond simple truth set him apart and, in allowing him to reveal a moral context within his stories it took him far beyond what most reporters are capable of doing. (p.27)
There’s more, much more:
[Kurt]’s extreme IQ and zero bullshit tolerance made him the terror of military and civilian spokesmen…
His involvement with war was the inevitable product of his being, for he was a man physically and mentally at his best in conflict and he glowed in that environment. War both completed and complimented him.
The man was the embodiment of purpose. He was vital… (p.139)
It’s odd. As if the brutal reality of the one aspect of his experience (war) can only be managed and coped with, by assigning a romantic glow and almost supernatural powers to the other aspect (friends and lovers).
He was my friend, my mentor. I was not looking for another father to replace my own, dead four years by then but absent much longer. Nevertheless, Kurt embodied goodness and wisdom to a degree I could never have imagined should I have had a thousand fathers.
Whatever the darkness of addiction or life’s other pitfalls, I could fall back on the certainty that Kurt was somewhere out there, and that his continued existence meant everything would work out fine in the end. He had a shine about him, the glow of assurance and invincibility that encouraged me to stick close and believe in hope. And, in my mind, he was never going to die. (p.28)
Of course, the second I read that final sentence, I realised that Kurt would die. The blurb on the back says this book is ‘a moving and painfully honest memoir of love and friendship, betrayal and loss, war and faith’ so I figured that the friendship and loss parts would be about Kurt. As the book progresses the hints get heavier.
Like his life force, his faith in both himself and his decision-making was so strong that I assumed him to be one of those rare men destined to survive while all around him died… (p.77)
Yep, he’s definitely going to die, and (spoilers) sure enough he does, in chapter 8, providing Loyd with a motive to fly to Freetown and obsessively try to track down the militia unit and officers who staged the ambush in which Kurt – and another old friend, Miguel – died in a hail of bullets.
Women
In true James Bond style, there’s references to the heroes success with women, to the number of beautiful, brave women Loyd has had hurried affairs with in the past. This book’s Bond girl is the tall, intelligent, beautiful Alexandra, with whom he has ‘a chariot race of a love affair’ (p.83) and ‘on-the-run relationship’ (p.140). Kurt’s death affects them in different ways (Loyd becomes cold and withdrawn) and they split up soon afterwards as a direct result.
Tall
Loyd’s number one attribute of praise is when someone is tall. All good people in his narratives (British officers, sexy women, valiant colleagues) are tall.
[Sami was] one of five brothers, born in Lausa, a small Drenica town with a long history of nationalist sentiment and armed resistance, he was a tall, rangy, thirty-year-old, bearded and with the shining eyes of a Biblical prophet. (p.32)
Miguel was not drinking either. The long, tall Spaniard, beak-nosed and gaunt like a young Jean Reno, preferred coffee and cigarettes. (p.43)
Alexandra [was] a Parisienne, striking in looks and temperament, she was a photographer in her thirties, tall, long-haired and veteran of Bosnia and numerous other conflicts. (p.83)
A tall, heavily built man with a shaven head and a goatee beard, Jago had once been the party king in the court of our early nineties London gang of revellers, able to work and play on minimal sleep and seemingly oblivious to comedown… (p.141)
It’s another aspect of the oddly comic-strip aspect of a lot of the text. The tall, striking men and women, the super-hero Kurt, his beloved grandmother in her ideal rural cottage etc. I dare say it’s all true. But it also has a kind of super-real, idealising feel to it. Sunday supplement perfection.
More wars than last time
The first book almost entirely described Loyd’s experiences in Bosnia and so had a geographical and geopolitical unity. (The exception is one long chapter about the completely unrelated war in Chechnya which he was sent to cover, but Bosnia is the main setting and backdrop to his various personal dramas.)
By contrast, this book is more varied in location. It includes descriptions of wars in not only Kosovo but also Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ was very focused on the Bosnia War 1992 to 1996. This one covers the period from February 1999 to spring 2004, when a lot of other major conflicts kicked off and Loyd, now no longer blagging his way into the role, as he’d done in Bosnia, is now a full-time professional working for an employer and so goes where he is told.
1. Kosovo
In Yugoslavia ruled by the communist leader Josip Broz Tito from 1945 to 1980, Kosovo was a province of Serbia, one of the 6 republics which made up the federation of Yugoslavia. Tito held the country together by, in the cultural realm, the force of his personality and charisma; in politics, by shrewdly distributing power among Yugoslavia’s fractious ethnic groups; but mostly, like any communist state, by the rigorous deployment of the army and secret police to repress any serious opposition.
In one sense the mystery is how the complicated power sharing structures he set up survived so long after his death in 1980. The answer is that the heads of each republic remained communists and had a vested interest in keeping the existing power structures in place. It was the collapse of Soviet power in Eastern Europe which precipitated the Yugoslav wars. Because the leaders of the three relevant republics realised they could use nationalism as a force to maintain their hold on power.
1. Slovenia The Slovene Republic in the north was the first to declare independence from Yugoslavia, in June 1991, which led to a brief ten-day war between Slovene nationalist forces and units of the Serb-dominated Yugoslav Army. It was so brief because Slovenia was ethnically homogenous i.e. there was no substantial ethnic minority to contest Slovenian rule (unlike all the other republics) and also because the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, wanted to keep all units of the Yugoslav Army, predominantly Serb in character, for the war which was kicking off in neighbouring Croatia.
2. Croatia The war moved steadily south like a plague. The war in Croatia was caused by the fact that the tough Croatian nationalist tone of the new regime under president Franjo Tudjman led Serbs in the eastern part of the country to rebel and win backing from the Serb government and Yugoslav Army. The resulting war lasted from March 1991 to November 1995.
3. Bosnia Long before it was over, however, the infection moved south into Bosnia where the Serb minority again rebelled against the country’s declaration of independence in April 1992. The war in Bosnia was the central and longest lasting conflict of the Yugoslav wars and changed character during its course. The Bosnian War is generally agreed to have lasted from April 1992 to December 1995 when the Dayton accords were signed. What made it so cruel was that, to begin with, adherents of the country’s multi-ethnic identity i.e. the country’s Croats and Bosnian Muslims (or Bosniaks), fought alongside each other against the Serb nationalists who seized Serb-majority territory in the east and north of the country.
But then, like a plague, the infection of nationalism spread among Bosnians and, eventually, turned Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims against each other, turning the war into a three-way conflict. Often the Serbs, always the best supplied of the warring parties because of their links with economically dominant Serbia and the former Yugoslav Army, stood aside and watched the Croats and Bosniaks slaughter each other.
Loyd’s first book, ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’, is a vivid and heat-breaking record of this process, how the split between the former allies, Croats and Bosniaks, spread from valley to valley, from village to village, with disgusting consequences of civilian slaughters and massacres.
4. Kosovo There was a lull between the end of the Bosnian War and the start of the conflict in Kosovo in spring 1998. Under Tito, Kosovo had been an autonomous part of Serbia i.e. had a lot of autonomy but ultimately came under Serb administrative control. The population was made up of about 1.8 million people of Albanian ethnicity and Muslim religion, and 200,000 or so Serbs, ethnic Slavs and believers of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Serbs tended to hold all the positions of power, and derived their control from Belgrade (capital of Serbia), something which had rankled for generations with Kosovo separatists.
Once the lid of communist rule was removed the way was open for nationalists of both sides to rouse ‘their’ people. Scattered militias, criminals and freedom fights came together to form the loosely organised Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA who carried out violent but ineffectual and counter-productive attacks on symbols of Serb power, like police stations. They began doing this following the end of the Bosnian War in what has become known as the Kosovan Insurgency, starting in 1996.
In 1997 there was anarchy and a brief civil war in neighbouring Albania early 1997, following the fall of President Sali Berisha. In March the police and Republican Guard deserted their posts, leaving their armouries open. Large amounts of guns and ammunition were stolen from barracks and smuggled across the porous border into Kosovo to equip the KLA.
What complicated the picture was that Kosovo happened to be the location of a famous battlefield, where Serbian defenders of Christendom and Europe had been defeated by the advancing Turks in 1389. On the anniversary of the battle, Serb leader Slobodan Milošević travelled to the site of the battle and made a highly publicised speech telling the Serbs in Kosovo that they would never be bullied or defeated again.
Thus, when in early 1998, KLA attacks increasingly targeted Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo, the Serbs responded by increasing the presence of army units and battle-hardened Serb paramilitaries. These set about pursuing a campaign of retribution, targeting KLA sympathisers and political opponents. In February 1998 this situation was recognised as being a war.
Extremists on both sides came to the fore. The KLA’s aim was to declare an independent Kosovo republic and take all the positions of power and administration out of Serb hands, driving all Serbs out of Kosovo if necessary. The Serbs, far more organised and better equipped, wanted to take full control of Kosovo and absorb it into their notion of a Greater Serbia. To do this required terrorising as many ethnic Albanians as possible into fleeing the country. So, as in Croatia and Bosnia, the Serbs set about ‘exemplary’ massacres, entering rural villages and killing everyone they found, rounding up civilians and shooting them in front of mass graves, letting some escape and shooting them as target practice, round them up into houses which they set fire to burn them to death.
Loyd reports on the KLA’s supremely cynical tactic which was to let the Serbs do it. The KLA gambled that, if the Serbs carried out enough well-publicised atrocities, NATO would be forced to intervene and then their moment would come. They were right but thousands of their own people had to die wretched, agonising deaths first.
But they were also wrong for they and NATO miscalculated and Slobodan Milošević showed himself to be a canny strategist. For Milošević realised that NATO was badly split. The Europeans were reluctant to intervene militarily, it was the Americans pushing for decisive action. So Milošević anticipated a NATO attack but banked on NATO lacking the resolve to follow it through.
Not only that but he realised that as soon the NATO air campaign began (as it did on 24 March 1999) he would be able to let loose his forces in a real wave of ethnic cleansing. Thus as the first NATO planes flew sorties against Serb targets, Serb forces unleashed a tsunami of ethnic cleansing across Kosovo. The air campaign was not as effective as anyone thought, due to bad weather and the strict limits NATO set itself to avoid all ‘collateral damage’. Nonetheless NATO planes hit a number of civilian targets, killing as many civilians as the Serbs. Moreover, if the aim was to protect Albanian civilians the air campaign had the opposite effect: the death toll among all concerned (including ethnic Albanians) skyrocketed following and a post-war report by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe noted that ‘the pattern of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings, rape, kidnappings and pillage once the NATO air war began on March 24’.
After a total of 78 days the Serbian Parliament passed a resolution to comply with NATO requirements and the air campaign ceased. The NATO-led peacekeeping Kosovo Force (KFOR) of 30,000 soldiers began entering Kosovo but Loyd is acid, not only about the West’s miscalculation about Serb resolution, but what happened next. He devotes some scathing pages to NATO’s complete unpreparedness for the levels of ethnic hatred and vengeance they were about to encounter. They didn’t realise the extent to which returning Kosovar Albanian refugees, and emboldened units of the KLA, would wreak the kind of massacre on unarmed Serb civilians that Serb paramilitaries had meted out to Kosovars. So now it was the turn of many innocent Serb villagers to be shot out of hand and have their homes and villages burned. The NATO force lacked the manpower, and legal expertise, to intervene into the tens of thousands of grievances which flared across the country.
Outside Pristina, Serbs and gypsies were slain in their dozens and their property burned. Once the dominant minority, in the months following NATO’s arrival most of the province’s Serbs simply packed their belongings into their vehicles and fled north to Serbia…The list of the international community’s excuses for failing to protect the Serbs was endless…So many of the war’s good intentions died in the peace, as the result of the failure by Western powers to anticipate the level of hate that would remain in Kosovo after the arrival of their troops there…It was difficult even for a believer in NATO’s intervention such as me to swallow… (pages 130 to 132)
Incidentally, the point about ‘the Western powers’ not being prepared for the level of ethnic hatred they encounter in Kosovo is echoed by Michael Ignatieff who, in his 2003 book, Empire Lite, says the UN’s humanitarian ambassador to Kosovo once the fighting ended, Bernard Kouchner, was taken by surprise by ‘the ferocity of the hatred in Kosovo’, p.63. What Ignatieff’s book brings out that Loyd’s doesn’t is that the Kosovars came to think of themselves as the intended victims of a genocide. Ignatieff quotes the NATO estimate that between March and May 1999 Serbian police and paramilitaries killed some 10,000 Kosavar Albanians and would have carried on killing as many as they could had not the bombing campaign eventually brought it to a halt. When you believe an enemy force has tried to exterminate your entire race, then no amount of revenge is enough. Hence the virulent hatred the West, NATO and Kouchner were astonished by.
When this kind of ethnic hatred has been created, can it ever go away?
2. Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone was granted independence by the UK in 1961. It is a poor country whose main assets are diamonds, gold, bauxite and aluminium in the east of the country. In 1991 a brutal civil war broke out which was to last 11 years. In part it was a spillover from the civil war in neighbouring Liberia whose dictator, Charles Taylor, sent forces to overthrow the Leonean government of Joseph Momoh. Nigeria sent peacekeeping forces in to try and secure stability. The main element of the conflict was the rise of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) which became notorious for:
abducting children who they brainwashed and drugged into becoming psychopathic killers; as many as 11,000 child soldiers were recruited
amputating the hands or arms of defenceless civilians as a form of intimidation and terror
The Sierra Leone civil war lasted 11 years, destroyed large parts of the country, and left up to 200,000 dead and tens of thousands disfigured and handicapped.
In Sierra Leone, in the west of the continent, the Revolutionary United Front, possibly Africa’s most infamous rebel army, had routed government troops, killed numerous United Nations soldiers, taken others prisoner, encircled many more, and was moving on the capital, Freetown. (p.134)
And:
The RUF was about as raving and insane as rebel groups get, its operations hallmarked by savage and wanton cruelty, utilising terror as a delight rather than as a tool…
The RUF’s political leader was Foday Sankoh, a clinically mad former corporal, by 2001 in jail on war crimes charges, whose manifesto was a mix of archaic Marxism and voodoo, and whose forces’ battle honours included class acts such as ‘Operation No Living Thing’, in which thousands of civilians had been butchered. The cutting off of prisoners’ hands with machetes was so commonplace that the rebels even had a terminology for it: ‘long sleeve’ and ‘short sleeve’ describing whether victims received their amputation at the wrist or elbow. (p.147)
So much for the grisly specifics. Loyd then delivers the kind of pithy and insightful summary which recur throughout the text and help you understand not just the specific conflict but the world we live in.
The RUF was an enduring manifestation of the general West African malaise: a lumpenproletariat of angry, ill-educated young men produced by the extreme poverty, rampant government corruption, spiralling disease and exploding population of the region. (p.147)
It was here that Loyd’s hero, Kurt, was killed, in a pointless roadside ambush carried out by the RUF, and which Loyd then devotes weeks to tracking down the killers, although he hasn’t really succeeded before he is badly injured in a car crash caused by his reckless local driver.
3. Afghanistan
Life for most Afghans was a subsistence battle in a year-zero world (p.197)
Loyd’s account brilliantly conveys the wrecked, devastated nature of the country, shedding light on its harsh, basic but attractive culture (Islamic fundamentalism, hashish, beards). But I thought the most interesting part was his dwelling on the cultural acceptance of Afghan fighters switching loyalties (pages 206, 223 to 230)
Afghan timeline
1953
General Mohammed Daud becomes prime minister of Afghanistan and turns to the Soviet Union for economic and military assistance, the start of a long association with the USSR.
1963
Mohammed Daud forced to resign as prime minister.
1964
Constitutional monarchy introduced but leads to political polarisation and power struggles.
1973
Mohammed Daud seizes power in a coup and declares Afghanistan a republic. Daud tries to play off the USSR against Western powers.
1978
General Daud is overthrown and killed in a pro-Soviet coup. The People’s Democratic Party comes to power but is paralysed by infighting and faces opposition by US-backed mujahideen groups.
1979 December
With the communist government in danger of collapsing, the Soviet Army invades to prop it up.
1980
Babrak Karmal is installed as ruler, backed by Soviet troops, but the opposition from mujahideen groups intensifies, with the muj armed and equipped by the US, Pakistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Low level guerrilla war spreads across the country.
1985
The mujahideen come together in Pakistan to form an alliance against the Soviets. It’s estimated that half the Afghan population is displaced by war, with many fleeing to neighbouring Iran or Pakistan. In the same year Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of the USSR and institutes his policies of perestroika and glasnost.
1986
The US starts supplying the mujahideen with Stinger missiles, enabling them to shoot down Soviet helicopter gunships. Babrak Karmal is replaced by Mohammad Najibullah as head of the Soviet-backed regime.
1988
Under Gorbachev’s aegis, the USSR signs peace accords with Afghanistan, the US and Pakistan and starts pulling out troops but leaving the communist government under Najibullah in place.
1989
The last Soviet troops leave but civil war continues as the mujahideen unite to overthrow Najibullah.
1990
Najibullah wasn’t a Soviet stooge. He tried to build support for his government via the National Reconciliation reforms, he distanced himself from socialism, abolished the one-party state and let non-communists join the government. He remained open to dialogue with the mujahideen, made Islam an official religion, and invited exiled businessmen back to re-take their properties. In the 1990 constitution, all references to communism were removed and Islam became the state religion
1992
Following the August Coup in Moscow and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, Najibullah was left without foreign aid. His government collapsed and he resigned in April 1992. The mujahedin were triumphant but immediately relapsed back into regional factions and a devastating civil war began.
1996
A new, much more hard-line Islamist faction, the Taliban, seize control of Kabul. They ban women from work, and introduce Islamic punishments which include stoning to death and amputations. They do not, however, control large parts of the country.
1997
The Taliban are recognised as the legitimate government of Afghanistan by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. They now control about two-thirds of the country.
1998
US embassies in Africa are bombed. US intelligence points the finger at Osama bin Laden who runs a terrorist organisation called al-Qaeda. The US launches missile strikes at suspected al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.
1999
The UN imposes an air embargo and financial sanctions to force the Taliban government to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial.
2001 September
Ahmad Shah Masood, leader of the main opposition to the Taliban – the Northern Alliance – is assassinated on 10 September. This is the point where Loyd enters the picture, with reminiscences of meeting Masood on previous visits to the country.
11 September, the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, quickly traced back to al-Qaeda and bin Laden.
2001 October
When the Taliban government in Kabul refuses to hand over bin Laden, the US commences a bombing campaign against the Taliban, co-ordinated with ground attacks by the Northern Alliance of mujahedin, formerly led by Masood. Loyd is with these forces when the first air strikes begin and then follows the escalating pace of the war, and is with Northern Alliance troops when they enter Kabul (which has largely been abandoned by the Taliban).
2001 December
Leaders of the various mujahedin groups are brought to Germany, where NATO i.e. the US, lean heavily on them to agree to create an interim government.
2002 January
Deployment of the first contingent of foreign peacekeepers – the Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) – marking the start of protracted fighting against the Taliban.
2002 June
The Loya Jirga, or grand council, elects Hamid Karzai as interim head of state. Karzai is to be a key figure in Afghan politics for the next 15 years.
2003 August
NATO takes control of security in Kabul, its first-ever operational commitment outside Europe.
This map from Wikipedia gives a sense of the landholdings by different Afghan groups between the fall of Najibullah in 1992 and the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.
The War of Afghanistan in four maps, showing the changing territory held by the major armed militias between 1992 and the October 2001 US-led intervention
4. Iraq
For Loyd’s involvement, see chapter 17, below.
Iraq timeline
28 February 1991
The Gulf War ends, leaving Iraq subject to United Nations sanctions and arms inspections designed to track down weapons of mass destruction (biological, chemical and nuclear weapons). Disputes over inspectors’ access to Iraqi facilities continue for years.
December 1998
US-led air raids on Iraq as punishment for not giving UN weapons inspectors access to facilities.
11 September 2001
Hijacked airplanes are flown into the World Trade Centre towers in New York, at the Pentagon and a fourth one was brought down by the passengers en route to attack a target in Washington DC. A Muslim fundamentalist organisation called al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi citizen living in Afghanistan, is quickly identified as being behind the attacks.
20 September
President of the United States George W. Bush first uses the term ‘war on terror’ in a speech to Congress. The enemy in the war on terror was ‘a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them’. The phrase was immediately criticised by every literate person who realised that you cannot declare war on an abstract noun, but also by US officials such as Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
October 2001
US intelligence knows that al Qaeda and bin Laden are based in Afghanistan. When American demands that the Taliban government of Aghanistan surrender bin Laden are rejected, US-led forces begin planning and then implementing military action in Afghanistan. Loyd is with Northern Alliance mujahedin forces as they fight their way south against the Taliban and into Kabul. Though the Americans don’t know it, the struggle to bring peace and security will last for twenty years and, ultimately, be a failure.
January 2002
Flush with success in Afghanistan, US President George W. Bush returns to the Middle Eastern nation which had been a thorn in the side of US policy since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq. Many hawkish Americans think the coalition led by Bush’s father should not have stopped at pushing the Iraqi invaders out of Kuwait, but should have continued on to Baghdad. In his State of the Union address on 29 January 2002 Bush identifies Iraq as part of an ‘axis of evil’ along with Iran and North Korea i.e. preparing the public and international community for war.
12 September 2002
President Bush addresses the United Nations General Assembly and warns Iraq that military action will be unavoidable if it does not comply with UN resolutions on disarmament.
24 September 2002
Keen to side with a bellicose America, the British government under Prime Minister Tony Blair publishes an intelligence ‘dossier’ which claims to assess the threat posed by Iraq. It includes the claim that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction which could be deployed within 45 minutes. Even at the time, to anyone of even moderate intelligence, it was clear that this was complete bollocks and, even if it was true, it wouldn’t be London or Paris let alone Washington that Saddam would attack with his useless Russian rockets, it would be Iran, which he’d failed to defeat in an 8-year war, or Israel, which is very capable of protecting itself.
8 November 2002
The UN Security Council unanimously passes resolution 1441, giving Iraq ‘a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations’ and warning of ‘serious consequences’ if it does not. It is obvious to observers that Bush Junior wants to finish off what his pappy started.
November 2002 to March 2003
Despite carrying out over 700 inspections in Iraq, the UN’s Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission fails to find weapons of mass destruction.
15 February 2003
As America continues to ramp up its warlike rhetoric, millions of people around the world conclude that America’s strategy is warlike, destabilising and completely unjustified. On 15 February hundreds of thousands of people – the organisers estimated almost two million – march through London to protest military action in Iraq and Tony Blair’s craven kowtowing to Bush. There are similar marches in Glasgow and Belfast, part of a worldwide weekend of protest. Loyd knows that, despite coming from a military family, his mother and sister go on the march.
25 February 2003
The US and the UK submit a draft resolution to the UN, stating that Iraq has missed its ‘final opportunity’ to disarm peacefully. To their great irritation the resolution is opposed not just by the usual obstructor, Russia, but by two NATO allies, France and Germany. In fact France emerged as the chief opponents of an invasion.
It was during this period that a joke line from the cartoon series The Simpsons, about the French being ‘cheese-eating surrender monkeys’ was revived in the American media, along with the widespread renaming of French fries as ‘freedom fries’.
March 2003
In face of opposition from France and Russia, the UK and US abandon attempts to secure a second UN resolution authorising force. US President George Bush gives Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war.
18 March 2003
Tony Blair wins House of Commons backing to send UK forces into war in Iraq, despite a major rebellion by Labour MPs.
19 March 2003
First air raids on Baghdad as part of the so-called ‘shock and awe’ campaign of aerial bombardment. 20 March ground forces invade. The invasion of Iraq lasted just over one month, led by combined force of troops from the US, UK, Australia and Poland. 9 April, 22 days after the invasion, coalition forces took Baghdad after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad.
Loyd accompanies Northern Alliance forces through the fighting into Baghdad.
1 May 2003
Bush declared the ‘end of major combat operations’ in his Mission Accomplished speech, delivered on an aircraft carrier off the coast of California.
29 May 2003
A BBC report casts doubt on the government’s 2002 dossier stating that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction capable of being deployed within 45 minutes.
18 July 2003
Government weapons expert David Kelly is found dead after being exposed as the source of the BBC story about the dossier.
13 December 2003
Saddam Hussein is found by US troops hiding in a cellar south of Tikrit, his home town.
Late 2003 onwards
Insurgents in Iraq begin targeting US-backed forces and fighting erupts between rival militias.
14 July 2004
The Butler Review on military intelligence finds key information used to justify the war in Iraq was unreliable. MI6 did not check its sources well enough and sometimes relied on third-hand reports. The 2002 dossier should not have included the claim that Iraq could use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes without further explanation.
In other words, Tony Blair’s government leant on British Intelligence to distort the information and lie in order to back a course of action he had already decided on, which was knee-jerk solidarity with George W. Bush’s America.
Structure of the book
The text consists of a prologue and 17 chapters. The paperback edition I have consists of 302 large format pages.
Prologue: Iraq, winter 2004
Like ‘My War Gone By, I Miss It So’ the text starts with a scene from the very end of the period being covered, in this case standing with an American NCO named Carlisle at the end of a firefight in a village on the edge of the al Anbar which has become the epicentre of the insurgent opposition to the American occupation, in which one of his soldiers has been killed and is even now being choppered back to the base where his body will be tidied up ready for the long journey home to the States.
Loyd describes the course of this one particular American ‘patrol’ and introduces a recurring leitmotif when he describes Carlisle as ‘a tall, rangy man with an aquiline nose, pale Celtic eyes and a straight mouth that hinted of something mean’ (p.3).
But the main purpose of the prologue is to establish the author as someone who has knocked around war zones for over a decade, knows that all battlefields are haunted, knows there is no rhyme or reason in who will survive and who will die, is haunted by his own cast of characters (naming people we will meet in successive chapters of the book).
The prologue then reverts to Loyd’s experience in Operation Desert Storm back in 1991, when, a fresh-faced 24 and nearing the end of a 5-year contract in the British Army, he volunteered to join a Scots regiment in order to be part of the British military contingent in the huge US-led coalition which kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in February 1991. But he was bitterly disappointed to see no fighting, just trenches of demoralised conscript Iraqis eagerly surrendering. The war was over in just 100 hours. A few weeks later he was flown back to Britain and officially left the army, with the itch for action, the urge to test his mettle and live up to the challenge of his warrior ancestors unappeased.
And then briefly refers to the scene 13 years later, in post-invasion, occupied Iraq.
Kosovo, February 1999 – Loyd describes his base at the hotel and bar of Beba, ‘a Serb gangland daddy’ (p.16) in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, from which he and other correspondents drive out to the countryside to see the evidence of the latest Serb atrocity. Description of the shootout between KLA and Serb forces which triggered the war. Introduces Kurt, his hero, with the anecdote of the time they took on sound bouncer-like Serb paramilitaries who beat them up.
More Kosovo: introduction to Sami, an amateurish KLA fighter then onto a gripping analysis of the political and military situation, the aims of the three parties: the KLA, the Serbs and NATO. Graphic, sickening descriptions of Serb massacres carried out in revenge for a KLA one. Both sides massacre defenceless civilians, while the Western press was obsessing about whether Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Loyd celebrates his 32nd birthday among colleagues, a psychological profile of his fellow war correspondents and then the family background which brought him to war.
London, September 1998 – Back in London for R&R and an extended description of his heroin addiction with a full description and psychology of the addict, his family’s response, the CORE rehab centre. ‘War for work, heroin for holidays’ (p.56).
Kosovo, February 1999 – Back in Kosovo the situation has deteriorated with the Serbs carrying out more massacres confident that NATO lack the resolve to punish them. The psychology of the war correspondent. ‘It was our profession but it was also our delight.’ (p.75) More stories about his hero Kurt, coming under fire reporting on a bombed bridge. With the collapse of the Rambouillet talks, NATO monitors are withdrawn, NATO goes to battle stations, and the Serbs hugely accelerated their campaign of murder and massacre. Loyd sees the, decapitated, mutilated bodies. The smell of fresh meat. At a stroke Western correspondents become potential spies or hostages, so their hurried, fraught, dicey escape from Kosovo into Macedonia.
Albania, spring 1999 – Now based in a scuzzy hotel in Bajaram Curri in north Albania, they undertake trips across the border into Kosovo to see and interview KLA forces, for example ‘the Fighting Emir’. Description of the Albanian version of vendetta, kanun (p.100) and how local officials (the town’s chief of police) are involved in it. Commentary on the NATO bombing campaign i.e. deeply disappointing and only encouraged the Serbs into ferocious action. The only thing that would stop it would be NATO committing ground troops which it was mortally afraid to do.
England, summer 1999 – extended description of his lovely grandmother and the rural cottage she lived in which has Loyd’s retreat as a boy. Memories of catching his first trout, and the odd characters who lived locally. A tribute to his mum’s hard working, tough but calm character.
Kosovo, June 1999 – The grim end-game of the conflict, with the KLA finally in the ascendant and Serb forces withdrawn from Kosovo, Loyd testifies to the Kosovars’ vengeance on any Serbs they can get their hands on, the usual rural massacres, fields of bodies etc, the utter unpreparedness of the occupying NATO forces for the level of hatred and vengeance they encounter, and their pathetic inability to stop revenge attacks on Serb civilians.
Ethiopia, May 2000 – Loyd is in Ethiopia when the office call to inform him of Kurt’s death in a roadside ambush in Sierra Leone. He flies to Paris where, with other friends, he meets the body, then onto America to meet the family and attend the funeral. Part of him dies. Back in London he goes on a bender with an old mate, Jago, who is both a crack head and a smack addict.
Sierra Leone, May 2001 – A year after Kurt’s death Loyd embarks on a personal quest to track down the RUF unit responsible for his death. I can see it meant a lot to him, but what struck me was his description of hot humid West Africa, the disgusting atrocities carried out by the RUF, and the terrifying volatility and unpredictability of the warlords he meets on his quest. Poro initiation ceremonies which involve scarring and magic and can stretch to cutting the heart out of a living victim and eating it raw (p.155). Politically, Sierra Leone is important because the UN’s entire role as a peacekeeping force was being called into question by the rebel successes. During a ceasefire he is invited by Nigerian peacekeepers to an RUF party given to celebrate 20 years since Bob Marley’s death (p.157).
Sierra Leone – Loyd’s efforts to reconstruct the events leading up to Kurt’s killing in the ambush, going deep into rebel territory to interview RUF officers, and visiting the scene and actually getting into the rusting wreckage of the Mercedes Kurt was travelling in. On one journey the very bad driver he’s been lumbered with crashes the car after a tyre blows.
Sierra Leone – vivid description of aftermath of the crash (the car spun over and lost its roof) and his attempts to save the life of his translator, Allieu, who dies anyway. Locals call the nearest Nigerian UN forces. He is helicoptered back to town. Still recovering from bad cuts and grazes Loyd soldiers on with his quest for Kurt’s killers…
France, summer 2001 – Loyd’s step-father owned a converted stable in rural France. When he sold it Loyd bought it and it became a refuge and sanctuary (p.187). He invokes boyhood memories of fishing. He has barbecues with local mates. 10 September 2001 his manager in London phones to tell him Ahmed Shah Masood has been assassinated, which leads into anecdotes about meeting Masood a few years previously, interviewing him, following him round the front line. Masood was leader of the Northern Alliance of mujahedin who are in a civil war with the Taliban. Back in the present, next day his mum phones to tell him about the 9/11 attacks.
Afghanistan, September 2001 – Profile of Afghanistan, ruined, impoverished land of endless war, from the Soviet invasion of 1979 onwards. With a good friend and colleague, Shay, he shares a bone-rattling ride north from Kabul to the front line. Lots of insightful explanations of Afghanistan’s history, wars, ruined economy, national character, the overwhelming role of Islam, the ubiquity of strong hashish (p.208). When, according to their values of hospitality and honour (p.204) the Taliban refuse to give up their guest, Osama bin Laden, after the 9/11 attacks, the American government decides to overthrow them. Loyd arrives just as the American campaign is girding its loins and finds the Northern Alliance upset at the death of their leader (Masood) but confident of American support. Complete scepticism about the bullshit spouted by Western military experts crapping on about precision strikes and drone warfare and other bullshit (p.207). In a bizarre digression, on their journey Loyd and Shay are invited to join the crowd witnessing the circumcision of a 7-year-old boy (p.211).
Afghanistan – Being shown round the dusty front line by Sher Agah. A night time firefight. Description of the Hazara as a distinct ethnic group. A visit to Bagram airport. Extensive description of the Afghan ability to switch sides with ease, really interesting insight into the base level survival tactics of most impoverished, beaten down Afghans.
Afghanistan – When some American special forces arrive Shay and Loyd are kicked out of their crib and find another place to stay in a derelict hotel without electricity or toilet in Golbahar. Their perilous consumption of the local moonshine. The stomach-turning story of Karimullah, a 26-year-old who fights against the Taliban, is captured, has his foot and hand surgically removed in the football stadium (p.244). His luxury was visits to an amateur hamam or Turkish bath. Explanation of the exchange value of enemy prisoners or corpses. A telling evening hosted by local businessman and warlord Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq, who can see that Afghanistan needs development but worries that the Americans might be waging a war against Islam? Are they, he asks Loyd.
Afghanistan – After months of hanging round, Loyd describes the Northern Alliance assault on the Taliban lines, break through and advance on Kabul which is captured on 13 November 2001. Firefights, the newly dead and the bleeding-to-death. Some journalist friends are murdered by bandits. But once he’s in the city he realises he’s tired, exhausted, demoralised. Taliban leaders and Osama bin Laden escaped into the Tora Bora mountains, to the Americans’ dismay. After a shave at a newly liberated barbers’ (with some sociology about the importance of the beard in fundamentalist Islam) he takes a ludicrously derelict chopper flight to neighbouring Tajikistan, and so home.
Iraq, March 2003 – 16 months later he is in northern Iraq. The Allies have assembled a huge force in Kuwait and are on the brink of invading to overthrow Saddam. Most reporters have based themselves there, ’embedded with the troops’. Loyd takes the conscious decision to go to the north of the country, entering Kurdish-held territory from Iran and hoping to catch a lift with the American forces which will come down through Turkey, into Kurdistan and sweep on to Baghdad. He is uneasily aware that his mother and sister, scions of a military family, both went on the million-people march against the war in Iraq. He doesn’t touch on the farce of the UN searches for weapons of mass destruction, but instead on his own personal farce. He has come back to Iraq 13 years after taking part in Operation Desert Storm and leaving frustrated that he saw no fighting, hoping for closure and completion, hoping that after over ten years of chasing wars he will experience some kind of revelation. But the Turkish government blocks the Americans from sending any men or equipment through Turkey and the northern offensive is delayed while in the south the Allied forces storm through the Iraqis. In the end, with the help of a small force of Green Berets calling down air attacks, the peshmerga (Kurdish militias) break through successive Iraqi lines and fight their way south, taking the talismanic city of Kirkuk. Baghdad has fallen and he missed it. He experiences no closure after all, and takes a taxi back into Iran, then a plane back to London, in the ‘identical’ state of frustration as when he first left Iraq, back in ’91.
Epilogue: Baghdad, spring 2004
A year or so after the setting of the final chapter, Loyd is now back in Baghdad, in a hotel bedroom. The insurgency is bedded in, the Americans have withdrawn to a heavily fortified compound, and Loyd is finally here, where he fantasised of being all those years ago during Desert Storm. Big deal.
In fact the epilogue turns out to be entirely about his beloved mother’s diagnosis with a brain tumour, loss of sight in one eye leading her to wear a piratical eye patch, her stoic strength of spirit described in Loyd’s best hero worshiping style and clichés come tumbling out:
Defeat was not an option as we geared ourselves for the coming treatment, but my heart was afflicted by naked dread masked by desperate resolve… (p.300)
He was covering the trial of Slobodan Milošević when his sister rang him to say his mother had collapsed and been rushed to hospital. By his mother’s hospital bed he is awed when she asks to be taken home to die, despite being told that such a move will hasten her demise. Here, a chastened Loyd realises, is the bravery he had spent his life seeking: not on some foreign battlefield but in the heart of his indomitable mother. She dies as Loyd and his sister hold her hand. She is buried on a beautiful winter’s day with the whole village turning out to see her off.
You can read this as either a really beautiful and moving tribute or a pack of high-minded clichés or, as I do, both at the same time, the one inhabiting the other.
Clichés
It’s tempting to analyse Loyd’s style at length. It can be very florid and purple, hyper-real Sunday supplement prose, burnishing every situation, every thought with gloss and sheen.
He is hyper-aware of the risk of cliché in writing about a) war, b) heroin addiction, c) his unhappy family – all subjects which have been done to death for generations.
Regarding war, as early as page 5 Loyd describes how the American marines nervously patrolling the backstreets of al Anbar, expecting an ambush at any moment, invoke folk memories of the Vietnam War and scenes from Apocalypse Now, a war that was over and a movie that was released before they were even born. The point is they all feel like they’re experiencing the war through the filter of someone else’s tropes and patterns.
Some barely out of college and experiencing their first foreign country, many of the younger American soldiers in Iraq were living in their own war films, life and art enmeshing in a freakish coupling to a contemporary soundtrack of thrash metal and gangsta rap… (p.5)
So it’s hard to avoid cliché when you and the people you’re reporting on all feel as if they’re living in a huge cliché, when reality itself seems to be made up of well-worn tropes. Loyd repeatedly raises the issue. When analysing his general unhappiness, he says:
Even the rages that sprang forward so easily from memories of my father seemed too trite, too convenient, too clichéd, to weave into a noose from which to hang heroin. (p.63)
A sentence which is also an example of his use of florid and elaborate metaphor. A little later he is writing about the motivation of war correspondents and says:
‘Death wish’ is a tired old cliché – simplistic, absolute and inept in describing our motivations. (p.75)
But it’s a risky strategy to highlight your aversion to clichés unless you can be quite certain that you will avoid them and, in the kind of stereotyped situations in which he finds himself, and much-described battlezone feelings he finds himself experiencing, this is very difficult.
Starting out in London, talking of his fellow drug addicts at the West London rehab centre, he writes:
A few had been crushed by such cruel hands of fate that I wondered how they had any alternative… (p.55)
‘Cruel hands of fate’? On the same page he talks about his gang of London friends:
Hardcore libertines, we thought we were cool and beautiful and turned on. (p.55)
Not so much a cliché of phrasing as of thinking. Sunday supplement thinking. When he describes his little cohort of friends they are all tall and beautiful and successful. You can virtually see the Sunday supplement photos.
Elsewhere, you consistently come across phrases describing stereotypes which boost the text, make it seem more hyper-real, idealised, airbrushed to a kind of generic perfection.
My sister Natasha, younger than me by four years, a woman of flint-like resolve beneath a gentle exterior… (p.58)
Later, in Kosovo, when NATO commences its bombing campaign, Loyd and all his fellow correspondents immediately become liable for arrest or worse:
From that moment on, our fate hung above the cauldron of harm on the frayed thread of the night’s few sleepless hours and Beba’s word. (p.91)
OK, that’s not a cliché as such, but it is a typical example of his purple prose. ‘Our fate hung above the cauldron of harm…’ Loyd’s prose, in other words, is very much not Hemingway minimalist, it’s the opposite; full of florid metaphors and similes, which, along with the clichés and stereotypes give the whole thing a super-real vividness. There’s a kind of continual psychological over-writing at work. When an American army chaplain shares his disillusion, Loyd remarks:
Once, I may have privately sneered at his predicament, for the crushing of another’s hope can be cruel sport to behold from the pedestal of nihilist certainty. (p.5)
Is this too purple and engorged? For frugal tastes, maybe. Then again, considering the extremes of experience which he is describing, maybe it’s a perfectly valid approach.
The few phrases I’ve picked out are fragments of Loyd’s overall strategy, which is to push language into baroque shapes and see what happens, to create a new idiolect. It’s easy to pick holes in, but the overall impression is of tremendous readability and enjoyability. He risks using odd words or words in odd combinations to capture moments and perceptions and often achieves brilliant effects. No risk, no reward.
Almost every conversation seemed to snag on this issue of money, a moment always marked by a pause, that tilting second of challenged pride or grace… (p.235)
In the buildup to the mujahedin attack on the Taliban lines, the fighters go about their preparations, loading up lorries, fuelling tanks and so on with no attempt at concealment.
As this readiness for war progressed with the same flagrant labour of a medieval siege… (p.255)
And leads him to deploy obscure, recherché terms. In a vivid account of battle of running through a minefield towards the Taliban lines, he writes:
Gunfire crackled. More shouts. More mujahedin piling into cover, wild-eyed, revved up, faces contorted, fervorous. (p.261)
Like a stone dropped in the pond of your mind. Nice. Reflecting on what he’d hoped to find back in 1991, during Operation Desert Storm, he writes:
Epiphany? It is an arrogant word of claim, suggesting more completion than the human state is capable of. (p.11)
‘An arrogant word of claim’, what an odd but evocative phrase.
Late in the book I noticed a particular mannerism which contributes to his creation of idiolect, which is omitting particles i.e ‘a’ and ‘the’. At one point he mentions the poet W.H. Auden and this omitting articles was one of the tricks of Auden’s early poetry. It creates an ominous sense of uncertainty, an uncertainty whether we’re dealing with a specific or general noun.
I had once asked Kurt what made him weep, supposing perhaps that his self-possession would have held him back from such release. (p.220)
I’d expect ‘such a release’ there, wouldn’t you? The choice of ‘weep’ instead of the more everyday ‘cry’ is already lending the sentence that super-real, idealised, airbrushed glamour I’ve described.
Yet loss had often rewarded me with some surprise and unexpected gift. (p.221)
‘Unexpected gift’ sounds like Auden to me. ‘Unexpected gifts‘ would be far more mundane. ‘Unexpected gift’ makes it sound mythical, like something from the age of legends. Describing the intensification of American air attacks on Taliban lines:
No longer the coy hit-and-run affairs of night, now attack jets and bombers appeared by day, in flagrant and riveting spectacle that had the locals gathered in audience on their flat rooftops.’ (p.222)
You’d expect it to be ‘in a flagrant and riveting spectacle’. See how removing that article (‘a’) makes it more archaical and momentous. Same with ‘gathered in audience’, an unusual way of phrasing it. Talking of Kosavar cigarettes:
A dollar for twenty, they were the best local tobacco available, their acrid, woody smoke affording great sense of luxury. (p.241)
Where’s the ‘a’? Interviewing local Afghan warlord, Fahrid Ahmad Shafaq:
After admiring the three herons wandering through his garden – as well as flowers, ornamental birds are a source of endless fascination to Afghans – we sat on the baked mud floor to enjoy a lengthy feast of chicken, rice and watermelon and debated the war in lively exchange. (p.25)
Another missing ‘a’ lends the phrase a strange archaic quality, matching the archaic medieval feel of so much of Afghan society.
I hope these examples demonstrate the way Loyd develops a prose style which adds a kind of pregnant meaning to so much of what he sees or feels, lending everything a legendary grandeur. This isn’t a criticism. I’m trying to understand the elements of his style (over and above 1) the searing content of many of his descriptions and 2) his extremely acute insights into the geopolitical situations of the wars he’s covering) which make the book such an enjoyable and sumptuous read.
Credit
Another Bloody Love Letter by Anthony Loyd was published by Headline Review in 2007. All references are to the 2007 paperback edition.
It is nearly always invisible dangers which are most terrifying. (VII.84)
This second half of the Gallic Wars is much more exciting than the first. In the previous four books the Romans steamrollered over everyone they encountered in a rather monotonous way. Here they experience the catastrophic loss of an entire legion and then the fierce siege of Quintus Cicero’s camp, i.e. for the first time you feel the contingency and risk involved in the entire project. And both events are carefully crafted to feature dramatic episodes of a kind not found in the first four.
Book 5: The second rebellion
The book title was supplied by the editors of the Penguin edition and refers to the revolt of the Belgic tribes.
1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels
At the end of each campaigning season in Gaul, Caesar spends the winter in Cisalpine Gaul attending to administration. He also visits the third province he’s in charge of, Illyricum. Here he stamped on the Pirustrae tribe who had allegedly been raiding over the border into Roman territory. Representatives of the tribe met him to tell him it wasn’t them, and delivered hostages as he demanded.
By this point we’re getting used to certain things.
This is a world made up of scores and scores of tribes who co-exist uneasily, continually liable to be invaded or go invading themselves.
Raiding other tribes’ territories seems to be a common occurrence so presumably is a standard way of making a living, acquiring land or loot.
Caesar has a standard methodology. Where possible, meet and threaten representatives of the erring tribe. If they persist in troubling the peace, attack and defeat them. Either way, you insist on them sending hostages to be kept as security against good behaviour.
This handful of options are repeated endlessly. In the spring Caesar returns to Gaul where he has to sort out the Treveri, a tribe living close to the Rhine whose leaders have failed to come to the annual conference of Gallic tribes. Turns out two rivals are vying for leadership, Caesar supports Cingetorix.
He rides on to Portus Itius, from where the invasion is to be launched. Tellingly, he takes leaders of most of the Gaulish tribes with him. The most dangerous of these is Dumnorix, ambitious leader of the Aedui. When Caesar insists he accompany him to Britain, Dumnorix begins spreading rumours to the other chiefs that they’ll all be killed in Britain. The sailing is delayed 4 weeks by a contrary wind, towards the end of which Dumnorix left the damp with some Aeduin cavalry. Caesar immediately delayed the sailing and sent troops to recapture Dumnorix, buy force if necessary. Dumnorix did indeed put up a fight, drew his sword and told his followers to protect him. So the Roman cavalry killed him. End of disruptive influence.
9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain
Caesar had ordered his troops over the winter to build a massive fleet eventually consisting of 600 troopships and 28 warships. He sets sail with five legions (about 25,000 soldiers) and 2,000 cavalry. Including private ships they hired, the Romans appeared over the horizon with 800 ships, an enormous force. No wonder the defending Britons decided to retire to higher ground.
They disembarked without event, set up a camp, then Caesar marched the majority 12 miles or so inland till they came to a Briton camp. The Seventh Legion stormed it and forced the Britons to flee but Caesar brought them back to work on the camp.
They set out again to confront the Britons but were informed of a large storms and when he returned Caesar saw it had damaged lots of boats. he drew them further up on the beach, ordered repairs made, sent orders to Titus Labienus back in Gaul to start building more.
He gives an overview of the British which is a bit random. He includes the plausible notion that the coastal areas have been settled by incomers from the continent with trivia such as, the natives think it wrong to eat of hare, fowl, and goose although it’s alright to keep for pastime or pleasure. He also makes the wildly inaccurate claim that the climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold seasons more moderate. I don’t think so.
He gives a wildly inaccurate description of the geography of Britain, making it out to be a huge triangular island off the west coast of France extending down to opposite Spain. It’s a great mystery how the Romans managed to conquer anywhere without decent maps.
He mentions that the British paint themselves with woad so have blue bodies. But then goes on to say they share wives between groups of ten or 12 men. This is the kind of wildly improbable legend that disfigures to much of the ostensibly ‘factual’ writing of the ancient world.
Back to the present, he describes a lightning British attack on the camp which takes them by surprise and causes casualties. The British fight well, making use of chariots and loose formations which replace each other ad lib.
Next day he sends legions foraging but once again the Britons attack in numbers. It’s hard fought but this time the legions turn them and chase. The Britons scatter and never again attack in such a unified way.
The Britons had united under the leadership of one chieftain, Cassivellaunus. He withdraws his forces north of the Thames which the Romans traverse and continue fighting, with Cassivellaunus hiding his chariots in the woods, till opportunities present for raids.
Envoys arrive from the Trinovantes. Their young leader Mandubracius had already crossed the Channel to seek Caesar’s protection after his father was killed by Cassivellaunus. Caesar demands from Mandubracius hostages and corn, but when these are brought, lets him go.
When other tribes see how fairly Mandubracius was treated, they send envoys seeking Caesar’s protection, being the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He learns that Cassivellaunus has retreated to famous stronghold built in a good defensive position. Caesar lays siege to it and storms it from its weakest side. Meanwhile Cassivellaunus had sent orders to four allied tribes to attack the Roman camp in Kent, but the Romans repel the attack, kill many attackers and capture a tribal leader.
Summer is nearly over and Caesar decides to return to Gaul. So while he was in the ascendent and the Britons demoralised, he demanded hostages and set an annual tribute for Cassivellaunus to pay Rome. And not to attack the British tribes which had allied with Rome. Then he marches the legions to the coast and into the ships and so back to Gaul.
Given the size of the invasion fleet (800 ships!) which indicated that it was a serious attempt to permanently conquer at least the southern part of Briton, you can’t help concluding the invasion – both the invasions – were a failure.
26 to 37: Revolt of Belgic tribes and massacre of the 7th Legion
Caesar distributes his legions and generals with various tribes. The Eburonians rebel and attack a Roman camp. Ambiorix tells the Romans that a Gaul-wide agreement has been made to launch a concerted attack on all the Roman forces and moreover a group of German mercenaries has crossed the Rhine. So he warns them to leave their camp and promises them safe passage through his territory.
The Romans are surprised but it makes sense that the Eburonians wouldn’t rebel on their own. So, what to do? Caesar gives a dramatic set piece debate among the two commanders, Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta who says stay put, and Quintus Titurius Sabinus who trusts Ambiorix and recommends that they leave (28 to 29).
Sabinus wins the argument and the legionaries are told to pack their most important belongings and set off. Catastrophe ensues. The Gauls wait till the legion has entered a deep narrow defile then bottles them up at either end and starts to massacre them. At one point Ambiorix asks the two Roman generals to a meeting. Cotta refuses to go but Sabinus leaves the fight to climb a hill and approach Ambiorix. He and his centurions are ordered to lay down their weapons, which they do. But as they approach Ambiorix they are surrounded and then killed. The Gauls raise a shout and fall on the remaining Romans with renewed fury. Cotta and most of the force are killed. The remnant make it back to the camp where, that night, seeing they are surrounded, they all commit suicide. A handful of survivors make it to Titus Atius Labienus’s camp to tell the story.
It is thought that some 6,000 legionaries died in this colossal blunder. The massacre happened at Atuatuca in modern Belgium.
38 to 58: Siege of Quintus Cicero
Emboldened, Ambiorix rallies allied Gaulish tribes, and led a ‘huge mass’ of the Eburones, the Nervii, the Aduatuci and their allies and dependents against the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero. This was somewhere on the river Sambre and about 80 miles from the camp Caesar had made at Amiens. The Gauls made a surprise attack as the legionaries (as so often) were out gathering firewood etc, but they fought a fighting retreat back to the camp. This the Gauls surrounded and invested. They had with them defectors and Roman prisoners who showed them how to build the kind of siege towers and earthworks the Romans used, so these were built and turned against their inventors.
The Gauls called a parley and offered Cicero the same deal they’d offered Sabinus i.e. to lay down their arms and walk away in peace. But Cicero is not as foolish as Sabinus and makes a defiant reply, telling the Gauls that if they lay down their arms he will send to Caesar who will judge them for their rebellion. And so the siege continues. On the seventh day a fierce gale blows up and the Gauls shoot flaming arrows into the camp which burn down a lot of the huts.
Cicero sends a series of messengers to try and get through to Caesar, but all of them are caught and some of them tortured in view of the camp. Eventually a native Gaul makes it through the blockade and to Caesar’s camp, to whom the news of Cicero’s siege comes as a shock. He immediately sends a message to Marcus Licinius Crassus at his camp 24 miles away telling him to march to meet him. Same to Gaius Fabius and Labienus. Labienus writes back that the entire force of the Treveri were upon him and so, on balance, it was too risky for him to leave his camp. Caesar approves this decision and sets off with just two legions to raise the siege on Cicero’s camp.
By a series of forced marches Caesar quickly reaches Cicero’s camp and sends word through a native messenger that he is near. The Gauls lift the siege and turn their forces to face Caesar, some 60,000 warriors (49). Caesar has 7,000 men (49). With the enemy only 3 or so miles away Caesar orders the building of a camp, only smaller than usual, and instructs the soldiers to run around and given an air of panic and fear. This lures the Gauls out into the open and then up to this camp which they start besieging. But they had barely begun engaging when Caesar ordered his infantry to flood out by side gates and the cavalry to sally out and attack the flanks. Taken by surprise the Gauls fled and the Romans were able to cut them down.
Then he marches to relieve Cicero. He is astonished to see the size and number of siege engines the Gauls had built and then to discover that almost all the defenders had been wounded and fought bravely. He publicly congratulates Cicero and all his men, carefully speaking to individual centurions and tribunes to thank them. He addresses the disaster of the massacred legion and assures them it was down to Sabinus’s error, unlike the resolute leadership of their own Cicero.
Caesar’s victory goes some way to rallying the Romans and, more importantly, their Gaulish allies. But nonetheless the tribes are in a ferment, all sending each other messages discussing alliances and attacks. Caesar realises he must winter in Gaul to keep an eye on the situation. Caesar calls meetings with the heads of various tribes, partly by threats, partly by promises, keeps them peaceful. The Aedui and the Remi remain the staunchest allies.
But the Senones try to murder their king, Cavarinus, who had been friendly to the Romans. Indutiomarus leader of the Treveri is particularly rebellious. He sends messages to the German tribes across the Rhine enticing them to war with the Romans, but none sign up, replying that they’ve learned their lesson.
In Gaul Indutiomarus is more successful in recruiting a large force from miscellaneous tribes, attracting to his standard exiles and criminals, training them, procuring horses and so on. Once he feels strong enough he calls an armed convention of the Gaulish tribes at which he a) outlaws Cingetorix, his son-in‑law and rival for leadership of the Treveri; and b) declares his intention to rally the Senones, the Carnutes and several other tribes, to march through the lands of the Remi and laying them waste, before going on to attack the camp of Labienus.
Indutiomarus with his massed forces approaches and invests Labienus’ camp. The latter feigns timidity and reluctance, all the while awaiting his opportunity. He recruits cavalry from nearby friendly tribes and keeps them all hidden in the camp, while Indutiomarus and his men ride up to the walls, yell and jeer and throw spears and abuse the Romans. At the end of a day like this, the Gauls are turning to ride away, with a false sense of security, when suddenly from two gates Labienus launched forth all his cavalry. Anticipating the enemy would scatter in confusion, Labienus carefully instructed his men to resist attacking anyone else but all of them to find and kill Indutiomarus. He put a big price on his head and sure enough some of his soldiers intercepted Indutiomarus at the ford of a river, killed him, cut off his head and brought it back to Labienus.
When they learned this, all his allies among the Eburones and Nervii flee, talk of rebellion is dowsed down and that winter found Gaul quiet.
Book 6: (53 BC)
1 to 8: Further revolt in Gaul
Caesar tasks three generals with raising new recruits and asks Pompey to send him the legion he recently raised in north Italy. He hears news of northern tribes conspiring to rebel and so makes a lightning attack on the Nervii, capturing cattle, prisoners and ravaging the countryside. When he convokes the annual conference of Gaulish leaders, the Senones, Carnuti and Senones refuse to attend, indicating their hostility. Caesar marches quickly on the Senones forcing their leader, Accio, to back down and hand over hostages.
Then he marches into the country of the Menapii in the far north, burning farms and villages and taking cattle and prisoners till their leaders were forced to sue for peace and hand over hostages in the usual way.
Meanwhile the Treveri, led by relatives of Indutiomarus, had gathered a large force of infantry and cavalry to attack Labienus. Labienus feigned fear and then pretended to leave the camp, luring the Treveri across the river onto flat ground this side. Once they were over he inspired his soldiers to turn and fight them, trapped by the river. Much killing. The Treveri submitted and the Germans they’d invited to come join them decided to stay on the other side of the Rhine.
9 to 10: Caesar crosses the Rhine, retreat of the Suebi
Another Rhine crossing:
to punish the Germans who had sent the Treveri reinforcements
to prevent Ambiorix finding asylum there
The Ubii swear it wasn’t them and he spares them. Investigation suggests it was the Suebi. The Suebi gather their men at a stronghold and await. Caesar’s men quickly build another bridge and he crosses it.
11 to 20: Description of the Gauls
Digression on the nature of Gaulish society. How the advent of the Romans reordered things to bring the Aedui and Remi into prominence. The Gauls fought every year among themselves. The Druids practised human sacrifice, sometimes in wickerwork giants which they set on fire (16).
When the father of a house, who is of distinguished birth, has died, his relatives assemble, and if there be anything suspicious about his death they make inquisition of his wives as they would of slaves, and if discovery is made they put them to death with fire and all manner of excruciating tortures.
Their funerals, considering the civilisation of Gaul, are magnificent and expensive. They cast into the fire everything, even living creatures, which they believe to have been dear to the departed during life, and but a short time before the present age, only a generation since, slaves and dependents known to have been beloved by their lords used to be burnt with them at the conclusion of the funeral formalities. (VI.19)
21 to 28: Description of the Germans
More primitive. Fewer gods, they only worship things they can see like sun, moon and fire. Sex in young men is frowned upon for stunting their growth. Land is redistributed each year to stop them becoming to land-bound and also to enforce a sort of equality. Obsession with war. When a chief proclaims a war anyone who resiles is shunned. They lay waste the land around each tribe.
The Gauls used to be more warlike than the Germans and at points crossed the Rhine and conquered. But being closer to Roman territory they’ve got used to trading and fine products unlike the Germans who remain more isolated and warlike.
He gives one of those characteristically ludicrous descriptions of the natural world, imputing to the great forest of Hyrcania a massive extent (true enough) and a number of fantastical animals.
The Penguin editor suggests that this long digression about Gauls and Germans was placed her to distract from the fact that Caesar’s second incursion across the Rhine, like the first one, achieved little tangible result. When the Germans retreat into the forest, Caesar doesn’t have the provisions to follow them and so, er, retreats back over the bridge, destroying the German end and placing a watchtower and guards on the Gaulish side.
29 to 44: Caesar returns to Gaul
Right up in the north, against the Rhine, is the territory of the Eburones led by Ambiorix. Caesar marches against them, sending ahead Gaius Volcacius Tullus with the cavalry. These go very fast and surprise Ambiorix off his guard with only a few men. However these hold off the Romans while Ambiorix saddles up and flees into the forest. He sends out messages telling every man for himself and many flee and hide.
The Segni and Condrusi come to Caesar and plead that not all Germans in Gaul are conspiring. They aren’t and give hostages and make peace.
Caesar makes his base at Atuatuca, then divides his forces in three and takes his force to ravage the land of the Eburones. Germans across the Rhine hear that there’s a free-for-all and cross the river 30 miles downstream of Caesar’s base, to join in. But prisoners tell them the Romans base is at Atuatuca, full of loot and poorly defended.
Cicero had been left in Atuatuca and initially kept the men penned up in case of attack. But after a week the frustrated men need to get out and the troops need corn so Cicero lets a detachment go collect some, and another detachment take out the animals for exercise. Inevitably it’s at this moment that the Germans appear, mounting a fierce attack, causing chaos. While a fierce fight goes on at the gates of the camp, the detachments sent to fetch food – raw recruits and servants – fell into a panic. Experienced centurions helped them form and wedge shape and make it back to the camp, but another detachment initially took to a nearby hill, then changed its mind and came back down into the flatlands where it was destroyed.
Failing to break in the Germans break off the engagement and ride back to the Rhine. Hysteria grips the Roman camp and rumours spread that Caesar and the other legions have been wiped out, until Caesar himself returns and restores order.
The Penguin edition notes that Cicero clearly deserved a bollocking but Caesar treats him very gently, listing all the extenuating circumstances he can think of. This is because his brother, the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, back in Rome, is still a political force who Caesar needs to keep onside.
This is reminiscent of the panic at Vesontio back in I.39. Caesar supervises widespread burning and ravaging of the country, with the deliberate intention of starving the inhabitants. An enquiry into the rebellion of the Senones and Carnutes concludes that it was instigated by Accio, who is executed in the traditional Roman manner i.e. scourged and hanged.
Penguin point out that by holding courts, judging and executing leaders like this Caesar was behaving like the governor of an accredited Roman province which Gaul very much was not. It was arrogant (and illegal) behaviour like this which raised so much opposition back in Rome.
Book 7: The rebellion of Vercingetorix (52 BC)
By far the longest book.
1 to 7: General conspiracy of the Gauls — Vercingetorix chosen as leader
The murder of Publius Clodius in January 52 BC led to increased political turbulence in Rome. The Gauls, hearing of this, took advantage to conspire to overthrow the invader and regain their liberty. The Carnutes lead the rebellion and sack the town of Cenabum, killing the knight Gaius Fufius Cita, in charge of managing trade.
This inspires the leader of the Arverni, far away in the south of free Gaul, abutting on the Roman Province, one Vercingetorix. Background to Vercingetorix, namely his father was at one point premier chieftain of all Gaul but was executed for seeking to be king. When Vercingetorix proclaims his ambition to kick out the Romans, his uncle and other chiefs expel him from their capital, Gergovia, but Vercingetorix takes to the road recruiting followers and building up a following. Eventually he returns to Gergovia, takes over his tribe and sends out messages for a major, allied rebellion. He enforces ferocious discipline on his recruits:
compelling waverers by severity of punishment. Indeed for the commission of a greater offence he put to death with fire and all manner of tortures; for a lesser case he sent a man home with his ears cut off or one eye gouged out, to point the moral to the rest and terrify others by the severity of the penalty.
In Italy Caesar hears of numerous tribes forming alliances constellated around Vercingetorix’s leadership. Vercingetorix moves his forces into the territory of the Bituriges.
8 to 14: Caesar moves suddenly against the Arverni
But Caesar surprises Vercingetorix by clearing the snow from a pass through the Cevennes and approaching him from an unexpected direction. He leaves Brutus in charge of his camp and makes a forced march to Vienne. He picks up two legions and marches in through the territory of the Aedui into that of the Lingones, where two legions were wintering. Hearing all this Vercingetorix returns to the country of the Bituriges, and from there heads to assault Gorgobina, a stronghold of the Boii.
This is the longest book of the 8 and is all like this, two leaders criss-crossing ancient Gaul, doing deals with, or being double crossed by, numerous tribes, sending out legions or detachments or squads of cavalry under lieutenants. The names of tribes and locations Caesar passes through, allies with or fights gets very confusing. In brief: Caesar takes three Gaulish towns, Vellaunodunum, Cenabum and Noviodunum.
15 to 31: Siege, defence, and capture of Avaricum
Vercingetorix had suffered 3 defeats in a row so holds a conference of his allies and persuades them to adopt a scorched earth strategy, withdrawing before the Romans and destroying all towns, villages, fields and crops in their paths, with a view to starving them. But the Bituriges went down on their knees and begged him not to burn Avaricum, their fairest town.
So Vercingetorix relents, but Caesar besieges it, for 25 days building an elaborate rampart wall and two huge siege towers. When the population of the town tries to sneak out one night, Caesar takes it, puts it to flame and massacres the 40,000 inhabitants.
Caesar adjudicates leadership contest between rival leaders of the Aedui. But the one he chooses betrays him, a week later telling his people that the Romans have massacred their army, so they have no choice but to go join Vercingetorix and fight for freedom.
34 to 53: Siege of Gergovia
The chief oppidum (fortified town) of the Arverni.— abandoned, after severe repulse. Impulsiveness of the troops who do not hear the recall, continue up the hill to storm the stronghold but are repulsed when the enemy muster with overwhelming numbers. — 46 centurions 700 men
This was the one and only military defeat Caesar suffered at the hands of the Gauls in 8 years. Caesar gives speech reprimanding men and insisting on discipline and then withdraws from Gergovia, marching back along then crossing the river Allier.
54 to 57: Caesar moves against the Aedui.
58 to 62: Labienus, successful against the Parisii, joins him.
63 to 74: General revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix.
They attack Caesar, but are defeated, not least because of Caesar’s German cavalry, and retire to Alesia, a town of the Mandubii. Caesar leaves two legions to guard his baggage and swiftly pursues Vercingetorix, killing 3,000 of his rearguard. Three Aeduin traitors are brought to Caesar.
68 to 89: The siege of Alesia
The Gauls retreat inside this stronghold. Caesar orders his troops to construct massive siege-works eleven miles in length, featuring 11 camps and 23 forts. After a confused fight between the opposing cavalries, Vercingetorix adopts the following strategy: he orders his cavalry to leave in the dead of night from a gate which isn’t yet covered by the Roman siegeworks, and to ride to their respective tribes and to raise all men of military age and bring them back, all in the name of a Final Battle which will achieve National Liberation. Meanwhile, all grain is confiscated and Vercingetorix adopts a daily ration for his 80,000 men, which should last a month or so of siege, until the reinforcements from the tribes arrive.
Details of Caesar’s astonishingly complex and thorough siegeworks which face both in and out.
Schematic side view of the Roman siege works at Alesia, 52 BC
The Gauls hold a national convention at which the tribes allot armed forces to send to Alesia, with various factions resiling and bickering. Eventually an astonishing force of 260,000 sets off, but by this stage Alesia’s food supplies have run out.
Caesar describes a meeting of the leaders inside Alesia and gives a speech – presumably entirely fictional – to Critognatus, a noble Avernian who, after a long prologue, recommends cannibalism (77)! It is also notable as belonging to that genre of speeches which Roman authors attributed to their enemies, in which the enemy eloquently describes the crushing servitude and slavery imposed by the Romans.
The weak and old and wives and children are expelled from Alesia and trek over to the Romans to beg them for food. But the Romans barely have enough to feed themselves and refuse the refugees food or permission to pass. So they are caught in no man’s land to starve.
The Gaulish hoard arrives, much to the joy of the besieged who throng the barricades to watch the battle. Caesar places all his infantry around the 11 mile siegeworks then sends his cavalry against the Gaulish cavalry. The Romans suffer casualties before an attack by German cavalry breaks the Gauls and chases them back to their main camp.
A day later a co-ordinated attack from the relieving force triggers a sortie by the besieged and the Romans find themselves hard pressed. But they are defeated by the Romans firing from their strong defences, and fall into the complex web of trenches, booby traps filled with spiked poles and so on. They are forced to withdraw while the besieged are still trying to fill in the first trench of the inner siegeworks, so the latter retreat back into the town, too.
The Gauls then mount an attack on the one Roman camp which isn’t integrated into their defensive circuit, while the besieged again sally forth. (The complexity of the siegeworks and the peril and anxiety of the repeated attacks remind me of the atmosphere at another famous French siege, Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China, March to May 1954.)
Caesar sends Labienus with reinforcements to the hilltop camp, sends Brutus with reinforcements to the strongest point of the sallying army, then leads reinforcements in person. The forces attacking the hilltop hesitate, then Labienus sallies forth with the cohorts he had picked up. Caught between these cohorts and Caesar’s cavalry, the Gauls panic, break ranks and are slaughtered.
Sedulius, commander and chief of the Lemovices, was killed; Vercassivellaunus the Arvernian was captured alive in the rout; seventy-four war‑standards were brought in to Caesar; of the vast host few returned safe to camp.
Vercingetorix conceded defeat to the tribal leaders inside Alesia. Kill him or surrender him alive, as they wish. The leaders go under flag of truce to Caesar, who sits in front of his fortifications. Vercingetorix is handed over, all the chiefs lay down their arms. Caesar puts the Aeduin and Arvernian prisoners to one side to use as bargaining chips with their tribes, then distributes all the captures Gauls to his army as loot, one Gaul to one Roman.
(I think what this means is each Roman soldier then gets his prisoner to contact his family and demands a ransom for their safe return. So equivalent to cash.)
Caesar then receives the submission of all the tribes, and carefully allots legions and commanders in the territories of the main tribes for the winter. When news of this comprehensive victory reaches Rome, a public thanksgiving of twenty days was granted.
Book 8
This final book was not written by Caesar but by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius. He was a legate of Caesar’s army of Gaul from 58, and crossed the Rubicon with him in January 49. He fought for Caesar during the civil war, and was appointed governor of Transalpine Gaul in 45. In other words a senior figure.
Preface
Hirtius addresses his friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus, another friend of Caesar’s, serving under him as chief engineer (praefectus fabrum) in Gaul. Balbus was said to have attended the very select dinner Caesar hosted, along with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius and Sulpicus Rufus on the evening of the day when he crossed the Rubicon.
He explains to Balbus that he is continuing the Commentaries because they don’t link up with Caesar’s own account of the Civil; War. He says he has finished the third of the latter books, set in Alexandria, and has now set to filling the blank between book 7 and the outbreak of civil war by supplying a book 8. But it has been hard work to match Caesar’s clear elegant style and also the speed and alacrity with which he wrote.
1 to 48: (51 BC) End of the revolt in Gaul
Winter of 52 to 51 Caesar hears that the Gauls are plotting again. Alesia proves they cannot defeat the Romans when the latter’s forces are united, but might be able to pick off the legions scattered around the country in different tribal regions.
At the end of December Caesar set out on a lightning march and caught the Bituriges in the fields (it’s not actually likely they would be tilling their fields in the depths of winter, is it? Is this a stock literary convention of this genre?) Anyway, Caesar captures thousands but then lets them go and, when they see him being similarly merciful to nearby allied tribes, the Bitiruges decide to submit and give hostages.
Carnutes dispersed, Bellovaci defeated. Dumnacus besieges Lemonum, but without success. The Armoric states subdued. Drappes captured. Uxellodunum besieged and taken by Caesar. Exemplary punishment, the captured have their right hands chopped off. Labienus’ successful operations against the Treveri. Commius subdued.
49 to 55: (50 BC) Caesar and the Senate
Caesar’s triumphal reception by cities and colonies. He returns to the army in Gaul. A description of his opponents in the Senate. Caesar returns to Italy.
Thoughts
Political consequences
1. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were fought to a) clear his debts b) bring him glory and political power.
2. But in doing so he went far beyond his brief as proconsul – dealing with the leaders of free Gaul as if he was governor of a conquered province, invading Britain (twice) and crossing the Rhine, far exceeding his authority. This prompted growing criticism in Rome throughout his eight-year command. And it was this which created the mounting political crisis about whether he would ever be prepared to lay down his command and return to Rome as a normal citizen – the ultimate result being that he was too scared to do so and, instead, crossed the Rubicon into Italy with his army thus triggering five years or ruinous civil war
The war itself
1. Interesting to learn how universal the exchange of hostages was – the standard procedure to ensure peace, not only with the Romans but among the Gaulish tribes themselves.
2. The relentless Roman victories of the first four books get a bit boring. Book 5 is far more dramatic and exciting, when the massacre of Sabinus’ legion and the siege of Quintus Cicero for the first time introduce a real sense of risk and uncertainty and pave the way for the epic account of the struggle against Vercingetorix in book 7.
3. The invasion of England cost a huge amount of time and money and resources and, in the end, seems completely futile. He took away hostages from southern tribes but, presumably that lapsed when Caesar returned to Rome a few years later. Nowhere was settled, no bases or camps, no trading. Seems like an expensive folly.
Anti-imperialism
One of the interesting things about the text is the way it contains its own anti-argument. Caesar’s entire account takes it for granted that rule by Rome is best for the Gauls. And yet fairly regularly he puts into the mouths of Gaulish leaders as direct speech, or attributes to them in indirect description, the wish to be free men in their own land, living under their own laws.
It’s not an unreasonable wish. And every time you read it, you think, ‘Just what right did Caesar think he had to ravage, burn, pillage, and endlessly fight all these peoples?’ Maybe he thought he was bringing ‘peace’ to a territory plagued by endless internecine violence but it’s hard to see how the endless campaigning and fighting and burning and selling into slavery which the Romans brought was an improvement. It consistently feels worse.
Slavery
Interesting when one of the chiefs, Ambiorix, complains that hostages given by his family were being treated ‘like slaves’ and put in chains (V.27). And, of Gaul in general:
Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. (VI.13)
At numerous other towns the inhabitants were captured and sold into slavery. But then so were some the captured Romans. Caesar says Britain is famous for half a dozen exports to the continent, among which are slaves.
In other words, slavery was current throughout Gaul, Britain and the land of the Germans, so well beyond ancient Greece or Rome. Was there any part of the known world where slavery wasn’t practised two thousand years ago? Was slavery universal?
Eternal war
The Gauls fought among themselves every year. The Britons fought among themselves until Caesar’s incursion temporarily united them. The Germans lived for war. The Italians went on aggressive campaigns every year and spent half their time fighting each other. In Africa Jugurtha, in Asia Mithridates and the Parthians, in Egypt civil war. War everywhere, every year, all the time, forever.
The stupidity of war
Men fighting, I get. It’s what we do, what we’ve always done. But some incidents highlight the sheer brainless stupidity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid cost to civilian victims, women and children. The height of lunacy is reached in book 7 when Vercingetorix persuades the Averni, to burn downtheir own towns and destroy their own crops all in the name of freedom and victory. Reminiscent of General Westmoreland’s famous quote during the Vietnam War, that the Americans had to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it. Or Vladimir Putin’s determination to ‘save’ eastern Ukraine by utterly devastating it.
War crimes
In descriptions of other Roman campaigns I’ve wondered whether what the Romans did amounted to war crimes. Yes, is the short answer. Massacring the populations of entire towns, including women and children, is a war crime.
Caesar’s sustained eight year campaign of destroying towns, massacring their inhabitants or sending them off into slavery, have caused many moderns to compare his actions as a genocide. If a genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group, then no, he just wanted every tribe in Gaul to submit, not to exterminate them.
On the other hand, when tribes or towns did hold out, it appears, from his often very casual references, that he did consciously raze towns to the ground and either massacre or enslave entire populations, most notably at the town of Avaricum, and then at Uxellodunum (VIII.44). Or:
Caesar thought that the next best way of obtaining the satisfaction that his honour demanded was to strip the country of inhabitants, cattle and buildings so thoroughly that any of the Eburones who had the good fortune to escape would loathe Ambiorix for bringing such calamities upon them and never allow him to return. Detachments of legionary or auxiliary troops went all over the country killing or capturing large numbers of the natives, burning the homesteads, and carrying off plunder, until it was completely devastated. (VIII.25)
There’s a revealing moment early in book 8 when Hirtius mentions that the population of the Carnutes are still living in makeshift tents and shacks, as all the towns in their territory have been razed to the ground (VIII.5).
At moments like this you see a vast landscape where all the towns, villages, fields and crops have been destroyed, leaving the survivors to scrape a living in pathetic shelters beside burned-out fields, and you realise this is what the Romans meant when they said they brought ‘peace’.
The scarlet cloak
Caesar always wore the scarlet cloak (paludamentum) of a commander-in‑chief (VII.88).
There was not one Congo war, or even two, but forty or fifty different, interlocking wars. Local conflicts fed into regional and international conflicts and vice versa.
(Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, page 69)
Twin wives
The coolest thing about President Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (1930 to 1997), latterly known as Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, dictator of Congo / Zaire from 1965 to 1997, was that, after his beloved first wife Marie-Antoinette Gbiatibwa Gogbe Yetene died in 1977, he married twins.
Well, technically, he married Bobi Ladawa in 1980 (Mobutu asked Pope John Paul II to officiate at the ceremony but the canny Pole politely declined). But Bobi had an identical twin, Kosia, and they shared the presidential marriage bed, sometimes singly, sometimes together, and they appeared at state occasions as a threesome.
Bobi bore the Great Leader four children, and Kosia bore him three daughters. Rumour had it that the deeply superstitious Mobutu was scared by the thought that the ghost of first wife Marie-Antoinette would return to haunt him so he a) had the vault of her mausoleum hermetically sealed to prevent her spirit getting out but b) kept the twins by him so they could ward off ghostly attacks from either side. Obviously that didn’t stop Mobutu having many other sexual adventures, like all the men in this story, but I can’t help admiring the twin wife strategy for warding off supernatural attack.
The two wives of President Joseph Mobutu, Bobi and Kosia Kadawa, identical twins
Synopsis
The Great War of Africa is said to have lasted from 1998 to 2003. At its height it drew in armies from about 12 African countries and involved over 40 different militias to create a chaos of violence, massacre and destruction across large swathes of what was then called Zaire, now the Democratic Republic Congo, in central Africa. The war was meant to have been ended by the Sun City Agreement supervised by South African president Thabo Mbeki but in fact, nearly 20 years later, conflict continues to wrack various parts of the Congo, including the Kivu area in the far east of Congo, near the border with Rwanda.
Traditionally the best way to understand roots of the great war is to start with the Rwandan genocide (1994), and the best way to understand that is as one of the snowballing consequences of the Rwandan civil war (1990 to 1993). Everything derives from this event. This idea immediately puts things in perspective and much easier to explain.
Tutsi and Hutu
To understand the Rwandan civil war you need to know that the Tutsi minority in Rwanda had been subjected to racial prejudice and periodic pogroms and massacres since before the country’s independence in 1962. For a century or more prior to this the Tutsi minority which made up about 10% of the population of Rwanda had lorded it over the Hutu majority. For centuries there had been a Tutsi king at the head of a Tutsi aristocracy and they all regarded the Hutu as peasants who worked the land.
In 1959 the Tutsi monarchy was overthrown when the last Tutsi king died in mysterious circumstances (after being injected by a Belgian doctor) and Hutu politicians led an uprising which drove many Tutsis into exile in the neighbouring countries of Uganda to the North, Zaire to the West and Tanzania to the East. This became known as the Hutu Revolution. At independence in 1962, Hutu politicians took leadership of Rwanda and there were periodic pogroms and massacres of the Tutsi minority in local regions or towns throughout the 1960s and 70s, forcing more to flee into exile.
In Zaire the exiles were mostly centred in two areas, north and south Kivu, so-named because they lie to the north and the south of Lake Kivu which forms most of the border between Rwanda and Zaire.
Yoweri Museveni
However, it’s in Uganda that the story begins. Because it was here that second-generation Tutsi exiles from Hutu-led Rwanda decided to join Yoweri Museveni’s rebellion against Ugandan dictator Milton Obote in the 1980s. Why? Because the Rwandan refugees in Uganda were persecuted by Obote, as they had been by his predecessor Idi Amin – discriminated against, lived in poverty, were jeered and spat on by Ugandans – so overthrowing Obote would directly improve their lives.
Museveni’s campaign became known as the Ugandan Bush War and ended with Museveni seizing power in 1986. (In fact, Museveni remains president of Uganda to this day, an indication of how difficult so many African nations find it to manage transitions between leaders.)
Having successfully overthrown one dictator, the senior Tutsis in Museveni’s army naturally got to thinking about overthrowing the dictator of their own homeland Rwanda, Juvénal Habyarimana, and thus being able to return from exile.
The RPF and the Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1993
In 1990 a small cohort of Tutsis who had risen to senior positions in Museveni’s army went absent without leave, taking guns and weapons with them, and launched an invasion of north Rwanda, calling themselves the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).
The Rwandan army, supported by French soldiers flown in to support them, repelled the invasion and drove the RPF back into the northern mountains, but here they regrouped under the brilliant leadership of Paul Kagame and settled into an effective guerrilla campaign.
This dragged on for three years until international arbitrators forced the RPF to the negotiating table with Rwanda’s dictator Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993. Habyarimana and elements in the Rwandan military and political world then did everything they could to delay implementation of the peace deal – the Arusha Accords – which they deeply resented because it required assimilation of the Tutsi exiles into the Rwandan cabinet and army.
Unlike the hardliners, however, Habyarimana came under pressure to fulfil the accords from the ‘international community’ and by spring the following year, 1994, looked like he was about to begin implementing them.
The racist ideology of Hutu Power
During the war a loose association of Hutu extremists had developed which enunciated an ideology of Hutu Power in racist propaganda outlets such as magazines and radio stations. They had representatives at the highest level of the army, political sphere and the media and slowly cranked up propaganda claiming the RPF didn’t just want to return from exile, but were planning a Tutsi revolution to restore the Tutsi monarchy and return the majority Hutu population to serfdom and slavery.
Habyarimana’s plane is shot down triggering the Rwandan genocide
It was against this extremely tense background that President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down by two ground-to-air missiles as it came in to land at Kigali airport on the evening of 6 April 1994, as he returned from attending a summit of East African leaders in Dar es Salaam. To this day there is acrimonious dispute about who shot it down: the French (Habyarimana’s strongest Western supporters) claiming it was agents of the Tutsi RPF; the RPF claiming it was hard line elements within the Hutu military.
The truth will probably never be known, but within the hour leading Hutu Power hardliners seized power, sending Presidential Guards to murder the country’s Prime Minister and all other cabinet members who weren’t part of their Hutu Power ideology, then ordering all army units to round up and kill as many Tutsi as they could get their hands on. This only makes sense if you realise it was the behaviour of men who genuinely thought a) the RPF was attempting a coup to restore Tutsi total domination of society, and therefore b) Hutus must be rallied to ‘fight back’ and eliminate all Tutsi, everywhere, because who knew how many of them might not be traitors and Fifth Columnists, enemies and – to use the dehumanising word which the propaganda relentlessly drummed home – ‘cockroaches’.
Rwanda has always stood out from its neighbours in being an unusually well organised and hierarchical society, and orders from the centre were quickly dispatched to regional leaders and passed down to ‘commune’ level. These local administrators had lists of all Tutsis living in their area, and the army and the fast-growing militia, the Interahamwe, were sent to work systematically through every city, town and village, to identify and murder every Tutsi they could find. By the time the message percolated down to militia level it had become very simplified: all Tutsi were in on the conspiracy to murder the beloved president and return all Hutu to slavery. “Quick, now, kill them all before they start to murder and enslave us!”
The RPF end the genocide
As soon as the killing started the RPF, which had established headquarters 50 miles north of Kigali, abandoned the peace accords and resumed its advance. Being far more disciplined and effective fighters than the poorly disciplined Rwandan army, let alone the drunk, crude, blood-thirsty Interahamwe gangs, the RPF advanced quickly.
The genocidal attempt to exterminate all the Tutsis in Rwanda was not halted by any external powers, not by the UN or Americans or French, but solely by the efforts of the RPF as it systematically conquered the country and, everywhere it came, ended the massacres. By July 1994 they had taken the country and the genocide effectively came to an end.
The Hutu refugee crisis
But such was the terror the Hutu Power propagandists had sown about Tutsi domination that as they swept through the country, the RPF created panic among the Hutu population and a huge number of Hutus fled. In the end as many as 2 million Hutus fled across Rwanda’s borders into exile, the great majority west across the border into Zaire.
Here a number of mega-sized refugee camps were established. At first the refugees lived in utter poverty, disease took hold, hundreds died every day of cholera until international aid agencies arrived by the hatful, with tents and water and food. It was a vast operation, which ended up costing millions of dollars a day.
However, there was a bitter irony at work because among the hundreds of thousands of impoverished refugees were many of the Hutu organisers of the original genocide and they rapidly set about re-establishing their authoritarian rule over the civilians, using the Interahamwe and other militias to terrorise the refugees. They established no-go zones where UN write didn’t extend, they inflated the numbers of refugees in order to maximise Western aid, which they then creamed off for themselves.
In the Rwanda capital, Kigali, Paul Kagame, officially vice-president but still head of the army and the acknowledged power in the land, complained that the international community had done nothing to stop the worst genocide since the Holocaust, and was now giving more money and support to the génocidaires than to the country they had half destroyed.
Hutu Power regroups and renews anti-Tutsi violence
Not only that but the Hutu Power ideologues began military operations. There were long-established Tutsi populations in north and south Kivu and revitalised Hutu armed groups began attacking them with the sole purpose of killing as many Tutsi as possible. Then they began crossing the border into Rwanda and attacking police stations or massacring small Tutsi communities. In other words, the same people who carried out the anti-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, were trying to continue it in their new setting.
Kagami asked the UN to move the refugee camps further away from the border with Rwanda, and appealed to individual Western powers such as America and France. Individual Western analysts later admitted that the optimal solution would have been to use overpowering force to go into the camps and separate the militias and the Hutu Power authorities from the vast majority of Hutu refugees, to peacefully return the latter to their towns and villages in Rwanda, and to have imprisoned and charged the latter.
But this would have required a lot of UN soldiers, cost a fortune and, most decisively, risked all out conflict a) something the UN is not meant to get involved in b) something vetoed by America since its traumatic experience during the Battle of Mogadishu in October 1993, when highly trained, well-armed American forces had entered Mogadishu to neutralise a militia which had been terrorising the city, but which ended in the surrounding and killing of 19 US servicemen. Intervention in the huge, highly armed Hutu camps would have been a very similar scenario with the same risks. The Americans said no (p.335).
Rwanda creates the AFDL
The situation festered for 2 years but Kagame but the Rwandan leadership had made their minds up and begun planning soon after the genocide ended. They knew the international community would severely disapprove of an invasion but would be less censorious of an internal conflict. Therefore they created an entity named the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (AFDL). Stearns goes into greater detail than anything else I’ve read on the way the leadership for the new group was chosen and gives an extensive profile of the disgruntled old Marxist rebel leader, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had been leading a feeble rebellion against President Mobutu’s rule since the 1960s, who was chosen for the job.
The First Congo War October 1996 to May 1997
But despite its Congolese name and Congolese ‘leader’ the AFDL largely consisted or Rwandan and Ugandan armed forces. In October 1996 they invaded eastern Congo and began fighting the Congolese army. Stearns gives plentiful eyewitness accounts of how utterly useless the Congo army was. Troops, including senior officers, simply turned and ran, looting what they could along the way.
The AFDL entered the refugee camps, fought Hutu Power elements who fled west into the jungle, and dramatically succeeded in their first aim, which was to dismantle the camps and force up to a million Hutu refugees to return to Rwanda where, to their surprise, they were treated well and helped to return to their towns and villages.
Zairian dictator Joseph Mobutu had been a close personal friend of Rwandan dictator Habyarimana and after the plane crash had his remains flown to his complex of luxury palaces in Gbadolite. He promised her and the other Hutu Power ideologues that he would help them return to power in Rwanda. Mobutu supported the reorganisation of the génocidaires in the refugee camps and his army helped revived Hutu militias carry out anti-Tutsi massacres in Kivu.
Therefore it was entirely logical and no surprise that the second aim of the AFDL was to overthrow Mobutu. Stearns interviews some AFDL officials and some of the many child soldiers or kadogo who made up the AFDL ranks and gathers the sense that most of them were incredulous at this aim. Attacking the refugee camps a few miles from Rwanda’s border was one thing, but ‘marching’ the thousand miles west to Zaire’s capital Kinshasa, through thick jungle with few if any usable roads and fording umpteen rivers, seemed like a fantasy.
Yet they did it. AFDL forces split into two broad wings, one marching west to Kinshasa, the other heading south to seize the vital mineral centres of Mbuji-Mayi and, in the far south of the country, Lubumbashi, the other heading west to the capital. Stearns is keen to clarify that:
The war that started in Zaire in September 1996 was not, above all, a civil war. It was a regional conflict, pitting a new generation of young, visionary African leaders against Mobutu Sese Soku, the continent’s dinosaur. (p.54)
Thus:
Not since the heyday of apartheid in South Africa had the continent seen this kind of mobilisation behind a cause. For the leaders of the movement, it was a proud moment in African history, when Africans were doing it for themselves in face of prevarication from the west and the United Nations. Zimbabwe provided tens of millions of dollars in military equipment and cash to the rebellion. Eritrea sent a battalion from its navy to conduct covert speedboat operations on Lake Kivu. Ethiopia and Tanzania sent military advisers. President Museveni recalled: “Progressive African opinion was galvanised.” (p.55)
RCD massacres and atrocities
It would be nice to report that the advancing AFDL and their Rwandan and Ugandan allies were greeted as liberators from the tired old dictatorship of Mobutu, and in many places they were, but, alas, Stearns gives eyewitness accounts of many places where Rwandan forces carried out massacres of locals, giving stomach-churning details of the massacres at Kasika and Kilungutwe, pages 251 to 261.
If only it was the story of an aggrieved nation overthrowing the wicked dictator of the neighbouring country who had supported the genocide, it would be a clean-cut fairy tale. But Stearns has clearly been very affected by the survivors of local massacres and pogroms he met and gives a much darker picture. He extrapolates out from the specific towns he visited to quote UN figures for the number of civilians massacred in the war and the extraordinary number of women raped and defiled (by defiled I mean things like pregnant women having their bellies ripped open by bayonets, their babies torn out, and then their dismembered bodies carefully arranged in obscenely pornographic poses – that kind of thing.) Thus it was that in a few short years, what many hoped was a kind of pan-African crusade, turned into a squalid affair of massacres and corruption.
Within several years, the Congo was to become the graveyard for this lofty rhetoric of new African leadership as preached by Mbeki, Albright, and many others. Freedom fighters were downgraded to mere marauding rebels; self-defence looked even more like an excuse for self-enrichment. Leaders who had denounced the big men of Africa who stayed in power for decades began appearing more and more like the very creatures they had fought against for so many years. (p.56)
And there is something eerie about the way the issue of Tutsis remained central to the entire story, as if the Tutsi-Hutu animosity is some really deep, ancestral Biblical curse. The atrocities Stearns investigates later on the book were all carried out by the RCD (the Congolese Rally for Democracy, the fig leaf name given to the Rwandan forces in the AFDL alliance) and these were of predominantly Tutsi ethnicity and this leads Stearns to discover that a bitter and abiding hatred of the Tutsi had been created in a trail of bloodshed right across Congo. Reading this book was sometimes like being in a nightmare where no-one can escape from the endless hyperviolence triggered by the endless obsession with ethnicity.
May 1997 Mobutu flees, Kabila becomes president
To cut a long story short, after failed negotiations mediated by everyone’s favourite African leader, Nelson Mandela, Mobutu and his ruling clique hastily fled Kinshasa into exile (where he died a few months later, an embittered sick old man) and Laurent Kabila was installed as president, promptly changing the country’s name back from Zaire to Congo.
Here as elsewhere in this book, Stearns goes into a lot more detail than any other account I’ve read, giving an in-depth account of Kabila’s 18 month rule, its few strengths and its many weaknesses. Chief among the weaknesses was the simple fact that he had no democratic mandate. He had won power by force and, what’s more, very obviously force backed by foreign countries, Rwanda and Uganda. He was a foreign imposition. Many in the political class had spent their entire lives campaigning against Mobutu, had been imprisoned sometimes tortured, multiple times, most notably the political survivor Étienne Tshisekedi. Polls suggested that if free elections were held, Tshisekedi would win by a landslide 70+% while Kabila would get around 10%. So he couldn’t hold free elections.
And his foreign backers very quickly made themselves unpopular. In the kind of detail this book excels at, Stearns tells us that youthful RCD cadres lorded it over the easy-going Kinshasans (or Kinois, in French). They took it upon themselves to upbraid Kinshasan women for wearing immoral western outfits (tight jeans) and forced Kinshasan men to lie on the floor and be beaten with canes for minor traffic infractions.
Stearns’ account makes it easy to understand why Kabila lost popularity on all fronts. None of this would have mattered, at least in the short term, if he had kept the support of his chief external backers, Rwanda and Uganda. But, seeing how unpopular their presence was making him, Kabila made the fateful mistake of blaming everything on them and expelling all external forces and advisers.
Second Congo War August 1998 July 2003
The details are complicated but the overall story is simple: Rwanda reacted very badly to being expelled by the very man they had helped to put in power and so they and Uganda, once again, mounted an invasion of Congo in what was, in effect, the Second Congo War. This time, however, more foreign countries got involved and this is the start of what came to be called the war of Africa.
In the First Congo War, other nations beyond Rwanda and Uganda had got involved. Other regional powers such as Angola and Zimbabwe wanted to see Mobutu overthrown and so had sent nominal forces to help the AFDL. There was general unanimity among most of his neighbours to get rid of the old leopard.
However, the second Congo war saw the breaking up of this alliance: Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi were still allies and the main force behind the second invasion; but Angola, Namibia, Chad and Zimbabwe lined up behind the Kabila regime.
The first Congo war was fought on points of principle: closing the refugee camps, neutralising the Hutu militias and overthrowing Mobutu. The second Congo war was more about seizing resources, about money and influence. Thus Robert Mugabe, dictator of Zimbabwe, had loaned Kabila up to $200 million during the first campaign and wanted it paid back. As a reward, Kabila had awarded Zimbabwe a valuable ammunition contract, and other lucrative agricultural and mining contracts were in the offing.
For Angola, Mobutu had been a thorn in their side, offering sanctuary to the UNITA rebels (and channeling CIA funds to them) as they fought the left-wing Angolan government. Kabila had presented a clean break with that tradition and so won Angolan support.
Once again there is something eerie in the way the Tutsi issue raised its head again for Kabila responded to the Rwandan invasion by trying to rouse Congolese patriotism on his side chiefly by resorting to fierce anti-Tutsi propaganda, just the kind of hate speech he had been hired by Kagame and co to stamp out in the Hutu Power refugee camps.
In the absence of strong civic institutions, ethnicity remains an enduring identifier
It’s an example of the point Stearns makes in the summary of his book that, in the absence of strong state institutions and traditions, ethnicity is one of the few enduring, solid, easily identifiable values citizens of many post-colonial countries have. It provides a mental, cultural, linguistic identity which everyone can understand, from the most over-educated professor to the illiterate peasant in his field. As soon as news of the new invasion from Rwanda became known, all Tutsi everywhere in Congo became fair game, and Stearns recounts numerous roundings up and mass executions of Tutsi. This is what I meant by the nightmare of ethnicity which I mentioned earlier. There is stomach-churning violence and bloodshed on almost every page of this book.
Just the buildup
Believe it nor not, all the preceding is just the the build-up to the great war of Africa. You need to understand all the above to make sense of what followed, which was five years of confusing conflict, eventually involving the armies of some 12 African nations and over 40 different militias.
The odd thing about this book is that it is brilliant about the build-up, shedding light on many of the incidents and events I’ve outlined above. Stearns has met a lot of key players and eyewitnesses and treats their testimony with great sophistication, starting chapters by introducing us to apparently random individuals and then, by letting them tell their stories, slowly revealing the role they played as army leaders, or political players or child soldiers or survivors of massacres, filling in part of the jigsaw and then often going on to make general points about, for example, the role of child soldiers in the conflict, or the recurrence of anti-Tutsis sentiment, or analysing in detail just why the Congo army was such rubbish and why the Congo state as a whole collapsed so easily to foreign invasion.
(This is because, in a nutshell, Joseph Mobutu had spent 32 years hollowing out, undermining and weakening the Congolese state. Mobutu thought that strong state institutions, such as an independent judiciary, police force, free press and strong well-trained army would all threaten his hold on power. So he created a system in which nobody received regular wages but everyone depended on him, the Great Chief, for handouts, bonuses and rewards. He recreated the traditional African social structure of the strong chief handing out rewards to family, clan, tribe and those who pleased him, and in doing so hollowed out and destroyed almost all the structures of a functioning society, including even the mining companies which were all that kept the Zaire economy from complete collapse, but which he sold off for quick profits, preferring to cream off money here and now so that none was left to invest, so that the infrastructure collapsed, power stations failed, mines flooded, entire mines were abandoned, output collapsed and the Zairian economy along with it. The more you read about his rule, the more astonishing it becomes that someone could be so criminally irresponsible in running a country.)
Weakness of the book
Often Stearns creates this effect by starting a new chapter by introducing us to a new personage, who we slowly get to know, describing the circumstances of his interview and so on, before slowly getting round to the point of how they fit into the history. In other words this is not a conventional chronological history, it is more like a series of magazine-style profiles of emblematic individuals which help us into the events and stories which form the history.
Anyway, although the book is nominally about the Great African War it’s more than a bit ironic that this method, which has served him so well during the preceding 200 pages, somehow breaks down when it comes to the main subject of the book. David van Reybrouck’s book about Congo breaks the Second Congo War / Great War of Africa down into 4 distinct phases with an explanation of each phase and maps showing how the vast territory of Congo was divided between various armies during each phase.
There is nothing as clear or graspable in this book. Instead Stearns continues his method of approaching the subject obliquely via biographies of individuals who he met and interviewed at length but, after a few chapters, I began to feel I was missing any understanding of the bigger picture. Thus there’s a long profile of Ernest Wamba dia Wamba, an ageing Marxist professor who was, unexpectedly made head of the Congolese Rally for Democracy (RCD) and why, not surprisingly, this didn’t work out. Stearns tracks him down to poverty-stricken shack in a remote suburb of Kinshasa and finds him still unbelieving of the mass violence which accompanied the RCD campaigns.
Jean-Pierre Bemba
Then there is a long chapter about Jean-Pierre Bemba, the bull-like rebel who set up his own group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) which in 1999 took control of the north of the country. Stearns is good on Bemba’s close relationship with Mobutu during the good times, and the roots of his rebellion, and then the (inevitable) descent into massacres and atrocities (real atrocities which are so disgusting I won’t repeat them, p.230). The kind of thing which wrecked the high-minded pan-African rhetoric which I quoted at the start.
Pastor Philippe
He meets Pastor Philippe, witness to a horrifying massacre in Kisingani, in which his own children were brutally murdered (p.243) and this broadens out into a series of descriptions of atrocities carried out throughout the region. Wherever you turn there’s a group of soldiers gagging to round up the village, lock them in the local church, chuck in some hand grenades and burn the building to the ground, or spray it with machine gun fire, or round up the village into a hall and call them out one by one to have their throats slit like goats, or get the men to watch while the women are gang-raped, and so on. On and on it goes, with stomach-churning atrocities on every page. Pastor Philippe thought the Tutsi soldiers were so savage because they were brain damaged after the genocide (p.243). (This is not as eccentric as it sounds; elsewhere Stearns quotes a study in a psychiatric journal estimating that around a quarter of Rwandans who lived through the genocide still suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. p.46).
Occupants of a house in a village Rwandan troops had taken over got into an argument with the soldier standing guard outside so he stuck his kalashnikov through the window and emptied a clip, killing everyone inside (p.248).
All these accounts explain why Stearns has a markedly more anti-Rwanda attitude than most of the other accounts I’ve read. It also feeds into a chapter Stearns devotes to estimates by aid agencies and the UN about how many people died during the five years of the war. The best estimate is 4 to 5 million died either through direct violence or the result of being dislodged from their land, becoming refugees, disease and starvation, and a shocking 200,000 women have been raped (p.263).
(This critical attitude to Rwanda is partly explained by Stearns’ CV. Born in California in 1976, and privately educated, Stearns took a degree in political science and was lined up to attend Harvard Law School when he first travelled to the Congo in 2001 to work for a local human rights organization, Héritiers de la Justice. Between 2005 and 2007, Stearns was based in Nairobi as a senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, working on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. In 2007, he left to spend a year and a half researching and writing this book, based on interviews with leading protagonists of the conflict. In 2008, Stearns was named as coordinator of the United Nations Group of Experts on the Congo, a panel responsible for researching support and financing of armed groups in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In their final report, the Group found both the Rwandan and Congolese governments guilty of violating United Nations sanctions. So Stearns is very highly qualified indeed to make these kinds of judgements.)
Back to the war, only a tiny fraction of the estimated 5 million death toll came from actual fighting because, as Stearns makes abundantly clear, the soldiers were mostly useless at set piece battles. The Congolese army, in particular, just dumped their weapons and ran away. What all the armies and militias of every side were extremely good at was massacring unarmed civilians, slitting their throats, tying their hands and chucking them in the nearest river, bayoneting them to death, gang raping women before cutting their vaginas open, dashing babies and toddlers brains out against walls or trees, and so on, and on, and on, for page after page. (The most disgusting disfigurements are from the massacre at Kasika on page 257.)
The assassination of Laurent Kabila 16 January 2001
Chapter 18, pages 267 to 284, is devoted to the assassination of Laurent Kabila, two and a bit years into the war, on 16 January 2001. He was shot dead in broad daylight in his office in Kinshasa by one of his personal bodyguards, a former child soldier who had accompanied him from the early days of the First Congo War. The assassination is the departure point for a review of Kabila’s administration which, basically, reverted to the same kind of personal rule as Mobutu, keeping all civic institutions weak and running everything by feudal patronage of the king-chieftain. Because of the collapse of the mining infrastructure Kabila became more and more reliant on cash from Angola and Zimbabwe to pay his troops and just about keep his rule afloat.
Stearns explains that in Congo this is known as envelopperie i.e. the system whereby nobody receives a fixed salary, but everything works by unmarked envelopes filled with cash. This isn’t corruption. It is the way the entire state is run, from the highest level of the cabinet, throughout the civil service, all local administration, the army and the police, right down to the lowliest business deals (p.321).
Anyway, Kabila’s assassination was also the focus for numerous conspiracy theories, just as the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane had been seven years earlier. Was it a revolt of the small cadre of child soldiers who were disgruntled at not being paid and the general chaos of Kabila’s rule. Or was it organised by the Angolan government who had previously supported him, because Kabila had reverted to allowing UNITA to smuggle diamonds through Congo as long as he got a much-needed cut? Or was it the people who had most to gain, a conspiracy organised by Paul Kagame and the Rwandans?
After much debate among his courtiers, it was decided he would be succeeded by one of his many sons by his numerous mistresses, Joseph Kabila, and this leads onto an extended profile of Joseph’s shy, reclusive, character. Anyone who expected a dramatic change in the style of government in Congo was initially heartened when he slowly got rid of the advisers who had surrounded his father and replaced them with a young generation of technocrats, but then disillusioned as he proceeded to use many of the same tactics his father. Joseph went on to rule as president from January 2001 to January 2019. He was only with difficulty persuaded to have genuine democratic elections in December 2018, which led to the election of Félix Tshisekedi, himself the son of Étienne Tshisekedi who was for so long a thorn in the side of Mobutu. African dynasties of power and who is, at the time of writing, still president.
Congo’s crooked mining industries
The next chapter, chapter 19, titled Paying For The War, pages 285 to 304, does what it says on the tin and gives a detailed account of the heroic mismanagement of Congo’s vast mineral wealth by Mobutu inn his 32 years of misrule, which was accelerated by Kabila in his three and a half year rule.
Both these rulers proved incapable of understanding that you need to invest significant amounts in infrastructure (power plants and cabling, roads, proper maintenance of mines and machinery, decent accommodation, schools and hospitals for tens of thousands of workers) and let all those things decay and collapse into (literal) ruins. This explains why few respectable multinationals were prepared to step in to run mines to extract the rich stores of copper, tin, coltan and uranium which sit under Congo soil.
And it explains why the way was left open for smaller operators who were prepared to take more of a risk, who didn’t have the wherewithal to rebuild the ruined infrastructure, but had the nous to get in and extract the easiest veins or even trawl through heaps of slag to extract what they could. Mobutu and then Kabila encouraged this behaviour because they wanted some money now to pay for the endless war, rather than vague promises of a lot of money in the future, and this explains why, as per Stearns’ method throughout, he elucidates the subject via a profile of entrepreneurial mining engineer Jean-Raymond Boulle, a foreigner (p.286), and then of Pierre Goma, a native Congolese (p.296). Olivier is attributed a pithy quote which sums things up usefully:
“The first war had been about getting rid of the refugee camps and overthrowing Mobutu. The second was about business.” (p.297)
Joseph Kabila
The penultimate chapter, pages 307 to 325 of this 327-page book, is devoted to the character and achievement in office of young Joseph Kabila who succeeded his assassinated father. This is all very interesting as far as it goes, but as I got to the end of the book I realised something fairly simple.
Somehow, in the previous 100 pages, although he makes mention of some military engagements and the leader of one particular rebel group, Jean-Pierre Bemba, and the stuff about the mineral industry, and some stomach-churning accounts of atrocities… somehow Stearns has failed to give a good overview of the Great War of Africa itself. There’s no chronology or overview or sense of the different phases of the war as are given in just a handful of pages in David van Reybrouck’s account.
It’s strange that a book ostensibly devoted to the Great War of Africa contains a wealth of information about the build-up to it, extensive information about the key players and many peripheral aspects of it, such as the funding from Zimbabwe or the trade in illegal diamonds and so on… and yet almost nothing by way of conventional account of the war itself, which groups fought where, if and where there were any major battles. In the quote I give at the start of this review he mentions that the war in fact involved 40 or more conflicts but he nowhere explains what these are.
I think the good reviews of the book stem from the fact that he is brilliant on the long, long buildup to the war, gives more in-depth and information rich profiles of key players such as Paul Kagame or Laurent Kabila than I’ve read anywhere else, and also features extensive profiles of individuals whose stories shed light on all aspects of the conflict which kicked off with the RPF invasion of Rwanda in 1990… and yet details of the Great War itself… oddly patchy, unsystematic.
I like the persona of Stearns who emerges from the book, I admire the immense amount of research he’s done, I enjoy his clear, authoritative, reasonable style, I am gripped by the portraits of so many Congolese and Rwandans, every page contains fascinating insights into life in the region, complemented by facts and figures from western aid agencies or economic bodies (about the Congo economy, the mining industry and so on).
And yet, puzzlingly, almost bizarrely, there’s a hole in the middle of the book where an authoritative account of the war itself should be.
Conclusions
In his final short chapter (pages 327 to 337) Stearns draws some conclusions from this sorry history.
The media
First he blames the media:
the short attention span of 24/7 news in which only the most bloody/grotesque stories can make it amid the endless turnover of domestic stories means that…
stories from beyond the West rarely feature and, if they do, without any background or context…
thus fuelling the general sense that these atrocities are happening far away in a conflict which is endlessly plagued by genocide and civil war
1. This is all true but it’s hard to see what can change it. It’s the same complaint Michael Ignatieff makes in chapter one of The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1998) where he calls for sweeping reform of TV news, which will replace superficial 3-minute items with in-depth documentaries, thus informing the citizens of the West about the deeper causes and contexts of the umpteen conflicts around the world, and so informing the decisions of Western governments about where and how to intervene and help.
2. Secondly, it’s not the media making it up or exaggerating – there has been a steady flow of atrocities, civil wars, massacres and genocides from Africa for most of my life, which overlaps almost exactly with the arrival of African independence in the early 1960s. The Congo Crisis, the Biafra Crisis, Idi Amin expelling Ugandan Asians, Emperor Bokassa and his fridge full of human heads, the daily reports of police atrocities in South Africa, the famine in Ethiopia, civil war in Sudan, civil war across the Mahgreb, the antics of Colonel Gaddafi, the Ethiopian famine and Band Aid, the collapse of Somalia and the activities of its pirates, the Rwandan genocide and so on. In the last week, while I’ve been reading this book, there’s been 1) a military coup in Sudan 2) the rapid advance of the rebel alliance which looks like it might overthrow the Ethiopian government, and 3) ongoing killings in the Kivu region of east Congo, which has suffered continual unrest since the events described above. In other words, Africa has been a source of endless disaster stories for most of my life. The media isn’t making them up.
It is unrealistic to expect the British viewing public to submit to hour-long documentaries about each of these situations. All the evidence is that the majority of the British public don’t give much of a damn about politics in their own country, so expecting them to put the effort into understanding the intricacies of conflicts thousands of miles away is utopian.
3. Thirdly, Stearns’ own text acts against his own argument. He scolds the media for presenting an image of Africa dominated by disaster, war and death at the end of a long, gruelling account of disaster, war and death in Africa. Far from countering the stereotype, Stearns’ book deepens and exacerbates my sense of Africa as the location of unending ethnic conflict, massacres, pogroms, atrocities and a terrifyingly high level of killing and rape.
The best way for Africans to stop their continent being portrayed as a zone of endless civil wars and atrocities is not to blame western media but to stop having endless wars and atrocities.
Ignatieff and Stearns in their different books seem to think that if only western audiences knew more about these faraway African conflicts, they would take a more sympathetic view of them. Well, looking up the Sun City Agreement on Wikipedia led me in two clicks to the ‘Effacer le tableau’ genocide. This isn’t even mentioned in Stearns’ book but was one of the many catastrophic side-effects of the Congo wars.
‘Between October 2002 and January 2003, two the rebel groups, the MLC and RCD-N in the East of the Congo, launched a premeditated, systematic genocide against the local tribes and Pygmies nicknamed operation ‘Effacer le Tableau’ (‘erase the board’). During their offensive against the civilian population of the Ituri region, the rebel groups left more than 60,000 dead and over 100,000 displaced. The rebels engaged in slavery and cannibalism. Human Rights Reports state that this was because rebel groups, often far away from their bases of supply and desperate for food, enslaved the Pygmies on captured farms to grow provisions for their militias or, when times get really tough, simply slaughtered them like animals and devoured their flesh, which some rebels believed gave them ‘magical powers’.
Can you seriously argue that if the average westerner learned knew about these conflicts, they’d become more sympathetic? More disgusted and repelled, I suggest.
The fundamental cause of civil violence
Stearns agrees with Ignatieff that the fundamental cause of the unending violence is the pitiful weakness of state institutions. As explained above, Mobutu systematically undermined any modern state institution which might present a challenge to his power and replaced it with the law of the Strong Man, the African chieftain who dispenses largesse to his favourites and locks up anyone who criticises him. This has been the identical pattern across numerous other African states since independence.
Since independence, the story of political power from Joseph Mobutu to Joseph Kabila has been about staying in power, not about creating a strong, accountable state. (p.330)
The lack of any state institutions to rein in power and limit violence helps to explain why ethnicity and tribalism remain behind as two of the few means left to politicians to mobilise their supporters and entire nations in times of stress. So long as African states have weak, powerless state institutions, so long will ethnicity remain an organising and rallying cry for leaders trying to remain in power (p.331).
Foreign aid
This is a very vexed issue. I worked at the UK’s Department for International Development for 2 years where I heard, read and researched the countless arguments for and against western aid to developing countries. It’s a big subject, with vast numbers of books, papers, speeches, political policies and research devoted to it, but the outline of the basic arguments are relatively simple.
1. Endless aid retards the development of civil society…
Stearns makes the point that giving aid indiscriminately encourages poorly developed states like Congo to remain such. If the French or German or Swedish government are paying for roads and hospitals in the Congo, then the Congo government doesn’t have to. More subtly, it won’t learn the tricky, fiddly, frustrating way in which western democracies work (most of the time) with their complex interplay of independent institutions, judiciary, free press and huge range of civil society agencies, charities and watchdogs and whatnot.
2. …but we must continue to give aid
Stearns disappoints me a little by saying we must continue to give aid to Congo ‘obviously’ because of the centuries of slavery, colonialism and exploitation by the West (p.332). But must we, though? There are some equally powerful counter-arguments. The slave trade was abolished over 200 years ago. How much longer must we continue to atone for it? Another hundred years? Forever?
The colonial period lasted from about 1885 to 1962, some 77 years. 77 years after independence will we still be bailing out the Congo government? How long does it take a post-colonial country to become truly independent? The pro-aid argument suggests the answer to that question is never. Former colonies will never cease requiring Western aid. Throw in periodic calls for reparations for slavery and/or inflicting climate change on them, and paying out to Third World countries will never end.
Wasted aid to date…
But the most powerful argument against aid is ‘look what happened to all the aid we’ve given so far’. It was creamed off by Mobutu and redistributed to his clients and powerbrokers with no regard to their ruined country. It went into the mad extravagances of Mobutu’s palace and Concorde lifestyle. It went directly into the purchase of bijou properties all over Europe. A huge amount of it never impacted the lives of the ordinary Congolese in the street, which got steadily worse and worse as time went by i.e. as the sum total of aid poured into the country increased. More aid = greater poverty.
When I worked at DFID there was a hoary old saying that development aid involved poor people in the First World giving money to rich people in the Third World. Certainly when you read about the lifestyle of Joseph Mobutu 1965 to 1997 it’s hard not to get very angry that all those palaces, luxury cars, expensive patisserie flown in from Paris, was paid for by aid money and countless loans from the World Bank or IMF or Western donors.
Not only that, but there’s a respectable anti-aid case which argues that Western aid keeps African nations infantilised, semi-developed, and dependent on their patrons. It encourages reliance. It is a form of neo-colonialism because it ensures the recipient countries will never be weaned and acquire real independence.
Pro aid people say we’ve learned from all those mistakes, and now we are much more savvy and targeted about how we give aid to named, defined projects which have specific measurable outcomes. Maybe. But if this book shows one thing it is the utter inability of Congolese politicians to run a country. They couldn’t run a medium-sized business. The clientilist system perfected by Mobutu was swiftly copied by his successor Laurent Kabila, and then by his successor, Joseph, creaming off short-term profits, fire-selling state assets, stealing whatever aid they could – all in order to pay off the army involved in endless stupid wars, and to pacify important stakeholders, army bosses and regional powerbrokers. To build civil society and proper infrastructure? As little as they could get away with.
On their own two feet
The vast, desolating irony is that everyone agrees the Congo is sitting on a literal goldmine, along with copper mines, diamond mines, uranium and coltan mines of incalculable value. It ought to be the richest country in Africa, but it has had a succession of leaders who were kleptocratic morons, who have run its mining industries into the ground.
Therefore, you’d have thought that if aid to the country is to continue, it should be focused on rebuilding the ruined infrastructure around the mines with a view to providing the country with a decent income of its own. Even if this involves inviting back in Western mining companies, this strategy would start to give well-paid employment to everyone living in those areas and, if production is taxed at an agreed and consistent level (i.e. not managed via corrupt backhanders and payoffs) then Congo’s budget would soon by buoyant and it could set about a plan for reviving the legal economy, building roads, investing in electricity and digital infrastructure, restoring a strong police force and civil service which receive regular decent pay so don’t have to resort to bribery and corruption, and generally try and make its way towards being a half-decent, viable state which provides a reasonable standard of living for its population. That’s the hope.
Demographics and climate
But lurking behind the political plight of all African and developing nations are two objective realities which no amount of books and articles and strategies can argue away: explosive population growth and environmental damage/climate change.
In 1962 when Congo became independent its population was an estimated 16 million (there’s never been a census). Now, as I write, it is estimated to be 90 million and every one of this huge country’s ecosystems – its agricultural land, its rivers, its rich rainforests – are being permanently degraded. It’s hard to be optimistic.
Congo proverbs and sayings
I started reading Stearns immediately after reading Philip Gourevitch’s famous book about the Rwandan genocide which readers of my review will know I had an allergic reaction to because of its foregrounding of the author’s naively American, blank incomprehension at the monstrosity of the thing, rather than applying knowledge and analysis.
As I read the Stearns I noticed a tiny but symptomatic difference between the two authors which is that whereas Gourevitch, being the A-grade English graduate that he is, uses as epigraphs to his chapters entirely inappropriate quotations from George Eliot or John Milton, Stearns instead uses Congolese proverbs and folk sayings. These are teasing, suggestive, evocative, flavoursome ways of entering into an alien culture, and also indicative of how much deeper Stearns has got under the skin of this country and its people than Gourevitch did of Rwanda.
Power is eaten whole. (p.3)
A cat can enter a monastery but she still remains a cat. (p.163)
No matter how hard you throw a dead fish in the water, it still won’t swim. (p.181)
The gratitude of a donkey is a kick (p.239)
Death does not sound a trumpet. (p.249)
Credit
Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason K. Stearns was published in 2011 in the United States by Public Affairs. All references are to the 2012 Public Affairs paperback edition.
“You have missed some of the enemies. You must go back there and finish them off. The graves are not yet full!”
(Radio Milles Collines)
“Go everywhere, spare no one, not even babies.”
(Lieutenant Bizumuremyi)
“No amount of its cash or its aid will ever wash its hands clean of Rwandan blood.”
(Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, talking about the UN’s guilt)
Linda Melvern
Melvern is a seasoned investigative journalist who worked on the Sunday Times in the 1980s. In her introduction, she tells us she was putting the finishing touches to The Ultimate Crime, a history of the United Nation’s first fifty years, at the UN headquarters in New York, when the first reports of the Rwanda genocide started to come in in April 1994.
She was able to interview people within the UN hierarchy and monitor the institution’s ham-fisted response as events unfolded, and this forms the basis of her first book on the subject, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (1995).
So why write another book on the same subject ten years later? The central reason is that during that time the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was set up and went to work, tracking down and bringing to justice the Rwandan army and government officials responsible for the genocide. The ICTR’s work resulted in a wealth of new evidence, the coming to light of countless documents, letters, faxes and so on, as well as extensive eye-witness accounts of key meetings and events.
In addition, documents and paperwork regarding the role of Western nations such as Belgium, France, the US and UK had emerged, as well as memoirs by central players, most notably Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire who led the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) and whose book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda was published in 2003.
Using her contacts at the UN Melvern has amassed extensive records of communications, faxes, memos which passed between its senior officials, such as the Secretary-General himself, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and his appointment as head of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR), Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh, who didn’t get on at all with Dallaire, and did everything to subvert his authority.
And then there are documents and quotes from the international charities involved such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Africa Watch and more.
In other words, this book is an update of her previous one which takes account of the huge number of new documents and testimonies which had become available, and this explains why the book is littered with references to witnesses, witness accounts, interrogations, statements under oath, quotations from papers, memoirs, faxes, interviews and much more.
Scholarly apparatus
This explains why there is such a scholarly apparatus to the book, which has 100 pages of notes and appendices. The notes themselves are very thorough and I enjoyed reading some of the random factoids as much as the main text (such as the fact that ‘There are no surnames in Rwanda. Women do not take the name of their husbands, and children do not bear the name of their parents.’ p.285; or that Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana had his predecessor, Grégoire Kayibanda, who he overthrew in a coup, locked up and starved to death because Habyarimana had a voodoo superstition that if he spilled Kayibanda’s blood in any way, he would be haunted by his spirit, p.287).
The notes are followed by a long section on sources, detailing books, reports, papers and journals relating to the genocide. I can imagine these would be very useful for a scholar setting out to study the genocide.
There’s a 13-page chronology of Rwanda which starts in the colonial period, but once it arrives at the commencement of the civil war with the invasion of the RPF in October 1990 becomes surprisingly gripping.
And, most striking of all, Melvern includes the full text of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It’s only five pages long. And – according to my present understanding – completely failed to prevent the genocide in Rwanda, Saddam’s attempts to exterminate the Kurds, the mass murders in former Yugoslavia (Srebrenica, Kosovo), the Darfur genocide, mass murders in the Syrian civil war and what, nowadays, seems to be accepted as China’s repression and mass murders of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. Apart from these blips, it’s been a roaring success.
It’s worth quoting the official UN definition of genocide in full:
Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
I’m interested to see the words ‘in part’. I thought genocide meant the intent to completely wipe out a group; I’m interested to see it’s significantly broader than that. I bet there’s vast scholarly debate on the subject…
Conspiracy to murder – the downsides
Terrible style
So much for the provenance of the book, what’s it like to read? Well unfortunately, despite the huge amount of research which Melvern has obviously put into the book, it suffers from some severe deficiencies. Very quickly you realise she writes a clunky, repetitive form of English, with odd, uncomfortable phrasing of even simple facts. Quite a few sentences felt like they’d been translated from another language and I frequently wondered whether English is Melvern’s first language, she sometimes struggles so badly to express herself in it.
Poor narrative skills
Bigger than that, though, is Melvern’s struggle to fully work through the material she’s amassed. The clunky English is often the expression of tortuous thinking.
The opening chapters giving the earlier history of Rwanda through the colonial period, the Hutu Revolution of 1959, the Habyarimana coup of 1973 and the build-up to the invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990, all these are basic facts which are admirably described in the books by Philip Gourevitch, Fergal Keane, David van Reybrouck or the Wikipedia entries.
But in Melvern’s hands they are told in a contorted way which I sometimes found hard to follow. For example, it was only because I’d read the other, much more clearly expressed accounts, that I could follow her description of the RPF’s origins in Uganda. She doesn’t bring out the key role played by the RPF leaders in Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement which overthrew Uganda’s dictator Milton Obote, and how that experience inspired them to think about attempting to overthrow their dictator, Juvénal Habyarimana.
The facts are all here but Melvern often lacks the ability to bring to the fore the ones that matter while leaving others in the background, to shape the facts into a narrative. Reading a book like this which completely lacks that skill makes you realise how important it is, particularly in factual-historical narratives.
Lack of interpretation
The same goes in spades for the end of the book. One of the concluding chapters looks in detail at the numerous (conspiracy) theories which have arisen around the shooting down of the Rwandan president’s private jet, which was what triggered the crisis. Melvern lists all the theories which have been put forward over the previous ten years by an impressive roster of interested parties, but she never manages to come to a conclusion. The more I read, the more confused I became. She doesn’t state which one she, as an investigative journalist who’s given it more time than you or I will ever manage, believes in (pages 260 to 266).
Even more glaring is the crude and clumsy way the book ends. The final chapter describes the setting up of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) but fails to stand back and give us an overview of its work. Instead it dives right into a detailed account of the proceedings against one of the central figures, Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, drilling down to such a detailed level that she quotes the cross-questioning Bagosora was subjected to in court by prosecuting council, Canadian lawyer Drew White (pages 281 to 283).
And then the book just stops, not quite in mid-sentence, but right in the middle of quoting the accusations White put to Bagosora and the latter’s indignant denials. It just stops, without any attempt at a conclusion or perspective.
I think all these flaws stem from Melvern’s apparent inability to think about the events she’s describing, to step back and place them in a wide-ranging intellectual or conceptual framework. Compare and contrast the terrific books on international affairs by Michael Ignatieff which I’ve just read. Ignatgieff is an intellectual to his fingertips, which means that he can’t describe any event in the real world without bringing to it fascinating and thought-provoking insights, placing it in a rich intellectual context, broadening individual moments out to make useful and interesting generalisations about civil war, humanitarian intervention and so on.
Melvern, by contrast, rarely if ever provides any insight into anything. She has amassed an awesome amount of documentation and arranged it in precise and accurate order, but this book doesn’t really reflect on any of it in any significant way.
Conspiracy to murder – the upsides
So far, so negative, and at moments in the first 50 or so pages I was tempted to put the book down for good and move on to something less clunky and more thoughtful. However, around page 60 the narrative is transformed with the UN decision to set up the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR). From this point onwards the book becomes first interesting and then absolutely riveting. I found myself gripped and thrilled by the narrative.
As explained, this isn’t because of any storytelling skills on Melvern’s part – selecting light and shade, carefully modulating the pace, dropping in selected insights and context – no, it’s because she has assembled a precise and specific and detailed account of the events of the genocide and these are, in themselves, gripping, horrifying and addictive. I went from feeling very meh about her so-so attempts to describe the historical background, to being utterly riveted. From page 60 to 260 I couldn’t put the book down.
The documents she has so carefully assembled allow Melvern to put together a meticulous day-by-day, and often hour-by-hour account of the key decisions made by the key players. Since she uses eyewitness testimony which emerged during ICTR trials, we are taken right into the rooms where the key decisions were made. You can see the sweat on the foreheads of the army chiefs as they agonise over what to do in the emergency meeting called as soon as news of the president’s plane crash (on 6 April 1994) arrives. You can smell the cigarette smoke and the paranoia.
Eyewitnesses testify to the specific words and phrases used by the senior army figures as they debate who should assume power, as they agree it must not look like a coup, as they allow Hutu Power exponents like Théoneste Bagosora to insist that the civilian Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (a moderate Hutu) must not be allowed to take power. Witnesses testify to adjutants being sent into side rooms to phone through orders to the Presidential Guard. Within the hour Uwilingiyimana’s house was surrounded, then she was beaten and murdered (p.163).
Melvern includes transcriptions of phone calls made by ministers in the supposed interim government as the Presidential Guard knocked on their doors, made them and their families lie on the floor, then murdered them (p.151). It is terrifying.
On the government side, Melvern explains more clearly than anything else I’d read how the shot-down plane was carrying not only the president but the army chief of staff and key ministers so a real power vacuum appeared at the top of the Rwandan state (p.137). She shows how, although the exponents of Hutu Power had for a long time been developing a detailed plan for the complete extermination of the 10% or so of the population who were ethnic Tutsi, there was nonetheless initial confusion about who was to do what, and where power ultimately lay. It took some days before Jean Kambanda, a regional leader of the Hutu extremist party, the Republican Democratic Movement (MDR), was appointed Prime Minister of the caretaker government and was its nominal leader throughout the genocide.
In fact one of the many fascinating things that comes over from her super-detailed account is that power shifted throughout the three month period of the genocide. By the end even the senior army officers were scared of the lawless, murderous Interahamwe militia and the men who controlled it who are, at one point, named as Robert Kajuga, Bernard Maniragaba, and Ephren Nkezabera (p.232) with their political master being Mathieu Ngirumpatse, chairman of Habyariman’s party, the MRND (p.198).
One of the absolutely key things which comes over in her account is the centrality of the Rwandan Civil War. I hadn’t quite grasped that UNAMIR was solely set up to oversee the implementation of the Arusha Accords, signed in August 1993, which gave the RPF positions in a Broad-Based Transitional Government (BBTG) and in the national army.
Thus Dallaire arrived in the country 6 months before the genocide occurred and the early sections about his arrival are devoted to a very detailed consideration of what the accords demanded and how the Hutu Power die-hards within President Habyarimana’s cabinet and army absolutely refused to implement them. They would literally rather die than see RPF Tutsis in positions of power in the cabinet or the army.
Habyarimana’s government put as many obstacles as possible in the way of implementing the accords, and Melvern’s detailed explanation of how they did this, and which ministers in the government were responsible, and General Dallaire’s exasperated attempts to get the two side to co-operate, make for fascinating reading.
It also reinforces everything I’ve read in other accounts which is the idea that, as the Western sponsors of the peace deal, namely France, Belgium and America, brought pressure on Habyarimana, and as he showed signs of buckling, giving in and starting to implement the accords (i.e. integrating the Tutsi RPF into the Rwandan army and cabinet) that’s when the hardline Hutu faction decided to get rid of him. Hence the widely-held theory that it was soldiers, militia or even mercenaries following orders from Hutu Power extremists, who assassinated their own president and then blamed it on the Tutsi RPF.
And immediately put into force a long-gestated plan to exterminate the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda, some 1.5 million men, women, children and babies.
Radio Milles Collines
Her treatment of Radio Milles Collines is a good example of Melvern’s strong points. All the other accounts certainly mention the radio station and its role in spewing poisonous racist genocidal propaganda from its founding in July 1993 and then going into overdrive during the period of the actual genocide (7 April to 15 July 1994).
It is typical that Melvern gives it its full name – Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – and thereafter refers to its proper initialism (RTLMC).
But, more importantly, Melvern explains who founded it, how it was funded, how it was run. She names the director-general Félicien Kabuga; the director Ferdinand Nahimana who was a respected historian; Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, chairman of the executive committee, who was also policy director in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and so provided a direct conduit from the genocidal government; editor-in-chief Gaspard Gahigi, and the day-to-day manager, Phocas Habimana. She gives us pen portraits of the four main broadcasters:
Kantano Habimana, who called for “those who have guns [to] immediately go to these cockroaches [and] encircle them and kill them…”
Valérie Bemeriki, the only female presenter, who encouraged the use of machetes not guns to eradicate the Tuti, telling her listeners to “not kill those cockroaches with a bullet — cut them to pieces with a machete”
Noël Hitimana
and Georges Ruggiu, a white man from Belgium who urged listeners to kill Tutsis and told them that “graves were waiting to be filled”
So Melvern’s great strong point is that, in the words of the old cliché, she names the guilty men. And by naming them she makes the entire thing incredibly more real and present. Instead of being a faceless emitter of toxic propaganda, Radio Milles Collines becomes a much more real institution, populated by flesh and blood people with specific personalities. Via eyewitness accounts we sit in on some of the editorial meetings, we are told how the poison messages were sent by named officials in the army or Hutu Power leadership, she quotes from the broadcasts.
We get a feel for the smirkingly jokey style of Valérie Bemeriki and we get several pages of the account Ruggiu gave years later to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda of, on several occasions, being shown round roadblocks in Kigali by the side of which were piles of bodies of people who had been hacked to pieces. He noticed that some of them were still breathing and suggested to the Interahamwe that they shoot dying to put them out of their misery, but the blood thirsty young men just laughed and said the ‘cockroaches’ weren’t worth a bullet (p.209).
So every element of the genocidal regime is treated in much more detail than in other accounts, and the repeated references to specific named individuals responsible for specific genocidal decisions and actions begins to build them up into real people. You can see why Melvin’s research was quoted in court proceedings against the génocidaires and why she is liberally quoted on the Wikipedia pages about many of them. It’s because she does such a good job of associating named individuals with specific meetings in specific locations which took specific murderous decisions.
She appears to have set out to document every single instance in which Tutsi were killed, even when it was ‘only’ a handful, documenting the time and place and numbers and the police or militia or army leaders in charge. In this sense the book is like a very long charge sheet.
The trials
And this brings us to another positive aspect of the book, which is the way she then follows these named individuals into their afterlives, on the run from the authorities, arrested, and then their court proceedings at the ICTR.
All the other books I’ve read roll straight on from the genocide to the refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, to the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps, to the eventual invasion of eastern Zaire by the RPF, on to the overthrow of President Mobutu and so on, in a continuous sweep of unfolding history.
Melvern ignores all that, ends her main narrative with the victory of the RPF in July 1994, and then switches her focus to the efforts to bring the génocidaires to justice. And because she has named them so consistently throughout the text and, as far as the evidence allows, pinned them to specific meetings and decisions, by the end of the book these guys are more than just names, they have the same kind of monstrous reality as Goebbels or Himmler.
Twelve of the leading Rwandan génocidaires and the sentences they received at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR)
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
This focus on trials prompted me to do a bit of searching on the internet and Immediately discovered the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s website. As far as I can see this shut down in 2015, along with the court, some 20 years after it was set up. But it contains a simple but fascinating page listing all 92 genocidaires who were brought to with full details of the charges and their sentences.
Once I discovered this I began to look up the individuals Melvern mentions, for example the man who emerges as the closest thing to a mastermind of the genocide, Bagosora and then go on to surf through the documents relating to his trial.
Fascinating to see how so many of the people she mentions in the book were indeed brought to justice (including the popular singer Simon Bikindi, who wrote songs and made speeches inciting the Hutu majority to liquidate the Tutsi.)
We learn about the trial of Hassan Ngeze, director and editor of the Kangura magazine which published the ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ in its December 1990 edition and played a key role in spreading Hutu supremacist ideology. During the genocide, Ngeze helped organise the Impuzamugambi militia and is said to have personally supervised and taken part in torture, mass rape and killings of Tutsis.
About Matthieu Ngirumpatse and Edouard Karemera, key figures in organising the genocide who were both sentenced to life imprisonment. The RTLM directors Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean Bosco Barayagwiza, mentioned above, were both given life sentences.
Venturing beyond the ICTR website, I discovered that the smirking RTLM announcer Valérie Bemeriki was convicted by a gacaca or local community court and sentenced to life imprisonment which she is currently serving in Gikondo prison, Kigali.
Main findings and insights
The Rwandan genocide was preventable. Decisive intervention by a sizeable and properly armed force could have stopped it.
The West behaved shamefully. After ten of its peacekeepers were murdered, Belgium withdrew the rest and the Belgian foreign minister Willy Claes rang round other nations telling them to withdraw their troops as well, claiming they’d all be massacred (p.219).
It’s a complicated series of events, and Melvern documents how arguments and debates and discussions influence a body like the United Nations, but there was a catalogue of failings which she anatomises in great detail. One of these was that Dallaire’s alarmed messages were often intercepted and superceded by the far more calm and complacent assessments of the situation by Jacques-Roger Booh-Booh.
I knew the US not only downplayed the genocide but actively undermined the UNAMIR force. As the genocide got underway, the Americans argued for downscaling the UN presence against all Dallaire’s protests.
The US put every obstacle in the way. (p.234)
But it was news to me that the UK took America’s side and also made every effort to downplay the situation, to resist requests for help, only reluctantly sending a fleet of clapped out lorries towards the end of the murdering. David Hannay, Baron Hannay of Chiswick (Winchester and New College, Oxford) was our man at the UN, arguing that we shouldn’t intervene to save the genocide victims. John Major was British Prime Minister. Eternal shame.
To be fair to the Western powers, Melvern’s account brings out how a number of players, starting with the Rwandan government, managed to hoodwink people for some time by portraying the violence as a fresh outbreak of the civil war. In other words, some Western officials and most of the Western media thought it was just a resumption of the hostilities which had characterised the country since the October 1990 invasion.
These people, exemplified by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright, later claimed they weren’t properly briefed by the UN bureaucracy, and she shows how there’s a flicker of truth in this, for example the way Booh-Booh doctored and toned down the accurate factual briefs an anguished Dallaire was sending daily from Kigali.
But it doesn’t hold up as much of a defence, because the foreign ministers of some other countries quickly grasped what was going on and spoke out against it early and strong, notably Colin Keating ambassador from New Zealand and the ambassadors from the Czech Republic, Spain, Argentina who lobbied hard for the massacres to be formally defined as a genocide. But the representatives of America and Britain vetoed this and they had the decisive say. Shame.
It goes without saying that the French government:
helped the genocidal regime at every opportunity
had military advisers at every level of the Rwandan army and Presidential Guard who did absolutely nothing to intervene or prevent the massacre
continued to break sanctions and fly in weapons to arm the murderers even after the genocidal massacres had begun
offered refuge to the wife and relatives of the assassinated president – some of the hardest core promulgators of racist, supremacist, genocidal Hutu Power ideology – in Paris
and then sent in a massive consignment of troops and equipment, not to stop the genocide, but to set up a safe haven in the western part of Rwanda into which over a million Hutu refugees, including the entire genocidal government, leaders of the murderous militias, could flee and be safe from the advancing RPF
“It was the French government which facilitated the cohesive migration of the interim government, in effect the political, military and administrative leadership of the genocide.” (p.250)
and then, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established, sent emissaries, journalists and historians to meet its new head, South African judge Richard Goldstone, to tell him that the stories about the genocide were simply untrue (p.275)
And then when the genocide was over… the French ambassador to the UN, Jean-Bernard Mérimée, blamed the UK and the USA for everything (p.260)
The French government stood shoulder to shoulder every step of the way with the administrators of the greatest genocide since the Holocaust. Even after the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had conquered the whole of the country and brought the genocide to a halt – the only power on earth which acted to do so – the French continued to undermine them in every way possible, blame them for shooting down the president’s plane, accusing the RPF of massacres while conveniently sheltering, supporting and overlooking the crimes of their own Hutu clients. Viva la France!
RPF official Tito Rutaremara documented fifty-six ways in which the militias killed people in the genocide the French claimed never happened, including using machetes, clubs studded with nails, screwdrivers, hammers, hoes, spades and so on (p.253). Pregnant women were commonly disembowelled. Men had their penises cut off. Young children were chopped in half.
Accounts tend to focus on the anti-Tutsi propaganda and massacres, but Melvern brings out in some detail that many of the victims were moderate Hutus, who the Hutu fanatics saw as traitors to their own race, starting with the Hutu Prime Minister and all the moderate members of Habyarimana’s cabinet who were murdered in their homes within hours of the plane crash.
She also brings out the north-south divide in the country. The Hutu Power heartland was in the north and sometimes Hutus from the south were murdered indiscriminately simply because they were southerners. Up to 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered, but as many as 200,000 Hutus were, too.
Main conclusion
Arriving exhausted at the end of the book, after 284 pages of gruellingly detailed evidence, one big conclusion leapt out at me. Gourevitch and Keane’s accounts both betray their nice white guy bewilderment and incomprehension at the scale and ferocity of the killing. Both men say, in effect, I have no idea why this happened.
Reading Melvern’s book totally explains why it happened. She explains how Hutu-Tutsi tension was over a century old, but received its modern animus as long ago as 1959 when the Hutu Revolution swept away the Tutsi monarchy, amid the usual feverish revolutionary rhetoric about overthrowing the exploiters and taking back their country for themselves.
She shows how this rhetoric never subsequently went away but became entrenched and embedded at every level of Rwandan society. Hutu propagandists, of which there were many, tried to make it a central plank of state education that the Tutsi were not Rwandan at all, but invaders from the North who had oppressed and enslaved the virtuous Hutu.
There was continual low-level harassment of Tutsis from independence in 1962 right through to 1994, which occasionally rose to the higher level of localised massacres. Real massacres. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of innocent Tutsis were hacked to pieces or hammered to death at intervals and various locations throughout the 1960s and 70s.
“I would like to inform the chamber that this hatred existed for a very long time, since 1959 in particular, until the time when the genocide took place in 1994.” (Militia leader and ICTR prosecution witness Omar Serushago, quoted on page 169)
So this was emphatically not a harmonious society living in peace. It was a society riven with inter-ethnic tension, in which localised pogroms broke out again and again, in which media at all levels – papers, magazines and radios – pumped out a continuous stream of anti-Tutsi propaganda.
In other words, closer familiarity with the problems of Rwandan society turns your attitude around 180 degrees, from wondering how such a thing could ever have happened, to wondering why it didn’t happen sooner.
In a sense the interest in the story is that such ferocious hatred had to wait so long to burst out into the open. And it’s interesting that it only did so under the stress of three Big Events:
In 1989 there was a worldwide glut of raw materials which led to a collapse in the price for Rwanda’s main exports, tea and coffee, which itself led to widespread poverty, misery and the traditional search for scapegoats. The government encouraged the 90% Hutu population to blame ‘Tutsi exploiters’ in much the same way the Nazi government encouraged the German population to blame all their tribulations on the Jews. So: Economic stress.
In October 1990 the small Rwandan Patriotic Force, soon to be led by Paul Kagame, invaded the north of the country, starting what became known as the Rwandan civil war, which underwent fluctuating fortunes for the invader and the government but led, eventually, to a peace treaty, the Arusha Accords, signed in the autumn of 1993. So: Civil war.
Assassination of the president. On the night of 6 April 1994 Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down as it came in to land at Kigali airport. It was the middle of the night so families across the country heard about it on the TV news, which spread the rumour that the country was once again, suddenly, under treacherous attack. All the people the journalists spoke to remember where they were when they heard the news. It was a JFK or 9/11 moment. Everyone knew something terrible was going to happen, a state of extreme crisis was created. So: mysterious assassination of the country’s leader.
And then there’s the fourth factor or element, which isn’t quite an event but rather the thing Melvern devotes her book to, which is:
The plan. Rwanda was a highly regimented, hierarchical and organised society. Since the RPF invasion of October 1990, influential elements in the cabinet, the civil service and above all the military, including the sinister Zero Network, had been making detailed plans to carry out a systematic, well-organised extermination of all the Tutsis which would end the Tutsi Problem forever.
So if you want a summary of why the Rwandan genocide took place, it goes something like this:
Generations-long inter-ethnic hatred directed from the Hutu majority against the Tutsi minority.
Deep rural depression, affecting the living standards of most of the population and exacerbating existing tensions and resentments.
Invasion of the country by a largely Tutsi force leading to civil war which could easily be portrayed as an attempt to reverse the Hutu revolution and re-subject the Hutu population to slavery and serfdom.
The sudden, terrifying and mysterious assassination of the president leading to widespread panic and hysteria.
At which (perfect psychological) moment the Hutu Power strategists immediately began implementing a far-reaching and well-worked-out plan for mass extermination, rousing a hard core of about 100,000 fanatical Hutu nationalists, at all levels of local government, who used lists of Tutsi names and addresses to drive from one neighbourhood to another, from one village to another, systematically rounding up all the Tutsi ‘spies and traitors’ who they accused of planning to help the invaders complete the reconquest of their country, and methodically hacking them to pieces with machetes, in a bid to end the ‘Tutsi Problem’ forever.
Surely if you put it like that, the Rwandan genocide is far from incomprehensible but can be seen as the result of a series of stresses (poverty, civil war) applied to a society already boiling over with seething hatred, all of which were ruthlessly exploited by the genocidaires who Melvern goes to such lengths to identify and provide evidence directly relating them to the killing.
Surely a good grasp of the background and the sequence of events makes the genocide seem the reverse of incomprehensible – it comes to seem human, all too human.
Credit
Conspiracy to Murder: The Rwandan Genocide by Linda Melvern was published by Verso Books in 2004. All references are to the revised 2006 paperback edition.
The family of nations is run largely by men with blood on their hands.
(The Warrior’s Honour, page 82)
The main title and the picture on the cover are a bit misleading. They give the impression the entire book is going to be an investigation of the honour or value system of the many groups of soldiers, militias, paramilitaries and so on involved in the small wars which broke out across the world after the end of the Cold War.
Not so. This book is more varied and subtle than that. The investigation of ‘the warrior’s code’ is limited to just part of the longest section, chapter 3. No, in the introduction Ignatieff explains that his overall aim in this collection of essays is not to investigate them, the people massacring each other in failing states, but to examine why we in the rich West feel so obliged to intervene in foreign countries to bring peace to those state, feed the starving, house the refugees, etc.
The narratives of imperialism are dead and buried but they have, according to Ignatieff, left us with ‘the narrative of compassion’. Why? Is this a novel development in world history, that the rich nations feel such a connection with the poor and such a moral obligation to help them? If so, what does this mean in practice? And why do our efforts seem doomed to fail or fall so far short of what is needed? And if our current efforts fail, what is needed to bring peace, order and fairness to the trouble spots and failed states of the world?
Introduction
Ignatieff sees the modern culture of international human rights and the conviction of so many in the West that we have to help the poor in the developing world – all those refugees and victims of famine or conflict – as a new development in human history, ‘a crucial new feature of the modern moral imagination’.
Our moral imagination has been transformed since 1945 by the growth of a language and practice of moral universalism, expressed above all in a shared human rights culture. (p.8)
I’m not totally convinced. It’s been a long time since 1945 and the founding of the UN and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The situation he describes in 1998 as if it was a sudden new thing was actually the result of a long evolution of legal understanding and organisational practice. The UN, aid agencies and charities have been working since the end of the Second World War, changing and adapting to a changing world.
And the sudden sense of ‘crisis’ he describes in his 1994 book Blood and Belonging and in this book, may have seemed suddenly more real and acute at the time (the early 1990s) but now, looking back, seem more like part of an ongoing continuum of disasters which had included Biafra and Congo in the 1960s, the Bangladesh Crisis of 1970, the overspill of the Vietnam War into neighbouring Laos and the killing fields of Kampuchea 1975 to 79, the Cyprus Crisis of 1974, the long civil war in the Lebanon which began in 1975, the Uganda–Tanzania War of 1978, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and so on.
So the problem of violent civil war was hardly a new phenomenon in the early 1990s.
On the one hand, taking the long view, maybe he’s correct that it is a newish phenomenon that people in the West, spurred on by television news, feel a moral obligation to help people in the Third World caught up in crises. But I can immediately think of two objections. One is that my recent reading of Victorian explorers and politics shows that the plight of people in the developing world was widely publicised back then, in the 1870s and 1880s, by explorers and missionaries who wrote numerous books, newspaper articles and went on popular lecture tours around their countries, drumming up support for the poor of Africa. Which in turn inspired charitable societies to be set up to help people in poor countries. In those days they were missionary societies but surely the fundamental aim was the same – to bring peace to troubled areas, to build schools and wells and help the natives.
Ignatieff writes as if ethnic cleansing were a new phenomenon, but I can think of the Bulgarian Uprising of 1876 which was brutally suppressed by the Ottoman Empire which sent its militias into Bulgarian villages to murder thousands of men, women and children. Maybe 30,000 Bulgarians died and the bloody repression was widely reported in Britain and became known as the Bulgarian Atrocities. The Liberal politician William Gladstone wrote a famous pamphlet about it which castigated the pro-Turkish policy of the British government of the day led by Benjamin Disraeli. Eye-witness accounts of western journalists who visited the burned-out Bulgarian villages and described the dead bodies lying everywhere were very widely reported in the European and British press.
All this is not really much different in spirit from the eye-witness accounts of Saddam’s gassing of Halabja or the Serb mass murder at Srebrenica, nor from the way these atrocities were widely reported in the West, arousing anger and indignation, and surely they anticipate the journalistic denunciations of the inaction or impotence of the British government which have echoed down the ages.
So the basic structure and content of reporting foreign atrocities has been around for at least a hundred and fifty years. On the other hand, maybe there is something to Ignatieff’s claim that television, in particular in the 1980s and 1990s, brought these disasters into everyone’s living rooms with a new urgency and prompted calls for action and triggered mass charitable movements on a previously unknown scale.
He’s thinking of Live Aid from 1985, and that certainly felt like a truly epic event. But surely, looking back, it was only part of an ongoing continuum of public sympathy and charitable donation? There had been huge publicity about the Biafran civil war and famine 1967 to 1970, many pictures, news footage, public outcry, pressure on the government to intervene. I’ve seen Don McCullin’s photos of the prolonged Congo Crisis from the same decade, ditto. In 1971 the Concert for Bangladesh raised money for UNICEF’s work in the new country born amid famine and war, for the first time using pop culture to raise awareness about an international disaster and combining it with fund raising.
Like most journalists and commentators, Ignatieff is making the case that the thing he’s writing about is dramatically new and requires his urgent analysis, so read my stuff and buy my book – but which, on a bit of investigation, is not nearly as dramatically novel as he claims.
Chapter 1. The ethics of television
This first chapter focuses on this issue. It reflects Ignatieff’s conviction that one of the things which is new in the 1990s is the way disasters in faraway countries are mediated by television.
He describes the way television news is selected, structured and edited, the way it is a genre in its own right. Fair enough, I used to work in TV news, I know very well what he’s talking about. But hand-wringing about the positive or negative effects of TV now seems very dated, very 1980s and 1990s. Things have, to put it mildly, moved on. He was writing before the internet and a full decade before smart phones and social media began. How people get their news, and how it is packaged for their slick consumption, has dramatically changed. But in any case, I find this whole ‘media studies’ approach to newspapers, telly and social media profoundly boring.
Excitable commentators these days have transferred their moral panic from TV to social media and not a day goes by without hand-wringing articles about the devastating impact of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the rest, hand-wringing articles about ‘fake news’, and so on. Who cares. It’s not interesting because:
it is an over-analysed subject – there must by now be thousands of articles agonising over the same ‘issue’ which all end up with the same conclusion – something must be done but nobody can say exactly what
so all this kvetching leads to precisely no practical result – thousands of articles saying how terrible Facebook is and yet Facebook is still there
so ultimately it’s boring; in the 1990s people kept on watching TV news despite hundreds of articles and books saying how bad our addiction to TV was, and now, 25 years later, people carry on using Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and all the rest of them, no matter how much the chattering classes tut and fret
Ignatieff summarises the argument of his first chapter thus:
the moral empathy mediated by television has a deep philosophical history, namely the emergence of moral universalism in the Western conscience (which he traces back to Montaigne and Locke)
moral universalism (no man is an island; any man’s death diminishes me) is permanently at odds with moral particularism (we should worry most about family, friends and our own people)
in the second half of the 20th century, moral universalism has increasingly taken an apolitical siding with the victim
there is a moral risk involved, which is that too many pictures of too many victims leads to indifference or, at worst, disgust with humans, and misanthropy
this risk is increased by television’s superficiality as a medium – people watch, are shocked for 30 seconds, then are immediately distracted by something else, then something else, then something else again: pictures of disasters, famines and so on become hollowed out, the viewer becomes more and more blasé
I dislike writing about morality because I think it has so little applicability to the real world. Give a moral philosopher a minute and she’ll start describing some improbably complex scenario designed to force you to make some kind of ‘moral’ decision you would never face in real life. (‘Imagine you have the power to save the world but only by killing an innocent child, would you sacrifice one life to save billion?’ – that kind of thing. Time-passing undergraduate games which have no application to real life.)
I also dislike writing about morality because morality is so endless. It is a bottomless pit. There is no end to moral hand-wringing… but at the same time most moralising writing has little or no impact on the world. It’s a paradox that moral philosophy ought to be the most practical and applicable form of philosophy, but is often the opposite.
I also dislike writing about morality because it is often sloppy and superficial. This first chapter is by far the worst in the book. To my surprise Ignatieff bombards us with cultural references which he himself (ironically, in light of his accusations that television is superficial) treats very superficially. In rapid and superficial succession, he namechecks the history of Christianity, Roman slave society, early enlightenment philosophers like Montaigne and Bayle, then leaps to the French literary critic Roland Barthes, mentions the racism inherent in imperialism, explains some Marxist theory and practice, namechecks the French phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the American politician Robert MacNamara, the theorist of colonialism Fritz Fanon, gives a list of post-war atrocities, civil wars and famines, then a list of international charities, quotes a snippet from Don McCullin’s autobiography, then briefly mentions the Vietnam War, Bosnia, the Rwandan genocide, CBS’s nightly news, the New York Times, Goya’s Horrors of War, Picasso’s Guernica.
See what I mean? It’s magpie philosophy, feverishly jumping from reference to reference. ADHD thinking. Compare and contrast with Blood and Belonging. In that book each 30-page chapter was set in a specific location. Ignatieff met and interviewed a cross-section of people from the country at length who we got to know and understand. Their lives and experiences then shed light on the place and the situation and allowed Ignatieff to slowly draw out more general ideas about the world we live in. This is what makes it an outstanding book.
This first chapter on telly in The Warrior’s Code is the opposite. It addresses a tired theme with a machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat of highbrow references, thrown out at such a rate that there isn’t time for any of them to acquire depth or resonance. I started skipping paragraphs, then entire pages.
This introductory essay shows Ignatieff at his most modish and pretentious and sometimes plain wrong. Take, for example, his passage on the way the state funerals of President Kennedy, Winston Churchill or Lady Diana were covered on TV.
These are the sacred occasion of modern secular culture, and television has devised its own rhetoric and ritual to enfold viewers in a sense of the sacred importance of these moments: the hushed voices of the commentators; loving attention to uniforms and vestments of power; above all, the tacit inference that what is being represented is a rite of national significance. (p.31)
This is not only pompous pretentiousness using breathy metaphors to dress up the bleeding obvious, but it is also largely wrong. The funeral of a much-loved president or prime minister actually is a rite of national significance, there’s no ‘tacit inference’ about it. Television has not ‘devised its own rhetoric and ritual’ for covering these events: I think you’ll find that funerals had a fair bit of rhetoric and ritual about them centuries before TV came along, that in fact a key aspect of Homo sapiens as a species appears to be the care we’ve taken to bury people, as evidenced by graves from up to 80,000 years ago. All telly has done is develop technical ways of covering what were already highly rhetorical and ritualised events.As to ‘the hushed voices of the commentators’, well, you do tend to keep your voice down at a funeral, don’t you. As to attention to ‘uniforms and vestments of power’, again I think you’ll find people at presidential and prime ministerial level have always paid a lot of attention, since time immemorial, to wearing precisely the correct outfits at a funeral, complete with the insignia of office or medals for military types.
In other words, this paragraph is dressing up the obvious in pretentious metaphor to make it sound like insight. But it isn’t thinking or valuable analysis, it’s just being a smart-ass. Having ‘proven’ that TV has a semi-religious, ritualistic aspect, Ignatieff goes on to use this proof as the basis for further argument. But the argument, as a whole, fails, because it is based on precisely the kind of assertion and rhetoric demonstrated in this passage, rather than on the facts and real insights which characterise the far better Blood and Belonging.
This first chapter about TV ends up by concluding that watching a 90-second TV news item isn’t as informative as reading a good newspaper or magazine article about the subject, let alone a book. Well… that’s not a very original or useful thought, is it?
The final few pages call for television journalism to completely change itself in order to give more information about the world. That way, via detailed discussions of gathering crises, viewers might get to learn about famines and wars before they broke out. This ‘transformed’ type of TV might help viewers to understand the world so much better that we could all prevent atrocities and catastrophes before they happen.Well, no.
This is such a utopian notion as to be laughable.
The entire chapter now feels utterly out of date. My kids don’t watch any TV news (and neither, in fact, do I). All they know about the world comes to them via their feeds on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and a host of other social media apps I’ve never heard of.
Blood and Belonging is a brilliant book because it examines in detail the political situations of half a dozen part of the world and:
Although they’re nearly 30 years old, his snapshots of moments in each country’s history remain relevant to this day because they continue to be excellent analyses of the basic ethnic and political situations in each of the countries.
So acute is his analysis of different types of nationalism that the general principles he educes can be applied to other nationalist crises elsewhere in the world, and still apply to this day, in 2021.
Whereas this essay about the special power of television news not only felt contrived and superficial at the time (when I first read it, back in 1998) but has dated very badly and now feels relevant to no one.
Chapter 2. The narcissism of minor differences
Chapter two is much better because it starts from a specific time and place. It invokes the time Ignatieff spent in a village in Croatia holed up with Serb paramilitaries in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse, an observation post from which the bored Serbs occasionally take potshots at their one-time Croat neighbours who are holed up in a similar ruined building two hundred and fifty yards away. How did it come to this?
This chapter picks up themes from Blood and Belonging and digs deeper. The most obvious thing to an outsider like Ignatieff is not the way Serbs and Croats come from distinct ethnic and religious groups, or represent the so-called Clash of Civilisations (the concept promoted by Samuel Huntingdon which became fashionable in the 1990s). It’s the opposite. Serbs and Croats come from the same racial stock, they look the same, they speak the same language. Sure, they belong to different religions (Croats Catholic, Serbs Orthodox) but Ignatieff’s point is that hardly any of the men he talks to go actually to church and none of them gave religion a thought until a few years ago.
Ethnic conflict is not inevitable
Ignatieff’s central point is that ethnic nationalism is NOT the inevitable result of different ethnic groups sharing one territory. Serbs and Croats lived happily together in Croatia and Serbia when both were governed by an (admittedly authoritarian, communist version of) civic nationalism.
The ethnic nationalism which tore the former Yugoslavia apart was the conscious creation of irresponsible rulers. It didn’t have to happen. Ethnic conflict is not inevitable where rulers make a sustained effort to inculcate civic nationalism at every level of their society. But once you let ethnic nationalism in, let it gain a foothold, it quickly spreads. Go out of your way to actively encourage it – as Franjo Tuđman did in Croatia and Slobodan Milošević did in Serbia – and you get disaster.
That 600,000 Serbs lived inside Croatia didn’t matter when Croatia was merely part of a larger federal country. But when Croatia declared its independence on 25 June 1991 and began aggressively reviving all the symbols of Croat nationalism, those 600,000 Serbs became intensely anxious about their futures.
Instead of doing everything in his power to address those concerns, the ruler of Croatia, Franjo Tuđman, made a series of errors or deliberate provocations. He restored the Croatian flag. Street signs began to be changed to Croat. The government announced that Croat would become the official language of the country and become the only language taught in all the schools. All of this reminded older Serbs of the Yugoslav civil war of 1941 to 1945 when Croatia allied with Nazi Germany and carried out a genocide of Serbs, murdering as many as 100,000, most notably at the notorious concentration camp at Jasenovac.
In other words, Serbs began to have real concerns that they were being quickly manoeuvred into becoming second class citizens in a place where they’d lived all their lives. Tuđman failed to address these concerns and so left the door open for the leader of Serbia, Slobodan Milošević, to depict himself as the heroic saviour of the Serb minorities within Croatia and (then the other Yugoslav states, notably Bosnia-Herzegovina) and to send into those territories units of the Yugoslav Army (mostly staffed by Serbs) along with new Serb paramilitaries, to ‘save his people’.
A proper understanding of the sequence of events makes crystal clear that the situation came about because of the complete failure of all political leaders to maintain and promote civic society and their crude rush to whip upethnic nationalism of the crudest kind.
Nationalism creates communities of fear, groups held together by the conviction that their security depends on sticking together. People become ‘nationalistic’ when they are afraid; when the only answer to the question ‘who will protect me now?’ becomes ‘my own people’. (p.45)
The psychodynamics of ethnic nationalism
So much for the macro scale, the large political picture. But Ignatieff is fascinated by the nitty gritty of what the individual Serbs in the basement of a ruined farmhouse think they’re actually fighting for. And here he makes some brilliant observations about how fake ethnic nationalism is and what a struggle it is, deep down, to really believe it.
He does this through a long consideration of Sigmund Freud’s idea of the narcissism of minor differences. Freud started from the observable fact that people who hate each other the most are often very close, for example, members of the same family, or husbands and wives. Nations often reserve their strongest antipathies for their neighbours, for example the English and the Scots.
To outsiders, these look like people who live in the same place, speak the same language, share the same values and experiences, and so on. And yet they are often divided by real antagonism. It’s as if, in the absence of all the large-scale differences, all their psychic energy is focused on the tiniest trivialest details.
Like a lot of Freud, this isn’t completely persuasive but let’s run with it for the time being. But Freud says something else, which is that when individuals join a group, they voluntarily suppress their own individualism in order to belong.
Ignatieff stitches together these insights to develop his own variation on Freud’s ideas, which states that: a nationalist takes the minor differences between himself and the ‘others’ he wishes to distinguish himself from and, in the process of promoting themselves and their cause, inflates these trivial differences into shibboleths, into stumbling blocks, into the things which define himself and his group.
Nationalism is guilty of a kind of narcissistic attention to trivial details (how you wear your hat, how you pronounce one particular letter or sound, this national song instead of that national song) and exaggeration – turning apparent trivia into a matter of life and death.
It has to be like this because this systematic overvaluation of our story, of our suffering, of our language, of our patriotic songs and so on always comes at the price of a systematic denigration of other people’s same attributes. An unrealistic over-valuation of the self seems to necessarily involve an equally unrealistic depreciation of others, and this depreciation is most intense at the point where the other approaches nearest to being like you.
The nationalist thinks his tribe and nation are wonderful, special and unique so that if someone calmly points out that they are actually pretty much the same as the other half dozen tribes or nations which surround it, the nationalist will furiously deny it, and the more alike they actually are, the more furious the denial will be.
Thus there is an anxiety at the heart of nationalism. When Ignatieff talks to the Serbian paramilitary in the farm basement he slowly realises that the man has a bad conscience, a very bad conscience. When asked why he hates the Croats a couple of hundred yards away, he comes up with all kinds of reasons, many of which contradict each other, until Ignatieff realises that there is no reason. There is no rational reason why Serb should hate Croat or Croat hate Serb. Instead they have plunged into this mental condition of Group Narcissism in which they find psychological validation, reassurance and belonging by investing all their psychic energy in the Group Ideology, an investment which denies reality. Which denies that they were ever friends, went to the same schools, drank in the same bars, shopped in the same shops, were married to each other’s cousins and so on.
If you allow a rational consideration of the situation to enter, it undermines the unrealistic fantasy at the core of ethnic nationalism and this is why ethnic nationalists get so angry about it, furiously denying that they have anything in common with them, the others. They are all murderers and rapists; we are all heroes and martyrs. The possibility that ‘they are just flawed people like we are cannot be allowed otherwise it brings the entire artificial and overblown fiction of nationalist belief crashing down.
This interpretation explains for Ignatieff what he observes in so many nationalist communities which is a large amount of fakery and insincerity. It often seems as if the politicians, ideologues, spokesmen and soldiers on the ground don’t entirely believe what they say. Ethnic nationalism is always characterised by inauthenticity, shallowness and fraudulence. It is if the extravagant violence with which ethnic nationalist beliefs are stated amounts to wilful overcompensation for notions the speaker knows, deep down, not to be true. He knows that his Croatian neighbour is not actually the murderer and rapist which his Serbian nationalism tells him he is, but… but to carry on being a member of The Group he has to conquer his own doubts. He has to march in line, wear a uniform and badge, get drunk with the boys and shout out patriotic songs.
All to conceal from himself his uneasy awareness that it’s all bullshit.
I’d take Ignatieff’s idea and extend it to explain another common phenomenon. This is the way that, when you watch documentaries which interview people caught up in massacres, wars and genocides, they themselves don’t really understand what happened. They look back and they can’t really explain why they and their friends grabbed their machetes and ran round to their neighbours’ house and hacked him, his wife and his children into hunks of bloody meat, as hundreds of thousands did during the Rwandan genocide. Now, calm and quiet for the camera, sitting sedately in their garden sipping tea and talking to the interviewer, they can’t quite believe it happened. I’ve noticed this in many TV documentaries about atrocities. Years later the participants can barely believe it happened.
Clearly, this is because it was a kind of mass intoxication. It was a delirium, like a prolonged party in which everyone was in a mad, feverish, drunken mood and did all kinds of wild things… and then they sobered up. Indeed Ignatieff records how everyone he spoke to in Yugoslavia expressed surprise at how quickly the boring, everyday society they knew collapsed so completely into a Hobbesian nightmare of terror and bloodshed. They describe it as a kind of madness or intoxication.
Words of advice
He concludes with words of advice for liberal society which arise out of these investigations and which can be summarised in two strategies:
1. His analysis suggest there is a kind of basic mathematical formula at work, an inverse ratio: the more people overvalue their group, their tribe, their nation (and overvalue themselves as a part of this Heroic People), the more, as if by some fateful psychological law, they will denigrate outsiders who are not members of the Heroic People. The more intense the positive feelings for our tribe, the more intense our negative feelings for the other. The cure for this is, pretty obviously, to moderate our feelings for our side. To cultivate a nationalism which is proud of various aspect of our national life and culture, but not blind to its faults, not exaggerated.
We are likely to be more tolerant toward other identities only if we learn to like our own a little less. (p.62)
All historical precedent suggests that the more you big up yourself, the more you will find someone to denigrate and anathematise.
2. Nationalist intolerance works by converting real people into abstractions.
Nationalist intolerance requires a process of abstraction in which actual, real individuals in all their specificity are depersonalised and turned into carriers of hated group characteristics. (p.70)
The solution to this is to consider everyone as an individual, including yourself. Instead of thinking of yourself primarily as a member of this tribe or nation or people or group, you should consider yourself as an individual person. This then forms the basis for treating everyone else you meet as themselves individuals in their own right, and not as representatives of this or that group, with all the (probably) negative connotations you associate with that group.
The essential task in teaching ‘toleration’ is to help people see themselves as individuals, and then to see others as such. (p.70)
This is difficult, Ignatieff says. It goes against the grain of human nature. But it is vital to the preservation of civil society.
Credit
The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience by Michael Ignatieff was published by Chatto and Windus in 1998. All references are to the 1999 Vintage paperback edition.
New world disorder reviews
History judges no one. There will be no reckoning at all. (p.55)
As I’ve discovered in Croatia and Serbia, the four-wheel drive is the vehicle of preference for the war zones of the post-Cold War world. It has become the chariot of choice for the warlords who rule the checkpoints and the command posts of the factions, gangs, guerrilla armies, tribes that are fighting over the bones of the nation in the 1990s. (p.139)
In 1993 Michael Ignatieff was commissioned by the BBC to make a TV series in which he investigated what was already being heralded as the rise of a new kind of virulent nationalism following the end of Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. With this aim he and his TV crew travelled to Croatia and Serbia, to recently reunified Germany, to Ukraine, Quebec, Kurdistan, and Northern Ireland. Each location produced an episode of the TV series and a chapter of this book.
Ignatieff introduces autobiographical elements into his text. We learn that he has personal links with Ukraine (where his Russian great-grandfather bought a farm), Quebec (his grandparents emigrated to Canada where he spent his boyhood), Yugoslavia (where his father was posted as a diplomat and Ignatieff appears to have spent 2 years as a teenager), Germany (where he has also lived) and Northern Ireland, because he had lived and worked in London through the later 1980s and 1990s, and Ulster was (and is) the UK’s biggest nationalist problem.
But the autobiographical elements are always dignified and restrained (for example, the moving and evocative descriptions of his great-grandfather’s long-ruined house in the Ukraine). More importantly, they always serve a purpose. They are chosen to bring out the broader political, sociological or historical points which he wants to make.
1. Croatia and Serbia
The key point about the wars in the former Yugoslavia is that, despite lingering memories of the brutal civil war between Croats and Serbs 1941 to 1945 within the larger Second World War, the wars which broke out across the former Yugoslavia were not inevitable. They were the result of the calculated efforts of communist leaders to cling onto power as the Soviet Union collapsed, especially Slobodan Milošević of Serbia; and of the over-hasty and thoughtless steps to independence of Croatia under its leader Franjo Tuđman which alienated the large (600,000) Serb minority within Croatia’s borders.
Another way of looking at it is that neither Serbia nor Croatia, nor Slovenia nor Bosnia, had time to develop anything like western levels of civic society before the slide to war began, at which point the crudest ethnic nationalism became the quickest way to maintain power, for someone like Milošević, and opened the way for opportunistic warlords such as Arkan (real name Željko Ražnatović, ‘the most powerful organized crime figure in the Balkans’ to take over entire regions).
Ignatieff reiterates the themes summarised in the introduction:
a slide towards anarchy inculcates fear; ethnic nationalism addresses that fear by providing safety and security among ‘your’ people
into the vacuum left by the collapse of civil society step warlords, whose rule revives the political arrangements of the late Middle Ages
He points out, in more than one chapter, the intense psychological and erotic pleasure of being a young men in a gang of young men wielding guns or machetes and lording it over everyone you meet, forcing everyone out of their houses, looting and raping at will, bullying people at checkpoints, making them lie on the ground while you swank around above them. Photos of Arkan and his tigers indicate what a band of brothers they were and how this kind of behaviour fulfils a deep male need. (Until you’re killed in a firefight or assassinated, that is; but who wants to live forever?)
Large parts of former Yugoslavia are now ruled by figures that have not been seen in Europe since late medieval times: the warlord. They appear wherever states disintegrate: in the Lebanon, Somalia, northern India, Armenia, Georgia, Ossetia, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia. With their carphones, faxes and exquisite personal weaponry, they look post-modern, but the reality is pure early-medieval. (p.28)
(Which is why Beowulf is, in many ways, a much more reliable guide to life in many parts of the contemporary world than any number of modern novels.)
The warlord is not only the figure who naturally emerges when civic society collapses; the ethnic cleansing which was given its name in Yugoslavia is his natural strategy.
The logic of ethnic cleansing is not just motivated by nationalist hatred. Cleansing is the warlord’s coldly rational solution to the war of all against all. Rid yourself of your neighbours, the warlord says, and you no longer have to fear them. Live among your own, and you can live in peace. With me and the boys to protect you. (p.30)
Ignatieff gives a great deal of historical background, especially the long shadow cast by the Yugoslav civil war of 1941 to 1945. In this context he explains Tito’s great failing. Tito went out of his way to defuse ethnic tension in the region by carefully redistributing power between the national groups and seeding Serb communities in Croatia and Croatian communities in Serbia and so on. But he made two signal mistakes:
He tried to bury and suppress the genocidal past, as symbolised by the way he had the notorious concentration camp at Jasenovach (where as many as 250,000 people, mostly Serbs, were taken to be murdered in the most brutal ways imaginable) bulldozed to the ground instead of acknowledging the atrocity and undertaking a truth and reconciliation process.
Although Tito’s Yugoslavia gained the reputation of being more independent from Soviet control and therefore more liberal, Tito completely failed to develop any form of civic democracy. When the collapse came none of the constituent nations had any track record of real democratic debate, of addressing disputes through discussion. Instead the respective leaders (in Serbia and Croatia in particular) seized power for themselves with arrogant indifference to the large minorities within their borders (most notably the 600,000 Serbs who lived inside Croatia) which triggered a wave of paranoia, and then it only took a few sparks to ignite localised fighting, and then the leaders declared ‘It’s war!’
To summarise the road to war:
until recently the difference between Serbs and Croats were glossed over or ignored by people who lived together, intermarried, worked and played football together
they made up a community of interest where people concern themselves with jobs and pay and housing and schools
the collapse of Yugoslavia into its constituent states was a long time coming (Tito, who held the place together, died in 1980);
in the decade after Tito’s death the peoples off Yugoslavia underwent a sustained period of austerity imposed on them by the IMF and Western bankers as the price of repaying the massive debts Tito had run up in the 1970s
at the same time it became evermore obvious that the communist rulers were corrupt and creamed foreign money off to live a luxurious life; the combination of poverty and corrupt leadership led to widespread resentment
the trigger was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the realisation by the communist rulers that their rule was destined to end soon
therefore they turned to ‘national identity’ to create a new ideology to underpin their rule
civic nationalism treats every citizen as equal, regardless of race, creed, colour, gender and so on, and citizens are united by a shared commitment to the rule of law and established institutions
however, the traditions and institutions of democracy and the civic virtues of tolerance and inclusivity take time to create and inculcate via education
for demagogues in a hurry it is much much easier to whip your population up using ethnic nationalism i.e. to tell people a) they are part of a distinct ethnic group b) that this group has historically been victimised and exploited but now c) it’s time to rise up, to stop being helpless victims, to stand up to the exploiter, to seize what is rightfully ours etc
ethnic nationalism provides all kinds of advantages to both the ruler and the ruled: for the ruler it is a quick way to whip up fervent support for a National Idea and cover up your own corruption; for the ruled the excitable fervour of nationalist belief makes you feel authentic, like you finally belong; it creates a community of equals, your tribe, gives opportunities to rise in the ranks and lord it over friends and neighbours who thought you were a loser: all the while this ideology explains that everything bad that’s ever happened in your life and to your country by blaming it on them, the others, the outsiders, who must be purged, expelled or plain liquidated from the territory you now consider your Holy Soil
Update
Ignatieff visited in 1993 and travelled through zones where different militias held neighbouring villages and had dynamited all the homes belonging to their ethnic adversaries. Reading his account you get the sense that some kind of uneasy peace had settled. But this was way wrong. The wars in Yugoslavia were to continue right up till 2001, centred on the cruelty and then Serb massacres of the Bosnian war, and then, when the Serbs refused to cease killing Kosovans, the 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Belgrade.
The Ten-Day War (1991)
Croatian War of Independence (1991 to 1995)
Bosnian War (1992 to 1995)
Kosovo War (1998 to 1999)
Insurgency in the Preševo Valley (1999 to 2001)
Insurgency in the Republic of Macedonia (2001)
2. Germany
Ignatieff’s prose is a little more purple and metaphorical in the chapter on Germany. This is because the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the epicentre of the crisis which swept the Soviet regime and its east European colonies. So he uses descriptive prose to try and capture what East Germany felt like during the long years of drab, repressed communist rule, and then what it felt like in the ecstatic months of protest leading up to the demolition of the wall.
Now, four years later, all the euphoria has gone. The East Germans he speaks to are a shabby, disillusioned bunch, very conscious of the way the West Germans quickly took to looking down on them, accusing them of being workshy malingerers.
What happened was a massive experiment in political theory. Divide a nation in half. Keep them utterly separate, physically and psychologically isolated, for 45 years. Then suddenly remove all barriers and let them reunite. Then ask: to what extent does the people (an unchanging social and cultural group) make the state? Or how much does the state shape and mould the people? I.e. in those 45 years, how much had the wildly divergent West and East German governments managed to mould their populations?
Short answer: states mould the people. During the Cold War West Germans were quietly proud that East Germany was the most economically successful of Russia’s colonies. But when the wall came down and Western industrialists visit the East’s fabled factories they discovered they were a shambles, incompetent managers overseeing workshy workers. They would have to start again from scratch, inculcating Germany virtues: timekeeping, conscientiousness, hard work.
In reality, it was less a reunification than the West colonising the East. Ignatieff meets Helmut Börner, the tired manager of a museum in Leipzig, so conceived and run to flatter the East German authorities and their Russian sponsors and they both reflect on how quickly the new Germany will erase memories of the shameful East. Ignatieff visits a sweaty underground club full of pounding music which has the exotic twist that it used to be the torture rooms of the East German security police. He looks around. It’s only a few years after reunification but the kids don’t care. They’re dancing and getting off with each other. Life is for living.
Ignatieff interviews a neo-Nazi called Leo who cheerfully denies the Holocaust and yearns to reconquer Silesia, now part of Poland, where his family came from. Ignatieff thinks the resurgence of neo-Nazism is dangerous but not really worrying, when it amounts to gangs of skinheads fighting immigrants.
More worrying is the growth of right-wing anti-immigrant parties, exemplified by the retired prison officer and local politician, Herr K, standing for election for the Republikaner Party. He wants rights for immigrants restricted more than they already were in 1990s Germany (where a Turk could be born, educated, work, pay taxes, and yet never achieve formal German citizenship).
Because there’s no actual war in reunified Germany, this long chapter is the most varied and subtle. It is a beautifully observed essay on the contradictions and quirks of the German nation and its ideas of itself, something we Brits rarely hear about.
Update
That was a long time ago. Inequality between East and West Germany has proved an intractable problem, admittedly partly because the East is more rural than the dynamic, industrialised West. And the refugee crisis he discusses turned out to be just the harbinger of a central issue of the 21st century, which is what to do about the increasing numbers of refugees and migrants wanting to escape Africa and the Middle East and start new lives in affluent Europe. Which came to a head in the refugee crisis of 2015.
And the right-wing Republikan Party candidate Ignatieff interviews has been superseded by the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland, founded in 2013 and which now holds 83 seats in the Bundestag. Germany’s struggle with its past, with its national identity, and its multicultural present, is a microcosm of the problems which face all Western nations.
3. Ukraine
Ignatieff’s great-grandfather was Russian and bought an estate in the Ukraine in the 1860s when he was ambassador to Constantinople (over 1,000 miles away). Ignatieff flies in to Kiev and takes a bus then taxi out to the old estate, stays the night, interviews the priest in the village church and the manager of the collective farm.
What keeps coming over is his sense of the Soviet Empire, as he calls it, the largest empire of the twentieth century, as a magnificent and catastrophic failure. In the Ukraine Soviet failure and tyranny had disastrous effects.
Something like 3 million Ukrainians died of hunger between 1931 and 1932. A further million were killed during the collectivisation of agriculture and the purges of intellectuals and party officials later in the decade. An additional 2 to 3 million Ukrainians were deported to Siberia. The peasant culture of small farmers and labourers that my grandfather grew up among was exterminated. This was when the great fear came. And it never left… (p.91)
Like the communist officials in charge in Yugoslavia, the leaders of communist Ukraine realised they could transition to independence and still remain in power, so they deftly adopted nationalist clothes, language and slogans, despite the fact that only a few years previously they had been locking up nationalists as subversives. Ignatieff meets the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, a smooth operator
He speaks to a Ukrainian journalist working for the Financial Times and a former nationalist, locked up in prison. Their fear is what happened to Russia will happen to Ukraine i.e. a relentless slide into economic collapse and anarchy.
He attends a service of the Ukrainian Uniate Church in St George’s Cathedral, Lvov, and has an insight. The nationalists dream that their entire country will be like this congregation:
Standing among men and women who do not hide the intensity of their feelings, it becomes clear what nationalism really is: the dream that a whole nation could be like a congregation; singing the same hymns, listening to the same gospel, sharing the same emotions, linked not only to each other, but to the dead buried beneath their feet. (p.95)
In other words nationalism can be a beautiful dream, a vision of unity and belonging, typically, as here, through religion, language and song.
Also, this passage mentions the importance of the dead and where the dead are buried. The land where the dead are buried. For the first time Ignatieff feels a stirring of that feeling for the land where his great grandfather and mother are buried, which he is the first member of his family to revisit since the revolution of 1917.
When he meets the Tartars returning to Crimea from their long exile in central Asia, they are even more obsessed about the land, about the soil, about the sacred earth of their ancestors (pages 99 to 103). Ignatieff begins to understand how our individual lives are trite and superficial, but acquire depth and meaning in light of these ancestral attachments.
Land is sacred because it where your ancestors lie. Ancestors must be remembered because human life is a small and trivial thing without the anchoring of the past. Land is worth dying for, because strangers will profane the graves… (p.93)
Update
In 2013, when the government of President Viktor Yanukovych decided to suspend the Ukraine–European Union Association Agreement and seek closer economic ties with Russia, it triggered several months of demonstrations and protests known as the Euromaidan.
The following year this escalated into the 2014 Ukrainian revolution that led to the overthrow of Yanukovych and the establishment of a new, more Europe-facing government. However, the overthrow of Russia-friendly Yanukovych led to the annexation of Crimea by Russia in March 2014 and the War in Donbas in April 2014.
4. Quebec
Ignatieff is Canadian, he grew up in Ottowa where his Russian grandparents had emigrated. As a boy he knew about the Frenchies up the road but he never actually met any. Now, as an adult, he realises he has never actually visited the French part of his own nation, Quebec. He thought he knew Canada, but realises now it was only a Canada of his imagining. Which leads him to realise that all nations are, in a sense, imaginary.
You can never know the strangers who make up a nation with you. So you imagine what it is that you have in common and in this shared imagining, strangers become citizens, that is, people who share both the same rights and the same image of the place they live in. A nation, therefore, is an imagined community.
But now he realises that during his young manhood he completely failed to imagine what it felt like for the other community in Canada. He recaps his definitions of nationalism, in order to go on and define federalism, for this chapter will turn out to be an investigation of the strengths and weaknesses of federalism. First nationalism:
Nationalism is a doctrine which hold (1) that the world’s people are divided into nations (2) that these nations should have the right to self-determination, and (3) that full self-determination requires statehood. (p.110)
Federalism is the antithesis of this idea of nationalism, for it holds that different peoples do not need a state to enjoy self-determination. Under federalism two different groups agree to share power while retaining self government over matters relating to their identity. Federalism:
seeks to reconcile two competing principles: the ethnic principle according to which people wish to be ruled by their own; with the civic principle, according to which strangers wish to come together to form a community of equals, based not on ethnicity but on citizenship. (p.110)
But federalism is not doing so well. He lists the world’s most notable federal states – Canada, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Belgium, India, the former USSR – and then points out that all of them are in deep trouble. The Czechs and Slovaks couldn’t live together; Yugoslavia collapsed in a welter of wars; India struggles with regional separatism. The very concept of federalism is in trouble around the world and so his long chapter on Canada treats it as a kind of test bed or laboratory to assess federalism’s long-term prospects for survival.
He gives a lot of detail about Canadian history, and the dawn of modern Quebecois nationalism in 1960, none of which I knew about. But out of this arises yet another definition or aspect of nationalism:
Nationalism has often been a revolt against modernity, a defence of the backwardness of economically beleaguered regions and classes from the flames of individualism, capitalism, Judaism and so on. (p.116)
Yes, this makes sense of the aggressive over-compensation of so many nationalists, who all speak a variation on the comic stereotype of the English provincial: ‘You come down here with your fancy London ways, with your multicultural this and your cosmopolitan that. Well, people round these parts live a more simple life, see, a more honest and authentic life than you la-di-dah city types.’ They flaunt their backwardness.
But this leads Ignatieff into a paradoxical development which he spends some time analysing. In the Canada of his boyhood the Quebec French really were discriminated against, weren’t served in shops unless they spoke English, were perceived as small-town bumpkins with a lower standard of education, dominated by an authoritarian Catholicism and with extravagantly large families (ten children!).
So, Ignatieff says, surely as these very real obstacles have been overcome, as Quebecois have become more urban, progressive, women’s liberation has led to much smaller families, they’re all less in thrall to the church, surely they would abandon their nationalism and become modern urban cosmopolitans like him? But no. Contrary to everything Ignatieff would have expected, Quebec nationalism has grown. The paradox is exemplified by a French Canadian Ignatieff interviews who is president of a very successful bank.
I had assumed that global players cease to care about nationalism. I was wrong. (p.115)
Historical grievances are never forgotten. The British won the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and Quebec nationalists are still unhappy about it. He talks to modern journalists and a group of students. All of them are proudly nationalistic and want their own Quebec. There’s a division between those who want an actual independent state with its own flag and seat at the UN, and those who just want almost complete autonomy. But they all see Quebec as not a part of Canada or a province of Canada but a separate nation and a separate people.
But the problem with nationalism is it’s infectious. If Quebecuois want a state of their own so they can be a majority in their own state and not a despised minority in English-speaking Canada, what about two other constituencies?
1. Ignatieff goes to spend time with a native American, a Cree Indian. There are about 11,000 of them and they reject all the languages and traditions and legal concepts of the white people from down south, whatever language they speak. The Cree think of themselves as a people and they want their own protection.
2. Then Ignatieff goes to spend time with some of the English-speaking farmers who live in Quebec, have done for hundred and fifty years. No-one tells their story, the history books ignore them, Quebec nationalists have written them out of their narrative.
Nationalism spreads like the plague, making every group which can define itself in terms of language, tradition, religion and so on angry because it doesn’t have a nation of its own. You could call it the Yugoslav Logic. Smaller and smaller nations become shriller and shriller in their calls for ethnic purity.
And, of course, increasingly anxious about all the outsiders, non-members of the language group, or religion or whatever, who remain inside its borders. Read about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires to see what happens next. Insofar as the Sudeten Germans found themselves in the alien state of Czechoslovakia, the Second World War was caused by the collapse of the Austrian empire into impractical ethnic nation states.
Ignatieff doesn’t state this explicitly but I see this nationalism as a malevolent virus which, wherever it goes, creates antagonism at best, sporadic violence, if you’re not too unlucky or, given enough economic collapse or social stress, war.
Ignatieff visits Dennis Rousseau, a working class guy who works in a local paper mill and plays ice hockey in Trois Rivieres which is, apparently, the working class neighbourhood of Quebec. In a long conversation Rousseau won’t budge from his position that he wants Quebec to be independent because Ontario (capital of English-speaking Canada) isn’t doing enough for the struggling papermill industry, for his town and his peers. No amount of evidence to the contrary can shift his simple conviction and Ignatieff wonders whether nationalist sentiment like Rousseau’s is, among other things, a way of avoiding the truth about the changing economic situation.
All round the developed world businesses are being exported and once prosperous communities are getting poor. This is a function of the super-charged neo-liberal global capitalism which has triumphed since the collapse of communism, all those manufacturing jobs going to China and India.
Apart from all its other appeals (the very deep psychological appeal of belonging, of having a home, having people around you who understand your language, your religion, your music, your jokes) this kind of nationalism provides simple answers to intractably complicated economic realities. Twenty years after this book was published Donald Trump would reach out to the tens of millions who live in those kind of communities where life used to be great and now it isn’t with his brand of whooping Yankee nationalism.
There are perhaps 40 million Kurds. The territory Kurdish mostly inhabited by Kurds and which Kurdish nationalists would like to be an independent Kurdish state straddles four of the fiercest nations on earth: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
Following the defeat of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War, the Kurds in Iraq rose up against his rule in the Kurdish intifada of March 1991. Hussein unleashed the full might of his army against them, driving hundreds of thousands of men, women and children up into the northern mountains until the Western allies intervened and set up a no-fly zone, preventing Saddam massacring any more of them.
It is this enclave which Ignatieff visits in 1993. With his typically intellectual perspective, he points out that it is something new: the first ever attempt by the UN to protect a people from the genocidal attacks of their national ruler. The enclave was far from being a state, but the Kurds had done as much as they could to make it like one, raising their own flag, holding elections. As in Ukraine among the Crimean Tartars, he realises how much the land, the actual soil, means in the mythology of nationalism:
At its most elemental, nationalism is perhaps the desire to have political dominion over a piece of land that one loves. Before anything, there must be a fierce attachment to the land itself and a sense that there is nothing else like this, nothing so beautiful, anywhere else in the world. (p.149)
Ignatieff travels and meets: representatives of the democratic party, the KDP, which has been run by the Barzani family for generations; then up into the mountains to see the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers Party, one of the last doctrinaire Marxist guerrilla groups in the world.
He is taken on a tour of Halabja, the town Saddam ordered his jets to fly over and bomb with a cocktail of chemical gasses, resulting in at least 5,000 dead. It is, of course, a horrific sight but, as always, with Ignatieff, he not only notes and records touching, moving, terrifying details: he also extracts interesting and useful points about nationalism and death. First is the way nationalist ideology gives a meaning to life and death, especially the latter:
Nationalism seeks to hallow death, to redeem individual loss and link it to destiny and fate. A lonely frightened boy with a gun who dies at a crossroads in a fire-fight ceases to be just a lonely frightened boy. In the redeeming language of nationalism, he joins the imagined community of all the martyrs. (p.148)
Thus the roads of Kurdistan are marked by portraits of killed peshmerga fighters staring down from the plinths which once carried portraits of Saddam. He goes on to make a point about genocide. He doesn’t phrase it like this, but you can think of genocide as the dark side of nationalism, the demonic brother. If a nation is defined entirely by ‘the people’, defined as one ethnic group, who occupy it, then anyone outside that ethnic group should not be there, has no right to the land, is a pollutant, a potential threat.
Before the experience of genocide, a people may not believe they belong to a nation. Before genocide, they may believe it is a matter of personal choice whether they belong or believe. After genocide it becomes their fate. Genocide and nationalism have an entwined history. It was genocide that convinced the Jews and even convinced the gentile world that they were a people who would never be safe until they had a nation state of their own. (p.151)
The Turks have been waging war against their Kurds since the foundation of modern Turkey in 1923. Its leader Kemal Ataturk envisioned Turkey as a modern, secular nation with a civic nationalism. Logically, therefore, there was no room for tribes and ethnic nationalism which destabilised his vision of a secular state. Hence the aggressive attempts to ban the Kurdish language in schools, erase their traditions and songs, even the word Kurd is banned; officials refer to the ‘mountain Turks’. To quote Wikipedia:
Both the PKK and the Turkish state have been accused of engaging in terror tactics and targeting civilians. The PKK has historically bombed city centres, while Turkey has depopulated and burned down thousands of Kurdish villages and massacred Kurds in an attempt to root out PKK militants.
For the only place in the book Ignatieff loses his cool when he is assigned a 24-year-old Turkish special forces agent who carefully chaperones him around the ‘pacified’ region of south-east Turkey, where the local Kurds obviously go in fear of their lives, and the agent carefully monitors everyone Ignatieff speaks to, while another spook photographs them all. The agent’s name happens to be Feret and this leads Ignatieff into the borderline insulting use of the word ‘ferret’ to refer to all such spooks and spies and security force agents and repressers and torturers (pages 158 to 161).
You can’t compromise when the very unity of the state is at stake. There is no price that is not worth paying. Pull the balaclava over your face; put some bullets in the chamber; go out and break some Kurdish doors down in the night. Pull them out of bed. Put a bullet through their brains. Dirty wars are a paradise for ferrets. (p.161)
Update
A lot has happened to the Kurds in the 28 years since Ignatieff visited them. The primary fact was the Allied invasion of Iraq in 2003 which led to the break-up of Iraq during which Iraqi Kurds were able to cement control over the territory in the north of the country which they claim. A Kurd, Jalal Talabani, was even elected president of post-Saddam Iraq (2005 to 2014). Kurdish fighters were also involved in the Syrian civil war (2011 to the present) and involved in the complex fighting around the rise of Islamic State. And low-level conflict between the Turkish-facing PKK and Turkish security forces continues to this day.
Northern Ireland
Like most English people I couldn’t give a monkey’s about Northern Ireland. I was a boy when the Troubles kicked off around 1970 and Irish people shooting each other and blowing each other up was the wallpaper of my teenage years and young manhood, along with glam rock and the oil crisis.
Decades ago I was hit by flying glass from a car showroom when the IRA blew up an army barracks on the City Road in London. Like the Islamist terrorists who drove a van into tourists on London Bridge then went on the rampage through Borough Market ( 3 June 2017) it was just one of those mad features of modern life which you cross your fingers and hope to avoid.
For the first time I get a bit bored of Ignatieff when he says he went to Ulster to discover more about ‘Britishness’. I’ve read hundreds of commentators who’ve done the same thing over the last 50 years and their clever analyses are all as boring and irrelevant as each other. Most English people wish Northern Ireland would just join the Republic and be done with it. The situation in Ulster doesn’t tell you anything about ‘Britain’, it just tells you about the situation in Ulster.
Ignatieff still makes many good points, though. He adds yet another category of nationalist conflict to his list: which is one caused – as in Ukraine, as in Croatia (as in Rwanda) – where there is a history of oppression of one community by another. The proximate cause of the Rwandan genocide was the conscious, deliberate, well worked-out plan for extermination devised by the ideologues of Hutu Power. But the deeper cause was the long period of time when the majority Hutus had been treated like peasants by the aristocratic Tutsis. Visitors to the country couldn’t tell the two groups apart, they lived in the same communities, spoke the same language, used the same currency. But deep in many Hutu breasts burned anger at generations of injustice and oppression. Breeding ground for virulent vengeful ethnic nationalism.
Same in Ulster where Roman Catholics were treated as second class citizens since partition in 1922, and were actively barred from various civil positions and comparable to the WASP prejudice against the Catholic French in Quebec, or to the much more vicious colour bar in the Deep South of America.
It is the memory of domination in time past, or fear of domination in time future, not difference itself, which has turned conflict into an unbreakable downward spiral of political violence. (p.164)
But much of Ignatieff’s discussion deals in clichés and stereotypes about Britain and its imperial decline which have been discussed to death during the extended nightmare of the Brexit debates.
He spends most of the chapter in the company of working class youths in a Protestant slum street in the build-up to the big bonfire night which inaugurates the July marching season. He notes how fanatical they are about the symbols of Britishness, pictures of the Queen, the Union Jack plastered over everything.
Which is when he springs another of his Big Ideas: Ulster Protestantism is like the cargo cults anthropologists have identified in the South Seas. The great white god arrives by ship, fights a battle, saves the local tribe and their religion from neighbours and rivals, then departs never to return. But generations of tribespeople wear out their lives waiting, waiting for that return, and turning the bric-a-brac the white man left at random into relics and cult objects to be worshipped at home-made shrines on special holy days (pages 182 to 184).
Same, Ignatieff claims, with Ulster Protestantism. It has become a weirdly deformed caricature of the culture of the homeland. While mainland England has become evermore secularised and multicultural, Ulster Protestantism has become evermore obsessed and hag-ridden by its forbidding religion, evermore furiously insistent on its ethnic purity, evermore angry at what it perceives as its ‘betrayal’ by the great white god across the water.
Apart from the historical accident of a handful of symbols (Queen, flag, crucifix) it has grown utterly separate from English culture and is an almost unrecognisable caricature of it.
Loyalism is an ethnic nationalism which, paradoxically, uses the civic symbols of Britishness – Crown and Union Jack – to mark out an ethnic identity. In the process the civic content is emptied out: Loyalist Paramilitarism, for example, makes only too clear what a portion of the Loyalist community thinks of the rule of law, the very core of British civic identity. In the end, the Crown and the Union Jack are reduced to meaning what they signify when tattooed on the skin of poor, white teenagers. They are only badges of ethnic rage. (p.185)
Update
The situation Ignatieff was reporting on in 1993 was superseded by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998 and the 23 years of peace which have followed. Nowadays, there is much feverish speculation that the peace may be jeopardised by the complicated economic and political fallout of Brexit. Maybe a new generation of men in balaclavas will return and think they can achieve something by blowing up cars and shooting farmers.
The bigger picture, though, is that Ulster is now part of a United Kingdom substantially changed since Ignatieff’s time, because of the devolution of Scotland and Wales. Somehow, Scotland and Wales are still part of something called the United Kingdom but articles every day in the press wonder how long this can last.
Personally, I feel like I’ve been hearing about Scottish nationalism and Plaid Cymru all my adult life. Although they now have their own expensive parliament buildings and control over their healthcare and education systems, the basic situation doesn’t seem to have changed much – both Scots and Welsh nationalists continue to make a good living criticising the English politicians who pay for their nations to remain solvent.
I have no skin in the game. If they want to be independent nations, let them. Fly free, my pretties. According to a 2020 YouGov poll, my indifference is fairly representative of my people, the fat lazy English:
Less than half of English people (46%) say they want Scotland to remain part of the UK. Few want to see the nation pull away, however, at just 13%. Most of the rest (34%) have no opinion, saying that they consider it a matter for the people of Scotland to decide.
It seems unlikely that Scotland or Wales will ever become independent nations or that Northern Ireland will join the Republic, and for the same simple reason. Money. All three receive substantial subsidies from London and would become poorer overnight if they left. Try and sell that to your electorate.
Brief summary
Reviewing the six nationalist issues reviewed in the book prompts a simple conclusion which is that: none of these conflicts have gone away. Nationalism is like a terrible disease: once it has gripped a people, a tribe, a region, and once it has been used to set populations at loggerheads with other neighbouring groups or with the very state they find themselves in, it is almost impossible to extirpate. Nationalism is a virus which has no cure. Like COVID-19 we just have to learn to live with it and try to mitigate its effects before they become too destructive, before there’s an outbreak of another, more virulent variety.
The Cold War as the last age of empire
The Cold War was a lot of things to a lot of people but I am still reeling from one of the biggest of Ignatieff’s Big Ideas, which is that the Cold War amounted to the last phase of imperialism.
There was the early phase of Portuguese and Spanish imperialism; there was the rivalry between the French and British around the world in the 18th century; the Europeans grabbed whatever bits of the world they could bite off during the 19th century; and then the French, British, Dutch, Belgians and a few others hung onto their colonies through the catastrophic twentieth century and into the 1960s.
Then they left in a great wind of change. But they did so at exactly the same time as the spreading Cold War meant that huge areas of the world came under the direct or indirect control of the Americans or the Soviets. Although it wasn’t their primary goal, the CIA supporting their authoritarian regimes and the Soviet advisers to countless communist groups, between them they sort of – up to a point – amounted to a kind of final reincarnation of imperial police. Up to a point, they policed and restrained their client states and their opponents around the world. They reined them in.
And then, in 1990, with little or no warning, the imperial police left. They walked away. And instead of blossoming into the wonderful, democratic, peaceful world which the naive and stupid expected – chaos broke out in a hundred places round the world. The gloves were off and ethnic nationalism and ethnic conflicts which had been bottled up for decades, exploded all over.
Because this ideology, this psychology of blood and belonging and ‘kill the outsider’ – it’s easier for hundreds of millions of people; it provides a psychological, cultural and linguistic home, a refuge in otherwise poverty-stricken, war-torn, economically doomed countries.
It offers reassurance and comfort to stricken populations, it flatters people that whatever is wrong with the country is not their fault – and it offers an easy route to power and strategies to stay in power for demagogic leaders, by whipping up ethnic or nationalist sentiment and justified violence against the Outsider. Demonising outsiders helps to explain away the injustices and economic failure which somehow, inexplicably, despite their heroic leadership, continues.
Blame it on the others, the outsiders, the neighbouring tribe, the people with funny shaped noses, different coloured skin, spooky religions, use any excuse. The poison of ethnic nationalism is always the easy option and even in the most advanced, Western, civic societies – it is always there, threatening to break out again.
Concluding thoughts on the obtuseness of liberalism
Ignatieff ends with a brief conclusion. It is that his liberal beliefs have profoundly misled him. Educated at a top private school, clever enough to hold positions at a series of the world’s best universities (Harvard, Cambridge) and to mingle with the most gifted of the cosmopolitan elite, he thought the whole world experienced life and thought like him. Idiotic. The journeys he made for this book have made him realise that the vast majority of the human population think nothing like him.
This was crystallised by one particular type of experience which kept cropping up wherever he went. On all his journeys he saw again and again that most of the warlords and fighters are young men aged 18 to 25 (p.187). Until he met them at roadblocks and checkpoints he had not understood what masculinity is. An etiolated, lily-pink liberal with the impeccable manners handed down by his family of Russian diplomats, Ignatieff had no idea what men, poor men, uneducated men, out there in the world, are really like.
Until I had encountered my quotient of young males intoxicated by the power of the guns on their hips I had not understood how deeply pleasurable it is to have the power of life and death in your hands. It is a characteristic liberal error to suppose that everyone fears and hates violence. I met lots of young men who loved the ruins, loved the destruction, loved the power that came from the barrels of their guns. (p.187)
Only someone so phenomenally clever and immaculately well educated could be so remote from the world as it actually is, from human nature in all its appalling greed and violence. Meeting gun-toting warlords made him realise more than ever that the aim of civic society is to quell, control and channel this kind of male aggression which he had never experienced before.
I began the journey as a liberal, and I end it as one, but I cannot help thinking that liberal civilisation – the rule of laws not men, of argument in place of force, of compromise in place of violence – runs deeply against the human grain and is only achieved and sustained by the most unremitting struggle against human nature. (p.189)
And the best all-round way to prevent the outburst of ethnic nationalism and the almost inevitable violence which accompanies it, is the creation and maintenance of a strong stable state with institutions which distribute and diversify power, which act as checks and balances on themselves, which are permanently capable of correction and reform, including the most important kind of reform which is the ability to get rid of your political leaders on a regular basis.
The only reliable antidote to ethnic nationalism turns out to be civic nationalism, because the only guarantee that ethnic groups will live side by side in peace is shared loyalty to a state, strong enough, fair enough, equitable enough, to command their obedience. (p.185)
The fundamental responsibility of a government is not to promote ‘equality’ and the raft of other fine, liberal values. They’re nice-to-haves. It is more profound than that. First and foremost it is the eternal struggle to build and maintain civic nationalism – because the alternative is horror.
Credit
Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism by Michael Ignatieff was published by BBC Books in 1993. All references are to the revised 1995 Vintage paperback edition.
This is an outstanding book, bubbling over with ideas and insights on a subject which is as relevant today as when it was written back in the early 90s. It’s actually the book of a BBC TV series. In 1993 Ignatieff and his five-man TV crew travelled to Croatia and Serbia, recently reunified Germany, Ukraine, Quebec, Kurdistan, and Northern Ireland to see at first hand what was already being heralded as the rise of a new kind of virulent nationalism following the end of Cold War and fall of the Soviet Union.
The text he’s produced is the extreme opposite of the two books of journalism about the Rwandan genocide which I’ve just reviewed, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (1998) and Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995).
What irritated me about those books was that the authors had travelled widely and had unparalleled access to loads of eye witnesses and key officials and yet were incapable of coming up with a single useful idea about what they had seen. The best Gourevitch could manage was repeated references to the Bible story of Cain and Abel and the best Keane could come up with at the very end of his book was the pathetic injunction ‘that we do not forget’ (p.191).
This is because they are journalists, paid to get to the trouble zone, report what they see, what people say, and leave it that. The lack of intellectual content worth the name explains why I find books by even very good journalists like John Simpson or Robert Fisk disappointingly empty of ideas.
By contrast, Ignatieff is a trained historian and political scientist, who has held a dazzling array of positions at academic institutions around the world, including a PhD from Harvard and senior research fellowship at Cambridge, before his writing and teaching became more involved with political theory, international law and human rights.
The result is that this book, although essentially a collection of travelogues and interviews just like Gourevitch and Keane’s, overflows with brilliant, invaluable insights into the origins and nature of the chaotic new nationalism and ethnic conflicts which followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the imperial duopoly which had run the world from 1945 to 1990 (otherwise known as the Cold War).
Right at the start of the book, Ignatieff takes all he’s learned on his journeys and boils it down into a set of principles and insights which are laid out in his ten-page introduction. I think these ten pages are among the most intelligent things I’ve ever read on any subject. Here’s a summary.
Blood and Belonging
As it passes beyond a UN-held checkpoint in Pakrac between Serb- and Croat-held territory in the former Yugoslavia, the crew’s van is stopped by drunk Serbian paramilitaries who insist they are spies because they saw them talking to Croatians, and are about to hijack the van and drive it off who knows where, maybe to shoot them all, when one of the UN soldiers intervenes, persuades the drunk Serbs out of the van, and lets them drive on their way.
This was the moment in my journeys in search of the new nationalism when I began to understand what the new world order actually looks like: paramilitaries, drunk on plum brandy and ethnic paranoia, trading shots with each other across a wasteland; a checkpoint between them, placed there by something loftily called ‘the international community’, but actually manned by just two anxious adolescents… (p.2)
When the Berlin Wall came down Ignatieff, like other cosmopolitan liberals of his type, thought it heralded a new era of freedom and justice. This is because (as I keep banging on) Ignatieff and his class do not realise what a tiny tiny fraction of the world’s population they represent – highly privileged, affluent, super-well-educated, international liberals gaily flying around a world mostly inhabited by resentful peasantries crushed by poverty and trapped in failing states.
He says the Cold War was really an extension of the era of European imperialism but in which the world was ruled not by half a dozen European nations but by America or Russia. Cold War terror i.e. the fear of nuclear armageddon, produced peace and stability, of a sort. The fall of the Berlin wall signalled the end of this final phase of Western imperialism. But it wasn’t followed by a blossoming of civic nationalism of the sort Ignatieff and his fellow liberals hoped for (‘with blithe lightness of mind’), for the very simple reason that most people are not sensitive liberal playwrights like Vaclav Havel.
What has succeeded the last age of empire is a new age of violence. The key narrative of the new world order is the disintegration of nation states into ethnic civil war; the key architects of that order are warlords; and the key language of our age is ethnic nationalism. (p.2)
Three levels of nationalism
As a political doctrine, nationalism is the belief that the world’s people are divided into nations, and that each of these nations has the right of self-determination, either as self-governing units within existing nation states or as nation states of their own.
As a cultural ideal, nationalism is the claim that while men and women have many identities, it is the nation which provides them with their primary form of belonging.
As a moral ideal, nationalism is an ethic of heroic sacrifice, justifying the use of violence in the defence of one’s nation against enemies, internal or external. (p.3)
In the contexts Ignatieff is looking at, nationalism is about violence.
Nationalism is centrally concerned to define the conditions under which force or violence is justified in a people’s defence, when their right of self-determination is threatened or denied. Self-determination here may mean either democratic self-rule or the exercise of cultural autonomy, depending on whether the national group in question believes it can achieve its goals within the framework of an existing state or seeks a state of its own. (p.3)
Civic nationalism versus ethnic nationalism
Nationalisms talk a lot about ‘the people’ and sometimes invoke ideas of ‘democracy’ but this is deceptive, since ‘the people’ often turns out not to include a lot of the people who live in a particular area, in fact the exact opposite, it turns out that ‘the people’ refers to a restricted and highly defined set. To clarify this, Ignatieff defines another two types of nationalism.
Civic nationalism maintains that the nation should be composed of all those – regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, language or ethnicity – who subscribe to the nation’s political creed. This nationalism is called civic because it envisages the nation as a community of equal, rights-bearing citizens, united in patriotic attachment to a shared set of political practices and values. This nationalism is necessarily democratic because it vests sovereignty in all of the people. (p.4)
Ignatieff says this concept of civic nationalism was pioneered in Great Britain which by the mid-eighteenth century consisted of a nation state united by a civic and not an ethnic definition of belonging i.e. shared attachment to certain institutions: the Crown, Parliament, the rule of law.
Admittedly this was a civic model restricted to white, (straight) male landowners. The history of nations characterised by this kind of civic nationalism, such as the UK and USA, can be seen as one in which during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those excluded groups fought for full civic inclusion.
As a result of their struggle, most Western states now define their nationhood in terms of common citizenship and not by common ethnicity. (p.4)
The other type of nationalism is ethnic nationalism. This is typified by Germany. When Napoleon occupied the German principalities in 1806 he unleashed a wave of patriotic fervour. German poets and politicians argued that it was not the state which created a people – since they did not then possess one unified state – but the people, the ethnic group, the Volk, which forms the state. Instead of the cold logic of the Napoleonic code with its abstract insistence on ‘rights’, German writers across the board insisted a nation was made out of feeling, a feel for and love for the people’s language, religion, customs and traditions.
This German tradition of ethnic nationalism was to go on and reach its acme in the hysterical nationalism of Hitler and the Nazis. But Ignatieff points out that it was this form of ethnic or cultural nationalism – not the civic nationalism of Britain or France – which inspired intellectuals in all the countries of Eastern Europe which, in the nineteenth century, were controlled by foreign empires (Poles and Ruthenians and Baltic peoples by the Russian Empire; Serbs, Romanians and Bulgarians under the Ottoman Empire; Croats by the Austro-Hungarian Empire).
Sociological realism
Which of these two types of nationalism, civic or ethnic, is a more realistic reflection of actual societies? Which has more sociological realism?
Of these two types of nationalism, the civic has a greater claim to sociological realism. Most societies are not mono-ethnic; and even when they are, common ethnicity does not of itself obliterate division, because ethnicity is only one of many claims on an individual’s loyalty. According to the civic nationalist creed, what holds a society together is not common roots but law. By subscribing to a set of democratic procedures and values, individuals can reconcile their right to shape their own lives with their need to belong to a community. This in turn assumes that national belonging can be a form of rational attachment.
Ethnic nationalism claims, by contrast, that an individual’s deepest attachments are inherited, not chosen. It is the national community which defines the individual, not the individuals which define the national community. This psychology of belonging may have greater depth than civic nationalism’s but the sociology which accompanies it is a good deal less realistic. The fact that, for example two Serbs share Serbian ethnic identity may unite them against Croats, but it will do nothing to stop them fighting each other over jobs, spouses, scarce resources and so on. Common ethnicity, by itself, does not create social cohesion or community, and when it fails to do so, as it must, nationalist regimes are necessarily impelled towards maintaining unity by force rather than by consent. This is one reason why ethnic nationalist regimes are more authoritarian than democratic. (p.5)
You can see why civic nationalism is harder to create than ethnic nationalism because it depends on two things: strong, functioning, well-established and long-lasting institutions, and an educated population. The UK has both, having had universal primary school education for 150 years, and a complex web of long-running institutions like the monarchy, Houses of Parliament, an independent judiciary, local governments, courts, police forces and so on. It has taken a long time and successive generations of hard-working, selfless public servants, politicians, activists and reformers to achieve the current state of British civic nationalism, and nobody agrees it’s perfect. In fact everybody has an opinion about where it is still far from perfect and what needs to be reformed. But all this exists within a broad framework of civic nationalism, namely everyone agrees that all British citizens are equal and entitled to equal rights.
1. Ethnic nationalism is easier
Compared with the complexity of mature civic societies such as Britain, America or France, you can see how ethnic nationalism is simpler: a certain ethnic group seizes power and defines itself and its members and rests its power precisely by who it excludes: everyone not part of the ruling ethnic group who quickly find themselves being attacked as traitors, then rounded up and imprisoned.
Leaving all morality to one side, you can see why government by ethnic nationalism is always going to be quicker to define, set up and manage, especially in states which have little if any experience of the complex web of power centres, rules and traditions which make up civic nationalism.
On this reading it should come as no surprise to anyone that ethnic nationalism, being the quicker, easier option, should be the one opted for by rulers who suddenly find themselves liberated from the rule of imperial masters and with big complicated countries to run.
Roughly speaking, this explains what happened:
in the early 1960s in Africa, when the newly liberated post-colonial nations found they had to be ruled somehow and in the absence of the deep-rooted institutions and traditions required by civic nationalism, reverted to authoritarian rule often based around the ruler’s ethnic group, which led to numerous wars of independence fought by ethnic groups who wanted their own nations, for example Biafra in Nigeria and Katanga in Congo, and the long-running war of independence in Eritrea
in the early 1990s in eastern Europe, where the new rulers of the 15 or so nations freed from Soviet hegemony discovered that the quickest way to establish and consolidate power was with forms of nationalism which invoked the supremacy of their people, their Volk, by shared allegiance to language and religion instead of to the more abstract institutions of civic nationalism, a creed which led to actual civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine
in the early 2010s, when a raft of Arab countries threw off their long-standing dictators but found that, instead of automatically transitioning to civic nationalism as so many day-dreaming liberals hope, promptly plunged into chaotic civil wars based on ethnic or religious allegiance, most notably in Libya and Syria
The tendency to authoritarianism and extremism of government by and on behalf of ethnic majorities explains the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan. In countries based on ethnic nationalism, the most extreme nationalists have a nasty habit of floating to the top and then, in situations of stress – such as the invasion and war in Rwanda or the famine in Sudan – they resort to the most extreme form of ethnic nationalism imaginable, which is the sustained attempt to exterminate everyone who doesn’t belong to the ruling ethnic group.
2. Ethnic nationalism fills a political vacuum
When the Soviet empire and its satellite regimes collapsed, the nation state structures of the region also collapsed, leaving hundreds of ethnic groups at the mercy of one another. Since none of these groups had the slightest experience of conciliating their disagreements by democratic discussion, violence or force became their arbiter. (p.6)
So ethnic nationalism flourishes where there is no tradition of democratic discussion and no experience of the (admittedly often complex and sometimes borderline corrupt) bargaining involved in democratic politics.
3. Negative reason for ethnic nationalism – avoidance of fear
The sense of belonging to an ethnic group within a nation based on ethnic nationalism has many aspects, positive and negative. The most obvious negative one, is the escape from fear. In a society falling to pieces, you are afraid of everyone. This fear is considerably lessened if you know you can at least trust everyone of your own ethnic group. In this respect, ethnic politics are an improvement on a state of total anarchy, where you can’t trust anyone.
In the fear and panic which swept the ruins of the communist states people began to ask: so who will protect me? Faced with a situation of political and economic chaos, people wanted to know who to trust, and who to call their own. Ethnic nationalism provided an answer which was intuitively obvious: only trust those of your own blood. (p.6)
Belonging, on this account, is first and foremost a protection against violence. Where you belong is where you are safe; and where you are safe is where you belong. (p.6)
This was the very important conclusion which came out of the many books I’ve read about the Weimar Republic and the chaotic social and economic situation of so much of continental Europe between the wars. The scared human animal prefers security to freedom. Given a choice between the politician who promises a crackdown on lawlessness, a return to order and stability, with the temporary curtailment of some human rights, and the politician who insists on the primacy of human rights but can’t promise anything about the economy, jobs and violence on the streets, people will always vote for the former. This explains why in the economic and political mayhem between the wars, almost every European nation ended up being ruled by authoritarian or out and out fascist governments.
4. Positive reasons for ethnic nationalism – belonging
That’s the negative aspect, escape from fear of anarchy. But there are also numerous positive aspects of ethnic nationalism which Ignatieff encapsulates as the sense of belonging.
At Oxford Ignatieff studied under Isiah Berlin (wow) and quotes him here to the effect that to be among your own people is to be confident that you will be understood, without having to explain. It is to feel at home among people who share the same language, catchphrases, jokes and references, love the same music, can quote the same national epic and so on.
‘They understand me as I understand them; and this understanding creates within me a sense of being someone in the world.” (quoted page 7)
This explains why the issue of language is so central to disputes in ethnic nationalism over the centuries. If the ‘official’ language, the language of street signs and government forms, is not the language you speak, then quite clearly you are not at home. Hence the issue of which language street signs are in can end up being a matter of life or death.
It also explains why so many of the ethnic nationalists Ignatieff meets are so sentimental. In Croatia, Ukraine and Belfast he met members of violent paramilitaries who showed a consistent tendency to get maudlin drunk, burst into tears or burst into rousing renditions of their national anthem or rebel songs. Sentimental kitsch is the characteristic art form of ethnic nationalists. (He nowhere mentions it, but the idea of a self-pitying, over-armed, drunk sentimentalism reminded me of a certain type of nostalgia for the Confederacy in the American South.)
5. Irresponsibility
There’s another positive aspect of the kind of ethnic nationalism he describes, which is its irresponsibility. Time and again in his journeys he talks to militiamen, paramilitaries and their political leaders, and finds them all saying the same thing: it’s not our fault. This avoiding of responsibility takes at least three forms: 1. it’s all the other side’s fault. 2. we’re the victims. 3. it’s all history’s fault.
Their fault
Again and again, drunk, self-pitying militiamen explain it was the other side who started it, we’re the victims in all this, we only took up arms to protect ourselves, to fight back. Ignatieff doesn’t mention the Rwanda genocide because it hadn’t taken place when he made his tour, but this is exactly the excuse made by every Hutu nationalist interviewed by Philip Gourevitch or Fergal Keane: ‘The Tutsis started it, the Tutsis used to lord it over us, the Tutsis invaded our country: so that’s why we have to exterminate every Tutsi we can find, even the grandparents and the little babies. Why can’t you understand?’
We’re only protecting ourselves
Same view given to Ignatieff about why the Serbs had to bomb Sarajevo, in a siege which went on long after he’d left, in fact from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996. Lasting 1,425 days, this made the siege of Sarajevo the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, lasting three times as long as the Battle of Stalingrad and more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad. Talk to any Serb commander and they would patiently explain that they had to surround and bombard the city for 4 years in order to protect themselves.
History is to blame
All the militias knew far too much history. From the UDA and IRA in Belfast to the Serb and Croat militias, all these people know far too much about their country’s histories and the histories they know prove they are right. This disproves two great liberal nostrums which I’ve always queried:
Those who ignore their own history are condemned to repeat it. Rubbish. It’s almost always the opposite, it’s the Serbs nursing their grievances going back to the Yugoslav civil war of 1941 to 1945 or, if you like, going all the way back to the famous battle of Kosovo in 1389, it’s the Croats nursing their grievance against wartime Chetniks; or the IRA celebrating their long tradition of martyrs or the UDA nursing endless grievance at the way they’re betrayed by the London government. For all these groups their history is a history of grievances and carefully tending it and memorising it traps them in the prison-house of their nationalist narratives and condemns them to repeat the same conflicts over and over. (It is in this spirit that James Joyce made his famous declaration, leaving Ireland to its endless squabbles in order to make a new life abroad, that ‘History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.’ Ethnic nationalists relive and re-enact the nightmare day after day but can never exorcise it.)
History will prove us right. Rubbish. History is as contested as contemporary politics i.e. historians will argue about the significance and legacy of this or that event till the cows come home and very often are swayed by simple professional motivation i.e. the need to come up with a new angle, ‘shed new light’ and so on. The notion that there will eventually emerge one unanimous version of history is a fantasy.
But back to the main theme, blaming history is a way of avoiding taking responsibility yourself. Hence the drunken mumbling of some militia Ignatieff interviews that ‘history is to blame’. This is cognate with the white liberal guilt over empire which drives Gourevitch and Keane to lay blame for the Rwandan genocide on the Belgian authorities for introducing ethnic identity cards in the 1930s and thus hardening the divide between Hutus and Tutsis. This is where the objective study of history topples over into the crowd-pleasing activity of naming and blaming, of which there is no end.
6. Ethnic nationalism as career path = warlordism
Intellectual categorisation of ethnic nationalism risks overlooking another really obvious factor in the rise of ethnic nationalism, which is that it offers a career path to supreme power for men the world had otherwise overlooked and, especially, for latent psychopaths:
Nationalist rhetoric swept through these regions like wildfire because it provided warlords and gunmen with a vocabulary of opportunistic self-justification.
The anarchy of a collapsing state presents terror to most civilians but career opportunities for those brave and amoral enough to seize them. Hence warlordism, a version of the mafia. Local strong men emerge who dominate their area, who rule through fear and intimidation and violence but, if you are of the right ethnic group and follow the rules, they also bring peace and certainty. Which is why Ignatieff is taken on a tour of his fiefdom by one such local strongman and is impressed at the way his open-top car is greeted by cheering crowds, women offering their babies to be kissed, local businessmen giving him gifts.
Some people might find this easiest to understand this as a kind of mafia rule, but it reminds me of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and its depiction of a Dark Age Europe made up of a patchwork of very localised regions ruled over by thousands and thousands of warrior kings who ruled by dint of winning battles and distributing loot to their soldiers. It’s this kind of historical perspective i.e. the unchanging link between Europe 500 AD and 2000 AD, which makes me think human nature, and the kind of social structures it creates, over and over again, in all times and places, doesn’t change very much.
Ethnic nationalism within civic states
Obviously, you can have ethnically chauvinist movements within civic nationalist societies, and this would include the movement for Catalan independence in Spain and Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland, who themselves spawn their opposites, Spanish nationalists within Catalonia, and the special case of the Unionists within Northern Ireland.
Cosmopolitanism and privilege
Finally, Ignatieff addresses the issue of his own perspective and makes the one cardinal point that I have made hundreds of times in this blog which is that cosmopolitan intellectuals have proved to be wrong, wrong and wrong again about the world they live in.
He devotes a fairly long passage to explaining why. He and his ilk of jet-setting intellectuals thought the rest of the world was like them, an associate professorship at Harvard, a research fellowship at Cambridge, a year-long teaching placement in Paris. Winners of life’s game flying round the world on expense accounts, eating out at fine restaurants, knowledgeable about wine and poetry. He and his friends thought the world was set to become ever-more cosmopolitan, ever-more multicultural, ever-more relaxed about race and ethnicity.
But Michael was the son of a Canadian diplomat, who moved his family around the world to different postings, so young Michael grew up naturally cosmopolitan, speaking numerous languages. He was sent to a top private school in Canada where he acquired the elite education and psychological confidence to feel right at home discussing definitions of liberty with Isaiah Berlin. Just like BBC correspondent and superstar Fergal Keane attended the leading boys private school in Ireland, works for the impeccably liberal BBC, and found himself at a complete loss to explain the Rwandan genocide.
Neither of them can comprehend the anger of being an outsider, the all-consuming rage caused by being a member of the poor, the exploited, the repressed, the ignored, the downtrodden, the humiliated, the shat-upon, the mocked and the ridiculed, told they are losers and deserve to be losers for the whole of their lives…
And how – when society starts to fall apart, when there’s an economic collapse, when an invading army turns everything upside down – then it’s your turn to get your revenge, to get your own back, to show them all you aren’t a slave and lackey to be ignored and humiliated but a man, a real man, a strong man, who can click his fingers and have whole villages exterminated, who can hold the life or death of prisoners in the palm of his hand, who distributes the pickings from the looted houses among his followers, likewise the kidnapped women and keeps the best for himself.
Neither Fergal nor Michael have a clue what that must feel like and so simply can’t comprehend what motivates so many of the ordinary soldiers, militiamen and paramilitaries they meet to carry out the murders, gang-rapes, tortures and massacres which their books describe.
But the big difference is Michael is aware of it. Not just aware, but places his own self-awareness of his privilege and ignorance within a dazzling intellectual, political and historical framework which does an enormous amount to clarify, define and help us understand the broader sociological and political causes of the new world disorder.
He acknowledges that the ‘privilege’ he has enjoyed is the reverse side of the coin of the plight of most people in the world. During the Cold War most of the world was divided up into American or Soviet spheres of influence, and these paymasters acted to restrain, up to a point, the behaviour of their clients in countries around the world. But when the Cold War ended, this support and this restraint disappeared from scores and scores of countries where fear of the Cold War master had kept an uneasy peace.
As a result, large sections of Africa, Eastern Europe, Soviet Asia, Latin America and the Near East no longer come within any clearly defined sphere of imperial or great power influence. This means that huge sections of the world’s population have won ‘the right to self determination’ on the cruellest possible terms: they have been simply left to fend for themselves. Not surprisingly, their nation states are collapsing, as in Somalia and in many other nations in Africa. (p.9)
So, with the imperial police withdrawn from large parts of the world, ethnic rivalries and enmities which had been kept bottled up for generations, could burst out anew: Yugoslavia. Rwanda. The new chaos only appears inexplicable to Ignatieff and most of his readers because they don’t grasp the fundamental geopolitical realities and, more importantly, are limited in their understanding, by their sociological situation.
Globalism in a post-imperial age only permits a post-nationalist consciousness for those cosmopolitans who are lucky enough to live in the wealthy West. It has brought only chaos and violence for the many small peoples too weak to establish defensible states of their own. (p.9)
And:
It is only too apparent that cosmopolitanism is the privilege of those who can take a secure nation state for granted. (p.9)
And:
A cosmopolitan, post-nationalist spirit will always depend, in the end, on the capacity of nation states to provide security and civility for their citizens. (p.9)
Thus when Keane gets into a tricky confrontation with border police, he can play his BBC and British government card. When Gourevitch gets into a tight spot, he can point out he’s an American and his government probably supplies arms to whatever ramshackle militia he’s dealing with. Or both can buy their way out of trouble with dollars, which the BBC or the New Yorker can provide by the suitcase full in order to rescue them. Both dip their toes in the chaos of failed states confident that they always can, if push comes to shove, buy their way out and get on the next plane home.
Neither of them seem to appreciate what it means to be someone who grows up in a society where there is no escape and where ‘kill or be killed’ is the only law and which has been drummed into you since childhood.
Ignatieff makes the dynamite point that many of the most senseless killings and brutal murders can be understood if you grasp the idea that they are fighting and murdering in order to bring a full, final and complete peace to their countries so that they can enjoy the same sense of security and safety which Gourevitch, Keane and Ignatieff have taken for granted all their lives.
Summary
It is Ignatieff’s mighty achievement to not only have created a conceptual framework which makes sense of the panorama of post-Cold War anarchy, extracting core principles and ideas which shed light on every aspect of the new nationalism; and not only to deliver high quality intellectual insights about all the conflicts this book goes on to investigate; but also to deliver an unblinking, candid and winning analysis of his own privileged position, which makes him such a fantastic guide to the new world disorder of the 1990s.
Credit
Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism by Michael Ignatieff was published by BBC Books in 1993. All references are to the revised 1995 Vintage paperback edition.
The new world disorder
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Berlin Wall came down and the countries of eastern Europe and central Asia were freed from Soviet tyranny, many Western politicians and commentators optimistically thought this marked the end of history and the dawning of a golden era of peace and democracy. Well, as any fool could have told them, they were wrong, very wrong.
Instead, relieved of the threat of socialist parties and movements (which found themselves suddenly deprived of moral, political and sometimes financial support by the Soviets) a new more virulent form of neo-liberal capitalism triumphed around the world. Workers and even middle classes in the developed world found their living standards steadily declining, and entire third world countries found themselves being exploited even more effectively by an international capitalist system evermore focused on supporting the lifestyles of westerners and a new class of international global super-rich.
Lacking political maturity (i.e. established democratic systems with a track record of the peaceful transition of power from one elected administration to another; the multifarious aspects of civil society such as a free press, charities) many newly liberated nations, afflicted with economic stress, political instability and unresolved nationalist-ethnic-border issues, not surprisingly, experienced major problems.
The specific causes were different in each case but instead of an outbreak of peace, love and understanding, the 1990s saw the Gulf War, the collapse of Somalia, civil war in former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide, to name just the highlights.
The Islamic terrorist attacks of 9/11 added a whole new layer of misunderstanding and confusion to an already chaotic world, leading directly to the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and subsequent destabilisation of the entire region. And was followed by the so-called Arab Spring of 2011 which, once again, naive liberal commentators welcomed as an outbreak of democracy and equality but almost immediately led to chaos, civil war and the rise of regional warlords, in Syria and Libya to take the two most notable examples.
‘It should be an interesting few weeks, old boy.’
(The words of David, Fergal Keane’s tall, elegant, 60-year-old BBC producer, as they arrive at the border of Rwanda, page 42)
Fergal Keane, reporter and moral superstar
Keane is an award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and writer. This is a short 190-page book which recounts the journey undertaken by him, his 3-man BBC TV news crew, with a couple of South African security guys (Glen and Tony) and two African drivers (Edward and Moses), as they crossed into north Rwanda from Uganda. It follows this team as they drove through the devastated countryside only weeks after it had been pacified by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and saw for themselves the corpses produced by the Rwandan genocide (April to July 1994). They saw hundreds and then thousands of dead bodies, clogging rivers, littered across the countryside and packed into buildings, houses and churches in villages and towns.
However, although the book contains many descriptions of bodies hacked to pieces, of mothers trying to protect their children who had their skulls cleaved open by machetes, children’s bodies cut clean in two, and so on – a kind of Pompeii of corpses caught in all manner of strange, poignant and horrifying postures as the murderers did their work – the horror is mixed with another element which I couldn’t help finding irritating at first and then broadly comic, which is Keane’s humourless self-importance.
Keane the sensitive reporter is front and centre of the entire account, which opens not with any African or Rwandan voices, stories, facts or history or events, but with pages and pages of Keane impressing on the reader how he is such a sensitive man that even now, a year after his journey, as he writes his book, he is still haunted by dreams and nightmares of what he saw; how he struggles to put it into words, how he struggles to make sense of the horror of mass killing and so on.
My dreams are the fruit of my journey down the dirt road to Nyarubuye. How do I write this, how do I do justice to what lies at the end of this road? As simply as possible. This is not a moment for fine words. (p.76)
But the fact that he even has to tell us that he is agonising about how to write it, how to describe the scene, and shares with us his heroic decision not to use ‘fine words’, this is all grandstanding, showboating, foregrounding his wonderful scrupulousness as a Man and as a Writer. He may claim not to use ‘fine words’ (although, in fact, he often does) but he certainly uses fine feelings.
He could have just described what he saw and been a simple, factual, objective observer. But Keane is incapable of keeping himself out of the picture and swamps everything with his first-hand impressions, all recounted in a lulling Irish brogue.
This self-promotion extends beyond himself to encompass his BBC news crew (producer, cameraman, soundman) and fixers (the two SA security men), describing them as the best in the world, top of their trade, ace professionals – sensitive (very sensitive), creative, reliable, hard working – a great bunch of guys!
These passages dwelling at length on what a caring, sensitive fellow Keane is, and what a fantastically hard-working but sensitive crew he was privileged to work with – made me smile and occasionally burst out laughing at their self-importance, their lack of self-awareness, their complete inappropriateness in what purports to be a record of one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.
So Season of Blood can be broken down into three elements:
The syrup-thick self-congratulation and oh-so-sensitive descriptions of how Keane felt, at the time and for months after the journey was over, which start and end the text and feature liberally throughout.
The series of incidents which made up his actual journey across Rwanda: names of the people they met (generally from the RPF, sometimes the UN) who showed them sites of numerous atrocities where the bodies were still piled up in streets and fields, houses and churches, and interviews with (often very badly injured) survivors, and the genocidal Hutu authorities who dismissed it all as exaggeration and the inevitable casualties of war.
Historical background – Keane’s solid reworking of the standard history I’ve read in all the other accounts.
1. A song for the sensitive
On the 1974 album ‘Monty Python Live at Drury Lane’, Neil Innes introduces his song ‘How sweet to be an idiot’ by whispering, ‘And now…a song for the sensitive’, to much laughter from those with a sense of humour. This phrase kept echoing round my head as I read the confessional parts of Keane’s text.
I thought New York journalist Philip Gourevitch had done a good job of showing off how sensitive and deep he was in his 1998 book about the Rwandan Genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, but he is blown clean out of the water by BBC journalist-superstar and softly-spoken Irishman, Fergal Keane. Here is the opening paragraph of Keane’s Rwandan Journey, for best effect to be intoned in a mellifluous Irish accent, very quietly and very sensitively:
I do not know what dreams ask of us, what they come to collect. But they have come again and again recently, and I have no answers. I thought that after the bad nights of last summer the dead had abandoned me, had mouldered into memory. But the brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers and children, all the great wailing families of the night are back, holding fast with their withering hands, demanding my attention. Understand first that I do not want your sympathy. The dreams are part of the baggage on this journey. I understood that from the outset. After all, four years in the South African townships had shown me something of the dark side, and I made the choice to go to Rwanda. Nobody forced or pressurised me. So when I tell you about the nights of dread, understand that they are only part of the big picture, the first step backward into the story of a journey that happened a year ago. (page 1)
Personally, I think it was very considerate of the Rwandan people to stage an epic bloodbath in order to provide Mr Keane with a splendid backdrop against which to display his sensitive soul, his simple but poetic prose, his knowledge of ‘the dark side’ (guffaw) and his fine moral scruples. Just recently I notice the arrival in the language of the phrase ‘humble-bragging’, which means:
the action of making an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud.
So when Fergal says he doesn’t want our sympathy, it was hell but he’ll be OK, no, no, he really doesn’t want our sympathy, not at all, really he doesn’t, the dreams, the dreams are sometimes hard to bear, but, shucks, he was just doing his job, no, no sympathy thank you — it’s hard not to burst out laughing at his self-important humble-bragging.
And not just him. He says there were many of ‘us’ who went there, many tip-top international journalists like Fergal. Some claim they don’t have bad dreams, but Fergal knows better. They, all of them, this band of brothers, this close-knit community of sensitive reporters, according to Fergal, they still ‘mourn the dead of Rwanda’. They still suffer at nights from that special feeling. What special feeling? Well:
How can I best describe it? It is a mixture of dread fascination, sorrow for what we learned and lost in the short few weeks of chaos, a mind weariness that feeds itself by replaying the old tapes over and over. We reach for the off switch but in the darkness cannot find it. (p.3)
Portentous and pretentious, humourless self-importance. Note the deliberately ‘poetic’ language. Given the choice between the ordinary functional word and the archaic, poetic equivalent, Fergal always plumps for the latter. He and his crew don’t get up at the start of the day; they ‘rise to start another day’ (p.44). The crooks they meet with in Nairobi are ‘rogues’ (p.48). The rains don’t prompt new growth, they ‘bring forth’ great tangles of vegetation, as if touched by the staff of Moses (p.49). David doesn’t start crying when he thinks about his daughter back home; he is ‘in the thrall of this fatherly emotion’ (p.35). Every page is blessed with a gem of pretentious and high-sounding diction.
And the journey itself is not just any hack’s trip to cover another grim African tragedy: it is a knight of the round table on a quest, it is a pilgrim’s progress, it is the odyssey of a Great Spirit, greater, finer, more sensitive than the humble likes of you and I.
My journey into Rwanda was about following the lines of blood and history; about sleeping with the smell of death, fear and hatred; about exhaustion and loss and tears and in some strange ways even love. For me to make sense of that journey, however, I cannot write in terms of facts alone. So bear with me when the road runs down into the valleys of the heart and mind and soul… (p.3)
What a wanker. And the Rwandans? The genocide? You want to know about them? Hang on, first there’s another fifty pages while we follow the road down into the valleys of Fergal’s heart and mind and soul…
Padding
So Keane comes over, fairly regularly, as a self-important so-and-so. But the emphasis on the personal nature of his text and the amount of time he spends describing his travelling companions may have a more banal cause. For he tells us early on that he only spent a few weeks in Rwanda (p.4) and, later on, that his brief trip started in early June 1994 (p.123).
So there may be an embarrassingly simple reason why so much of the text describes his fine feelings, his doughty companions and the details of their itinerary rather than the history or politics of Rwanda – this preening might simply be padding, padding out a book which, even with all this bumf, barely stretches to 190 pages.
In fact it’s only on page 48 of the 190 pages that Keane and his team actually cross into Rwanda and the journey proper begins. So the actual travelogue of Rwanda is barely 140 pages long. It’s an often intense but, ultimately, quite thin and superficial account.
Top chaps
Fergal went to Rwanda with a BBC team to make a film for Panorama and what a team he took with him! He is accompanied by one of the BBC’s most respected producers ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’; by a soundman who is also a novelist; by a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’. Goodness! What special people Fergal surrounds himself with! What heroes! What legends!
And it takes one top chap to know another top chap. Thirty seconds on Fergal’s Wikipedia page tells us that Keane attended the Presentation Brothers College in Cork, a private, fee-paying Catholic school which is ranked the number one boys’ secondary school in Ireland. Maybe this is where his overweening sense of superiority comes from, his indestructible confidence in what are, in the end, pretty banal observations written in humble-bragging prose.
Rather snipingly, Fergal points out that most other TV journalists and crews are, unfortunately, just mercenary hacks who fly wherever the bodies piling up, knock out superficial stories about a situation they barely understand and then, as soon as the fighting stops, move on.
Where television is concerned, African news is generally only big news when it involves lots of dead bodies. The higher the mound, the greater the possibility that the world will, however briefly, send its camera teams and correspondents. Once the story has gone ‘stale’ i.e. there are no new bodies and the refugees are down to a trickle, the circus moves on. (p.7)
TV news is sensationalist and superficial!? Who knew? This must be why the BBC pays its top correspondents the big bucks, for coming up with wonderful insights like this.
But Saint Fergal goes out of his way to emphasise that he is not like all those other TV correspondents and his crew are not like all those other horrible mercenary crews. No, his crew includes a sound man who is also a novelist; and a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’; and a producer ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’.
And they work for the BBC so they must be the best! And they are fronted by a sensitive soul who still has dreams, all these months later, of the terrible things he saw but no, thank you, no, he doesn’t need your sympathy. Very kind, but he’s man enough to take it.
Admittedly, this band of heroes only flew into Rwanda when the story began to involve lots of bodies – exactly like the other crews he criticises. Admittedly, they only stayed for a few weeks – exactly like those other crews he criticises. Admittedly, his team also moved on once the story had gone stale –exactly like those other crews he criticises. But his crew did it in a specially sensitive and rugged and heroic way, in a noble BBC way, which completely separates them from all the other media riff-raff. This isn’t just any old reporter and his camera crew; this is an M&S reporter and his camera crew.
David the producer is tall, silver haired and works harder than anyone Fergal has ever met! He is steady as a rock, ‘not given to exaggeration or panic’! Whatever situation they find themselves in David can always fix it, with a few discreet words and a shrewd wink. What a top chap!
David never reveals his feelings because he’s that kind of steady, dignified, old-fashioned type of fellow. Right up until, one day, barrelling along in their Land Rover, Fergal shares the Yeats poem, ‘Prayer For My Daughter,’ with him, at which point a quiet tear comes to David’s eye, as he thinks of his own dear beloved daughter back home in Blighty (p.35). Poetry! Yeats! A quiet tear! Yes, what a fine and sensitive chaps he is, they all are!
Perhaps more than anything I admired his old-fashioned journalistic honesty. David believed in going to places and finding out what was happening, talking to as many sides as possible, and only then making up his mind. In this he was different from many producers who arrived with their own predetermined ideas of what the story should be and then sought out the voices to support their theories. He wasn’t a glamorous media figure, nor was he political in the sense of fighting internal battles within the BBC. Although it is hard to guess at the true motives of a colleague, I liked to think that David Harrison was moved ultimately by the oldest and most noble journalistic aspiration of all: to seek the truth and report it whatever the consequences. (p.67)
Shucks. Saint Fergal and noble David are travelling with old Africa hands Tony and Glenn. Tony is a short story writer and novelist who went to ‘one of Johannesburg’s top public schools’. Need Fergal say any more. I’m sure we are all prepared to bow down before this great achievement and, what’s more, Tony was his college rowing champion!
Glenn, by contrast, worked his way up from a tough, deprived and petty criminal background, via a spell in the South Africa Defence Force, on to become ‘one of the best news cameramen in the country’ and ‘the most sensitive cameraman I have ever worked with’ (p.40). The sensitivity and camaraderie ooze out of this book like ectoplasm. I washed my hands after reading it but I couldn’t wash my brain.
Carlsberg doesn’t make world-beating TV news crews, but if they did…
Basically, Saint Fergal is trying to write a novel, except it is a novel full of hilariously portentous and symbolic moments (before they leave Kenya for Rwanda, Keane gets drunk with a fellow journalist in a hotel bar in Nairobi who ominously warns Keane that he is heading towards a realm of ‘spiritual damage’, p.43).
This novel manqué features a cast of noble, high-minded chaps (top public school, best cameraman in the country, champion rower, noble producer etc) and is written in a pretentious mash-up of late Victorian diction (‘we rose to begin our journey’ – that’s actually what he writes on page 44) and the Bible (‘The rains had brought forth a great tangle of vegetation’). The prose reads like the stained glass windows in the chapel of his elite Catholic boarding school – simple, over-coloured, larger than life, sentimental and repellently high-minded.
Buried in this short book is some excellent reportage, some vivid encounters and some stomach-churning scenes – but all swamped by a kind of rehashing of a Victorian, boys own adventure novel.
2. Rwandan history
Fergal tells the same outline history I’ve read in David van Reybrouck, Philip Gourevitch and Jason Stearns. Nobody really knows their origins, but eventually Rwandan society came to be split between three ethnic groups, the Hutu from the west (85%), the Tutsi from the north (15%) and smattering of the Twa, descendants of the pygmies who probably lived in the Rwanda-Burundi region first but are now marginalised.
In the mid-nineteenth century, when Europeans first arrived, they discovered a society where the Tutsi formed a cattle-rearing elite, ruled by a Tutsi king, who lorded it over the four-fifths of the population who were Hutu peasant farmers. The stereotype has it that the Tutsi are tall and thin, with thin lips, long noses and lighter skins, while the Hutu are shorter, stockier with more classical ‘Negro’ features – although, like all the other writers on the subject, Fergal emphasises that, after centuries of intermarriage, plenty of the population was impossible to assign to one group or the other.
The German colonisers in the 1890s, and then the Belgians who were allotted Rwanda after Germany lost World War One, both these European colonisers sided with the aristocratic Tutsi. In the 1930s the previously fluid demarcation between the ethnic groups was destroyed when the Belgians issued identity cards which required you to specify which racial group you belonged to.
At this point Fergal does what Gourevitch does: he speeds over the history of ethnic tension between the two groups because he is concerned to make the genocide seem unique, unprecedented, a freak, impossible to understand. In its scale it certainly was, and in the way it was very deliberately planned, managed and organised by Hutu extremists it certainly was, and in its aim at total extermination of the enemy, it was. And yet the insistence of both Gourevitch and Keane on making it sound exceptional is a serious distortion of the facts. Because, as both writers concede, there had been a long history of inter-communal violence before 1994, which continued well after 1994.
Thus when the Tutsi monarch Mwaami Rudahigwa died in 1959, the Hutus rose in rebellion against Tutsi rule and between ten and one hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred. The rivers were full of bodies. That’s a lot of people. It begins to undermine the claim of the genocide to complete uniqueness.
In neighbouring Burundi the Tutsi held on to power through the 1960s and, to forestall a Hutu revolt, in 1973 the Burundi army murdered nearly a quarter of a million Hutus. A quarter of a million. That’s a lot of people, isn’t it? Once you start reading Rwandan history you realise the genocide may have been unique in conception and ambition, but it is, at the same time, part of a continuum of Hutu-Tutsi massacres and pogroms, both in Rwanda and Burundi, which go back at least as far as independence if not before.
Gourevitch and Keane both come on as if the 1994 genocide was a one-off, uniquely wicked and evil event, and it is its perceived uniqueness which prompts in both writers a great deal of hand-wringing and virtue signalling. Why oh why did they…? What oh what made them…? How could anybody behave like this…? and so on.
But hang on – isn’t massacring 100,000 Tutsis in 1959 also a bit, you know, evil? And what about the murder of nearly a quarter of a million Hutus? Also, pretty violent and pretty evil, too.
Why aren’t there books about those massacres? Does a hundred thousand not register? Is quarter of a million not enough? Is it as simple as the fact that back then, in the 60s and 70s, there was less TV coverage, less satellite technology to flash footage round the worlds, that it was harder to travel to these remote countries, so the massacres didn’t get covered and so…all those dead Africans don’t count?
Keane goes on to explain that by 1990 the kleptocratic crony regime of Rwandan dictator Juvénal Habyarimana was so corrupt that it found it very convenient to use the century-old bogeyman of the Tutsi oppressor to stir up the Hutu masses in order to stay in power, so that top figures in the regime could carry on happily creaming off aid money and World Bank loans into their personal Swiss bank accounts.
Keane supports the mainstream theory the Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane wasn’t shot down, killing all on board, by Tutsi wrong-doers but by extremists within his own Hutu government. Habyarimana’s sudden death allowed Hutu supremacists to seize power and, within just one hour of the president’s death, to start issuing orders to implement the plan for the total extermination of the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda (maybe 1.5 million people) which senior members of Hutu Power had been carefully working on for years.
I take the point that what sets the 1994 massacres apart was the entirely political nature of the genocide, and the existence of a detailed plan, and the use of all the levers of the state to mobilise people to the killing, and the fact that the stated ambition was total annihilation of the Tutsis…
But I felt uneasy that Keane, like Gourevitch, devotes two hundred pages and a lot of hand-wringing to the killing of 800,000 people, but skims over the murder of 250,000 people or of 100,000 people in a sentence – as if their murders don’t matter so much because they weren’t massacred in such an organised way.
Are some campaigns of mass murder more important, more meaningful than others? Are the dead in one mass murder campaign less important than the dead in another one? The short answer, on the evidence of these books, appears to be yes.
3. What Fergal saw
Keane and his crew cross the border and are met with polite and intelligent RPF soldiers, part of the well-disciplined force which has driven the Hutu army from the country. David the noble producer had contacted the RPF from Belgium and so an army liaison officer, Lieutenant Frank Ndore, is waiting for them at the first checkpoint inside Rwanda. From here onwards, Frank will be their polite and helpful guide.
Frank takes them to meet Rose Kayitesi who’s switched from being a rebel fighter to setting up a refuge for 50 or so orphaned children aged 6 to 8 in an abandoned hotel (p.68). Some of them tell their stories, like the young girl who describes seeing her entire family hacked to death by the Interahamwe, herself is badly injured but left under a pile of corpses where she remains still till the attackers have left. Their guide, Frank explains why the Interahamwe were so keen to exterminate all children and hid in wait for them or silently listened out for whimpers and crying before moving in for the kill (p.71). Which has resulted in some of the child survivors in his care withdrawing, refusing to eat and, literally, dying of grief (p.72).
Fergal sees the river clogged with corpses (p.74). Many rivers were clogged with bodies. Lake Victoria became so polluted with corpses that Ugandan fishermen dragged them out and buried them to stop them killing off the fish (p.75).
Frank takes them to the town of Nyarubuye where some 3,000 people were hacked to pieces in and around the parish church (p.76). Keane describes lots of human bodies which have been hacked to death from every possible angle, displaying every possible wound.
They meet small groups of refugees on the road, clustering together for safety, each one generally the sole survivor of the massacre of their family, their village, their entire community.
The offices of the mayor of Rusomo have been converted into a makeshift hospital for survivors with terrible wounds. There is no medicine, no painkillers. The mayor or bourgmestre was Sylvestre Gacumbitsi and many of the poor Tutsis of the town turned to him for help as the atmosphere became tense on the buildup to the genocide. Not only did he turn them away, but a few days later he led Hutu death squads round the homes of Tutsis and directed the mass murder, using the identity cards he had in the filing cabinets in the office. Flora Mukampore only survived, badly cut and bleeding, because she hid under a pile of fresh corpses (p.89).
On the spur of the moment Keane and is producer decide to try and track down this génocidaire and mass murderer, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, and so drive east, across the border into nearby Tanzania, and to Benaco, one of the biggest refugee camps which sprang up as hundreds of thousands of terrified Hutus fled the advancing RPF.
Bencao camp turns out to be a vast mudbath, organised into ‘roads’ between groups of tents made from tarpaulin supplied by the UN and aid agencies. They spend the night and then, next morning, assiduous questioning does in fact lead them to Sylvestre Gacumbitsi. He is surrounded by young men with machetes who are carrying out his orders as he manages the distribution of rice to refugees from his canton. Keane questions him as hard as possible, putting to him the accusations of eye witness who saw him (Sylvestre Gacumbitsi) directing the killing. But the big man denies it, dismisses it all as Tutsi propaganda, and his surly followers mutter agreement.
In a flash Keane realises the génocidaires have brought their entire social system into the camps, recreated their networks of clientilism and patronage and intimidation. And the international community is going along with it, funding them, feeding them, allowing them to recreate their murderous Hutu militias (p.107).
Keane realises the international community which did sweet FA to prevent the genocide has been only too happy to jump into action when confronted with a huge refugee crisis. Setting up camps, flying in vast amounts of food, publicity photos of the faces of happy aid workers helping happy refugees, this is what everyone wanted. Keane thinks well-armed Western soldiers could have easily identified leading génocidaires and arrested them. Their failure to do so was a complete moral failure. The international community was ‘giving comfort to butchers’ (p.110).
That same night the team drive back over the bridge by the Rusomo Falls into Rwanda. They see soldiers looting refugees. Reading this, it occurs to me that most of the world is like this, and most of history has been like this: bullies preying on smaller bullies who prey on the absolutely helpless.
Drunk Tanzanian soldiers try to stop them crossing the bridge and then to confiscate their video camera, but, like their fairy godmother, Lieutenant Frank appears and gets the RPF soldiers his side of the river to pay the drunk Tanzanian soldiery a few hundred dollars and a tricky situation is defused (p.113). Really makes me want to go to Africa. Sounds like a wonderful place.
Lieutenant Frank organises a tour of the abandoned and ransacked presidential palace. (This is reminiscent of Michela Wrong touring the abandoned and ransacked palace of Joseph Mobutu or Philip Gourevitch in the abandoned and ransacked palace ditto. It’s a kind of standard element or trope of ‘the overthrow of dictators’ journalism.)
Then the team are staying at the UN offices along with all the other correspondents, journalists and news crews. (They do tend to stick together, journos and news teams.) Keane is in Kigali when half the city was still in the Hutu government hands and the RPF was shelling and mortaring its way into the government half.
At short notice the team is invited to visit a Red Cross hospital. To nobody’s surprise a hospital in a war zone is packed with terribly injured soldiers and civilians. He sees a small Tutsi boy whose arm has been cut off. Details like that, snapshots, say more than all Keane’s editorialising.
When they leave to drive back through roadblocks to the rebel side of Kigali, they are hustled into smuggling with them two European missionaries who have escaped from a mission up country because Brother Otto’s arm was wounded and he needs treatment. Nerve-racking moments as they smuggle the two missionaries out of the Hutu side and into the RPF side. If the Hutus stop them, maybe they’ll arrest the missionaries, maybe the whole team, or maybe just shoot them all.
Later, Keane hears the missionaries’ story. To seek out help they left behind a mission full of Tutsi children they had been protecting. The children knew it was coming. They asked to be locked in a room. A week later the militia came and slaughtered all 50 of them. Brother Henri tells Keane all this though tears.
That night the team get drunk with their faithful guide Lieutenant Ndore who insists, like all the RPF they’ve met, that it’s not about ethnicity, it’s about power and politics. A political cabal and their clients had made personal fortunes creaming off the nation’s wealth and turning the civil service into a party machine (p.20). They wanted to carry on doing so under the dictatorship and didn’t want to be forced to accept a multi-party, multi-ethnic constitution which the ‘international community’ was forcing Habyarimana to accept.
Without political power the whole system of patronage and clientelism would collapse. (p.23)
The politics of ethnicity
Throughout the book Keane repeats the same notion, which is that the genocide may have been defined in terms of ethnicity but it was at bottom politically motivated. It took expression in ethnic cleansing but it was about one group, one party, the extreme wing of the president’s MRND party and its extended clients, clinging on to power and consolidating its power for ever.
Keane’s insistence can be interpreted several different ways: one is that he is sticking to a humanistic conviction that ethnicity isn’t the be-all and end-all because this optimistic conviction allows him to hope that ethnicity can be overcome and so that the genuinely multi-ethnic state which the RFP promises can be brought into existence.
But it is possible to devise a kind of reverse interpretation of the same set of facts, which is: what if, in many countries, ethnicity is politics? In the 25 years since Keane wrote this book ethnicity hasn’t disappeared as a defining factor in political cultures around the world, it has grown, particularly in the last decade. All round the world we have seen the rise of nationalist leaders waving their national flag and liable to attack minorities: the BJP demonising Muslims in India; the military junta in Myanmar ethnically cleansing the Rohingya; China brutally clamping down on the Xinjiang Muslims. And anti-immigrant rhetoric becoming widespread across the West.
Keane’s book was written before any of this happened but, at various points, it emphasises that these kinds of divisions between ethnicities are not inevitable but are always stirred up by politicians with essentially political motivations i.e. using ethnic differences in order to stir up their base and remain in power. And in the money.
Back to the journey
Anyway, back in the narrative, it’s time to say goodbye to the helpful, intelligent Lieutenant Ndore and so Fergal gives him the edition of Yeats’s poetry which he’s been carrying round, as a thank you present (p.141).
He writes a half-page note about visiting the Amohoro stadium in Kigali, which the UN forces managed to secure during the genocide and where they protected thousands of terrified refugees.
And the second half of the same page records a visit to the Milles Collines Hotel, also guarded by a small contingent of UN soldiers, where hundreds of refugees were still living in terror that the Interahamwe lounging at the roadblocked entrance would one day simply walk in and hack everyone to pieces, the hotel which was to become famous because of the movie, Hotel Rwanda (p.142).
Keane and his crew are assigned a new RPF minder named Ernest to replace Lieutenant Frank, but he is a kid, unreliable and always wants to sleep. He is meant to guide them on the route south into Burundi. They get into their Land Rovers and drive to the town of Kabuga, which saw heavy fighting. Every building is damaged, bodies, not just of humans. A dead cow is wedged into a doorway (p.145).
Ernest then tells them he knows the route to the border with Burundi and sets them off down a road which gets smaller and more jungley until they pass two wrecked vehicles and realise the road is landmined. As this is sinking in, they see two figures ahead burying something and, in a sweaty panic, hurriedly turn the jeep round and drive all the way back to Kabuga.
After recovering from this stressful experience back in Kabuga, they set off south again, this time by a different route. Hours of nervous tension driving through jungle with one of the crew’s two Land Rovers making bad sounds as if it’s about to break down. They arrive at the village of Zaza, held by the RPF, who are guarding several hundred Hutu prisoners. Keane quotes an African Rights report which estimates that 800 people were murdered in the commune of Zaza, and quotes one woman survivor who watched the children being hacked to death and was, again, buried under a pile of bodies, covered in blood and so thought dead by the attackers (p.154).
They spend a nerve-racking night in this village, given a few rooms in an abandoned house by the RPF officer, who commands just 15 men to hold a remote village filled with 300 or more Hutu prisoners, while everyone knows the Interahamwe are out there in the jungle.
Next day, 12 June 1994, they finally make it to the Burundi border and are checked through by drunk Tutsi Burundi soldiers. They say goodbye to the two Ugandan drivers, Edward and Moses, who have to turn round and drive right the way across Rwanda and back across the northern border, into Uganda, before it gets dark.
They are met in Burundi by Rizu Hamid, a South African-born Asian who’s worked as Fergal’s fixer before, during his time in South Africa. She is, of course, ‘tough and dedicated’. He is awestruck by her ability to smooth talk even the most difficult, dangerous soldiers at roadblocks (p.167). But then we long ago learned that everyone Fergus works with is an epitome, world beating, top of their profession, and so on.
Rizu has arranged for a young government soldier named Sergeant Patrice to be their minder as they penetrate back north into the government-held areas of west Rwanda to meet and interview, well, murderers.
After a series of nerve-wracking encounters at no fewer than 30 roadblocks, the crew finally arrive in Butare and put up in a basic hotel. David and Fergal interview the Rector and Vice-Rector of Butare University. Like other Hutus they’ve already met, this couple are far from stupid, but believe the government’s line entirely: that the nation was under threat from the RPF’s 1990 invasion, that war was the only way to defend themselves, that the RPF only seek to reassert Tutsi paramountcy and restore the Hutu serfdom of pre-1959.
Next day they go to interview the town prefect, Sylvan Nsabimana. They ask him about the fate of the last few hundred Tutsi left alive in the whole region who are being held in a camp right outside the prefect’s office. Nsabimana is all reassurance and tells them that, in fact, he is planning to evacuate the children to nearby Burundi, the following day.
Keane presses him on the murders, on the genocide but, like every government official they meet, Nsabimana repeats the government line that there was no genocide, that the government was protecting the country against attack by the RPF, who are wickedly planning to restore their oppressive rule. If confronted with examples of actual killings, Nsabimana gives the stock answer that, alas and alack, casualties happen in time of war.
The next day Fergal, Rizu, David and the rest attach themselves to the convoy of lorries carrying Tutsi children to freedom in Burundi. they pass through a series of nerve-racking roadblocks, which Nsabimana himself negotiates their way through and then, finally, they cross the border into Burundi for good and Keane’s Rwandan journey is at an end.
Thoughts
How long did Fergal’s Journey last in total, then? Two weeks? Three weeks? Less than two weeks? He doesn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t long and he didn’t really get to talk to that many people, 20 to 30 maximum. Compare and contrast with Philip Gourevitch who visited Rwanda for a total of something like nine months and gives the impression of having spoken to hundreds of people.
Keane’s book is shorter but it is much more intense. The descriptions of his anxiety in long trips through the jungle and his terror at roadblocks manned by drunken soldiery are very vivid. And his first-hand account of seeing the actual bodies piled up in streets and fields and offices and churches is powerful. Almost powerful enough to make you forget the preening opening of the book.
For all his feeble inability to really grasp the scale and depth and meaning of the genocide, Philip Gourevitch’s book is a lot better. It has far more history and context than Keane’s and he includes testimony and interviews from far more people, including lots of UN officials and, crucially, the brains behind the RPF, Paul Kagame.
And Gourevitch also continues the story on past the genocide itself, for quite a few years, up till 1998, so he gives a far better sense of the ongoing political importance of the huge refugee camps in Zaire, and how they came to trigger the first Congo War – a depth of perspective which is necessarily missing from Keane’s account which, in essence, boils down to vivid reportage of a hurried, stressful 2-week visit to the country in June 1994, smack bang in the middle of its combined civil war and genocide.
He didn’t have to go
The very force of Keane’s candidly described terror keeps prompting the same thought. He undergoes ordeals of tension and stress, bursts out swearing at the drivers, has to get drunk at night to obliterate the sights he’s seen or take pills to get to sleep. He thinks forlornly of his family. He wishes he were back home. The rector of Butare university invites him to his house to watch Ireland play in the World Cup, in New York, and Keane desperately, desperately wishes he was there.
Well, OK, the reader thinks: so go on, then – leave. Hire a taxi, get driven clean out of the danger zone, catch a plane home, be with your family. Tell the BBC you’d like to be the Westminster correspondent. Or work on Strictly Come Dancing. If you hate your job so much, if it means you end up seeing too many corpses, meeting too many evil people, having too many nightmares, here’s an idea – quit being a foreign correspondent and go home.
No-one is forcing Keane to repeatedly travel into war zones and risk getting casually murdered by drunk soldiers at a roadblock in the middle of nowhere. This is a choice he has made.
When he keeps telling us how wretched and awful and terrifying and lonely and damaging it is to be in such horrific zones and see so many corpses and confront so much evil, the reader thinks: well, don’t do it, then. But don’t willingly and voluntarily choose this line of work, hustle for the job, undertake the assignments – then bleat about how horrible it all is and expect my sympathy.
The shameful record of the Americans
The US administration of Bill Clinton did its best to ignore the genocide. America (and Belgium) insisted on reducing the UN presence from 2,500 to 250 on the eve of the genocide, guaranteeing that the UN could not intervene, and reinforcing them with a mandate which stipulated no military intervention. Even when they could see Tutsis being hacked down from their offices, they were unambiguously instructed not to intervene to save anyone.
‘Never again must we…. All it requires for evil to flourish is good men to do nothing…We must never forget the victims of the Holocaust… blah blah blah.’ Whenever you hear public figures spouting that kind of feel-good cant, remember it’s bullshit.
Once alerted to the killings, the Americans deliberately delayed sending what UN troops remained in Rwanda a consignment of arms and armoured cars to help them. America insisted on charging full market rate for the vehicles and their delivery, which the UN couldn’t afford (p.123).
On President Bill Clinton’s orders the Americans refused at every level of government to use the word ‘genocide’ for, if they did, America would have been legally obligated to intervene and America did not want to intervene.
When the victims of a genocide were being murdered in front of their eyes, the Americans did everything in their power to avoid giving any help. Beyond shameful. Complicit.
French support for the genocidal regime
The French continued to support the genocidal Hutu regime after the genocide was well under way and opposed the Tutsi RPF which ended the genocide, because partly because the génocidaires spoke French, and the PDF (hailing from the former British colony Uganda) spoke English. Seriously.
The French had long supported Habyarimana and had no wish to see him driven from power by the rebels. The pro-Habyarimana faction in Paris was led by François Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe, who saw Rwanda as part of a Francophone Africa under threat from the encroachments of the English-speaking nations to the north and east i.e. Uganda and Tanzania. Among Jean-Christophe’s gifts to the Rwandan president was the personal jet which was shot out of the sky on 6 April. The implication of this friendship was clear: if the price for maintaining some degree of French influence was the preservation of despots and kleptocrats, then Paris was always more than willing to pay.
In contrast to Habyarimana, the leaders of the RPF were largely English-speaking. The long years of exile in Uganda had forced them to abandon the French language. For their part the French maintained a military mission and a sizeable detachment of intelligence officers in Rwanda. With their contacts inside the army and at every level of government and the state media, Paris could not have been ignorant of the genocidal intentions of many of the senior officers and officials. For the French to suggest otherwise would be a lamentable comment on the abilities of their own intelligence services and diplomats. (p.26)
As part of a sustained effort to discredit the invading RPF and continue support for the genocidal Hutu Power regime, a French security agent claimed he had the black box from Habyarimana’s shot-down jet which proves it was the RPF who fired the missiles. But he provided no actual evidence and soon disappeared from view (p.117).
[President Habyarimana’s] brother-in-law Protais Zigiranyirazo was up to his neck in the trade in endangered species. Protais was a founder member of the Zero Network and an original shareholder in Radio Milles Collines. A book David has brought with him on our journey, Murder in the Mist, alleges that Protais was involved in the murder of American naturalist Dian Fossey because of her attempts to save the gorillas of the Rwandan rain forest. To date he has not even issued a rebuttal, much less attempted to sue the author. Protais is currently enjoying the sanctuary provided by the government of France, along with his sister Agathe and several other family members. It is not likely that they will see the [presidential] palace again, but they have the security of foreign bank accounts and the sympathy of the Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) to console them in exile. I can see what sickens Frank. (pages 119 to 120)
That last sentence refers to the way the entire RFP up to its leader Paul Kagame were sickened at the absolute inaction of the ‘international community’ to prevent the genocide. The inaction was led by America which blocked every attempt to intervene, and by France, which energetically supported the genocidal regime, gave it arms and weapons even as the genocide was taking place and set up safe havens in the west of the country for genocidal Hutus fleeing the advancing RPF.
As the RPF rolled through the country and brought the genocide to an end, the French government flew the genocidal regime’s leaders to safety in Paris, where they’ve been leading lives of luxury ever since, right up to the present day, 2021. What’s not to despise and loathe about the despicable French government and security apparatus?
Mistaking genres
Lastly, maybe my negative reaction to Keane’s book is my fault. Maybe I’m being dim. Maybe I’m getting my genres mixed up. Maybe I’m expecting the objectivity of a history from a text which, right from the start, declares it is going to be an entirely subjective account. Only right at the end of the book did it occur to me that this kind of subjective journalism is maybe a variety of confessional literature.
When Keane writes at length about the nightmares he’s suffered ever since his Rwanda trip, about his drinking, about how scared he was at numerous points, about how he lost his temper with the driver and came to loathe their irresponsible RPF guide Albert, how much he missed his wife and how much he wished he could just go home – I found all this tediously subjective, but maybe I’m being an idiot for expecting anything else. It is titled a journey and clearly states right from the start that it is going to be a highly subjective account of one man’s experiences of a nightmare situation.
And, after all, maybe Keane’s prolonged descriptions of his feelings and psychological struggles are a deliberate strategy to take you with him right into the belly of the beast, to make you feel the fear and see the bodies, designed to be an immersive experience which combines historical background and political analysis with stomach-churning descriptions of what it was like.
I still didn’t like this book, but maybe my allergic reaction is my fault because I was continually judging it by the wrong criteria, assessing a work of confessional journalism as if it was a factual history. Anyway, I’ve given you enough evidence to make up your own mind.
Credit
Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane was published in 1995 by Viking. All references are to the 1996 Penguin paperback edition.
‘Hutus must stop having mercy on the Tutsis.’
Eighth of the Hutu Ten Commandments published by Hutu Power propagandist Hassan Ngeze in 1990 (page 88)
Disappointment
Simon’s law of book-buying states that the more you spend on a book, the more likely you are to be disappointed. Nothing has brought me as much pleasure as picking up a copy of my childhood favourite, The Town That Went South by Clive King, for 30p in a National Trust second-hand bookshop a few years ago. By contrast, I paid full whack to buy We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and almost immediately took against it.
The shiny cover of the Picador paperback somehow belies the fact that it was published in 1998 and so is nearly a quarter of a century old.
Next, the introduction by Old Etonian and Conservative Party leadership contender Rory Stewart is reasonable enough but offers no insights or ideas. In fact it opens with disappointing stupidity. His very first sentence is: ‘Is genocide a suitable subject for literature?’ to which the obvious answer is, ‘Yes, everything is a suitable subject for literature’. More specifically, ‘Yes – have you not heard of Holocaust literature?’ Literature about the killing fields of Cambodia, about the Armenian genocide, and so on? So it’s a non-question asked for purely rhetorical effect.
And finally, Gourevitch’s book itself is also disappointing because, although it contains a lot of good quality history of the background and buildup to the genocide, of the events of the genocide itself, and then a detailed account of the aftermath up until late 1998 when he completed his text, and although it contains interviews with a phenomenally large number of representative figures – it is continually interrupted by Gourevitch’s own meditations on the nature of genocide, what we should feel about genocide, whether we can write about genocide, the difficulty of imagining genocide and so on, which are uniformly poor quality, entry-level, GCSE-level. Trite ideas padded out with lame and obvious quotes. It is a big disappointment. Gourevitch may be a terrific reporter but he’s no intellectual.
The tone is set in the puzzling first chapter where Gourevitch retails a conversation he had with a pygmy (one of the aboriginal inhabitants of the region now known as Rwanda, who were swamped by later Bantu incomers and now make up about 1% of the population). This conversation delivers the thumpingly banal message that humanity is one and needs to be united in its struggle against nature. This is the ‘insight’ message Gourevitch chooses to open his long book about the Rwandan genocide with, i.e. not very insightful at all, certainly not worth paying £10 for.
With a sinking feeling, I realised within a few pages that this book was not going to offer much insight into politics or human nature. In fact, in the passages where he tries to ‘think’ about the genocide, Gourevitch’s banal meanderings tend to blanket and dull the impact of the horrifying facts he sets down so powerfully in the factual passages.
The second disappointment is that a major part of the book’s USP is that it contains interviews and conversations Gourevitch had with scores of Rwandans from all parts of the country, from all classes and professions, Hutus and Tutsis, which go to create an impressive mosaic, like the walls of photos I’ve seen in some art installations, hundreds of photos of ordinary people caught up in a nightmare. Hence the book’s sub-title, Stories from Rwanda.
But I’m sad to report that these stories, also, partake of the general disappointment because they, also, are often surprisingly dull and banal. Obviously, many of the interviewees describe horrifying scenes: they describe entire lives lived in the shadow of the ethnic conflict between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations, they describe the repeated crises in the 1960s and 70s, when small-scale pogroms, massacres and localised ethnic cleansing broke out for one reason or another; then they describe the atmosphere of fear created by the RPF invasion of 1990 and the emergence of really vitriolic Hutu supremacism, the advent of magazines and radio stations calling for the complete extermination of the Tutsis; and then describe gathering round their radios to listen to the dreadful news that the moderate Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane had been shot down as it came into land at Kigali airport and the terrible sense of doom most of them felt.
And then, of course, Gourevitch includes eye-witness account of going into hiding, being arrested, trying desperately to contact family members, watching people being shot, hacked to death with machetes, driving through smoking villages, coming across streets full of bodies, terror and despair.
The content of these stories is, of course, gripping and horrifying. But the style is uniformly flat. They all sound the same, they all speak very simply. Either that’s because all Rwandans sound the same, very simple and flat. Or because all Rwandans are dull and boring. Or maybe because every interview had to be carried out through an interpreter, since most Rwandans speak French, and French has less lexical variety than English and that’s why everyone comes out sounding the same. Or maybe it’s because all the testimony has been first translated, and then put through Gourevitch’s own style machine. All the interviews are made up of suspiciously complete sentences. There are no hesitations or repetitions or stumblings. All Gourevitch’s interviewees speak in perfect and grammatically correct sentences. They all sound the same and they all sound boring.
He even manages to make Paul Kagame sound boring, which is quite a feat. Paul Kagame was born and raised a Rwandan exile in Uganda. He volunteered to join the Ugandan army, rose quickly through the ranks, studied military theory, was a senior officer in the rebel force which helped Yoweri Museveni overthrow the Ugandan dictator Milton Obote. Kagame then went on to become a co-founder and eventually leader of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) which invaded north Rwanda in 1990 and fought the Rwandan army to a ceasefire in 1993. Kagame was still working through implementation the peace accords he signed with the Hutu president Juvénal Habyarimana in August 1993, when the latter’s plane was blown out of the sky in April 1994. This was the trigger for Hutu Power extremists in the government to launch their genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi population, so Kagame immediately resumed the RPF incursion into Rwanda, quickly seizing large parts of the country, taking the capital Kigali on 4 July 1994, then pushing west to conquer almost the entire country and putting an end to the genocide by 17 July 1994.
Kagame then took up the twin roles of vice-president and defence minister in the post-genocide government, but everyone knew he was the real power in Rwanda, which he has gone on to lead down to the present day, 2021, when he is still serving as president.
Kagame is described by analysts as a military leader of ‘genius’ for turning the RPF from a ragtag of half-armed volunteers into a highly disciplined and effective military force (p.218). And then, after all this, he went on to be the military and strategic brains behind the alliance of armies, the AFDL, which invaded east Zaire in 1997 to close the Hutu refugee camps where Hutu Power génocidaires had been regrouping and preparing for genocide part two. This was the incursion which led to the AFDL marching all the way to Kinshasa and overthrowing Zairean dictator Joseph Mobutu.
In other words, Kagame is one of the most fascinating characters of the late 20th/early 21st centuries and Gourevitch has had the privilege of interviewing him not once but on numerous occasions. And yet, in Gourevitch’s hands, this is what Kagame sounds like:
“I have wanted to be original about my own thinking, especially in regard to my own situation here. Not that I don’t realise that there are other people out there to admire, but it is just not my habit to admire anybody. Even if something has worked, I think there are many other things that could work also. If there’s anything else that has worked, I would certainly pick a bit from that. But if there could be another way of having things work, I would like to discover that. If I could have some original way of thinking, that would be OK for me.” (quoted on page 213)
Pretty dull, eh. It’s far too harsh to say that Gourevitch is a lightweight and he makes everyone he interviews sound like a lightweight, but that thought did cross my mind during more than one of the duller interviews in the book.
He’s spoken to literally hundreds of people, including many key players and all kinds of experts and aid and UN officials and yet…hardly any of them say anything interesting. Only towards the end did some of the Rwandan officials complaining about the utter ineffectualness of the international community make an impression.
A literary account, alas
Gourevitch is a longtime staff writer for New Yorker magazine and a former editor of The Paris Review. He knew nothing about Rwanda or African politics before he watched the shocking images on the TV news as the Rwanda genocide broke in spring 1994. Fascinated and appalled he realised he had to find out more (or realised this was a terrific opportunity for an ambitious journalist looking for a subject for a book).
So Gourevitch began visiting Rwanda in 1995 (p.7) and over the next two years made nine trips to the country and to its neighbours (Zaire, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania) to report on the genocide and its aftermath. He made 6 trips lasting a total of 9 months (p.185). During that time he interviewed hundreds of people from Rwanda and the neighbouring countries and the book contains an impressive number of first-hand, eye-witness testimony from many, many Tutsi survivors, as well as more confrontational interviews with men accused of complicity or of organising particular local massacres.
Possibly his lack of background in African affairs partly explains the air of hopeless bewilderment he exudes right from the start. In the opening sections of the book Gourevitch goes heavy on his inability to imagine the events, on the importance of imagination in our lives, his interest in how people imagine their identities, on the importance of the narratives which shape their lives. In other words, he brings a heavily literary slant to his huge and complicated subject.
On the first page of his text he mentions Charles Dickens, on page 3 he is citing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, there are epigraphs from George Eliot and John Milton. Directly after that limp quote from Kagame which I cite above, Gourevitch says it reminds him of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke writing on love and art (p.213).
Oh dear. It is going to be literary journalism, the worst sort, the type of journalism which spends a lot of its energy emphasising the author’s own sensitivity, which foregrounds his own emotional responses, to the subject matter, rather than doing a journalist’s job which is to get on and tell you what happened and let interviewees tell their own stories, preferably without a load of editorialising about how you everything you find out about the horrors makes you feel. In the showbiz world of American journalism, ruined by the egotistical displays of Norman Mailer or Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, it is acceptable to put the author and his responses at the centre of the story, but I wanted a history, I wanted to know the facts, not reiterations of how a pampered New York journalist was appalled to discover how brutal life is in much of Africa and how thoughtlessly cruel human beings can be.
His factual sections are sensational but when he stops to reflect on it all, Gourevitch writes quite a lot of stupid things. When he writes that ‘Power is terribly complex’ on page 78 I suddenly realised I was dealing with an idiot. My daughter learned more about political, social and cultural power in her GCSE Sociology course than Gourevitch displays in this entire book. All the ‘reflection’ in the book displays a disappointingly low knowledge of political theory, knowledge of international relations, or philosophy about human nature.
And I was irritated by his casual assumption that the ‘we’ he continually refers to are all white, liberal, college-educated, East Coast readers of New Yorker magazine, that ‘we’ all share his over-developed moral scruples and his severely under-developed sense of world affairs, geopolitics, African history and politics. Right at the beginning he tries to implicate the reader in his sensitive moral scruples:
I presume that you are reading this because you want a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. (p.19)
Well, er, no. I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Rwandan genocide in the same way that I am not disturbed by my interest in reading about the Holocaust, or the Second World War, or the First World War, the Somme, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American Civil War, the Tapei Rebellion, the rape of Nanking, the Gulag Archipelago, the Russian Civil War, the Ukraine famine, the Partition of India, Islamic State, the Crusades, the decimation of the Incas and Aztecs, the violent rise of Islam, the blood-soaked fall of Byzantium, the life and massacres of Genghiz Khan. I could go on…
I am reading this book because I want to be better informed about human history which, as anyone who has even a superficial knowledge of the subject knows, amounts to an unrelenting series of wars, massacres, genocides and bloodbaths. I’m kind of used to it.
So, no, I am not in the slightest disturbed by my curiosity to want to understand a recent historical event better. Seems perfectly normal to me, and most of the history books I read include passages where historians say the public in general ought to be more aware of history. In addition, many progressive historians and commentators tell us we need to get out of our Eurocentric frame of reference and understand more about the wider world and places beyond London or Paris. So that’s why I’m reading a book about Africa, and about one of the most striking events in post-war African history.
Gourevitch’s comment betrays a basic…what…dimness, obtuseness, ignorance…about the entire subject of History and why people would want to study it, which is to find out what happened, to try and understand why it happened, in order to better understand the forces at work in the world around us, now, in the present.
The facts
The book consists of three elements:
Gourevitch’s self-consciously literary fretting over the power of imagination and the importance of narrative and the centrality of stories and the difficulties of human identity and a familiar checklist of progressive, liberal arts issues
interviews with scores of Rwandans, UN officials, foreign doctors and aid workers, politicians and so on, giving often harrowing descriptions of their experiences or clarifying the political situation in Kigali, in the UN, in the aid camps in Zaire
actual historical facts
When he sticks to the facts, Gourevitch is very good indeed. Suddenly, about a third of the way into the book, after the kind of maundering speculation I’ve been slagging off, it changes tone dramatically and becomes a riveting account of the early history of the country, a description of the colonial era when the Belgians divided the two ethnic groups of Hutu and Tutsi the better to control them, and how this ethnic division, once created, went on to dog the Rwanda, which won independence in 1962 but continued to suffer repeated outbreaks of ethnic violence, pogroms and massacres (the massacres of 59, of 61, of 63, and so on).
In what follows I extract the facts Gourevitch gives and supplement them from other sources to try and create a comprehensive and useful timeline.
Rwandan history
In 1994 Rwanda had a population of about 7 million. Relatively small, it was the most densely populated country in Africa. About 85% of the population were Hutus, 14% Tutsis and 1% pygmies known at the Twa.
Rwanda is divided into five provinces: Kigali, Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western.
Because they were illiterate, no Rwandans before the arrival of Europeans had ever written anything down. Therefore, their prehistory relies entirely on unreliable oral traditions and speculation. Modern archaeology tentatively suggests that the hilly region was inhabited by pygmies as long ago as 8,000 BC, before it was slowly infiltrated from 700 AD by Bantu tribes from West Africa who went on to form the Hutus, and by ‘Nilotic’ ethnic groups from the north who were ancestors of the Tutsi (p.49). Maybe.
Hutus and Tutsis
For centuries before Europeans arrived, the Tutsis were nomadic cattle rearers, which made them wealthier than the Hutu majority who were mostly static farmers; the ruler of Rwanda was a Tutsi and the aristocratic Tutsis looked down on the peasant Hutus.
The regime was essentially feudal: Tutsis were aristocrats; Hutus were vassals. (p.49)
Although there’s a racial stereotype that the Hutus are full-on ‘negroid’ African in appearance while the Tutsis have narrow faces, with narrow noses and thin lips, in reality scores of generations of interbreeding meant the majority of the population didn’t conform to these stereotypes and very often Rwandans couldn’t tell which groups each other belonged to (p.50). Plenty of the Rwandans Gourevitch talks to tell him they pass for one ethnic group when they in fact belong to another. In other words, it wasn’t such a starkly obvious divide as between blacks and whites. Many Hutus and Tutsis are indistinguishable.
Tutsi ruler Kigeli Rwabugiri reigned from 1853 to 1895 and expanded the kingdom to its greatest extent. He oversaw a society which was regimented and hierarchical, with layers of military, political and civil chiefs and governors, priests, tax collectors, sub-chiefs, deputy governors and so on (p.49). Divisions between Hutu and Tutsi were hardened, with the former obliged to perform forced labour for the latter.
When the Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 carved up Africa between the European imperial nations, Rwanda was handed to the Germans because they had explored the region, had missionaries on the ground, and nobody else wanted it (p.55). After Germany lost the Great War, Rwanda was combined with the neighbouring nation of Burundi and handed by the victorious allies over to Belgium, because they abut the huge Belgian Congo to the west. Belgium ran Rwanda from 1918 to 1962.
The Belgians hardened the ethnic division in the country by compelling every citizen to state on their identity papers which group they belonged to. This had the effect of crystallising a racial divide which had been far more fluid and flexible before.
The Hutu revolution
Throughout the century Hutu resentment at their inferior status simmered. With the advent of an educated class it found expression. In 1957 nine Hutu intellectuals published a Hutu Manifesto. Its full title was ‘Note on the social aspect of the native racial problem in Rwanda’ and it was ten pages long. The manifesto called for a ‘double liberation’ of the Hutu people, from the colonial oppression of the Belgians, and then from the racial oppression of the Tutsis. The manifesto called for the political disenfranchisement of the Tutsi, banning intermarriage between the two groups, and banning the Tutsi from military service.
1959 Hutu political leaders backed by elements in the Belgian administration overthrew the Tutsi monarchy (which had continued to exist throughout the colonial period) and replaced it with a republic. Violence against Tutsis spread across the country and tens of thousands of Tutsis fled to neighbouring countries, including Uganda. (When many of these exiles returned with the triumph of the RPF government in 1994, they were referred to as ’59ers’.)
Independence 1962
Rwanda was separated from Burundi and the two countries gained independence on 1 July 1962. Tutsi militias raised among exiles, especially in neighbouring Uganda, staged occasional raids into Rwanda, which always led to reprisals by the Hutu government. In December 1963 a Tutsi raid led to Hutu reprisals in which tens of thousands of Tutsis were massacred, in what one journalist called a genocide and Bertrand Russell declared was the worst massacre since the Holocaust. (This Russell quote crops up in Fergal Keane’s book on the genocide; it’s obviously one of those quotable quotes you get extra marks for in your GCSE essay.)
More than 336,000 Tutsi left Rwanda in 1964 to escape the Hutu purges. In 1972 Tutsi school students across the country were attacked, beaten, their houses torched. So large-scale massacres and pogroms came in waves.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burundi, it was the Tutsis who were in charge and in 1973 embarked on a pogrom of Hutus. As many as 100,000 were killed and a further 200,000 Hutus fled as exiles into Rwanda, where every one of their stories fed the fuel of anti-Tutsi anger.
The 1973 influx of Hutu refugees inspired the Rwandan president Grégoire Kayibanda to order his army chief of staff, Juvénal Habyarimana, to set up ‘committees of public safety’, which promptly set about massacring Tutsis. On this occasion the victims were ‘only’ in the hundreds, but as many 100,000 Tutsis fled abroad.
To summarise, Rwanda and Burundi have a long record of attack and counter-attack, profound ethnic antagonism and ethnic cleansing of the two groups which dated back before independence and flared up on an almost annual basis, with the Tutsi almost always being victimised, massacred, and fleeing the country in tens of thousands. The 1994 genocide was generations in the making.
Habyarimana’s coup 1973
In 1973 Rwanda’s army chief of staff, Hutu nationalist Juvénal Habyarimana, carried out a coup, overthrowing president Kayibanda and declaring himself president of independent Rwanda. Under his rule Rwanda became a totalitarian, one-party state in which every citizen was compelled to be a member of his MRND party and was required to chant and dance in adulation of the president at mass pageants (p.75). Habyarimana was to remain dictator of Rwanda for 21 years, kept in place by lavish aid from Western nations and in particular from his most loyal Western supporter, France. Naturellement.
Gourevitch makes the point that during the 1980s and 90s France channeled huge amounts of armaments to the Hutu government, up to and through the actual genocide; that French advisers helped the government at all levels; that French president Francois Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe was an arms dealer who made a packet from the trade (p.89).
In 1986 the global price of Rwanda’s main exports, coffee and tea, collapsed, and real hardship for the majority of the population added to simmering Hutu disaffection. The racist, supremacist policies of Hutu Power spread like a virus, popularising the insulting term inyenzi or cockroaches for Tutsis.
The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) The Tutsis in Uganda
But so did the Tutsi fightback. It is important to understand the role played by Ugandan politics. In 1979 Tutsi exiles in Uganda formed the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). (It was initially known as the Rwandan Refugees Welfare Association and then, from 1980, as the Rwandan Alliance for National Unity (RANU)). It was formed in response to the persecution of Tutsi refugees by the regime of Ugandan president Milton Obote. Obote accused the Rwandans of collaboration with his predecessor, Idi Amin.
Tutsi refugees Fred Rwigyema and Paul Kagame had joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebel Front for National Salvation (FRONASA). Museveni had fought alongside Obote to defeat Amin in 1979 but withdrew from the government following Obote’s disputed victory in the 1980 general election.
With Rwigyema and Kagame, Museveni formed a new rebel army, the National Resistance Army (NRA). Their campaign to overthrow Obote’s government became known as the Ugandan Bush War.
Obote remained hostile to Rwandan refugees throughout his presidency and in 1981 forced RANU into exile in Kenya. In 1982 he encouraged local councils to force Rwandan refugees out of ordinary civil life and into refugee camps. When Rwandans attempted to cross the border back into Rwanda, the Habyarimana regime confined them to isolated refugee camps and closed the border to prevent further migration.
You can see why many Tutsi exiles found themselves in an impossible position and it explains why so many joined up with Museveni’s NRA with the aim of overthrowing Obote and restoring their rights within Uganda.
In 1986 the NRA captured Kampala with a force of 14,000 soldiers which included 500 Rwandans, some of them senior officers, among them Kagame and Rwigyema. Museveni was grateful for their support and relaxed all Obote’s laws discriminating against Rwandans.
But you can also see why their success in the Bush War led soldiers like Rwigyema and Kagame to think they might launch a similar military attack against the consider an attack against Rwanda, with the aim of overthrowing the dictatorial Habyarimana regime, installing a moderate government and so allowing the Rwandan refugees inside Uganda to return home. And you can see why the new man they’d helped to power in Uganda, Museveni, would support such a move.
The Rwandan civil war 1990 to 1994
At its 1987 convention RANU renamed itself the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). After a small-scale incursion was repelled in 1989, a cohort of Tutsi soldiers within the Ugandan army deserted, along with uniforms, arms and ammunition and invaded north Rwanda in 1990. It was the right year, as the Cold War came to an end and Western powers abruptly ceased their support for African dictators like Mobutu of Zaire and Habyarimana of Rwanda and force them to instal multi-party democracies.
The RPF incursion developed into the Rwandan Civil War. (To give a sense of the relatively small scale of all this, the original Tutsi incursion numbered some 2,500 soldiers who effectively went AWOL from the Ugandan army, accompanied by some 800 civilians such as doctors and nurses.) The RPF were defeated and repelled by the Rwandan Army (bolstered by French troops flown in to prop up another notorious African dictator) and withdrew to the Virunga mountains where Paul Kagame, establishing himself as its paramount leader, led a very effective regrouping and reorganisation. He attracted funds and exiles, he imposed strict military discipline and turned the RPF into an impressive fighting machine. In 1991 they emerged from the mountains to conduct an effective guerrilla campaign, hitting military targets across the north.
Throughout this period Hutu Power stepped up their propaganda that the Tutsis were parasites on decent hard-working Hutus, exacerbated by the war which Hutus blamed on Tutsi invaders. The circle around Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, set up a propaganda magazine, Akura, edited by Hassan Ngeze, who developed into the Dr Goebbels of the regime and in December 1990 published a Hutu Ten Commandments mandating Hutu supremacy in all aspects of Rwandan life (p.87).
Propaganda claimed the Tutsis were an alien people, were not Christians, were fighting to gain dictatorial control of Rwanda, restore the old monarchy and reduce the Hutu majority to slaves. In 1992 Hutu Power ideologue Leon Mugesera made a much-reported and chilling speech calling on Hutus to send the Tutsis back to Ethiopia by river i.e. as corpses down the river Nyabarongo (pages 53 and 96). And throughout the war Radio Rwanda broadcast anti-Tutsi hate and there were sporadic anti-Tutsi pogroms around the country, in which thousands were murdered.
The RPF invasion ratcheted up the very anti-Tutsi hate they were set up to counter.
Fragile peace 1993
By 1992 Habyarimana had been forced to accept a measure of multi-party politics and had included politicians not members of his party in the cabinet. It was these opposition politicians who met with the RPF leadership and negotiated a ceasefire in July 1992, leading to face-to-face peace negotiations.
It’s vital to realise that the hardline Hutus, often referred to as the akazu (p.81) and linked with the extended family of the president’s wife, disapproved of Habyarimana’s willingness to compromise and negotiate. They began setting up parallel hard-line Hutu structures within the organs of state, the civil service, the media and the army. Historian Gérard Prunier names late 1992 as the time when the idea of a genocidal ‘final solution’ to kill every Tutsi in Rwanda was first floated among this group. It was led, ironically enough, by one of the new parties encouraged to form by Western pressure to set up a proper democracy, the Coalition for the Defence of the Republic (CDR).
When Habyarimana signed a treaty with the RPF in early 1993 promising a transition to a genuine pluralist democracy in which Tutsi rights would be respected the CDR refused to sign, organised nationwide protests and encourage anti-Tutsi violence in which hundreds were murdered. In response the RPF resumed hostilities, this time defeating the Rwandan army which hadn’t been paid due to the country’s deteriorating economy.
Ever-faithful France sent troops to bolster the Rwandan army. The numbers are tiny. Just the arrival of 400 well disciplined and trained French troops was enough to halt the RPF advance. Nonetheless the RPF came within striking distance of Kigali but Kagali overruled his senior officers and refused to take the capital, shrewdly pointing out that it would alienate his foreign backers and the Hutu population. Instead he declared a ceasefire and called for more negotiations.
On the Hutu side, factions arose in all the parties which allied themselves with what became known as Hutu Power. Each party split into a moderate faction which believed in some amount of political negotiation, and a ‘Power’ faction, which rejected compromise and stood for total Hutu supremacy (p.97). Youth militia wings of each of the parties emerged, including the Interahamwe meaning ‘those who attack together’, who had their origin in football supporters clubs (p.93).
Habyarimana began to realise that the Hutu Power militants were more his enemy than the RPF. After prolonged haggling over the make-up of the post-war Rwandan army, a formal peace treaty was signed on 4 August 1993 (p.99). A transitional government was to be set up with members from all the main parties. UN troops were flown in to supervise the treaty, while Hutu Power authorities began to plan a genocide. Four days after the signing a new radio station set up by the akazu, Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, began broadcasting genocidal propaganda (p.99).
The general situation was not helped at all when president of Burundi, Melchior Ndadaye, who had been elected in June as the country’s first ever Hutu president, was assassinated by extremist Tutsi army officers in October 1993, leading to a Hutu uprising and a violent crackdown by the Tutsi army which left around 50,000 dead (p.101). The assassination reinforced the notion among Rwandan Hutus that the Tutsi presented a permanent threat and that there could be no peace, not real long-lasting peace, until they were completely eliminated. This very fragile ‘peace’ lasted from August 1993 till April 1994.
Trigger for the genocide 1994
On the night of 6 April 1994 a plane carrying president Habyarimana and his counterpart Cyprien Ntaryamira of Burundi – both Hutus – was shot down as it approached Kigali airport, killing everyone on board. Hutu extremists blamed the RPF. The Hutu Power wing of the army, led by Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, assassinated the next in line to civilian authority, the (Hutu) Prime Minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, along with ten Belgian UN soldiers charged with her protection (who were tortured first, p.114), and immediately started to implement the campaign of slaughter which they had been developing for years. It was to be a ‘final solution’ to the Tutsi problem.
The RPF claims that Hutu extremists themselves murdered their own president because he was engaged in negotiations with the Tutsis i.e. was a moderate Hutu and seen by a ‘sellout’ by the extremists on his own side.
The very next day, 7 April, as systematic killings across the country began, Kagame warned he was abandoning the treaty and the RPF broke out of its base in the north, attacking into Rwanda in three directions. So the genocide took place against the backdrop of renewed invasion and war. The RPF slowly seized territory in the east, heading south. UN troops were stationed in the demilitarised zone in the north but were ordered to withdraw to their camps to avoid getting involved in the fighting.
You can see why the renewal of war incited the Hutu Power advocates to carry out the genocide with feverish haste, ordering their followers at local level to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible before either the RPF won or the international community stepped in. For Hutu Power, it was a race against the clock.
The genocide – 100 days in 1994
Between April and July 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the space of 100 days. Three key facts to grasp are that:
1. The Hutu Power extremists had been preparing for this day for years, had drawn up lists of every Tutsis in the country with names and addresses, had assigned local Hutu leaders to direct and manage the slaughter, and had plans to take over state radio The Hutu extremists set up a radio station, RTLM, and newspapers which circulated hate propaganda, urging people to ‘weed out the inyenzi‘, to broadcast messages of hate. In other words, it was all extremely well planned. The identity cards which every Rwandan had been obliged by law to carry ever since the Belgians introduced them in 1931 (p.56) now became death warrants for any Tutsi stopped by police, militias, at road blocks, in the street, stopped search identified and hacked to death with a machete.
2. Second thing is that Rwanda was unique in tropical African countries in having been, from before Europeans arrived, a highly hierarchical country, organised like a pyramid from each district up to the top of government. Habyarimana’s governing party, the MRND, had a youth wing called the Interahamwe, which was turned into a militia to carry out the slaughter, but they operated within a highly organised society. It was a very well-organised genocide.
3. French troops, fighting on the side of the Rwandan army, freed up resources which Colonel Théoneste Bagosora could redirect to speeding up the genocide (p.90). On the nights of 16 and 18 June French arms shipments were flown into Goma in Zaire and then ferried across the border to support the genocidal Hutu Power regime (p.155). Gourevitch writes of:
The French political and military establishment’s…blatant complicity in the preparation and implementation of the butchery. (p.155)
I was amused to read that as the RPF closed in a French military plane whisked Habyarimana’s wife, Agathe, the central figure in the networks of Hutu Power, the leading figure in the azaku, to safety back in the homeland of liberty, equality and fraternity. Vive la France!
Number killed
At least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days, making it the fastest mass killing in human history. People were slaughtered at a faster rate than even during the Holocaust. Some Tutsis, commentators and historians put the figure higher at 1 million, for example a Red Cross report published soon afterwards.
What’s Somalia got to do with it?
Six months before the genocide broke out American troops had carried out Operation Gothic Serpent, an attempt to take on the evil warlord, Mohamed Farrah Aidid.,who ruled Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, which led to the so-called Battle of Mogadishu on 3 and 4 October 1993 during which a black hawk helicopter was shot down and 19 American soldiers were killed and 73 wounded. Not just that. The American corpses were paraded through the streets, and filmed and the video footage beamed around the world. The world’s only superpower was humiliated.
This explains why, when trouble broke out in another faraway African state, the administration of President Bill Clinton desperately tried to ignore it, then downplay it. Gourevitch quotes the press conferences given while the genocide was being carried out in which the poor press secretary tried to explain the administration’s position that ‘genocidal acts’ were taking place but these didn’t amount to an actual genocide. Why the hair-splitting? Because if the Americans conceded it was a genocide, then they would be legally obliged under the Genocide Convention of 1948 to intervene. And Clinton refused under any circumstances to risk another Black Hawk Down humiliation. And therefore officials at every level of the administration were under strict orders never to use the g word.
A bit too neatly Gourevitch says that in May, as the genocide was in full swing, he was visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which happened to have been opened by President Bill Clinton who made a speech repeating the museum’s motto Never Again. But not only did it happen again, and the American government was the number one reason that the West, the international community and the United Nations did not do more to stop it (as explained in detail on pages 151 to 154). Disgusting.
French involvement and guilt
By June the RPF, attracting more and more Tutsi recruits, controlled the east of Rwanda, had surrounded the key cities including Kigali. In the same month France launched Opération Turquoise in the west of the country, entering from bases in the Zairian cities of Goma and Bukavu and eventually controlling the western fifth of Rwanda in order to create a safe haven for refugees. The fact that many of these refugees were Hutus, fleeing the advancing RPF army, and included many Hutu Power administrators and officials, has led to claims ever since that the French in effect protected those responsible for the genocide.
From the moment they arrived, and wherever they went, the French forces supported and preserved the same local political leaders who had presided over the genocide. (p.158)
Throughout the genocide French military spokesman argued that it was a ‘two-way’ genocide, both sides were as bad as each other and sneeringly referred to the RPF as the Khmer Rouge. The French had many motivations. 1. To maintain hegemony over the widest possible area of francophonie. 2. To maintain its credibility with the other African dictators it supported. Hatred of the English. Hard though it is to believe, the French government opposed the RPF because they originated in English-speaking Uganda. French culture must be preserved even at the cost of supporting the largest genocide since the Holocaust. This was recognised as a factor in France’s support for mass murder by as senior figure as Paul Kagame:
‘If they wanted people here to speak French, they shouldn’t have helped to kill people here who spoke French.’ (p.160)
The permanent grievance of the history’s losers.
The signal achievement of [France’s] Opération Turquoise was to permit the slaughter of Tutsis to continue for an extra month, and to secure safe passage for the genocidal command to cross, with a lot of its weaponry, into Zaire. (p.161)
Scum. cf p.289 and p.325.
End of the genocide July 1994
By late June the RPF had surrounded Kigali and took the capital on 4 July, followed on 18 July by the major towns of the north-west, forcing the interim government into Zaire. The RPF victory ended the genocide as well as the civil war. By the end of July 1994 Kagame’s forces held the whole of Rwanda except for the Turquoise zone in the south-west.
The international community, the UN troops on the ground and the French had done fuck-all to halt the worst genocide since the Second World War. (To be fair, Canadian General Roméo Dallaire sent his superiors in New York advance warnings he had learned from high-placed Hutu dissidents that a really huge massacre was being planned. When they ignored his warnings and actively reduced the UN presence on the ground, he and his reduced forces were at least able to provide refuge for thousands of Tutsi and moderate Hutu at its headquarters in Amahoro Stadium, at other secure UN sites, and assisted with the evacuation of foreign nationals.)
Instead the genocide ended solely as a result of the military intervention of Paul Kagame’s RPF (p.143). (Mind you, you could make the case that the genocide only came about because of the sequence of events following the RPF’s initial invasion of 1990, designed to overthrow the ‘legitimate’ Hutu government. Academics, commentators and advocates of all sides can spend the rest of time assigning blame.)
Map showing the advance of the RPF during the 1994 Rwandan genocide (source: Wikipedia)
Aftermath – flight of the Hutus
As the RPF closed in the Hutu extremists prepared not just to flee the country, but used state radio and local authorities to terrify the Hutu population into believing they too, in their turn, would be slaughtered by vengeful Tutsis. Which explains why some two million Hutu peasants took to the road and fled west into Zaire, eventually setting up huge refugee camps as big as cities.
And indeed the RPF were accused of themselves killing thousands of Hutu civilians as they took power, and of pursuing and Hutus across the border in Zaire as they tracked down members of the notorious Interahamwe. The RPF denies this was intentional but Gourevitch has Kagame admitting certain rogue elements in his army may have carried out illegal revenge attacks. He tried to restrain them, some were tried and imprisoned, but there’s a limit to his control.
But the bigger story, which Gourevitch dwells on at length, was the creation of vast Hutu refugee camps which became cities in their own right, homes to countless businesses, run with fear and intimidation by Hutu Power administrators, and funded and supported by the international community and hundreds of well-meaning aid agencies.
Ethnic cleansing in East Congo 1995 to 1996
The resulting situation in eastern Congo became chaotic with Rwandan Tutsis tracking down and massacring Hutus, and Hutu extremists regrouping in the vast refugee camps helped by Western governments and aid agencies a) launching cross-border raids back into Rwanda to murder survivors and kill witnesses and b) embarking on their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Tutsis who had lived in Zaire for generations, specifically in the area of Kivu around the Zairean town of Goma.
In other words, intense Hutu-Tutsi animosity, spilling over into massacres and ethnic cleansing continued for years after the genocide itself was ended by the invading RPF.
First Congo War 1996 to 1997
Gourevitch spells out how the genocide was a gift from God for Congo dictator Seko Sese Mobutu (p.281). The old bastard had been unceremoniously dumped by his Western supporters when the Cold War ended in 1990 and had gone through a lean time manipulating a succession of fig-leaf ‘democratic’ governments while he slowly lost control of the lucrative mining industries which had kept his kleptocratic state alive, inflation soared to 9,000 per cent, the economy collapsed.
But with the advent of nearly two million refugees in the far east of his country in 1994, Mobutu was suddenly the man the international community and countless aid agencies had to go through to help them and he proved a willing participant, seeing as he got to cream off significant percentages of the money passing through his capital and its crooked banks. Leading the charge was, of course, the dictator’s most loyal Western friend and the most avid supporter of the genocidal Hutus, France.
France, ever eager to bail out Hutu Power, broke ranks with the rest of what in Cold War parlance used to be called the ‘Free World’ and unilaterally restored aid to Zaire – which meant, of course, to Mobutu who shovelled the money directly into his Swiss bank accounts. (p.281)
Throughout the spring of 1996 Hutu Power militias based in the refugee camps funded by the West continued a campaign to ethnically cleanse the area of North Kivu of its native Zairean Tutsi population, Gourevitch tours the area after such cleansing, travelling through miles of devastation, meeting terrified refugees. The RPF Rwandan government demanded something be done to protect the Tutsis. Zaire protested no such cleansing was going on. The international community did precisely nothing (p.289).
Eventually Kagame was forced to consider direct military intervention into eastern Zaire where the camps were located. His ally Museveni had introduced Kagame to Zairean revolutionary and guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. They began recruiting troops and creating networks of like-minded soldiers, militias and exiles which coalesced into the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation or AFDL.
Since North Kivu had been largely ethnically cleansed of Tutsis, Kagam predicted the Hutu Power militias would next turn on the 300,000 or so Tutsis living in South Kivu, known as the Banyamulenge after the town they were meant to have immigrated from back in the seventeenth century.
In September 1996 Hutu militias began attacking the Banyamulenge, burning houses, assassinating key officials, executing people in the street. They were fully supported by Mobutu’s army and media, who blamed the Tutsis victims for every atrocity. This was the same pattern and rhetoric which had led to the genocide. Tutsis fought back and were aided by Rwandan soldiers infiltrated into the area (p.295).
When the local Zairean governor declared that the entire Banyamulenge population had one week to vacate their homes and leave the territory, it was precisely the kind of categorical provocation Kagame had been waiting for. He immediately ordered the advance of the amalgamated forces which he, Museveni and Kabila had created into South Kivu. He tells Gourevitch he had three aims:
protect the Banyamulenge Tutsis, arm them, empower them to fight and protect themselves
to dismantle the notorious refugee camps and get their Hutu occupants to return to Rwanda where they would be treated decently
to ‘change the situation in Zaire’ i.e. remove Mobutu as an active supporter of genocidal Hutu Power and replace him with a modern, neutral figure
The AFDL advance was as disciplined and effective as the RWP invasion of Rwanda 2 years earlier. It had the decisive effect of breaking the grip of Hutu Power on the camps and forcing an estimated 700,000 refugees to abandon the camps and trek the 20 or 30 miles back across the border into peaceful Rwanda, and return to their communities. Obviously, there were all kinds of problems with this enormous reintegration into such a densely populated country and with so many divisive memories, but the wholesale massacre of Hutu refugees which the Hutu Power ideologues had terrified the refugees with never happened.
But to the wider world’s surprise the invading AFDL didn’t just invade the Hutu camps, tracking down Hutu Power exponents, freeing the majority of the Hutu refugees into returning to Rwanda – they then declared their intention of marching on Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa, approximately two and a half thousand miles west.
Fall of Mobutu May 1997
It took the AFDL a long seven months to get there, more a tribute to the shocking state of Zaire’s roads and infrastructure than to any opposition put up by the rubbish Zaire army, the FAZ (which Gourevitch describes as ‘Mobutu’s famously cowardly army’, p.256).
As Kabila’s troops approached the capital, president Nelson Mandela of South Africa flew in to try and broker a deal, but failed. Mobutu wanted to stay on the scene, if only as a figurehead president, while Kabila, leading the winning army, wanted all or nothing. Mobutu, his family and cronies fled, Kabila’s troops entered Kinshasa and on 30 May 1997 Kabila was sworn in as president. Next day Kabile changed the country’s name from Zaire to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He was to be president until his assassination in 2001.
The Second Congo War 1998 to 2003
Kabila turned against his own backers, responding to the Congo public’s dislike of the occupying army of Rwandans and Ugandans and summarily expelling them all in 1998. Bad move. Rwanda and Uganda again collaborated in putting together an invasion force, this time with the aim of overthrowing Kabila and installing a more compliant president. However, the conflict ended up roping six other African nations into the fighting which degenerated into chaos.
The conflict dragged on till 2003 by which time an estimated five million people had died as a result of the conflict. Some armed groups remain active in the areas near Rwanda’s border right up till the present day, 2021.
The post-genocide period
The last hundred pages of this 350-page book cover the period after the genocide. Gourevitch describes the surprising number of Tutsis who returned from exile all over the place, not just the neighbouring countries of Uganda and Tanzania, but Europe and America, once it was clear that a democratic, mixed ethnicity and peaceful government was in place. And the inevitable tensions this led to between those who’d lived through the horror and seen family and loved ones literally hacked to death before their eyes, and returnees from abroad who moved into the many empty houses, tidied up the mess left by the departing Hutus, had barbecues, laughed and joked as if nothing had happened. Many of the survivors Gourevitch interviews find this difficult to cope with (pages 229 to 241).
He covers the massacre of Hutu refugees at the Kibeho refugee camp. He visits post-genocide prisons packed with Hutus who are strangely passive. Considering that high-profile Hutus were being assassinated on the outside, many of them were relieved to be in the relative safety of prison, regularly visited by international aid workers and monitors. He describes in detail the paradox of Hutu Power genocidaires being protected and funded by western aid agencies, at the complete inability of the international community, yet again, to intervene to stop their attacks into Rwanda and their ethnic cleansing of North Kivu and, yet again, the only thing to stop it being a military invasion organised by Paul Kagame, this time in the shape of the coalition AFDL.
At this kind of thing – specific settings and the issues arising from them – Gourevitch excels and his book will remain a valuable record and testimony to the tense, disorientated spirit of the period after the genocide and before the second Congo war of 1998, the one which degenerated into the Great War of Africa. Gourevitch thought he was covering an event which had finished but ended up recording a moment in the continual, ongoing flux of human events, the edgy post-genocide moment which has itself become part of history.
Stupid remarks
Gourevitch peppers the books with remarks which are, presumably, intended to be insightful, but as someone who did a history GCSE, A-level, history-based degree and has spent my life reading history books and attending history exhibitions, I found disappointingly obvious and trite.
Colonisation is violence and there are many ways to carry out that violence. (p.55)
Every war is unconventional after its own fashion. (p.82)
They sound good, don’t they, they create a good literary, rhetorical effect, they sound profound, but a moment’s reflection tells you they are trite or untrue. He operates on a very superficial level. When he quotes Lord Acton’s hoary dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, as if it was a useful contribution to the debate about the genocide, you realise you are dealing with a child. He quotes Stalin’s alleged saying that one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic, as if it’s a dazzling new discovery (p.201). Disappointing.
Worst of all, Gourevitch develops a theory of human nature based on his literary feelings, on the premise that the most important thing about human nature is the power of the imagination. Instead of seeing things in political terms, he again and again reverts to modish blah about narratives and stories and identity and returns again and again to the importance of imagination, narrative and stories. He is more indebted to Coleridge than Clausewitz. John Milton, Charles Dickens, Rilke, George Eliot, these are his terms terms of reference. It is thin stuff and wholly inappropriate to the subject matter.
He keeps writing things I profoundly disagree with.
We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us… (p.71)
(Note the prissy, attention-drawing use of commas, a rhetorical flourish to make the sentence sound more considered and profound.) I am a Darwinian materialist so I simply disagree. I would counter-suggest that we are, each of us, (sic) not at all functions of how we imagine ourselves, but functions of how our bodies work, products of our biology, of the complex interaction between our genetic inheritance and the myriad biochemical signals the environment we find ourselves in sends us or triggers in our bodies.
If I am starving to death in one of the world’s countless famines or dying of cancer or stroke or heart attack or delirious with malaria it doesn’t really matter what my imagination or anyone else’s imaginations are doing. I am a function, first and foremost, of my biology, all else is secondary.
He writes that the most basic function of power is to coerce us into its narratives. This reads to me like the modish bullshit of the English graduate. The whole approach reeks of the trend across all the humanities and high brow journalism to invoke the magic words ‘narrative’ and ‘story’ as if they explain everything about human nature and politics, but they don’t. If someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do something or die, complex theories of meta-narrative and Coleridgean distinctions between imagination and fancy become irrelevant. When he writes:
I felt tempted, at times, to think of Rwanda after the genocide as an impossible country. (p.224)
I felt tempted to throw the book out the window. This is high-sounding bullshit. What does it even mean? A country is a country is a country, borders on a map, enforced by border police, with a government and administration and laws and a currency. Russia continues to exist after its century of Soviet tyranny, Germany is going strong, decades after the Holocaust and its violent partition, even Cambodia is still a country after the horror of the killing fields – and so on and so on. Clearly the worry that Rwanda is an ‘impossible’ country is a problem which only exists in Gourevitch’s head and shows you just how obtuse his responses can be.
There’s a lot to be written about the ideology of Hutu Power which drove the genocide and the way it shaped the actions of the génocidaires at all levels of Rwandan society, but Gourevitch doesn’t have the conceptual framework or academic training to do it. He makes repeated efforts to do so, but I found them shallow and disappointing.
The big takeaway
Leaving Gourevitch out of the equation, I think the biggest single thing to take away from study of the Rwandan genocide is that it wasn’t a one-off, inexplicable outbreak of barbarity. The one big thing you learn from studying it is that it was simply the highest point of a century-old culture of ethnic rivalry and hatred, which broke out from the 1950s onwards in repeated massacres and pogroms, exactly as the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe were subject to centuries of persecution and pogroms way before the Holocaust.
In that sense it is far from inexplicable, it is very, very explicable. What turned the long history of minor, localised outbreaks of ethnic violence into a genocide was the hard work of the Hutu Power ideologues who set out to organise the extermination of the Tutsis by harnessing the organisation and technology of a modern state, using state radio, magazines, and every level of the highly structured administration to promulgate simple messages of hate and desperation. It boiled down to: “Kill the cockroaches before they kill us!” and hundreds of thousands of Hutus, primed by decades of negative propaganda, bought this message and acted on it (p.251).
But study of the Rwandan genocide doesn’t stop in July 1994. Like all the other accounts I’ve read, Gourevitch shows how it leads directly on to the issue of the Hutu refugee camps and the way the Hutu Power génocidaires survived and recreated their power structures there, terrorising hundreds of thousands of refugees, carrying out deadly incursions back into Rwanda, and then setting about the ethnic cleansing of east Congo. And how that led directly to the AFDL invasion of Zaire which became known as the First Congo War, and how that led on to the second invasion of Congo, by Rwandan and Ugandan forces which led to the disastrous Great War of Africa.
For a few months the specific genocidal Hutu Power campaign was able to be carried out with unbridled ferocity, but the killing of Tutsis had been commonplace for decades before it, and the killing of comparable numbers of Hutus (maybe as many as 100,000 Hutus were killed in all forms of revenge attack, from individual reprisals and local pogroms through to the more organised massacres in the refugee camps) followed seamlessly after it.
Gourevitch ends his book gloomily with Bill Clinton’s flying visit to Rwanda in March 1998 (he didn’t even leave the airport) but during which he acknowledged that the events of 1994 had been a genocide and that ‘the international community’ had done too little to intervene. The later sections of his book testify over and over to the complete failure of the international community, America or the UN to act either to prevent the genocide or to intervene to prevent the regrouping of the génocidaires in the camps. Gourevitch gets progressively more angry about it.
But the thing that comes over in his last few pages is the way the killings resumed inside Rwanda. During 1997 and into early 1998, as he was finalising his account, the number of murders and massacres of Tutsis by revived groups of Hutu Power génocidaires was steadily increasing. In fact the book ends with yet another grim atrocity, an account of how a group of 150 Hutu Power militia and interahamwe attacked a boarding school in Gisenyi and hacked to pieces the 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old Belgian nun.
In other words, as he ended the book, the tide of communal hate killing had returned and was rising. I’ll need to read other books to find out what happened next…
A correct understanding of human nature
The Rwandan genocide itself was a definable and unique historical event with a specific start and a specific end-point. Gourevitch, throughout his book, professes himself puzzled and bewildered at how it could ever have happened, incapable of imagining the motivation and mindset of ordinary people who took up machetes to hack their neighbours and own family members to pieces.
But the more you study it, the more understandable the Rwandan genocide becomes, provided you have a correct understanding of human nature.
We humans are animals, part of the animal kingdom, subject to the same constraints and urges as other animals. My son who’s just completed his Biology degree, said one of his lecturers summed up all animal activity in a snappy motto: feed, fight, fuck. That’s it. Like all animals, we humans are programmed to mate and reproduce; to do that effectively, we have to fight or compete (albeit in socially mediated and sublimated ways) for a mate. But none of this can take place unless we can feed and water ourselves on a regular basis.
For sure, the so-called ‘mind’ and ‘reason’ which well-fed philosophers have pontificated about for millennia, beginning in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, is also a deep part of human nature – but most people, even the most highly educated, are fundamentally irrational and easily swayed. Humans are very suggestible and easily steered towards courses of action which let them fulfil their primal urges – hunger, lust, violence, and the more socialised wishes for praise and acceptance, wealth and power, no matter how local and fleeting. (Presumably Gourevitch has heard of Sigmund Freud. If so, why has he not learned anything from him, from the grim conclusions Freud drew about human nature based on the First World War?)
The great appeal of war for young men in less-than-perfectly-disciplined armies is that you can fulfil a lot of these really primitive urges. As well as the joy of killing alongside a closely-bonded band of brothers, war all too often provides endless opportunity for risk-free sexual violence. Hence the outbreak of mass raping during every conflict in human history, including the Rwandan genocide.
Once you align your thinking with the basic facts that humans are fundamentally irrational animals, driven by a cacophony of unconscious primitive urges, which lead them to make all kinds of irrational mistakes and, given the opportunity, behave terribly – then most of human history, including all its atrocities, make perfect sense, indeed seem inevitable.
Human nature doesn’t change, at least not on a timescale which human society registers. Give or take a few differences in social conventions, we understand the motives of medieval kings and Roman emperors just fine. And they map very well onto to the behaviour of contemporary African dictators such as Mobutu or Bokassa, just as the lickspittles and hangers-on in the court of each would be interchangeable, and just as the lives of the ordinary businessmen or urban workers or peasants doing forced labour in the fields would be recognisable in 1st century Rome or 20th century Congo.
It is only if you have a wrong understanding of human nature that you are surprised by atrocity and barbarity. Only if you assume that everybody else is as highly educated as you, as well-read in Rilke and Milton, as able to eat out in 5-star restaurants around the world on New Yorker expense accounts. If you come from this blessed background then you might be tempted to think that everyone else is as kind and generous and thoughtful and concerned about issues of gender and equality and identity and narrative as you are. So it is only if you live in this cloud cuckoo-land, liberal arts culture that you are going to be shaken to your core when you visit a country where hundreds of thousands of people undertook the systematic slaughter by hand of their neighbours and even their own family members.
The Armenian Genocide. The Russian Civil War. The Ukraine Famine. The Second Word War. The Holocaust. 20 million Russian dead. Indian Partition. The Great Leap Forward. The Chinese Cultural Revolution. Pol Pot in Cambodia. The Yugoslav wars. Has he not heard of these and many other comparable mass murders?
Why has he not learned the simple lesson that this is what humans do. In the right circumstances, whipped up by the right leaders, humans are capable of any atrocity. The Rwandan genocide wasn’t an inexplicable outbreak of madness but just the most recent example of an enduring and central aspect of human nature.
Gourevitch displays the same naive or obtuse shock every time he comes to ‘think about’ the genocide. The shock and dismay of a privileged, literature-soaked author, at the pinnacle of his liberal profession in the richest country in the world, amazed to discover what life is like in one of the poorest countries in the world (which is how Rwanda was classified by the World Bank in the immediate aftermath of the genocide, a place where the average annual wage was estimated to be $80, far less than Gourevitch and his fellow editors of The Paris Review probably used to spend on one business lunch.)
It isn’t anything ‘wrong’ in human nature or ‘wrong’ about the human imagination which he is discovering. Human nature is human nature just like gravity pulls things towards the centre of the earth, the sun rises in the morning, fire burns and so on. It is a basic fact of the world we exist in.
The reason Gourevitch is shocked is that he had such a completely mistaken view of human nature in the first place. He had read about the Holocaust but not really processed its lessons, what it tells us about what ‘ordinary’ people are capable of, namely any level of cruelty and barbarity if they think it means they and their loved ones will survive.
It is the shock of a pampered American discovering that the rest of the world is not like America, in fact it is inconceivably different. (Gourevitch is well aware of the issue of American parochialness and American ignorance. He routinely criticises the sparse and uninformed commentary on the situation in Rwanda and Zaire which he reads in even leading American newspapers like the New York Time and Washington Post, e.g. pages 297, 343. What’s the title of the Green Day song, American Idiot.)
Because he has diametrically the wrong view of human nature, Gourevitch at various points describes the genocide and the killings which followed it as a kind of failure of political and cultural imagination (p.206).
On the contrary, from my point of view, the Rwandan genocide was a kind of fulfilment of the profound and bestial aspects of human nature which I’ve described – albeit carefully whipped up, legitimised and organised by the Hutu Power propagandists. The genocide is explicable because it derives from understandable, analysable aspects of human nature. Have you not read any human history? Do you not know it amounts to a catalogue of massacres and genocides?
The common objection people make to my view of human nature, starting with my own kids, is: “Well, it’s not like that where I live. Where I live everyone is nice and friendly and caring. If what you say is true, how come everyone isn’t at everyone’s throats all the time?”
But the answer is simple: we in the West are well fed. Really well fed. The biggest medical problem in the West is the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. Fat people don’t fight. Even the most casual knowledge of history shows a direct correlation between hunger and social upheaval. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the rise of the Nazis took place in societies pushed to the brink by famine, hunger and extreme social stress; in Weimar Germany mass unemployment meant people were literally starving.
In these circumstances, the most basic human drives come to the fore and can be manipulated and directed by those who understand how: Danton, Lenin, Goebbels, Pol Pot and, in Rwanda, the exponents of Hutu Power such as Hassan Ngeze and Colonel Théoneste Bagosora.
It follows that the fundamental aim of any government should be to manage the economy in such a way as to ensure that most of its citizens are fed, not only as a good in itself but as the basic protection against social collapse and reversion to barbarism. To take a leaf from Gourevitch’s book and quote a famous literary figure, it was Bertolt Brecht who wrote: “Food first, then fancy talk about morality”. (“Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” The Threepenny Opera).
Feeding your population, ensuring security of food, then of housing, then of work which is rewarded with a stable currency, are probably any modern government’s top priorities.
Gourevitch’s assembly of all the facts and his narrative of the deep history, build-up to and then catastrophic events of the Rwandan genocide are thorough and authoritative, and he has obviously interviewed an enormous variety of people who shed light on all levels of events, victims and perpetrators, as well as numerous UN and aid officials, ministers, government spokesmen, including president Kagame of Rwanda and president Museveni of Uganda. It’s a hugely impressive roster. He had tremendous, what the journalists call “access”.
For all these reasons his book tells a searing story and will remain important evidence. But every time he stops to ‘think’ about what he’s describing, he displays a regrettably low level of awareness about human nature, society and history. He demonstrates that he is an idealistic American unprepared for a world which is mostly not populated by well-read, New York liberals. His bewilderment is sometimes so total I wish I found it funny, but it ended up being deeply irritating and marring my admiration for the extensive and very impressive factual sections of his book.
Cecile Kayirebwa
We are animals, bound by the same fundamental facts and constraints of biology as all other life forms on earth. And yet we belong to a freak line of evolution which has led us to develop language, speech, writing, mathematics and technology, and create an impenetrably complex labyrinth of cultural artefacts. One among billions of these human artefacts is this song written by Rwandan poet and singer, Cecile Kayirebwa, which laments the victims of the Rwandan genocide.
Credit
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1998. All references are to the 2000 Picador paperback edition.
Books & Boots 
The Gallic War by Julius Caesar – 3
It is nearly always invisible dangers which are most terrifying. (VII.84)
This second half of the Gallic Wars is much more exciting than the first. In the previous four books the Romans steamrollered over everyone they encountered in a rather monotonous way. Here they experience the catastrophic loss of an entire legion and then the fierce siege of Quintus Cicero’s camp, i.e. for the first time you feel the contingency and risk involved in the entire project. And both events are carefully crafted to feature dramatic episodes of a kind not found in the first four.
Book 5: The second rebellion
The book title was supplied by the editors of the Penguin edition and refers to the revolt of the Belgic tribes.
1 to 8: Illyricum and Gaulish rebels
At the end of each campaigning season in Gaul, Caesar spends the winter in Cisalpine Gaul attending to administration. He also visits the third province he’s in charge of, Illyricum. Here he stamped on the Pirustrae tribe who had allegedly been raiding over the border into Roman territory. Representatives of the tribe met him to tell him it wasn’t them, and delivered hostages as he demanded.
By this point we’re getting used to certain things.
This handful of options are repeated endlessly. In the spring Caesar returns to Gaul where he has to sort out the Treveri, a tribe living close to the Rhine whose leaders have failed to come to the annual conference of Gallic tribes. Turns out two rivals are vying for leadership, Caesar supports Cingetorix.
He rides on to Portus Itius, from where the invasion is to be launched. Tellingly, he takes leaders of most of the Gaulish tribes with him. The most dangerous of these is Dumnorix, ambitious leader of the Aedui. When Caesar insists he accompany him to Britain, Dumnorix begins spreading rumours to the other chiefs that they’ll all be killed in Britain. The sailing is delayed 4 weeks by a contrary wind, towards the end of which Dumnorix left the damp with some Aeduin cavalry. Caesar immediately delayed the sailing and sent troops to recapture Dumnorix, buy force if necessary. Dumnorix did indeed put up a fight, drew his sword and told his followers to protect him. So the Roman cavalry killed him. End of disruptive influence.
9 to 25: Second expedition to Britain
Caesar had ordered his troops over the winter to build a massive fleet eventually consisting of 600 troopships and 28 warships. He sets sail with five legions (about 25,000 soldiers) and 2,000 cavalry. Including private ships they hired, the Romans appeared over the horizon with 800 ships, an enormous force. No wonder the defending Britons decided to retire to higher ground.
They disembarked without event, set up a camp, then Caesar marched the majority 12 miles or so inland till they came to a Briton camp. The Seventh Legion stormed it and forced the Britons to flee but Caesar brought them back to work on the camp.
They set out again to confront the Britons but were informed of a large storms and when he returned Caesar saw it had damaged lots of boats. he drew them further up on the beach, ordered repairs made, sent orders to Titus Labienus back in Gaul to start building more.
He gives an overview of the British which is a bit random. He includes the plausible notion that the coastal areas have been settled by incomers from the continent with trivia such as, the natives think it wrong to eat of hare, fowl, and goose although it’s alright to keep for pastime or pleasure. He also makes the wildly inaccurate claim that the climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold seasons more moderate. I don’t think so.
He gives a wildly inaccurate description of the geography of Britain, making it out to be a huge triangular island off the west coast of France extending down to opposite Spain. It’s a great mystery how the Romans managed to conquer anywhere without decent maps.
He mentions that the British paint themselves with woad so have blue bodies. But then goes on to say they share wives between groups of ten or 12 men. This is the kind of wildly improbable legend that disfigures to much of the ostensibly ‘factual’ writing of the ancient world.
Back to the present, he describes a lightning British attack on the camp which takes them by surprise and causes casualties. The British fight well, making use of chariots and loose formations which replace each other ad lib.
Next day he sends legions foraging but once again the Britons attack in numbers. It’s hard fought but this time the legions turn them and chase. The Britons scatter and never again attack in such a unified way.
The Britons had united under the leadership of one chieftain, Cassivellaunus. He withdraws his forces north of the Thames which the Romans traverse and continue fighting, with Cassivellaunus hiding his chariots in the woods, till opportunities present for raids.
Envoys arrive from the Trinovantes. Their young leader Mandubracius had already crossed the Channel to seek Caesar’s protection after his father was killed by Cassivellaunus. Caesar demands from Mandubracius hostages and corn, but when these are brought, lets him go.
When other tribes see how fairly Mandubracius was treated, they send envoys seeking Caesar’s protection, being the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci and the Cassi. He learns that Cassivellaunus has retreated to famous stronghold built in a good defensive position. Caesar lays siege to it and storms it from its weakest side. Meanwhile Cassivellaunus had sent orders to four allied tribes to attack the Roman camp in Kent, but the Romans repel the attack, kill many attackers and capture a tribal leader.
Summer is nearly over and Caesar decides to return to Gaul. So while he was in the ascendent and the Britons demoralised, he demanded hostages and set an annual tribute for Cassivellaunus to pay Rome. And not to attack the British tribes which had allied with Rome. Then he marches the legions to the coast and into the ships and so back to Gaul.
Given the size of the invasion fleet (800 ships!) which indicated that it was a serious attempt to permanently conquer at least the southern part of Briton, you can’t help concluding the invasion – both the invasions – were a failure.
26 to 37: Revolt of Belgic tribes and massacre of the 7th Legion
Caesar distributes his legions and generals with various tribes. The Eburonians rebel and attack a Roman camp. Ambiorix tells the Romans that a Gaul-wide agreement has been made to launch a concerted attack on all the Roman forces and moreover a group of German mercenaries has crossed the Rhine. So he warns them to leave their camp and promises them safe passage through his territory.
The Romans are surprised but it makes sense that the Eburonians wouldn’t rebel on their own. So, what to do? Caesar gives a dramatic set piece debate among the two commanders, Lucius Aurunculeius Cotta who says stay put, and Quintus Titurius Sabinus who trusts Ambiorix and recommends that they leave (28 to 29).
Sabinus wins the argument and the legionaries are told to pack their most important belongings and set off. Catastrophe ensues. The Gauls wait till the legion has entered a deep narrow defile then bottles them up at either end and starts to massacre them. At one point Ambiorix asks the two Roman generals to a meeting. Cotta refuses to go but Sabinus leaves the fight to climb a hill and approach Ambiorix. He and his centurions are ordered to lay down their weapons, which they do. But as they approach Ambiorix they are surrounded and then killed. The Gauls raise a shout and fall on the remaining Romans with renewed fury. Cotta and most of the force are killed. The remnant make it back to the camp where, that night, seeing they are surrounded, they all commit suicide. A handful of survivors make it to Titus Atius Labienus’s camp to tell the story.
It is thought that some 6,000 legionaries died in this colossal blunder. The massacre happened at Atuatuca in modern Belgium.
38 to 58: Siege of Quintus Cicero
Emboldened, Ambiorix rallies allied Gaulish tribes, and led a ‘huge mass’ of the Eburones, the Nervii, the Aduatuci and their allies and dependents against the camp of Quintus Tullius Cicero. This was somewhere on the river Sambre and about 80 miles from the camp Caesar had made at Amiens. The Gauls made a surprise attack as the legionaries (as so often) were out gathering firewood etc, but they fought a fighting retreat back to the camp. This the Gauls surrounded and invested. They had with them defectors and Roman prisoners who showed them how to build the kind of siege towers and earthworks the Romans used, so these were built and turned against their inventors.
The Gauls called a parley and offered Cicero the same deal they’d offered Sabinus i.e. to lay down their arms and walk away in peace. But Cicero is not as foolish as Sabinus and makes a defiant reply, telling the Gauls that if they lay down their arms he will send to Caesar who will judge them for their rebellion. And so the siege continues. On the seventh day a fierce gale blows up and the Gauls shoot flaming arrows into the camp which burn down a lot of the huts.
Cicero sends a series of messengers to try and get through to Caesar, but all of them are caught and some of them tortured in view of the camp. Eventually a native Gaul makes it through the blockade and to Caesar’s camp, to whom the news of Cicero’s siege comes as a shock. He immediately sends a message to Marcus Licinius Crassus at his camp 24 miles away telling him to march to meet him. Same to Gaius Fabius and Labienus. Labienus writes back that the entire force of the Treveri were upon him and so, on balance, it was too risky for him to leave his camp. Caesar approves this decision and sets off with just two legions to raise the siege on Cicero’s camp.
By a series of forced marches Caesar quickly reaches Cicero’s camp and sends word through a native messenger that he is near. The Gauls lift the siege and turn their forces to face Caesar, some 60,000 warriors (49). Caesar has 7,000 men (49). With the enemy only 3 or so miles away Caesar orders the building of a camp, only smaller than usual, and instructs the soldiers to run around and given an air of panic and fear. This lures the Gauls out into the open and then up to this camp which they start besieging. But they had barely begun engaging when Caesar ordered his infantry to flood out by side gates and the cavalry to sally out and attack the flanks. Taken by surprise the Gauls fled and the Romans were able to cut them down.
Then he marches to relieve Cicero. He is astonished to see the size and number of siege engines the Gauls had built and then to discover that almost all the defenders had been wounded and fought bravely. He publicly congratulates Cicero and all his men, carefully speaking to individual centurions and tribunes to thank them. He addresses the disaster of the massacred legion and assures them it was down to Sabinus’s error, unlike the resolute leadership of their own Cicero.
Caesar’s victory goes some way to rallying the Romans and, more importantly, their Gaulish allies. But nonetheless the tribes are in a ferment, all sending each other messages discussing alliances and attacks. Caesar realises he must winter in Gaul to keep an eye on the situation. Caesar calls meetings with the heads of various tribes, partly by threats, partly by promises, keeps them peaceful. The Aedui and the Remi remain the staunchest allies.
But the Senones try to murder their king, Cavarinus, who had been friendly to the Romans. Indutiomarus leader of the Treveri is particularly rebellious. He sends messages to the German tribes across the Rhine enticing them to war with the Romans, but none sign up, replying that they’ve learned their lesson.
In Gaul Indutiomarus is more successful in recruiting a large force from miscellaneous tribes, attracting to his standard exiles and criminals, training them, procuring horses and so on. Once he feels strong enough he calls an armed convention of the Gaulish tribes at which he a) outlaws Cingetorix, his son-in‑law and rival for leadership of the Treveri; and b) declares his intention to rally the Senones, the Carnutes and several other tribes, to march through the lands of the Remi and laying them waste, before going on to attack the camp of Labienus.
Indutiomarus with his massed forces approaches and invests Labienus’ camp. The latter feigns timidity and reluctance, all the while awaiting his opportunity. He recruits cavalry from nearby friendly tribes and keeps them all hidden in the camp, while Indutiomarus and his men ride up to the walls, yell and jeer and throw spears and abuse the Romans. At the end of a day like this, the Gauls are turning to ride away, with a false sense of security, when suddenly from two gates Labienus launched forth all his cavalry. Anticipating the enemy would scatter in confusion, Labienus carefully instructed his men to resist attacking anyone else but all of them to find and kill Indutiomarus. He put a big price on his head and sure enough some of his soldiers intercepted Indutiomarus at the ford of a river, killed him, cut off his head and brought it back to Labienus.
When they learned this, all his allies among the Eburones and Nervii flee, talk of rebellion is dowsed down and that winter found Gaul quiet.
Book 6: (53 BC)
1 to 8: Further revolt in Gaul
Caesar tasks three generals with raising new recruits and asks Pompey to send him the legion he recently raised in north Italy. He hears news of northern tribes conspiring to rebel and so makes a lightning attack on the Nervii, capturing cattle, prisoners and ravaging the countryside. When he convokes the annual conference of Gaulish leaders, the Senones, Carnuti and Senones refuse to attend, indicating their hostility. Caesar marches quickly on the Senones forcing their leader, Accio, to back down and hand over hostages.
Then he marches into the country of the Menapii in the far north, burning farms and villages and taking cattle and prisoners till their leaders were forced to sue for peace and hand over hostages in the usual way.
Meanwhile the Treveri, led by relatives of Indutiomarus, had gathered a large force of infantry and cavalry to attack Labienus. Labienus feigned fear and then pretended to leave the camp, luring the Treveri across the river onto flat ground this side. Once they were over he inspired his soldiers to turn and fight them, trapped by the river. Much killing. The Treveri submitted and the Germans they’d invited to come join them decided to stay on the other side of the Rhine.
9 to 10: Caesar crosses the Rhine, retreat of the Suebi
Another Rhine crossing:
The Ubii swear it wasn’t them and he spares them. Investigation suggests it was the Suebi. The Suebi gather their men at a stronghold and await. Caesar’s men quickly build another bridge and he crosses it.
11 to 20: Description of the Gauls
Digression on the nature of Gaulish society. How the advent of the Romans reordered things to bring the Aedui and Remi into prominence. The Gauls fought every year among themselves. The Druids practised human sacrifice, sometimes in wickerwork giants which they set on fire (16).
When the father of a house, who is of distinguished birth, has died, his relatives assemble, and if there be anything suspicious about his death they make inquisition of his wives as they would of slaves, and if discovery is made they put them to death with fire and all manner of excruciating tortures.
Their funerals, considering the civilisation of Gaul, are magnificent and expensive. They cast into the fire everything, even living creatures, which they believe to have been dear to the departed during life, and but a short time before the present age, only a generation since, slaves and dependents known to have been beloved by their lords used to be burnt with them at the conclusion of the funeral formalities. (VI.19)
21 to 28: Description of the Germans
More primitive. Fewer gods, they only worship things they can see like sun, moon and fire. Sex in young men is frowned upon for stunting their growth. Land is redistributed each year to stop them becoming to land-bound and also to enforce a sort of equality. Obsession with war. When a chief proclaims a war anyone who resiles is shunned. They lay waste the land around each tribe.
The Gauls used to be more warlike than the Germans and at points crossed the Rhine and conquered. But being closer to Roman territory they’ve got used to trading and fine products unlike the Germans who remain more isolated and warlike.
He gives one of those characteristically ludicrous descriptions of the natural world, imputing to the great forest of Hyrcania a massive extent (true enough) and a number of fantastical animals.
The Penguin editor suggests that this long digression about Gauls and Germans was placed her to distract from the fact that Caesar’s second incursion across the Rhine, like the first one, achieved little tangible result. When the Germans retreat into the forest, Caesar doesn’t have the provisions to follow them and so, er, retreats back over the bridge, destroying the German end and placing a watchtower and guards on the Gaulish side.
29 to 44: Caesar returns to Gaul
Right up in the north, against the Rhine, is the territory of the Eburones led by Ambiorix. Caesar marches against them, sending ahead Gaius Volcacius Tullus with the cavalry. These go very fast and surprise Ambiorix off his guard with only a few men. However these hold off the Romans while Ambiorix saddles up and flees into the forest. He sends out messages telling every man for himself and many flee and hide.
The Segni and Condrusi come to Caesar and plead that not all Germans in Gaul are conspiring. They aren’t and give hostages and make peace.
Caesar makes his base at Atuatuca, then divides his forces in three and takes his force to ravage the land of the Eburones. Germans across the Rhine hear that there’s a free-for-all and cross the river 30 miles downstream of Caesar’s base, to join in. But prisoners tell them the Romans base is at Atuatuca, full of loot and poorly defended.
Cicero had been left in Atuatuca and initially kept the men penned up in case of attack. But after a week the frustrated men need to get out and the troops need corn so Cicero lets a detachment go collect some, and another detachment take out the animals for exercise. Inevitably it’s at this moment that the Germans appear, mounting a fierce attack, causing chaos. While a fierce fight goes on at the gates of the camp, the detachments sent to fetch food – raw recruits and servants – fell into a panic. Experienced centurions helped them form and wedge shape and make it back to the camp, but another detachment initially took to a nearby hill, then changed its mind and came back down into the flatlands where it was destroyed.
Failing to break in the Germans break off the engagement and ride back to the Rhine. Hysteria grips the Roman camp and rumours spread that Caesar and the other legions have been wiped out, until Caesar himself returns and restores order.
The Penguin edition notes that Cicero clearly deserved a bollocking but Caesar treats him very gently, listing all the extenuating circumstances he can think of. This is because his brother, the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, back in Rome, is still a political force who Caesar needs to keep onside.
This is reminiscent of the panic at Vesontio back in I.39. Caesar supervises widespread burning and ravaging of the country, with the deliberate intention of starving the inhabitants. An enquiry into the rebellion of the Senones and Carnutes concludes that it was instigated by Accio, who is executed in the traditional Roman manner i.e. scourged and hanged.
Penguin point out that by holding courts, judging and executing leaders like this Caesar was behaving like the governor of an accredited Roman province which Gaul very much was not. It was arrogant (and illegal) behaviour like this which raised so much opposition back in Rome.
Book 7: The rebellion of Vercingetorix (52 BC)
By far the longest book.
1 to 7: General conspiracy of the Gauls — Vercingetorix chosen as leader
The murder of Publius Clodius in January 52 BC led to increased political turbulence in Rome. The Gauls, hearing of this, took advantage to conspire to overthrow the invader and regain their liberty. The Carnutes lead the rebellion and sack the town of Cenabum, killing the knight Gaius Fufius Cita, in charge of managing trade.
This inspires the leader of the Arverni, far away in the south of free Gaul, abutting on the Roman Province, one Vercingetorix. Background to Vercingetorix, namely his father was at one point premier chieftain of all Gaul but was executed for seeking to be king. When Vercingetorix proclaims his ambition to kick out the Romans, his uncle and other chiefs expel him from their capital, Gergovia, but Vercingetorix takes to the road recruiting followers and building up a following. Eventually he returns to Gergovia, takes over his tribe and sends out messages for a major, allied rebellion. He enforces ferocious discipline on his recruits:
compelling waverers by severity of punishment. Indeed for the commission of a greater offence he put to death with fire and all manner of tortures; for a lesser case he sent a man home with his ears cut off or one eye gouged out, to point the moral to the rest and terrify others by the severity of the penalty.
In Italy Caesar hears of numerous tribes forming alliances constellated around Vercingetorix’s leadership. Vercingetorix moves his forces into the territory of the Bituriges.
8 to 14: Caesar moves suddenly against the Arverni
But Caesar surprises Vercingetorix by clearing the snow from a pass through the Cevennes and approaching him from an unexpected direction. He leaves Brutus in charge of his camp and makes a forced march to Vienne. He picks up two legions and marches in through the territory of the Aedui into that of the Lingones, where two legions were wintering. Hearing all this Vercingetorix returns to the country of the Bituriges, and from there heads to assault Gorgobina, a stronghold of the Boii.
This is the longest book of the 8 and is all like this, two leaders criss-crossing ancient Gaul, doing deals with, or being double crossed by, numerous tribes, sending out legions or detachments or squads of cavalry under lieutenants. The names of tribes and locations Caesar passes through, allies with or fights gets very confusing. In brief: Caesar takes three Gaulish towns, Vellaunodunum, Cenabum and Noviodunum.
15 to 31: Siege, defence, and capture of Avaricum
Vercingetorix had suffered 3 defeats in a row so holds a conference of his allies and persuades them to adopt a scorched earth strategy, withdrawing before the Romans and destroying all towns, villages, fields and crops in their paths, with a view to starving them. But the Bituriges went down on their knees and begged him not to burn Avaricum, their fairest town.
So Vercingetorix relents, but Caesar besieges it, for 25 days building an elaborate rampart wall and two huge siege towers. When the population of the town tries to sneak out one night, Caesar takes it, puts it to flame and massacres the 40,000 inhabitants.
Caesar adjudicates leadership contest between rival leaders of the Aedui. But the one he chooses betrays him, a week later telling his people that the Romans have massacred their army, so they have no choice but to go join Vercingetorix and fight for freedom.
34 to 53: Siege of Gergovia
The chief oppidum (fortified town) of the Arverni.— abandoned, after severe repulse. Impulsiveness of the troops who do not hear the recall, continue up the hill to storm the stronghold but are repulsed when the enemy muster with overwhelming numbers. — 46 centurions 700 men
This was the one and only military defeat Caesar suffered at the hands of the Gauls in 8 years. Caesar gives speech reprimanding men and insisting on discipline and then withdraws from Gergovia, marching back along then crossing the river Allier.
54 to 57: Caesar moves against the Aedui.
58 to 62: Labienus, successful against the Parisii, joins him.
63 to 74: General revolt of the Gauls under Vercingetorix.
They attack Caesar, but are defeated, not least because of Caesar’s German cavalry, and retire to Alesia, a town of the Mandubii. Caesar leaves two legions to guard his baggage and swiftly pursues Vercingetorix, killing 3,000 of his rearguard. Three Aeduin traitors are brought to Caesar.
68 to 89: The siege of Alesia
The Gauls retreat inside this stronghold. Caesar orders his troops to construct massive siege-works eleven miles in length, featuring 11 camps and 23 forts. After a confused fight between the opposing cavalries, Vercingetorix adopts the following strategy: he orders his cavalry to leave in the dead of night from a gate which isn’t yet covered by the Roman siegeworks, and to ride to their respective tribes and to raise all men of military age and bring them back, all in the name of a Final Battle which will achieve National Liberation. Meanwhile, all grain is confiscated and Vercingetorix adopts a daily ration for his 80,000 men, which should last a month or so of siege, until the reinforcements from the tribes arrive.
Details of Caesar’s astonishingly complex and thorough siegeworks which face both in and out.
Schematic side view of the Roman siege works at Alesia, 52 BC
The Gauls hold a national convention at which the tribes allot armed forces to send to Alesia, with various factions resiling and bickering. Eventually an astonishing force of 260,000 sets off, but by this stage Alesia’s food supplies have run out.
Caesar describes a meeting of the leaders inside Alesia and gives a speech – presumably entirely fictional – to Critognatus, a noble Avernian who, after a long prologue, recommends cannibalism (77)! It is also notable as belonging to that genre of speeches which Roman authors attributed to their enemies, in which the enemy eloquently describes the crushing servitude and slavery imposed by the Romans.
The weak and old and wives and children are expelled from Alesia and trek over to the Romans to beg them for food. But the Romans barely have enough to feed themselves and refuse the refugees food or permission to pass. So they are caught in no man’s land to starve.
The Gaulish hoard arrives, much to the joy of the besieged who throng the barricades to watch the battle. Caesar places all his infantry around the 11 mile siegeworks then sends his cavalry against the Gaulish cavalry. The Romans suffer casualties before an attack by German cavalry breaks the Gauls and chases them back to their main camp.
A day later a co-ordinated attack from the relieving force triggers a sortie by the besieged and the Romans find themselves hard pressed. But they are defeated by the Romans firing from their strong defences, and fall into the complex web of trenches, booby traps filled with spiked poles and so on. They are forced to withdraw while the besieged are still trying to fill in the first trench of the inner siegeworks, so the latter retreat back into the town, too.
The Gauls then mount an attack on the one Roman camp which isn’t integrated into their defensive circuit, while the besieged again sally forth. (The complexity of the siegeworks and the peril and anxiety of the repeated attacks remind me of the atmosphere at another famous French siege, Dien Bien Phu in French Indo-China, March to May 1954.)
Caesar sends Labienus with reinforcements to the hilltop camp, sends Brutus with reinforcements to the strongest point of the sallying army, then leads reinforcements in person. The forces attacking the hilltop hesitate, then Labienus sallies forth with the cohorts he had picked up. Caught between these cohorts and Caesar’s cavalry, the Gauls panic, break ranks and are slaughtered.
Sedulius, commander and chief of the Lemovices, was killed; Vercassivellaunus the Arvernian was captured alive in the rout; seventy-four war‑standards were brought in to Caesar; of the vast host few returned safe to camp.
Vercingetorix conceded defeat to the tribal leaders inside Alesia. Kill him or surrender him alive, as they wish. The leaders go under flag of truce to Caesar, who sits in front of his fortifications. Vercingetorix is handed over, all the chiefs lay down their arms. Caesar puts the Aeduin and Arvernian prisoners to one side to use as bargaining chips with their tribes, then distributes all the captures Gauls to his army as loot, one Gaul to one Roman.
(I think what this means is each Roman soldier then gets his prisoner to contact his family and demands a ransom for their safe return. So equivalent to cash.)
Caesar then receives the submission of all the tribes, and carefully allots legions and commanders in the territories of the main tribes for the winter. When news of this comprehensive victory reaches Rome, a public thanksgiving of twenty days was granted.
Book 8
This final book was not written by Caesar but by his lieutenant Aulus Hirtius. He was a legate of Caesar’s army of Gaul from 58, and crossed the Rubicon with him in January 49. He fought for Caesar during the civil war, and was appointed governor of Transalpine Gaul in 45. In other words a senior figure.
Preface
Hirtius addresses his friend Lucius Cornelius Balbus, another friend of Caesar’s, serving under him as chief engineer (praefectus fabrum) in Gaul. Balbus was said to have attended the very select dinner Caesar hosted, along with Sallust, Hirtius, Oppius and Sulpicus Rufus on the evening of the day when he crossed the Rubicon.
He explains to Balbus that he is continuing the Commentaries because they don’t link up with Caesar’s own account of the Civil; War. He says he has finished the third of the latter books, set in Alexandria, and has now set to filling the blank between book 7 and the outbreak of civil war by supplying a book 8. But it has been hard work to match Caesar’s clear elegant style and also the speed and alacrity with which he wrote.
1 to 48: (51 BC) End of the revolt in Gaul
Winter of 52 to 51 Caesar hears that the Gauls are plotting again. Alesia proves they cannot defeat the Romans when the latter’s forces are united, but might be able to pick off the legions scattered around the country in different tribal regions.
At the end of December Caesar set out on a lightning march and caught the Bituriges in the fields (it’s not actually likely they would be tilling their fields in the depths of winter, is it? Is this a stock literary convention of this genre?) Anyway, Caesar captures thousands but then lets them go and, when they see him being similarly merciful to nearby allied tribes, the Bitiruges decide to submit and give hostages.
Carnutes dispersed, Bellovaci defeated. Dumnacus besieges Lemonum, but without success. The Armoric states subdued. Drappes captured. Uxellodunum besieged and taken by Caesar. Exemplary punishment, the captured have their right hands chopped off. Labienus’ successful operations against the Treveri. Commius subdued.
49 to 55: (50 BC) Caesar and the Senate
Caesar’s triumphal reception by cities and colonies. He returns to the army in Gaul. A description of his opponents in the Senate. Caesar returns to Italy.
Thoughts
Political consequences
1. Caesar’s Gallic Wars were fought to a) clear his debts b) bring him glory and political power.
2. But in doing so he went far beyond his brief as proconsul – dealing with the leaders of free Gaul as if he was governor of a conquered province, invading Britain (twice) and crossing the Rhine, far exceeding his authority. This prompted growing criticism in Rome throughout his eight-year command. And it was this which created the mounting political crisis about whether he would ever be prepared to lay down his command and return to Rome as a normal citizen – the ultimate result being that he was too scared to do so and, instead, crossed the Rubicon into Italy with his army thus triggering five years or ruinous civil war
The war itself
1. Interesting to learn how universal the exchange of hostages was – the standard procedure to ensure peace, not only with the Romans but among the Gaulish tribes themselves.
2. The relentless Roman victories of the first four books get a bit boring. Book 5 is far more dramatic and exciting, when the massacre of Sabinus’ legion and the siege of Quintus Cicero for the first time introduce a real sense of risk and uncertainty and pave the way for the epic account of the struggle against Vercingetorix in book 7.
3. The invasion of England cost a huge amount of time and money and resources and, in the end, seems completely futile. He took away hostages from southern tribes but, presumably that lapsed when Caesar returned to Rome a few years later. Nowhere was settled, no bases or camps, no trading. Seems like an expensive folly.
Anti-imperialism
One of the interesting things about the text is the way it contains its own anti-argument. Caesar’s entire account takes it for granted that rule by Rome is best for the Gauls. And yet fairly regularly he puts into the mouths of Gaulish leaders as direct speech, or attributes to them in indirect description, the wish to be free men in their own land, living under their own laws.
It’s not an unreasonable wish. And every time you read it, you think, ‘Just what right did Caesar think he had to ravage, burn, pillage, and endlessly fight all these peoples?’ Maybe he thought he was bringing ‘peace’ to a territory plagued by endless internecine violence but it’s hard to see how the endless campaigning and fighting and burning and selling into slavery which the Romans brought was an improvement. It consistently feels worse.
Slavery
Interesting when one of the chiefs, Ambiorix, complains that hostages given by his family were being treated ‘like slaves’ and put in chains (V.27). And, of Gaul in general:
Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and dignity. As for the common folk, they are treated almost as slaves, venturing naught of themselves, never taken into counsel. The more part of them, oppressed as they are either by debt, or by the heavy weight of tribute, or by the wrongdoing of the more powerful men, commit themselves in slavery to the nobles, who have, in fact, the same rights over them as masters over slaves. (VI.13)
At numerous other towns the inhabitants were captured and sold into slavery. But then so were some the captured Romans. Caesar says Britain is famous for half a dozen exports to the continent, among which are slaves.
In other words, slavery was current throughout Gaul, Britain and the land of the Germans, so well beyond ancient Greece or Rome. Was there any part of the known world where slavery wasn’t practised two thousand years ago? Was slavery universal?
Eternal war
The Gauls fought among themselves every year. The Britons fought among themselves until Caesar’s incursion temporarily united them. The Germans lived for war. The Italians went on aggressive campaigns every year and spent half their time fighting each other. In Africa Jugurtha, in Asia Mithridates and the Parthians, in Egypt civil war. War everywhere, every year, all the time, forever.
The stupidity of war
Men fighting, I get. It’s what we do, what we’ve always done. But some incidents highlight the sheer brainless stupidity of war and the terrible, futile, stupid cost to civilian victims, women and children. The height of lunacy is reached in book 7 when Vercingetorix persuades the Averni, to burn down their own towns and destroy their own crops all in the name of freedom and victory. Reminiscent of General Westmoreland’s famous quote during the Vietnam War, that the Americans had to destroy the village in order to ‘save’ it. Or Vladimir Putin’s determination to ‘save’ eastern Ukraine by utterly devastating it.
War crimes
In descriptions of other Roman campaigns I’ve wondered whether what the Romans did amounted to war crimes. Yes, is the short answer. Massacring the populations of entire towns, including women and children, is a war crime.
Caesar’s sustained eight year campaign of destroying towns, massacring their inhabitants or sending them off into slavery, have caused many moderns to compare his actions as a genocide. If a genocide is defined as the systematic attempt to wipe out a particular ethnic group, then no, he just wanted every tribe in Gaul to submit, not to exterminate them.
On the other hand, when tribes or towns did hold out, it appears, from his often very casual references, that he did consciously raze towns to the ground and either massacre or enslave entire populations, most notably at the town of Avaricum, and then at Uxellodunum (VIII.44). Or:
Caesar thought that the next best way of obtaining the satisfaction that his honour demanded was to strip the country of inhabitants, cattle and buildings so thoroughly that any of the Eburones who had the good fortune to escape would loathe Ambiorix for bringing such calamities upon them and never allow him to return. Detachments of legionary or auxiliary troops went all over the country killing or capturing large numbers of the natives, burning the homesteads, and carrying off plunder, until it was completely devastated. (VIII.25)
There’s a revealing moment early in book 8 when Hirtius mentions that the population of the Carnutes are still living in makeshift tents and shacks, as all the towns in their territory have been razed to the ground (VIII.5).
At moments like this you see a vast landscape where all the towns, villages, fields and crops have been destroyed, leaving the survivors to scrape a living in pathetic shelters beside burned-out fields, and you realise this is what the Romans meant when they said they brought ‘peace’.
The scarlet cloak
Caesar always wore the scarlet cloak (paludamentum) of a commander-in‑chief (VII.88).
Video
A useful video summary.
Related link
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Posted by Simon on June 8, 2022
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/the-gallic-war-julius-caesar-3/