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 Recent commentary from National Journal: Media: The Death of Greatness (January 8, 2002) The New York Times' "Portraits of Grief" show a sudden appreciation for ordinary people. By William Powers. Legal Affairs: How 9/11 Shines a Spotlight on Litigation Lottery (January 8, 2002) The impulse to avoid litigation over September 11 should spur deeper thought about our legal system. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: And, They're Off! (January 8, 2002) With the primary just two months away, the California governor's race is already personal, nasty. By William Schneider. Social Studies: Therapeutic Cloning: Why Congress Should Butt Out (December 18, 2001) Forget about a national law. Let states go their separate ways, as they are doing already. By Jonathan Rauch. Legal Affairs: Politically Correct Idealogues, Still Stuck In Their Ruts (December 18, 2001) A bah-humbug for Norman Mineta, John Ashcroft, leftist professors, Republican tax-cutters, and Jerry Falwell. By Stuart Taylor Jr. Political Pulse: Domestic Issues Making a Comeback (December 18, 2001) The surprising thing about the trade vote was how hard Bush had to work to win. By William Schneider. Media: The Phony War (December 18, 2001) The woods are full of pressies eager to return to toxic, '90s-style ideological battles. By William Powers. More from National Journal. |
On Books 
Villains Galore, Some of Them American
A review of The Graves Are Not Yet Full, by Bill Berkeley by Angela Stephens .... The Graves Are Not Yet Full by Bill Berkeley Basic Books, 309 pages, $27.50 Considering the scant knowledge most Americans have of African history, it is not unusual for the horrific carnage of recent civil wars on the continent to be blamed on "age-old hatreds" and "tribal animosities." Journalist Bill Berkeley argues in The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe, and Power in the Heart of Africa that much of the brutality in countries such as Rwanda, Liberia, and Sudan is the fault of tyrannical leaders pitting groups against each other in calculated power plays, rather than primitive or irrational acts of the populace. The "Big Men," as the author calls them, exploit historic inequities and their populations' fears through the classic strategy of divide and conquer. In looking over the decade or so that he reported from sub-Saharan Africa for The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The New York Times Magazine and The Washington Post (and, for a time, for a human rights organization), Berkeley attempts to find common elements in the slaughters in Rwanda, Liberia, Sudan, South Africa, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) that took place throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He argues that each of these countries' conflicts were orchestrated at the highest level using organized-crime tactics, and that the United States government had a pivotal role in all of them. A key American villain, to the author, was Assistant Secretary of State Chester A. Crocker, who served in President Reagan's Administration and is now chairman of the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace and a professor of strategic studies at Georgetown University. Berkeley asserts that Crocker was "indispensable to tyrannies." Crocker maintained in an interview with Berkeley in 1997 that the Cold War context of the time must be considered when analyzing U.S. decisions about Africa and whom Washington chose to support. "We are talking about a time when we were damned certain that we were not going to let Liberia fall into a hostile influence," Crocker said. "We counted 25 countries where the Libyans were trying to get in." Crocker is surprisingly straight up about his views on America's strategic interests in Africa. Berkeley's ruminations on his findings can seem a bit naive, especially when it comes to evaluating the reasons that America did what it did in resource-rich Africa. Oddly, Berkeley refers to his and Crocker's shared passion for Africa as an "eccentric preoccupation." And Berkeley admits that he's been taken in by some of the architects of tyranny. "I was nearly smitten," he writes of his encounter with Maj. Gen. Jac Buchner, former commissioner of South Africa's KwaZulu Police. Buchner was infamous for "turning" guerrillas of the African National Congress in the 1980s—when the black nationalist movement was banned—then training them to become informers and carry out death squad attacks. Berkeley calls Buchner "one of apartheid's craftiest spies," but admits that Buchner "was so smooth and intimate and seductive that I almost felt like I'd bonded with the man." Some of the book's quirkier passages involve the unusual attention that Berkeley devotes to the footwear favored by the gallery of dictators and killers he met, yet the detail adds a bit of lightness to an otherwise grim history. A participant or supervisor in genocide or torture may wear rubber flip-flops, sneakers, oxfords, or Hush Puppies. In 1986, then-U.S. Ambassador to Liberia Edward Perkins, in an interview with the author, dismissed Berkeley's observation that Liberians were seething about Samuel Doe's stealing the late-1985 election that was to have ushered in civilian rule. Perkins said he had urged Doe—who seized power in a 1980 coup—to "mix with the people" more. Berkeley jotted in his notebook, "This man is living on another planet." When Berkeley interviewed Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, head of South Africa's Inkatha Freedom Party, Buthelezi launched into a diatribe about federalism, while closing his eyes and droning on robot-like for as long as 15 minutes at a time. Buthelezi, the author asserts, had secretly conspired with apartheid security forces against the ANC, in an alliance that resulted in the deaths of 20,000 South Africans. "He's weird," Berkeley wrote in his notebook, noting also that Buthelezi wore paisley socks and black loafers with tassels. One of the most moving characters in the book is Berkeley's wife, Mary Jane, the daughter of Cuban immigrants and a human rights researcher who maintained a steely calm when she was arrested with the author in 1993 and held for four days in Zaire. Fluent in French, she translated the interrogators' questions for her husband, telling him, "We can't do that," when he nervously said they might have to offer some information about the purpose of their visit, which was to investigate a campaign of state-sponsored ethnic violence. Berkeley wraps up his report on a tragic yet hopeful note: After the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis by Hutus in 1994, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1998 issued the first conviction for genocide in an international court. Jean-Paul Akayesu, the mayor of Rwanda's Taba Commune, was given the maximum sentence of life in prison after being convicted of nine counts of genocide, crimes against humanity, and other assorted war crimes, including rape. Only such accountability for criminal acts, the author asserts, will put an end to the tyranny that haunts Africa.
What do you think? Discuss this article in the Politics & Society conference of Post & Riposte. More from National Journal. More on politics and society in Atlantic Unbound and The Atlantic Monthly. Angela Stephens is managing editor of UN Wire. Book reviews appear every week in National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C. For information on National Journal Group publications, see NationalJournal.com. Copyright © 2001 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved. | [an error occurred while processing this directive] | ||
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