Philip Gourevitch

LETTER FROM RWANDA

AFTER THE GENOCIDE

When a people murders up to a million fellow-countrymen, what does it mean to survive?
by Philip GourevitchDECEMBER 18, 1995

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Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was low-techperformed largely by machete

it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of seven million seven hundred thousand, at least eight hundred thousand were killed in just a hundred days. By comparison, Pol Pots slaughter of a million Cambodians in four years looks amateurish, and the bloodletting in the former Yugoslavia measures up as little more than a neighborhood riot. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. Members of the Hutu majority group began massacring the Tutsi minority in early April, and at the end of the month dead Tutsis were easier to find in Rwanda than live Tutsis. The hunt continued until mid-July, when a rebel army conquered Rwanda and brought the massacres to a halt. That October, a United Nations Commission of Experts found that the concerted, planned, systematic and methodical acts of mass extermination perpetrated by Hutu elements against the Tutsi group in Rwanda constitute genocide. (This week, the International Tribunal for Rwanda is expected to hand down its first indictment of Rwandans charged with participation in the genocide.) Hutus in Rwanda had been massacring Tutsis on and off since the waning days of Belgian colonial rule, in the late fifties. These state-sanctioned killings were generally referred to as work, or clearing the bush. The current crisis was triggered in 1990, when the Rwandese Patriotic Front, an army led by Tutsi exiles, attacked from Uganda, seizing a foothold in the northeast and demanding an end to Hutu Power, as the state ideology was called. The members of the R.P.F. were known within the Rwandan government as inyenzi (cockroaches), and, following the obvious logic that the brother of ones enemy is also an enemy, all Tutsisand any Hutus who opposed Hutu Power were ibyitso (accomplices). As Hutu youth militias were recruited and armed for civil defense, massacres of Tutsis and assassinations of Hutu oppositionists occurred with increasing regularity. In August of 1993, when the Hutu President Juvnal Habyarimana signed a power-sharing peace accord with the R.P.F., extremist Hutus began to speculate whether the President himself had become an accomplice. Let whatever is smoldering erupt, Kangura, a Hutu extremist newspaper, advised in January of 1994. At such a time, a lot of blood will be poured. Most Rwandans cannot read a newspaper, much less afford one, but all the right people read Kangura. In March, when Kangura ran the headline HABYARIMANA WILL DIE IN MARCH, the article explained that the assassins would be Hutus bought by the cockroaches.

On the evening of April 6, 1994, Thomas Kamilindi was in high spirits. His wife, Jacqueline, had baked a cake for a festive dinner in their home, in Kigali, Rwandas capital. It was Thomass thirty-third birthday, and that afternoon he had completed his last day of work as a reporter for Radio Rwanda. After ten years at the state-owned station, he had resigned in protest against the lack of political balance in news programming. Thomas was taking a shower when Jacqueline began pounding on the bathroom door. Hurry up! she shouted. The President has been attacked! Thomas locked the doors of his house and sat by the radio. President Habyarimanas plane, returning from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had been shot down over Kigali. There were no survivors. Thomas, who had well-placed friends, had heard that large-scale massacres of Tutsis were being prepared nationwide by the Presidents extremist entourage, and that lists of Hutu oppositionists had been drawn up for the first wave of killing. But he had never imagined that Habyarimana himself might be targeted. If the extremists had sacrificed him, who was safe? (Seven months earlier, in BurundiRwandas southern neighbor, and the only country to have the same Hutu-Tutsi mix as Rwandathe assassination of the Hutu President by Tutsi soldiers had set off a two-month Hutu uprising that left at least fifty thousand dead, most of them Tutsis. Now the radio announced that Burundis new Hutu President, Cyprien Ntaryamira, had been on board Habyarimanas plane, and had died alongside him.) The radio normally went off the air at 10 P.M., but that night it stayed on. When the bulletins ceased, music began to play, and to Thomas the music, which continued through his sleepless night, confirmed that the worst had been let loose in Rwanda. The next day, Radio Mille Collines, a popular station founded by Hutu extremists, blamed the Rwandese Patriotic Front for the assassination. If Thomas had believed that, he would have been at the microphone, not at the receiver. He didnt leave his house for a week. He collected news from around the country by telephone and filed reports for a French radio service. Within hours of Habyarimanas death, roadblocks set up by the military and youth militias that were known as interahamwethose who attack togetherhad appeared throughout Kigali, and assassins from the Presidential Guard were dispatched with lists of opposition leaders to kill, including the Hutu Prime Minister. The next day, soldiers killed ten Belgian blue helmets from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda, which had been deployed when the peace treaty with the R.P.F. was signed. After that, the U.N. troops offered little resistance to the killers, and foreign governments rushed to shut down their

embassies and evacuate their nationals. You cockroaches must know you are made of flesh, a broadcaster at Radio Mille Collines proclaimed. We wont let you kill. We will kill you. Encouraged by political and civic leaders, the massacring of Tutsis spread from region to region. Following the militias example, Hutus young and old rose to the task. Neighbors hacked neighbors to death in their homes, and colleagues hacked colleagues to death in their workplaces. Priests killed their parishioners, and elementary-school teachers killed their students. Many of the largest massacres occurred in churches and stadiums where Tutsis had sought refuge often at the invitation of local authorities, who then oversaw their execution. In mid-April, at least five thousand Tutsis were packed in the Gatwaro Stadium, in the western city of Kibuye; as the massacre there began, gunmen in the bleachers shot zigzag waves of bullets and tossed grenades to make the victims stampede back and forth before militiamen waded in to finish the job with machetes. Throughout Rwanda, mass rape and looting accompanied the slaughter. Militia bands, fortified with potent banana beer and assorted drugs, were bused from massacre to massacre. Hutu prisoners were organized in work details to clear cadavers. Radio announcers reminded listeners to take special care to disembowel pregnant victims. As an added incentive to the killers, Tutsis belongings were parcelled out in advancethe radio, the couch, the goat, the opportunity to rape a young girl. A councilwoman in one Kigali neighborhood was reported to have offered fifty Rwandese francs apiece (about thirty cents at the time) for severed heads, a practice known as selling cabbages. On April 12th, Thomas received a call from Radio Rwanda saying that Elizer Niyitegeka wanted to see him. Niyitegeka, a former radio colleague, had just been appointed Minister of Information, replacing an oppositionist who had been killed. Thomas walked to the station, and Niyitegeka told him that he had to come back to work. Thomas reminded him why hed quit, and the Minister said, O.K., Thomas, let the soldiers decide. Thomas hedged: he would not take a job under threat but would wait for an official letter of employment. Niyitegeka agreed, and Thomas returned home to learn from Jacqueline that, while he was gone, two soldiers from the Presidential Guard had appeared, carrying a list with his name on it. Thomas was a Hutu, but he was not surprised to learn that he was on an assassins list: at Radio Rwanda, he had refused to speak the language of Hutu Power and had led two strikes; he was a member of the Social Democratic Party, which had ties to the R.P.F.; and he was from the city of Butare, Rwandas

second-largest city, in the southa region known for its moderate politics. Considering these factors, Thomas went to bed determined to seek a safer refuge than his home. The next morning, three soldiers came to his door. He invited them to have a seat, but the leader of the contingent told him, We dont sit when were working. The soldier said, Come with us, and Thomas said he wasnt budging until he knew where he was going. You come with us or your family will have trouble, the soldier said. Thomas left with the soldiers, and walked up the hill, past the deserted American Embassy and along the Boulevard de la Rvolution. At the corner in front of the Soras Insurance Building, across from the Ministry of Defense, there was a bunker, with soldiers around it. The soldiers scolded Thomas for describing their activities in his reports to the international media. He was ordered to sit down on the street. When he refused, the soldiers beat him. They beat him hard and slapped him repeatedly, shouting insults and questions. Then someone kicked him in the stomach, and he sat down on the street. O.K., Thomas, one of the men said. Write a letter to your wife and say what you like, because youre going to die. A jeep drove up, and the soldiers in it got out and kicked Thomas. Then he was given pen and paper, and he wrote, Listen, Jacqueline, theyre going to kill me. I dont know why. They say Im an accomplice of the R.P.F. Thats why Im going to die, and heres my testament. Thomas wrote his will, and handed it over. One of the soldiers said, O.K., lets finish this, and stood back, readying his rifle. I didnt look, Thomas recalled when he told me of his ordeal. I really believed he would shoot me. Then another vehicle came up, and suddenly I saw a major with his foot up on the bunker, and he said, Thomas? When he called me, I came out of a sort of dream. Thomas is spry, compact, and bright-eyed. His face and hands are as expressive as his speech. He is a radio man, a raconteur, and, however bleak his tale, the telling gave him pleasure. After all, he was alive. His was what passed for a happy story in Rwanda. But the story made no sense: the major who had spared his life may have recognized Thomas, but to Thomas the major was a stranger. It was not unusual for someone to survive or escape from a large massacrea man told me that his niece was macheted, then stoned, then dumped in a latrine, only to get up each time and stagger awaybut Thomas had been deliberately reprieved, and he could not say why. He shot me a look of comic

astonishmenteyebrows high, forehead furrowed, a quirky smile working his mouthto say that his survival was far more mysterious than his peril had been. During the genocide, the work of the killers was not regarded as a crime in Rwanda; it was effectively the law of the land, and every citizen was responsible for its administration. That way, if a person who should be killed was let go by one party he could expect to be caught and killed by somebody else. When the major called off Thomass execution, the soldiers who escorted him home told him he was still slated for death. In the ensuing weeks, three assassins were sent for him, and each left with a warning that the next one would get him. I spoke with Thomas this past July, on a soft summer evening in Kigalithe hour of sudden equatorial dusk, when flocks of crows and lone buzzards reel, screaming, between the trees and rooftops. Walking back to my hotel, I passed the corner where Thomas had expected to be killed. The Soras Insurance Buildings plate-glass portico was a tattered web of bullet holes. If I dont kill that rat hell die, Clov says in Samuel Becketts Endgame. But those who commit genocide have chosen to make nature their enemy, not their ally.

WHY AM I ALIVE? Living came to seem an accident of fate. I went to Rwanda last summer, a year after the killings, because I wanted to know how Rwandans understood what had happened in their country and how they were getting on in the aftermath. The word genocide and the images of the nameless and numberless dead left too much to the imagination. Rwanda is spectacular to behold, the rival of any Tuscan idyll. Through its center, a winding succession of steep, tightly terraced slopes radiates out from small roadside settlements and solitary compounds. Gashes of red clay and black loam mark fresh hoe work; eucalyptus trees flash silver against brilliant-green tea plantations; banana trees are everywhere. The land presents hills of every possible variety: jagged rain forests, undulating moors, broad swells of savanna, volcanic peaks as sharp as filed teeth, and round-shouldered buttes. During the rainy season, the clouds are huge and low and fast, lightning flickers through the nights, and by day the land is lustrous. After the rains, the skies lift, the terrain takes on a ragged look beneath the flat unvaried haze of the dry season, and in the savannas of the Akagera Park wildfire blackens the hills.

One day, when I was returning to Kigali from the south, the car mounted a rise between two winding valleys, the windshield filled with purple clouds, and I asked Joseph, the man who was giving me a ride, whether Rwandans realize what a beautiful country they have. Beautiful? he said. After the things that happened here? The people arent good. If the people were good, the country might be O.K. Joseph told me that his brother and sister had been killed, and he made a soft hissing click with his tongue against his teeth. The country is empty, he said. Empty! It was not just the dead who were missing: when the genocide began, the R.P.F. resumed its war, and as the rebels advanced in the summer of 1994 some two million Hutus fled into exile at the behest of the leaders and radio announcers who had earlier urged them to kill. This most rapid exodus in modern historytwo hundred and fifty thousand people crossed a single bridge into Tanzania in one day, and a million entered Zaire in one weekmade the R.P.F. victory possible and, at the same time, rendered it incomplete. In effect, the refugees, clustered in camps just beyond Rwandas borders, constitute a rump state; the government, the army, and the militias that presided over the genocide remain intact and in arms around the camps, reminding Rwanda by both their absence and their presence that the fight is not over. Yet except in some rural areas in southern Rwanda, where the desertion of Hutus had left nothing but bush to reclaim the fields around crumbling adobe houses, I, as a newcomer, could not see the absences that blinded Joseph to Rwandas beauty. Yes, there were grenade-flattened buildings, shot-up faades, and mortar-pitted roads, and I knew that the retreating Hutu Army and militias had left the country pillaged: a virtually empty treasury; the tea-curing factories and coffee-depulping machinesRwandas source of foreign exchange destroyed; electrical and telephone lines slashed; water systems sabotaged and often clogged with bodies. But these were the ravages of war, not of genocide, and by the time I arrived in Rwanda most essential services had been restored and most of the dead buried. Fifteen months before, Rwanda had been the most densely populated country in Africa. Now the work of the killers looked just as they must have wanted it to look when they were done: invisible. From time to time, mass graves were discovered and excavated, and the remains were transferred to new, properly consecrated mass graves. But even the occasionally exposed bones, the conspicuous number of amputees and people with deforming scars, and the superabundance of packed orphanages could not

be taken as evidence that what had happened to Rwanda was an attempt to exterminate a people. There were only peoples stories. Every survivor wonders why he is alive, Abb Modeste Mungwararora, a Tutsi priest at the cathedral in Butare, told me. Abb Modeste had hidden for weeks in his sacristy, eating Communion wafers, before moving to his study and, finally, into the rafters of a house where some neighboring nuns lived. The obvious explanation of his survival was that the R.P.F. had come to the rescue. By the time the R.P.F. had installed a new government, in mid-July of 1994, however, seventy-five per cent of Rwandas Tutsis were dead. In this regard, at least, the genocide had been entirely successful: to those who had been targeted, it was not death but life that seemed an accident of fate. I had eighteen people killed in my house, tienne Niyonzima, a former businessman who is now a deputy in the National Assembly, told me. Everything was totally destroyeda place of fifty-five metres by fifty metres totally destroyed. In my neighborhood, they killed six hundred and forty-seven people. They had the number of everyones house, and for the Tutsis and intellectuals they went through and painted the numbers with red paint. My wife was at a friends, shot with two bullets. But she is still alive, onlyhe waited a moment, then said, she has no arms. The others with her were killed. The interahamwe left her for dead. Her whole family of sixty-five in Gitarama were killed. Niyonzima was in hiding at the time. Only after he had been separated from his wife for three months did he learn that she and four of their children had survived. Well, he said, one son was cut in the head with a machete. I dont know where he went. His voice lowered, and caught. He disappeared. Then Niyonzima clicked his tongue, and said, But the others are still alive. Quite honestly, I dont understand at all how I was saved. Laurent Nkongoli attributes his survival to Providence, and also good neighbors, an old woman who said, Run away, we dont want to see your corpse. Nkongoli, a lawyer, was one of more than eight thousand oppositionists, most of them Tutsis, who had been jailed without charges for as long as six months following the R.P.F.s 1990 attack. Many of the prisoners were tortured, and dozens died, but Nkongoli, who is now the Vice-President of the National Assembly, shows no outward sign of his recent ordeals. He is a robust man, with a taste for double-breasted suit jackets and lively ties, and he moves, as he speaks, with a brisk determination. In the third week of April last

year, when his neighbor urged him to flee, Nkongoli left Kigali and sneaked through the lines to the R.P.F. zone, where his wife and children already were. Before leaving, I had accepted death, he said. At a certain moment, this happens. One hopes not to die cruelly, but one expects to die anyway. Not death by machete, one hopes, but with a bullet. If you were willing to pay for it, you could often ask for a bullet. Death was more or less normal, a resignation. You lose the will to fight. There were four thousand Tutsis killed here at Kacyirua neighborhood of Kigali. The soldiers brought them here, and told them to sit down because they were going to throw grenades. And they sat. Rwandan culture is a culture of fear, Nkongoli went on. I remember what people said. He adopted a piping voice, and his face took on a look of disgust. Just let us pray, then kill us, or I dont want to die in the street, I want to die at home. He resumed his normal voice. When youre that resigned and oppressed, youre already dead. It shows the genocide was prepared for too long. I detest this fear. These victims of genocide were being killed for so long that they were already dead. I reminded Nkongoli that, for all his hatred of fear, hed said he had accepted death before he left. Yes, he said. I got tired in the genocide. You struggle so long, then you get tired. Every Rwandan I spoke with seemed to have a favorite unanswerable question. For Nkongoli, it was how so many Tutsis had allowed themselves to be killed. For Franois-Xavier Nkurunziza, a Kigali lawyer of mixed ethnicity, the question was how so many Hutus had allowed themselves to kill. Nkurunziza, who was a Hutu by law and is married to a Tutsi, lost many family members last year. Conformity is very deep, very developed here, he told me. In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isnt enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, Its yours. Kill. Theyll obey. The peasants, who were paid or forced to kill, were looking up to people of higher socioeconomic standing to see how to behave. So the people of influence, or the big financiers, are often the big men in the genocide. They may think that they didnt kill, because they didnt take life with their own hands, but the people were looking to them for their orders. And in Rwanda an order can be given very quietly. As I travelled around the country, collecting accounts of the killing, it almost seemed as if, with the machete, the nail-studded club, a few well-placed grenades, and a few bursts of automatic-rifle fire, the quiet orders of Hutu Power had made the neutron bomb obsolete. Then I came across a man in a market

butchering a cow with a machete, and I saw that it was hard work. His big, precise strokes made a sharp hacking noise, and it took many hackstwo, three, four, five hard hacksto chop through the cows leg. How many hacks to dismember a person? At Nyarubuye, in the province of Kibungo, near the Tanzanian border, more than a thousand Tutsis were rounded up in the church, and hundreds of bodies had been left where they were found, for commemorative purposes: tangled skeletons with weather-greened skin and flowered clothing patched over them; lone skulls in the grass; a pelvis with a sneaker stuck in it; and a lower jaw attached to a neck and torso with the rest of the head gone. The killers at Nyarubuye killed with machetes all day, and at night they hobbled the survivors by severing their Achilles tendons; then they went off to eat and sleep, and returned in the morning to kill again. When the operation was finished, even the little terra-cotta statues in the sacristy had been methodically decapitated. They were associated with Tutsis, the R.P.F. sergeant who showed me around the site explained. The killers at Nyarubuye had become mad, the sergeant said. They werent human beings anymore. But Dr. Richard Mollica, the director of Harvards Program in Refugee Trauma, believes that mass political violence cannot simply be written off as madness. It is one of the great human questions, he told me. Why, in these situations, is there always the extra sadism to achieve the political goal? You achieve your political power, why do you have to flay some guy alive like a piece of lox and then hang him out to suffocate in the sun? What does a guy get from raping a woman? One five-minute rape can destroy an entire family for a generation. Five minutes. Now were talking about a whole country, and my opinion is that the psychology of young people is not that complicated, and most of the people who commit atrocities in most of these situations are young males. Young males are really the most dangerous people on the planet, because they easily respond to authority and they want approval. They are given the rewards for getting into the hierarchical system, and theyre given to believe theyre building heaven on earth. In most atrocities, theres a big utopian dreama cleaner society, or purer society. Young people are very idealistic, and the powers prey on the young people by appealing to their more idealistic nature. Mollica also challenges the presupposition in modern Western society that people who commit a murder will live to regret it or that it will sicken their lives. He said, I havent seen it, to tell you the truth. In fact, he told me,

people who commit murder find it very easy to rationalize it and to come to terms with it, and this is particularly so when its being condoned by the state. Nobody knows how many Rwandans it took to butcher as many as a million of their countrymen in three months, and nobody could have known in advance how many would be needed. The people were the weapon, and that meant everybody: the entire Hutu population was called upon to kill the entire Tutsi population. In addition to insuring obvious numerical advantages, this arrangement eliminated any questions of accountability that might arise. If everybody is implicated, then implication becomes meaningless. In a war, you cant be neutral, Stanislas Mbonampeka told me. If youre not for your country, are you not for its attackers? Mbonampeka, a large man with a calm, steady manner, is the Minister of Justice in the Rwandan government in exile, a self-appointed body culled largely from the deposed government that presided over the genocide. Mbonampeka was not in the government himself during the killing, but he operated informally as its agent; he pleaded its cause both at home and in Europe, to the surprise of those who remembered that in the early nineties he had been a prominent human-rights activist. In 1992, during a brief stint as Habyarimanas Justice Minister, he even issued an arrest warrant against Lon Mugesera, a Hutu Power ideologue who had delivered a famous speech calling for the extermination of Tutsis. This was not a conventional war, Mbonampeka told me last June, when I found him living a few miles from the Rwandan border, at the Protestant Guest House in Goma, Zaire. The enemies were everywhere. I asked him if what he called civil defense was what the United Nations calls genocide. It wasnt genocide, he told me. Personally, I dont believe in the genocide. There were massacres within which there were crimes against humanity or crimes of war. But the Tutsis were not killed as Tutsis, only as sympathizers of the R.P.F. In fact, Mbonampeka said, ninety-nine per cent of Tutsis were pro-R.P.F. There was no difference between the ethnic and the political. Even the women and children? Think about it, he said. When the Germans attacked France, France defended itself against Germany. They understood that all Germans were the enemy. The Germans killed women and children, so you do, too. I had seen Mbonampekas name on a list, produced by the government in Kigali, of four hundred and fourteen suspected commanders, organizers and authors of genocide. He did not seem concerned about the prospect of indictment. Even if the international tribunal condemns the leaders of Hutu

Power, Mbonampeka said that those who are condemned will remain heroes, because they saved their people. If not for them, we would be dead. In the famous story, the older brother, Cain, was a cultivator, and Abel, the younger, was a herdsman. They made their offerings to GodCain from his crops, Abel from his herds. Abels portion won Gods regard, Cains did not. So Cain killed Abel. Rwandas first inhabitants were cave-dwelling Pygmies, whose descendants today are the Twa people, a disenfranchised group who make up less than one per cent of the population. Hutus and Tutsis came later, but their origins and the order of their immigrations are not accurately known. While convention holds that Hutus are a Bantu people, who settled Rwanda first, and Tutsis are a Nilotic people, who migrated from Ethiopia, these theories draw more on legend than on documentable fact. With time, Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language, intermarried, followed the same religion, and shared the same social and political structure of small chiefdoms. Some chiefs were Hutus, some were Tutsis; Hutus and Tutsis fought together in the chiefs armies; through marriage and clientage, Hutus could become hereditary Tutsis, and Tutsis could become hereditary Hutus. Because of all this mixing, ethnographers and historians agree that Hutus and Tutsis cannot properly be called distinct ethnic groups. Still, the names Hutu and Tutsi stuck. They had meaning, and though there is no general agreement about what word best describes that meaningclasses, castes, and ranks are favoritesthe source of the distinction is undisputed: Hutus were cultivators, and Tutsis were herdsmen. This was the original inequality: cattle are a more valuable asset than produce, and the name Tutsi became widely synonymous with the political and economic lite. The stratification was accelerated after 1860, when the Mwami Kigeri Rwabugiri, a Tutsi king, launched a series of military and political campaigns to centralize his authority and extend it over most of the country. According to the American historian Alison Des Forges, a consultant for Human Rights Watch/Africa, Tutsi litism in the late nineteenth century derived more from financial and martial power than from racial identity. The new lite had a sense of its own superiority, Des Forges writes, and then asks, But has there ever been an lite that did not? Within the jumble of Rwandan racial, or tribal, characteristics, the question of appearances is particularly touchylast year, it often meant life or deathbut nobody denies that there are physical archetypes: for Hutus, stocky and roundfaced, dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, and square-jawed; for Tutsis, lanky

and long-faced, light-skinned, narrow-nosed, thin-lipped, and narrow-chinned. Nature presents countless exceptions. (You cant tell us apart, Laurent Nkongoli, the Vice-President of the National Assembly, told me. We cant tell us apart. I was on a bus in the north once, and because I was in the north, where theyHutuswere, and because I ate corn, which they eat, they said, Hes one of us. But Im a Tutsi from Butare.) Still, when the Europeans arrived in Rwanda at the end of the nineteenth century, they formed a picture of a stately race of warrior kings, surrounded by herds of long-horned cattle, and a subordinate race of short, dark peasants, hoeing tubers and picking bananas. The white men assumed that this was the tradition of the place, and they thought it a natural arrangement. Race science was all the rage in Europe in those days, and for students of Central Africa the key doctrine was the so-called Hamitic hypothesis, propounded by John Hanning Speke, the Nile explorer. Spekes idea was that all culture and civilization in the region had been introduced by the taller, fairer people, whom he declared a Caucasoid tribe of Ethiopian origin, and therefore a race superior to the native Negroids. Speke had never been to Rwandano white man had until 1894; even the slave traders had passed the place bybut the Germans and Belgians who colonized the country took him at his word. In 1897, two years after Rwabugiris death, the Germans instituted a policy of indirect rule, which harnessed Tutsi chiefs as puppets and as feudal lords to the Hutus. The Belgians took over after the First World War, and, working in collaboration with the Catholic Church, proceeded to further dismantle local structures of Hutu autonomy. Then, in 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (eighty-five per cent) or Tutsi (fourteen per cent) or Twa (one per cent). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and allowed the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system that perpetuated the myth of Tutsi superiority. So the offering of the Tutsi herdsmen found favor in the eyes of the colonial lords, and the offering of the Hutu cultivators did not. While the great majority of Hutus and Tutsis still maintained their customary relations, Alison Des Forges writes, extremist Tutsis, encouraged by European admiration and influenced by the amalgam of myth and pseudo-anthropology, moved from litism to racism, and there developed simultaneously a corresponding and equally virulent formulation on the part of extremist Hutus. Tribalism begets tribalism, and, as the mood in Africa moved toward independence and majority rule, the Hutu

Power movement began to emerge. In 1959, when violence erupted, the Belgians went with the tide, backing the Hutu revolutionaries as they themselves prepared to depart. Rwandas first President was Grgoire Kayibanda, inaugurated in 1962, and by the time General Juvnal Habyarimana ousted him, in 1973, the power struggle had become an internal affair of the Hutu lite, much like feuds among royal Tutsi clans had in the past. Rwandas revolutionaries had become what V. S. Naipaul calls postcolonial mimic men, who reproduce the abuses against which they rebelled, while ignoring the fact that their past-masters were ultimately banished by those they enchained. (France quickly drew Rwanda into its neo-colonial sphere of influence in Francophone Africa. When the R.P.F. attacked in 1990, France sent arms and also troops to fight alongside the Rwandan Army. After Habyarimanas death, the French continued to support his Hutu Power successors, providing arms, refuge, and diplomatic support throughout the genocidesupport that followed them into exile. On the eve of the R.P.F. victory in late June of 1994, when France launched a humanitarian military operation into Rwanda from Zaire to assist its routed friends, interahamwe bands greeted the French soldiers with a sign proclaiming, Welcome French Hutus.) By 1990, the Tutsi diaspora, which began in the aftermath of the Hutu Power revolution, had become the largest and longest-standing unresolved refugee problem in Africa. But Habyarimana, citing Rwandas chronic overpopulation, maintained that there wasnt room for the Tutsis to come home. Ninety-five per cent of Rwandas land was under cultivation, and the average family consisted of eight people living as subsistence farmers on less than half an acre. In 1986, Habyarimana had declared that Rwanda was full; end of discussion. The Rwandese Patriotic Front was founded the next year in Uganda, as a secret fraternity of Tutsi refugees who had become officers in the Ugandan Army. The R.P.F. formed itself against Habyarimana, just as Hutu Power had been formed in his image. In October, 1990, the R.P.F. attacked Rwanda, demanding an end to tyranny and exclusion. The invasion came at a sensitive moment for Hutu Power: earlier in the year, Habyarimana, facing domestic political and economic crises, had adopted reforms that allowed for a host of opposition parties to spring up. For a time, the political scuffling was mostly an intra-Hutu affair, but then the R.P.F. offered Hutu Power its best weapon yet against the menace of pluralism: the unifying spectre of a common enemy. Three days after the R.P.F. attacked, the

Rwandan Army staged a fake assault on Kigali, and the government, blaming infiltrators and accomplices, began arresting Tutsis and Hutu oppositionists en masse. A week later, Hutu officials in Kibilira were instructed to kill Tutsis as part of their communal work obligation; three hundred and fifty Tutsis died in what can be seen as the first massacre of the genocide. The widely circulated Hutu Ten Commandments, published in the newspaper Kangura shortly after the R.P.F. invasion, urged vigilance against the accomplices on all frontssex, business, and affairs of state. The Hutus should stop having mercy on the Tutsis, the eighth commandment went. We the people are obliged to take responsibility ourselves and wipe out this scum, Habyarimanas good friend Lon Mugesera explained in his celebrated 1992 speech. No matter what you do, do not let them get away. Invoking the Hamitic hypothesis that Tutsis came from Ethiopia, Mugesera advised that they should be sent back there, by way of the Nyabarongo River, which ultimately feeds into the Nile. His message was understood; last year, tens of thousands of dead Tutsis were dumped in Rwandas rivers. Genesis identifies the first murder as a fratricide. The motive is politicalthe elimination of a perceived rival. When God asks what happened, Cain offers his notoriously guileless lie: I do not know; am I my brothers keeper? The shock in the story is not the murder, which begins and ends in one sentence, but Cains shamelessness and the leniency of Gods punishment. For killing his brother, Cain is condemned to a life as a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. When he protests, Whoever finds me will slay me, God says, Not so! If any one slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. Quite literally, Cain gets away with murder; he even receives special protection. As the legend indicates, this blood-revenge model of justice was not viable. People soon became so craven that the earth was filled with violence, and God regretted his creation so much that he erased it with a flood. In the new age that followed, law would eventually emerge as the principle of social order. But that was many fratricidal struggles later.

THERES NO POL POT HERE Rwandas most wanted are too numerous to track. In criminal syndicates like the Mafia, a person who has become invested in the logic of the gang is said to be owned by it. This concept is organic to Rwandas

traditional social, political, and economic structures, which have been organized since precolonial times in tight pyramids of patron-client relationships. Every hill has its chief, every chief has his deputies and his sub-bosses; and the pecking order runs from the smallest social cell to the highest central authority. Rwandas postcolonial civil bureaucracy followed the pattern with famous efficiency, and at the top sat the Hutu Power oligarchy, composed in later years largely of President Habyarimana, his extended family, and assorted business, political, and military cronies. Looking back in the wake of the genocide, Alison Des Forges writes that far from being part of the failed state syndrome that appears to plague some parts of Africa, Rwanda was too successful as a state. But if Hutu Power essentially owned Rwanda, who owned Hutu Power? Habyarimana was its chief patron, and after his assassination no single figure emerged to assume his stature. Habyarimanas assassins have never been positively identified, but at the moment the bulk of circumstantial evidence collected by international investigators points to a job sponsored by members of the Hutu Power entourage. Immediately after the Presidential plane was shot down, the Rwandan Army sealed off the area around Kigali Airport, from which the surface-to-air missiles that hit the plane had been fired, thus preventing an investigation by the U.N. and adding to speculation that top Rwandan officers had something to hide. Leaders of the Hutu population in exile still insist that the R.P.F. fired the missiles. The R.P.F. started last years hostilities with the death of the President, Stanislas Mbonampeka, the Minister of Justice in exile, told me. Thats the key to everything. But he acknowledged that the affair remains a mystery. Whoever did that are the ones truly responsible for the situation in Rwanda. If it was the entourage of the President, that would change everything for us. Regardless of who killed Habyarimana, the fact remains that the organizers of the massacres were primed to exploit his death instantaneously. The Rwandan genocide, however, does not have a signal signaturea Hitler, a Pol Pot, a Stalin. The list of Rwandas most wanted is a hodgepodge of Hutu Power bosses, military officers, businessmen, mayors, journalists, civil-service functionaries, teachers, taxi-drivers, shopkeepers, and untitled hatchet mendizzying to keep track of and impossible to rank in any precise hierarchy. Some were said to have given ordersloudly or quietlyand others to have followed orders, but what emerges is the picture of a society run according to a plan that had been conceived to look planless. (While Rwandas military and political lite spent the night of the assassination cranking up the genocidal engines, in Burundi, whose

President had also been killed, the military and the United Nations worked for calm, and this time Burundi did not explode.) Habyarimanas death consolidated the Hutu Power leaders and their followers as he had never been able to do in life. No longer the traitor who had made peace with the R.P.F., the martyred leader became the patron saint of the genocide. Rwanda is predominantly Catholic, and five weeks after the Presidents death Radio Rwanda reported that a renowned local visionary had had a colloquy with the Virgin Mary, in which the Virgin indicated that Habyarimana was with her in Heaven, and that she approved the killing of Tutsis. Three days after Habyarimanas assassination, Thodore Sindikubwabo, a pediatrician who was also the speaker of the Assembly at the time, was installed as President by the military. Sindikubwabo is from Butare, where he lived in a large villa. Although many of his former patients were killed last year, I met several survivors who recalled him from their childhoods, and they told me that he was a good doctor. At the outbreak of the killings, Butare was the only district in Rwanda with a Tutsi prefect. While leaders elsewhere rallied their constituencies to massacre, this prefect, Jean-Baptiste Habyalimana, urged restraint. His example illustrates the power that authority figures exercised over Rwandas population. For the first twelve days of the killing, Butare was calm, and Tutsis fleeing massacres elsewhere flocked to the district. Then Sindikubwabo visited Butare. He fired the prefect (who was subsequently killed) and held a rally. The next day, soldiers of the Presidential Guard were flown in, buses and trucks carrying militia and arms arrived, and the slaughter began. Some of the most extensive massacres of the genocide occurred in Butare: in just two or three weeks, at least twenty thousand Tutsis were killed in Cyahinda Parish, and at least thirty-five thousand in Karama Parish. Sindikubwabos old villa in Butare has since been smashed into a heap of stones, but he has a new one, in an exclusive enclave of Bukavu, Zaire, where he lives as President in exile. The property commands a stunning view of the hills of Rwanda across Lake Kivu. Two black Rwandan-government Mercedes sedans stood in the drive when I stopped by, on a May morning, and a man at the gate introduced himself as Sindikubwabos chief of protocol. He said that the press was always welcome, because the world must know that Hutus were Rwandas true victims. Look at us in exile, he said. Then he volunteered the opinion that Sindikubwabo is an innocent man, and asked me whether I believed in the idea of innocence until guilt is proved. I said I didnt know that Sindikubwabo had been

charged with any crimes in any courts of law, and he told me that all Rwandan refugees were waiting for the judgment of the international tribunal. But, he asked, Who is this tribunal? Who is influencing them? Who are they serving? Are they interested in the truth or only in avoiding reality? The chief of protocol told me to wait where I was, and after a while Andr Nkurunziza, Sindikubwabos press attach, took his place. Nkurunziza wanted to brief me before I talked to Sindikubwabo. This is a government hurt by a media conspiracy that labels it a government of genocide, he said. But these are not people who killed anyone. We hear them called planners, but these are only rumors planted by Kigali. Even you, when you go to Kigali, they could pay you money to write what they want. He put out a hand to touch my forearm soothingly. I dont say that they did pay you. Its just an example. Eventually, I was taken in to Sindikubwabo, who sat in his modestly furnished living room. He had a strikingly asymmetrical face, divided by a thick scar that drew his mouth up in a diagonal sneer. When I said that he was often mentioned as a chief instigator of the massacres in Butare, and asked what he could tell me about that, he gave a dry, breathy chuckle. The moment has not yet come to say who is guilty and who is not guilty, he said. The R.P.F. can bring accusations against it doesnt matter whom, and they can formulate these accusations it doesnt matter howreassembling, stitching together, making a montage of the witnesses. His face began to twitch around his scar. This becomes a bit of comedy that will be sorted out before the tribunal. I come from Butare, and I know what I said in Butare, and the people of Butare also know what I said. But he refused to tell me what he had said. If the mayors of Butare affirm that the massacres began under my order, they are responsible, because it was their responsibility to maintain order, Sindikubwabo said. If they interpreted my message as a command, they executed a command against my words. I said I wondered why he didnt correct them, since he was the President and a doctor, and hundreds of thousands of people had been killed in his country. He said that if the time came he would answer that question in court. A portrait of President Habyarimana hung behind Sindikubwabo. The dead leaderbuttoned up in military dress and draped with braidlooked much happier than the exiled leader, and it seemed to me that as a dead man he did have the happier position. To his people, Habyarimana was the true President many Hutus in the refugee camps of Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi told me so whereas Sindikubwabo was regarded as a nobody. He is President of nothing,

several refugees saida man who had filled the job opening for only a brief, unfortunate moment. Now he was spurned by the world and could do his people no good. To his enemies, too, Sindikubwabo was a nobody; R.P.F. leaders and genocide survivors saw him as an attendant lord, plucked from the lower echelons of Hutu Power at the moment of crisis precisely because he had no standing and seemed content to play the puppet. As for Habyarimana, he was still despised by his enemies, for they believed that the genocide was committed not only in his name but in his spirit, and, perhaps (aside from his assassination), even by his design. Sitting with Sindikubwabo as he offered what sounded like a dry run of the defense he was preparing, I had the impression that he almost yearned to be indicted, even apprehended, in order to have a final hour in the spotlight, and I realized that Habyarimana still owned Hutu Power. The wild gamble of the genocidethat his death would bring his people to lifehad backfired. Leaderless, the people had run amok; that had been the plan. But with no single commander to run the show, the twin demands of completing the extermination and repelling the R.P.F. had proved too much for the genocidal clique. As the Hutu Power leaders changed their message to the masses from an order to kill in self-defense to an order to flee for their lives, more than two million Hutus, many of whom had demonstrated their readiness to kill, abandoned their country before a rebel army of some thirty thousand. The obvious question would seem to be: What had gone wrong? But the genocidal movement had been billed from the start as a resistance to Tutsi aggression. By starting the war, the line went, the R.P.F. had invited the genocide. In yielding Rwanda to the R.P.F., the Hutu Power leaders could retain control of the mobs on whom they depended, and say that their fears were justified. You have to transport yourself into the twenty-first century and wonder what all this will look like, says Jacques Franquin, a Belgian, who had been a field officer of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ngara, Tanzania, since the first Hutu refugees flooded over the border, in June of 1994. In fifty or sixty years, what will we say? Probably that the influx of refugees was organized, that they came because they knew there would be some relief while they reorganized themselves. By contrast, the Harvard psychiatrist Richard Mollica says, In Rwanda, the new government is being demonized now. Its just fascinating how the perpetrators become the victims.

Since the R.P.F. came to power in July of 1994, and installed what it called a Broad Based Government of National Unity, some eight hundred thousand diaspora Tutsis (with one million cows) have returned to Rwandaroughly a one-to-one replacement of the dead. The R.P.F. had never really expected to win Rwanda on the battlefield, and the irony is not lost on Rwandas new leaders that the genocide actually handed them more power. Yet, even so, they cannot properly declare victory. The enemy wasnt defeated; it just ran away, and the country it left behind was so ravaged and divided that it was guaranteed to present its new rulers with temptations to extremism and revenge. The new government included a Hutu President and a Hutu Prime Minister. Hutu Power leaders in exile proclaimed the Hutus in the government to be puppets, since the R.P.F.s military, renamed the Rwandese Patriotic Army (R.P.A.), and now at a strength of forty thousand men, still remained under Tutsi control. When the government abolished the despised system of ethnic-identity cards, which had served as death tickets for Tutsis during the genocide, Hutu Power leaders pointed out that Tutsis, and especially R.P.A. soldiers, seemed to have no problem identifying Hutus for the revenge killings that were reported to be taking place in Rwanda on a daily basis, or for arrest as suspected participants in the genocide. This gang made a genocide, then they say Hutu-Tutsi, Hutu-Tutsi, and everything is a genocide to them, Major General Paul Kagame, an R.P.F. leader who is now Vice-President and Minister of Defense, told me. Im saying we have problems. Im saying things are ugly. But if we take everything to mean the same, then we are making a mistake. The ugliest killing since the genocide ended took place in late April of this year, when R.P.A. soldiers began slaughtering Hutus at a camp for internally displaced people in the village of Kibeho, in southern Rwanda. The Kibeho camp was the last of several camps that together had held about four hundred thousand Hutus who fled their homes at the end of the genocide but hadnt made it into exile. The other camps had been closed, and their occupants sent back to their villages, with a minimum of chaos. But at Kibeho the closing operation went awry, and, after a five-day standoff, eighty thousand Hutus surged toward the R.P.A. soldiers. The soldiers responded by firing for hours into the stampeding crowd. The R.P.A.s conduct was unrestrained; in addition to machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and at least one mortar were fired. Eyewitnesses from the United Nations and international relief agencies counted between two thousand and four thousand bodiesmany of people trampled to

death in the stampede. But the numbers were only estimates; the thickness of bodies on the ground in some places made it impossible to navigate the camp, and the R.P.A. obstructed access. The Rwandan government put the body count at three hundred and thirty-four. An international commission of inquiry on Kibeho, convened by the Rwandan government, established that the killings resulted from a failure of the R.P.A. command structure rather than from design, and the Rwandan government has said that a high-ranking R.P.A. officer has been jailed and is facing court-martial for his role at Kibeho. The wholesale killing at Kibeho placed Rwanda on the worlds front pages again, and it played as the usual story: the tribe in power slaughtering the disempowered tribe. The massacre was just what the Hutu Power forces in exile had been waiting forproof positive, their pamphleteers declared, that the R.P.F. was Rwandas true genocidal aggressor. Kibeho also dealt a blow to the confidence of foreign observers who had been well disposed toward Rwandas new regime. In Butare, Fery Aalam, a Swiss delegate of the Red Cross, who had been in Rwanda throughout the killings, told me, Last year, when nobody in the world tried to stop the genocide, and I saw the first R.P.F. officer coming to liberate Rwanda, these guys were heroesI went straight to shake his hand. After Kibeho, I dont know if Id put out my hand first. At the time I arrived in Rwanda, in May, at least thirty-three thousand men, women, and children had been arrested for alleged participation in genocide. By the time I left, in August, the number had climbed to forty thousand. Today, there are sixty thousand prisoners, the great majority of whom are packed into thirteen central prisons built to house twelve thousand. Rwandas prisons have no guards, and only a few soldiers outside the gates both the prisoners and the soldiers are considered safer this wayand although nearly all the inmates are alleged murderers, fights are said to be rare and killings unheard of. The prisons have not elicited favorable press. They are widely viewed as a human-rights catastrophe, and since my visit access has been limited. The prisoners are generally calm and orderly. They greet visitors amiably, often with smiles and hands extended for a shake. In the womens block at the central prison of Kigali, three hundred and forty women lay about, barely clad in the stuffy heat; babies crawled underfoot; and two inmate nuns in crisp white habits conducted a prayer service in a corner. In the Butare prison, old men stood in the yard in a downpour with bits of plastic over their heads, while young boys were scrunched together in a cell, singing a chorus of Alouette. In the mens block of the Kigali prison, I was conducted past acrobatic and choral groups,

three men reading Tintin, and a scout troop by the captain of the prisoners and his adjutant, who wielded a short baton to clear a path through the throng of prisoners, squatting at our feet. The captain kept calling out, Heres a journalist from the United States, and the huddled men clapped. It occurred to me that this was the famous mob mentality of blind obedience to authority which is often described in attempts to explain genocide. Between visits to prisons, I stopped by to see General Kagame, at the VicePresidents office in the Ministry of Defense. I was wondering why the government exposed itself to bad press about the prisons, and how he interpreted the prisoners apparent calm acceptance of their horrible conditions. Kagame, who cuts a Giacometti-like stick figure and is generally regarded as the most powerful man in the government, had a question of his own: If a million people died here, who killed them? A lot of people, I said. Yes, he said. Have you found many that admit they participated? I hadnt. Every prisoner I spoke with claimed to have been arbitrarily and unjustly arrested, and, in every case, the claim was entirely possible. I asked Kagame if it bothered him that there might be innocent people in jail. Yeah, he said. But that was the way to deal with the situation. If we would have lost these people through revenge, that would have even been a bigger problem for us. I would rather address the problem of putting them in prison, because that is the best way to do it for the process of justice, and simply because I dont want them out there, because people would actually kill them. In July, Rwandas National Commission of Triagea sporadically functioning body charged with locating prisoners against whom the accusations seem insubstantialordered the release of Placide Koloni from the prison at Gitarama, an hours drive south of Kigali. Koloni, a Hutu, who had held the office of deputy prefect before, during, and after the genocide, had been arrested on February 15th. He was released on July 20th, and he returned to his office on July 24th. On the night of July 27th, a sentry in a U.N. brigade saw some men enter Kolonis house. A scream was heard, and the house exploded in flames. Koloni, his wife and their two daughters, and a domestic were killed. A week later, a Hutu deputy prefect in Gikongoro, just west of Butare, was shot to death, and a Catholic priest in Kamonyi Parish, not far from Kigali, was also shot to death, and dumped in a banana field. It was a tense week in Rwanda, but only because the victims were prominent civic leaders; rumors and reports of at least a dozen killings circulate each week in the country. General Kagame, who never

tired of pointing out that some four hundred R.P.A. soldiers were in military jails for such crimes (today, the number is seven hundred), told me that soldiers are not the only Rwandans frustrated to the point of criminality. But given the situation you have here, ordinary crimes are not going to be looked at as ordinary crimes, he said. Kagames distinction offers little comfort to frightened Hutus, who live under a cloud of collective suspicion. When we see they are killed, wed rather be in here than out there, a detainee told me at Gitarama prison, which last summer was known as Rwandas worst prison. More than six thousand men were packed in a space built for seven hundred and fifty. That meant four prisoners per square metre: night and day, the prisoners had to stand, or to sit between the legs of those who stood, and even in the dry season a scum of dampness, urine, and bits of dropped food covered the floor. The cramped prisoners feet and ankles, and sometimes their entire legs, swelled to two or three times normal size. They suffered from an atrophying of the swollen extremities, and from rot, and from assorted infections; hundreds had required amputations. Lieutenant Colonel R. V. Blanchette, a United Nations military observer from Canada, told me in early July about his first visit to Gitarama prison. I went down in the back with my flashlight, he said, and I saw this guys foot. Id heard it was pretty bad in there, but this was quite uglyvery swollen, and his little toe was missing. I shined my flashlight up to his face, and he reached down and just snapped off the next toe. When I visited Gitarama prison a few weeks after Blanchettes encounter, prisoners told me that conditions were much improvedthat the Red Cross, which supplies the food for Rwandas central prisons, had installed duckboards and evacuated the worst medical cases. We had eighty-six deaths in June, and in July only eighteen, a doctor at the prison clinic told me. On the day of my visit, six thousand four hundred and twenty-four prisoners formed a solid-looking knot. As the assistant director of the prison led me in, the mass parted slightly to make a path. It was difficult to figure out how the people fitted togetherwhich limbs went with which body, or why a head appeared to have grown three legs without a torso in between. Many of the feet were badly swollen. The bodies were clad in rags. Pressing through the throng, I received the usual welcoming smiles and handshakes. In the childrens cell, sixty-three boys, ranging in age from seven to sixteen, sat in rows on the floor, facing a blackboard where an older prisonera schoolteacher by professionwas conducting a lesson. They looked like

schoolboys anywhere. I asked one why he was in prison. They say I killed, he replied. I didnt. Other children gave the same answer, with downcast eyes, evasive, unconvincing. But who knows? Rwandas formal arrest procedures are rarely followed in the current emergency; it is generally enough for someone to point a finger and say, Genocide. Luc Ct, a lawyer from Montreal who was directing the Butare field office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, told me, Most of the arrests are founded on some type of evidence, which means that they may not be arbitrary even if they are technically incorrect. Even if legal procedures were followed to the letter, its not clear what difference that would make, since Rwandas courts are closed, and no trials have been conducted or are currently planned. The government says it lacks the financial and human resources to open the courtsmany of Rwandas lawyers are dead or in prison themselves. But nobody talks seriously about conducting sixty thousand murder trials in Rwanda. Its materially impossible to judge all those who participated in the massacres, and politically its no good, even though its just, Tito Rutaremara, an R.P.F. genocide investigator, told me. This was a true genocide, and the only correct response is true justice. But Rwanda has the death penalty, and that would mean a lot more killing. In other words, a true genocide and true justice are incompatible. Rwandas new leaders see their way around this problem by describing the genocide as a crime committed by masterminds and slave bodies. Neither party can be regarded as innocent, but if the crime is political, and if justice is to serve the political good, then the punishment has to draw a line that would sever the criminal minds from the criminal bodies. Inherently, the people are not bad, General Kagame told me. But they can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good. At a press conference, he explained that long ago Rwandan justice was conducted in village hearings, where fines were the preferred penalties. The guy who made the crime can give some salt or something, and that can bring the people back together, Kagame said. Salt for genocide? When you speak of justice with our peasants, the big idea is compensation, the lawyer Franois-Xavier Nkurunziza told me. You can kill the man who committed genocide, but thats not compensationthats only fear and anger. This is how our peasants think. Government leaders talk of public-works programs and political education; the key to reconstruction, they say, is for perpetrators to acknowledge that they

have done wrong. In theory, Kigalis proposed approach is similar to that of deNazification in postwar, and post-Nuremberg, Germany. But the justice at Nuremberg was brought by foreign conquerors, and de-Nazification in Germany was conceived with the understanding that the group that had been killed would never again have to live side by side with the killers. Rwanda offers no such tidy arrangement. Right now, if you were to give an amnesty you would be inviting chaos, said Charles Murigande, the chairman of Rwandas Presidential Commission on Accountability for the Genocide. But, if we could put our hands on the leaders, even an amnesty would be very well received. That is a very big if. Shortly after the genocide, in the summer of 1994, the Rwandan government appealed to the United Nations for help in apprehending the authors of the genocide who had fled into exile. The U.N. responded by creating the International Tribunal for Rwanda, which is essentially a satellite of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal. We asked for help to catch these people who ran away, and to try them properly in our own courts, a Rwandan diplomat told me. And the Security Council just started writing Rwanda in under the name Yugoslavia everywhere. The Rwanda tribunal is understaffed and its funding has been slow in coming. The fact that it is only now promising to indict a few fugitives is regarded in Kigali as proof not that the system is working but that it is not serious. The majority of the genocidal fugitives live in Zaire and Kenyastates whose leaders, Mobutu Sese Seko and Daniel arap Moi, were intimates of Habyarimana and today often play host to his widow in their palaces. Habyarimanas remains are buried on the grounds of one of Mobutus estates. The old-boy club of African strongmen protects its own, and seems eager to demonstrate that the notion of international law is spineless and an affront to sovereignty. In June, when I asked Honor Rakotomanana, a Madagascan who is the Rwanda tribunals deputy prosecutor, how he expected to extradite anybody from Zaire or Kenya, he said, There are international treaties to which those countries are signatories. Those are the instruments by which we operate. In early October, however, President Moi assailed the tribunal as a haphazard process, and announced, I shall not allow any one of them to enter Kenya to serve summonses and look for people here. No way. If any such characters come here, they will be arrested. We must respect ourselves. We must not be harassed. Kenya has since made conciliatory noises, but even if a genocidal leader were handed over to the tribunal it is unlikely that Rwandan leaders would stand up

and cheer. The tribunal has no power to recommend a death penalty, and Tito Rutaremara told me, It doesnt fit our definition of justice to think of the authors of the Rwandan genocide sitting in a Swedish prison with a television and tout confort. According to General Kagame, when Rwanda protested that the tribunal should carry the death penalty, out of respect for Rwandas laws, the United Nations advised Rwanda to abolish its death penalty. To abolish the death penalty after the genocide seems cynical, General Kagame said at a press conference.

A CONFUSED REACTION What is a humanitarian response to genocide? Shortly after my conversation with Kagame, I ran into an American militaryintelligence officer, who was having a supper of Jack Daniels and Coca-Cola at a Kigali bar. I hear youre interested in genocide, he said. Do you know what genocide is? I asked him to tell me. A cheese sandwich, he said. Write it down. Genocide is a cheese sandwich. I asked him how he figured that. What does anyone care about a year-old cheese sandwich? he said. Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a shit? Crimes against humanitywheres humanity? Whos humanity? You? Me? Did you see a crime committed against you? Hey, just a million Rwandans. Did you ever hear about the Genocide Convention? I said I had. It was passed by the United Nations in 1948, in the days after Nuremberg; it has been ratified by scores of countries; and it says that they will all undertake to prevent and punish genocide if it should ever happen again. That convention, the American at the bar said, makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich. For a time, in June, 1994, as the killing continued in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration instructed its officials to avoid calling it a genocide, although the possibility that acts of genocide may have occurred was acknowledged. There are obligations which arise in connection with the use of the term [genocide], Christine Shelly, a State Department spokeswoman, explained at the time. On April 21st of that year, two weeks after the slaughter of Tutsis began, General

Romo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of the U.N. force in Rwanda, had announced that he could end the genocide with between five thousand and eight thousand troops. Instead, the Security Council cut Dallaires existing force, of two thousand five hundred, to two hundred and seventy. Dallaires claim that vigorous intervention could have prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths is now widely held as obvious; a Western military source familiar with the region told me that a few thousand soldiers with tanks and big guns could have knocked out the radio, closed off Rwandas main roads, and shut down the genocide in one or two days. Later, when United Nations and international relief agencies rushed in to wrestle with the humanitarian disasters that the genocide had created, they quickly discovered that there was nothing much to be done except bury the bodies. The crisis among the living was the crisis of the refugees, and the overwhelming portion of humanitarian assistance went to creating and sustaining the sprawling network of camps for fleeing Hutus in Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi. John Keys, an American who ran the Kigali office of the American Refugee Committee, a private relief organization, had previously worked in the camps in Goma, Zaire, where he had felt deeply compromised. Many of those camps were controlled by interahamwe bands, and it had distressed Keys to find himself helping to support a genocidal political movement. Theres a right and a wrong in this case, he told me. If neutrality is the ideal for the humanitarian community even in the face of genocide, then the humanitarian community has a lot of thinking to do. Jacques Franquin, of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, agrees that the Rwandan crisis is a political crisis that requires political solutions, but he did not believe that was a matter for humanitarian aid workers to concern themselves about. Franquin supervised camps that held more than five hundred thousand Rwandan Hutus, and he said he had no doubt that there were genocidal criminals among them. But dont ask me to sort them out, he told me. Dont ask me to take the criminals out of the camps and put humanitarian workers in danger. Charles Murigande, of Rwandas accountability commission, told me, The international tribunal was created essentially to appease the conscience of the international community, which has failed to live up to its conventions on genocide. It wants to look as if it were doing something, which is often worse than doing nothing at all.

Murigandes sentiment was prevalent among Rwandas leaders. If the international community is coming, theres no way you can stop it, General Kagame told me. But in the long run it creates a bigger problem, because room is created for a manipulation to make the genocide that took place here less and less visible as a very big crime that people should be hunted for and prosecuted for. Officials of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees say that ninety-five per cent of the Hutu refugees who have returned to their villages in Rwanda have done so without being arrested or attacked. As I toured the camps that ring Rwanda, however, every one of hundreds of refugees I spoke with told me precisely the oppositethat at least ninety-five per cent of those who returned had been killed or jailed. Everywhere I went, inside Rwanda and in the border camps, to R.P.F. leaders and to Hutu Power leaders, to relief workers and to prisoners, I was told that there would be another war, and soon. At the end of October, the United Nations reported that armed forays into Rwanda by Hutu refugees from Zaire had increased. On November 7th, the Rwandan government announced that it had overrun a deeply entrenched Hutu military and militia camp on Iwawa Island, between Rwanda and Zaire, on Lake Kivu. The battle lasted several days. The Hutu forces, whose arsenal included antitank cannons and anti-aircraft guns and a large cache of high-tech antipersonnel mines, were described in wire-service dispatches as Hutu rebels, just as the R.P.F. used to be described as Tutsi rebels. In response to the escalation of military activity there and elsewhere, United Nations agencies began stockpiling food and other supplies to draw on in the event of vast population movements. But the U.N.s role in Rwanda is more in doubt than ever; when the peacekeeping mandate expired on December 8th, the Rwandan government, which has regarded the blue helmets presence as an insult to its sovereignty, asked that it not be renewed, and Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said he would honor the request. President Mobutu of Zaire has been threatening, in an on-again, off-again way, to force more than a million Rwandan Hutus out of his country at the end of this year, and there is little doubt that if he chose to do so he could clear the camps. Last week, Kigali expelled dozens of relief agenciesmostly those with ties to Franceand Burundi, which holds two hundred thousand Rwandan refugees, was torn by heavy fighting. As I followed these developments from afar, I was struck once again by the simple tactical brilliance of the Hutu Power forces. A renewed war, after all,

could easily force the genocide out of memory. Observers close to the Rwandan scene fear that a war could trigger reprisals against Hutus within Rwanda; prison massacres are a favorite scenario. And then who could talk of genocide? In a war of all against all, it is impossible to take sides, and the authors of the Rwandan genocide seem to have understood that what the so-called international community likes best is situations in which it can proclaim its neutrality. History is full of long wars, Jacques Franquin told me. That is how history is made. Now we have the humanitarian system and fast information, so we can stop people from killing each otherand good that we can. But what are we really doing? And where are we really going?

THE FUTURE Was the killing a prelude for worse to come? The expectation that a new war could spark a regional conflict involving Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi raises the prospect of bloodshed on a scale that would make last years horror seem a mere prelude. What makes this strange is that a new war would be a war about the genocide; for, while Hutu Power still seeks to make its crime a success by making it indistinguishable from the continuum of Rwandan history, the R.P.F. and the new government it leads depend on the genocide to justify their rule. This is a minority government, coming from a diaspora, Fery Aalam, the Swiss Red Cross delegate, told me. The genocide is the source of its credibility, and for the time being all political thinking is based on military logic, not on social or economic or humanitarian logic. It is like the military logic of Israel for a long time, and to a large extent, as with Israel, its justified. When I saw General Kagame, I asked him if Israels experience corresponded in any way with his own countrys. Maybe in terms of persecution and exile, he said. Kagame was born in Rwanda, but from the age of four until he forced his way into Kigali last year he lived in Uganda. The whole world is now up in arms about these refugees, but for over thirty years we were refugees, and nobody talked about us. People forgot. They said, Go to hell. Its a question of rights. Do you deny that I belong to Rwanda, that I am a Rwandan? Kagame thumped the arm of his chair rhythmically. He was opening up a vein: resentment, the feeling of being an outcast, even in his big, VicePresidential office in Kigali. We came here, he said. We took power, we

overthrew the regime, we tried to do our best to bring the people of Rwanda together. But the others come and say, Ah, the Tutsi-dominated government. He laughed. I am sorry to define people by their ethnic background, thats not my business and intention at all, but the President is Hutu, the Prime Minister is oneoh, but there is a Vice-President somewhere who is a Tutsi. So this is the man in charge. I said, You won the war. My business was to fight, Kagame said. I fought. The war is over. I said, Lets share power. If I werent sincere, I would have taken over everything. His plea for understanding suddenly seemed to carry a threat. He said, If I wanted to be a problem, I would actually be a problem. I dont have to dance around weeping, you see. Not long after this conversation, I was approached in Kigali by a man who had long been privy to the workings of Rwandan power and was himself now in the government. He told me that he wanted to be completely honest about what was going on in the country, but on an anonymous basis. He was a Hutu, and travelled with a Kalashnikov-toting soldier in tow. Listen, he said. Rwanda had a dictatorship, Rwanda had a genocide, and now Rwanda has a very serious threat on the borders. You dont have to be R.P.F. to understand what that means. You dont have to fall into the old thinkingthat if youre not with these guys youre with those guys. The man went on to explain at length his view that Rwandans cannot be trusted. Foreigners cannot know this place, he said. We cheat. We repeat the same little things to you over and over and tell you nothing. Even among ourselves, we lie. We have a habit of secrecy and suspicion. You can stay a whole year and you will not know what Rwandans think or what they are doing. I told him that this didnt fully surprise me, because I had the impression that Rwandans spoke two languagesnot Kinyarwanda and French or English but one language among themselves and another with outsiders. By way of an example, I said that I had spoken with a Rwandan lawyer who had described the difficulty of integrating his European training into his Rwandan practice. He loved the Cartesian, Napoleonic legal system, on which Rwandas is modelled, but he said that it didnt correspond to Rwandan reality, which was for him an equally complete system of thought. By the same token, when this lawyer spoke with me about Rwanda, he used a language quite different from the language he would speak with fellow-Rwandans.

You talk about this, my visitor said, and at the same time you say, A lawyer told me such-and-such. A Rwandan would never tell you what someone else said, and, normally, when you told a Rwandan what you had heard from somebody he would immediately change the rhythm of his speech and close himself off to you. He would be on his guard. He looked up and studied me for a moment. You Westerners are so honest, he said. He seemed depressed by the notion. Im telling you, he said. Rwandans are petty. I wasnt sure of the French word that he used for petty, which was mesquin. When I asked him to explain it, he described someone who sounded remarkably like Iagoa confidence man, a cheater and betrayer and liar, who tries to tell everyone what he imagines they want to hear in order to maintain his own game and get what he is after. Colonel Doctor Joseph Karemera, a founding officer of the R.P.F. who is now Rwandas Minister of Health, told me that there is a Rwandan word for such behavior. Having described the legacy of thirty-four years of Hutu Power dictatorship as a very bad mentality, Karemera said, In Kinyarwanda we call it ikinamucho that if you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill mehe clutched his throatand your mission is successful, but then you cry. That is ikinamucho. My visitor liked the word mesquin. He used it repeatedly. I remarked that he didnt seem to have a very high opinion of his people. Im trying to tell you about them without lying, he said. A few days before I was to leave Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to a latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. He had mentioned the story before, and I remembered that he made a sound tcha, tcha, tchaand chopped his hand in the air to describe his sisters killing. Edmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few still left in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. He used to work for a German firm, and his wife was German; she had remained in Berlin with their children after the genocide. As we drove, in the direction of the airport, Edmond told me that he was a well-travelled man, and that after many trips in East Africa and in Europe he had always felt that Rwandans were the nicest, most decent people in the world. Edmond spoke quietly, with great intensity, and his face was expressive in a subtle, wincing way. He had never imagined the

ugliness, the meannessthe disease, he saidthat had afflicted Rwanda, and he could not understand how it could have been so well masked. Near the outskirts of Kigali, we turned onto a red dirt track that descended between high reed fences surrounding modest homes. A blue metal gate leading to his sisters house stood open. The yard was crackly dry bush strewn with rubble. A family of squattersTutsis just returned from Burundisat in the living room, playing Scrabble. Edmond ignored them. He led me around the side of the house, to a stand of dried-out banana plants. There were two holes in the ground, about a foot apart and three feet in diameterneat, deep, machine-dug wells. Edmond grabbed hold of a bush, leaned out over the holes, and said, You can see the tibias. I did as he did, and saw the bones. Fourteen metres deep, Edmond said. He told me that his brother-in-law had been a religious man, and on the twelfth of April last year, when the interahamwe came to his house, he had prevailed upon the killers to let him pray. After his prayers, Edmonds brother-in-law told the militiamen that he didnt want his family dismembered, so they invited him to throw his children down the latrine wells alive, and he did. Then Edmonds sister and his brother-inlaw were thrown in on top. Edmond took his camera out of a plastic bag and photographed the holes. People come to Rwanda and talk of reconciliation, he said. Its offensive. Imagine talking to Jews of reconciliation in 1946. Maybe in a long time, but its a private matter. He reminded me that he had lost a brother as well as his sister and her family. Then he told me that he knew who his brothers killer was, and that he sometimes saw the man around Kigali. Id like to talk to him, Edmond said. I want him to explain to me what this thing was, how he could do this thing. My surviving sister said, Lets denounce him. I saw what was happeninga wave of arrests all at onceand I said, What good is prison, if he doesnt feel what I feel? Let him live in fear. When the time is right, I want to make him understand that Im not asking for his arrest but for him to live forever with what he has done. Im asking for him to think about it for the rest of his life. Its a kind of psychological torture. Edmond had thought of himself as a Rwandanhe identified his spirit with that of his peoplebut after the genocide he had lost that mooring. Now, to prove himself his brothers keeper, he wanted to fix his brothers killer with the mark of Cain. I couldnt help thinking how well Cain had prospered: he founded the first city, and, though we dont like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1995/12/18/1995_12_18_078_TNY_C ARDS_000372942?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz2d1sXFNJT

LETTER FROM ALASKA

THE STATE OF SARAH PALIN

The peculiar political landscape of the Vice-Presidential hopeful.
by Philip GourevitchSEPTEMBER 22, 2008

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Palin was elected governor just as the corruption scandal broke, and quickly took the opportunity to proclaim herself a reformer.

It rained a lot in Alaska this summereven more than usualand it was a cold summer, too. The sun doesnt set on much of the state between mid-June and mid-July, but the weather was such that if you came from Outside, which is how Alaskans refer to the rest of the United States, and you happened to visit on a day that was fair, people would thank you for bringing the sunshine. If you were there to inquire into the political situation, people thanked you for that, too. They thanked you for coming, for hearing them out, and for not treating their story as a national joke. Many Alaskans enjoy being disconnected from the Lower Fortyeight, which is sometimes referred to as if it were a foreign country. There is pride in this sense of apartness, and that pride has been stung repeatedly since 2006, when the F.B.I. began raiding state lawmakers offices in an everexpanding anti-corruption campaign. There have been indictments and guilty pleas. Oil-industry executives who were caught on videotape in the Baranof Hotel, in Juneau, the state capital, giving cash handouts to a state legislator have coperated in pointing out other state legislators who liked to get paid before voting on oil-industry tax rates. Last year, the F.B.I. hit the home of Ted Stevens, Alaskas six-term senator, and he became a favorite figure of ridicule on The Daily Show: an angry little man, with an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Magoo, who had once made himself seem even older than his eighty-plus years by describing the Internet as a series of tubes; Jon Stewart called him a coot, and portrayed him as a bully and a crook. As I travelled around Alaska in midAugust, Alaskans wanted me to understand that, sadly, he might well be all of thatand a very good thing for the state, too. I booked a flight to the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport shortly after Stevens was indicted on, and pleaded not guilty to, seven felony charges for failing to report more than a quarter of a million dollars in gifts from the same oilmen who had bought much of the state legislature. I had to change planes in Las Vegas, but when I got there I was told that my flight to Anchorage had been cancelled, on account of a volcano in the Aleutian Islands that had erupted and burpedthe technical terma gigantic cloud of ash into the lower stratosphere. The cloud had drifted in a northeasterly direction and occupied much of the airspace over the Gulf of Alaska. More than five thousand travellers were stranded as a result. The next day, when the cloud moved and I completed my journey, I learned that, after a similar belch of ash choked out all four engines of a K.L.M. flight into Anchorage in 1989, Ted Stevens finagled an earmark on

an appropriations bill to secure federal funds for the Alaska Volcano Observatory, whose missions included the monitoring of volcanic activity and its attendant hazards. The Alaska Volcano Observatory became a punch line on The West Wing, mocked as a ludicrous example of congressional pork, which is how it might sound until you think about your plane crashing. So Ted Stevens may have saved my lifeand that was something a great many Alaskans could say as they looked about at the roads and bridges, the hospitals and flood-control systems, the satellite weather and global-positioning relay stations, the sprawling Army and Air Force bases, the rural landing strips and postal air-cargo flights that sustain existence in Alaska as it enters its fiftieth year of statehood. Much of this infrastructure was the result of Stevenss work on the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services Committees and its Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and he made no apologies for his transactional approach to politics.* On the contrary, as he brought Alaska the highest number of federal dollars per capita in the nation, he boasted that he was doing his job. Still, Stevenss decision to launch a relection campaign in the middle of a federal investigation required more than ordinary moxie. The oilman at the center of the corruption scandal, Bill Allen, had agreed to testify against Stevens. The two men had once shared ownership of a racehorse, and had counted themselves good friends. Allen, a former welder and oilfield superintendent who came to Alaska from Texas and built a billion-dollar oilfieldservices company, Veco Corporation, liked to be around other powerful men. He liked them to need him, and he had already claimed under oath that he had bribed Stevenss son, Ben, a former state senator with a reputation for profiteering from government contracts his father had a hand in. For instance, Ben Stevens had received seven hundred and fifteen thousand dollars over three years from the Special Olympics, as the chief executive of the 2001 Winter Games in Anchorage, for which his father had brought millions of dollars in federal aid. Conflicted interests also hung heavily over Ben Stevenss dealings regarding Alaskas fisheries. He has said that he has done nothing illegal, yet the speculation in Alaska was not whether, but when, indictments would drop on him, and how they might affect his fathers fate. (Everyone was waiting, too, for charges to be filed against the states only congressman, Don Young, a man so ornery that he makes Stevens look affable. Young, who is seventy-five and has been in office almost as long as Stevens, was also running for relection, and he had so far spent more than a million dollars from his campaign war chest on

lawyers, an expense that he would not explain except to say that being investigated gets pricey.) With so much trouble encompassing Stevens, the desire for a seventh term had a brazen air of unreality about it. At his age? Why not go gently? That would not be the way of Ted Stevens, the dominant figure of Alaskas fifty-year existence as a state. He is a man given to rageshe has said that they are an effective way to get what he wanted, and I dont lose my temper. I always know where it is. He is also a man used to having enormous clout. On the eve of the millennium, he was named Alaskan of the century, and he is known as Alaskas Senator-for-Life. Before his last run for office, he told the Anchorage newspaperman Michael Carey, I just want people to understand the commitment Im making if I stay on. This is a period I could go out and make a million dollars a year, without any question. Stevens had by then made a lot of people rich. Evidently, he felt underpaid, and Bill Allen had been there to help out. This time around, his humble pitch to voters is: Ive always been there for you; now I need you to come through for me. Its the most momentous political season Ive lived through in Alaska, Pat Dougherty, the editor of the Anchorage Daily News, the states largest newspaper, told meand that was three weeks before the governor, Sarah Palin, became the human cannonball of the Presidential campaign and blasted into overlapping orbits of political and tabloid super-celebrity. Just about everyone in Alaska knew that Palin was on John McCains list of potential running mates, but no one in the states insular, Republican political world had seen any indication that the campaign was checking her background. That made sense to Dougherty. Palin was forty-four years old and had served only a year and a half as governor, and he said, The idea of her as Vice-President is ridiculous. Shed be way in over her head. Then again, two years ago Dougherty hadnt considered Palin ready to be governor, even after she prevailed in the Republican primary against the deeply unpopular incumbent, Frank Murkowski, who had previously spent twenty-two years as Alaskas junior senator. We endorsed the Democrat in her race, he said. We didnt think she had the experience. Looking back, Dougherty allowed that he had underestimated Palin. After twenty months in office, she enjoyed an eighty-per-cent approval ratingthe highest in the nationand although he said he wouldnt yet call himself an admirer, he described her performance as great spectator sport. Dougherty was particularly impressed by

her tough, you-deal-with-Alaska-on-Alaskas-terms attitude toward the big oil producers on whom the states economy largely depends. Palin was elected governor just as Alaskas political establishment was being realigned by the Veco bribery scandal. She had no role in exposing the corruption, but she was swift to see opportunity in the moment of crisis. The tainted politicians were being held to account, but hostility to the oil companies behind the corruption remained high. Since the nineteen-seventies, and the construction of the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, major oil producers had enjoyed extraordinary influence over Alaskan lawmakers, and had pretty much dictated the terms on which they did business with the state. Under Frank Murkowski, the big oil companies had negotiated terms for the construction of a new pipeline that would allow for the extraction and conveyance to market of thirty-five trillion cubic feet of natural gas from Alaskas North Slope; and it was in the context of the legislatures votes on the gas pipeline that the F.B.I. had begun its corruption sting. When Palin arrived on the scene, Murkowskis gas-line deal was dead, and she adopted another approach, cutting out the big oil producers in favor of a Canadian pipeline company. She counted it a great victory when, this summer, the legislature approved a framework for proceeding with the project. Were not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillipsand beg them to do this for Alaska, Palin told me last month in Juneau. Were gonna say, O.K., this is so economic that we dont have to incentivize you to build this. In fact, this has got to be a mutually beneficial partnership here as we build it. Were gonna lay out Alaskas musthaves. Parameters are gonna be set, rules are gonna be laid out, a law will encompass what it is that Alaska needs to protect our sovereignty, to insure its jobs first for Alaskans, and in-state use of gas her list went on. In the past, she said, Alaska was conceding too much, and chipping away at our sovereignty. And Alaskawere set up, unlike other states in the union, where its collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs. And she said, Our state constitutionit lays it out for me, how Im to conduct business with resource development here as the state C.E.O. Its to maximize benefits for Alaskans, not an individual company, not some multinational somewhere, but for Alaskans. Alaska is sometimes described as Americas socialist state, because of its collective ownership of resourcesan arrangement that allows permanent residents to collect a dividend on the states oil royalties. It has been Palins good fortune to govern the state at a time of record oil prices, which means record

dividend checks: two thousand dollars for every Alaskan. And because high oil prices also mean staggering heating bills in such a cold placeand because its always good politics to give money to votersPalin got the legislature this year to send an extra twelve hundred dollars to every Alaskan man, woman, and child. But, even as Palin enjoyed populist acclaim for her grand gesturessharing the wealth and standing up to Big Oilit was far from certain that the naturalgas pipeline, which she claimed as her proudest accomplishment, would ever get built. Palin had committed the state to risking half a billion dollars to help move the project forward, but there was no commitment from the producers to ship their gas through the line; without that, no one was willing to finance its construction. As Palin boasted of putting the big boys in their place, it looked increasingly likely that she would have to plead with them to return. In the meantime, Palin the reformer had been caught up in her own scandal, known as Troopergate. The allegation was that Palin had dismissed her public-safety commissioner, a respected and well-liked officer named Walter Monegan, because Monegan had resisted pressure from her office to fire a state trooper named Michael Wooten. Wooten was Palins ex-brother-in-law, and his divorce from Palins sister Molly had involved an ugly custody battle that was not entirely resolved; it appeared that Palin had used her public office to settle a private family score. On July 28th, a bipartisan vote in the state legislature commissioned an investigation into the matter, at a cost of up to a hundred thousand dollars. Palin had invited it. Hold me accountable, she said. She promised full coperation: We would never prohibit, or be less than enthusiastic about, any kind of investigation. Lets deal in the facts. On the day I stopped by Palins office in Juneau, she did not seem bothered that Alaskas newspapers were filled with stories about Troopergate. Palin had just called a press conference to discuss the latest twista tape-recorded phone call from Frank Bailey, one of her closest aides, who could be heard trying to influence an officer to sack Trooper Wooten. Todd and Sarah are scratching their heads, you know, Bailey said, referring to the Governor and her husband, Todd Palin. Why on earth hasntwhy is this guy still representing the department? Hes a horrible recruiting tool. And, from their perspective, everybodys protecting him. Bailey, Palins director of boards and commissions, went on to convey the Governors displeasure, and urged action against Wooten. She really likes Walt a lot, Bailey said on the tape, referring to Monegan. But on this issue she feels like itsshe doesnt know why theres absolutely no

action for a year on this issue. Its very troubling to her and the family. I can definitely relay that. At her press conference, Palin said she realized that the recording could be regarded as a smoking gun. She claimed that she had never asked Bailey or anyone else to make such calls on her behalf. However, she said, the serial nature of the contacts understandably could be perceived as some kind of pressure, presumably at my direction. Palin, who studied journalism in college and worked for a time as a sportscaster, has an informal manner of speech, simultaneously chatty and urgent, and she reinforces her words with winks and nods and wrinklings of her nose that seem meant to telegraph intimacy and ease. Speaking recently at her former church, the Wasilla Assembly of God, she said, It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here, getting baptized by Pastor Riley in Little Beaver Lake Camp, freezing-cold summer days that we had at campmy whole family getting baptized when we were little. She sounded the same when we met, high-spirited, irrepressible, and not in the least self-conscious. On the contrary, she is supremely self-confident, in the way of someone who believes that there is nothing she cant talk her way into, or out of, or around or through. There was never a hesitation before speaking, or between phrases, no time for thought or reflection. The words kept comingengaging, lulling, distractinga commanding flow, but without weight. Yet, for all the cozy colloquialism, she cannot be called relaxed. Shes onfull on. She said that one of her goals had been to combat alcohol abuse in rural Alaska, and she blamed Commissioner Monegan for failing to address the problem. That, she said, was a big reason that shed let him goonly, by her account, she didnt fire him, exactly. Rather, she asked him to drop everything else and single-mindedly take on the states drinking problem, as the director of the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board. It was a job that was open, commensurate in salary pretty muchten thousand dollars lessbut, she added, Monegan hadnt wanted the job, so he left state service; he quit. As for Frank Baileys phone call, Palin professed not to understand what it had to do with anything. We just found out about it a couple of days ago, she said. And yeah, its very disturbing, and its an issue, andshe began to speak as if Bailey were in the room and she were having it out with him: You blundered, Bailey, and you know you did. She said, Ill be talking to him, and the next week she put Bailey on paid leave and ordered him to coperate with the investigation. But that did not explain Baileys phone call. After all, Palin told me, my husband made a call also. But, you know, there were death threats

against a member of my family. She said, About my husband, his First Amendment rights, evenwas that taken away once his spouse was elected governor? Palin continued, Our security detail, when I first got elected, met with us and said, Do you guys got any issues with any threats? To which Palin replied, Yeah, well, by the way, there happens to bethe only threat that I knew of was one of your own troopers. And theyre, like, Geez, this doesnt sound good, you need to go tell your commissioner that. So I did. I shared that with the commissioner. So did Todd, and then Todd followed up to sayat this point, Palin seemed to be quoting her husband: We were interviewed back in 05 before Sarah was even a candidatewhat ever happened to that investigation, that interview? We know that the trooper Wooten got to see the interview notes; well, we never have, and thats kind of a scary position for us to be in. We complied with your request to bring you information on this trooper forward, and did we put our family in jeopardy by letting him see the interview notes about the illegal activities? Palin insisted that Wooten did have illegal activities. We witnessed them, and people have come to us with complaints. He Tasered his eleven-year-old stepson. This trooper, he was pulled over for drinking and driving and a witnessed open container in his car, and he did threaten to kill my dadI heard himand illegally shot a moose, which is a big darned deal here in Alaska. Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governors whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palins father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when theyre under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something elsethat her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified. Compared with Ted Stevenss impending criminal trial, the Troopergate investigation seemed like a sideshowan added dash of intrigue in Alaskas sensational political summerexcept for the fact that Palin had always liked to present herself as a new kind of Alaskan politician, the kind who cleaned up after others shenanigans, not the kind who needed to be cleaned up after.

Palins record as the mayor of Wasilla, a town forty miles north of Anchorage, told a somewhat different story. According to Sarah, a biography by Kaylene Johnson, Palin had got into politics after she befriended the man who was then mayor and his police chief at a step-aerobics class. She made them her allies and ran for City Council. Then she challenged them for control of City Hall, and drove them out. As she purged her former friends and patrons, she denounced them as good ol boys, although her takeover of Wasilla had been aided from the start by Alaskas Republican Party establishment. Palins style of governing was unorthodox and at times impulsive. Although she boasts of a record as a fiscal conservative, she raised the sales tax while she was in office. She left the town saddled with millions of dollars in debt from the building of a new sports complex, and with legal fees, because she had failed to secure title to the land on which the complex was built. Casting herself in the Ted Stevens mold, however, she had proved herself skilled at collecting federal earmarks for Wasilla, bringing in twenty-seven million dollars for her small town in three years. Palins biggest difference with Alaskas Republican establishment, then, was not so much fiscal as it was social. Ted Stevens is one of the last of the Rockefeller Republicansthe real thing, as he supported Nelson Rockefeller over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 Presidential race. He is essentially secular and skeptical of government, and favors abortion rightsa common profile in Alaska, a state that attracts a strong streak of libertarians and rugged individualists. By contrast, Palin belongs to the states small evangelical community, which is centered in the Mat-Su Valley, around Wasilla. She thinks that creationism should be taught in the public schools alongside Darwinian evolution, she was called the towns first Christian mayor by a local TV station, and she asked the town librarian about banning books, but did not follow through. As governor, Palin has done nothing to impose her religious or social views. Alaska has no death penalty, and during the campaign she said that she would support one, but never made an issue of it; she opposed abortion even for pregnancies caused by rape, but this was a personal opinion, not a legislative cause. In fact, she refused requests to put abortion bills on the agenda during a special legislative session this summer, preferring to discuss the natural-gas pipeline, which she pursued in such a bipartisan manner that she ultimately won more solid support for it from Democrats than from Republicans. While Republicans hold most of the states top political posts, only twenty-five per cent

of Alaskan voters are registered Republicans. Fifteen per cent are Democrats, and three per cent belong to the Alaska Independence Partythe extremist states rights, quasi-secessionist faction to which Todd Palin once pledged his allegiance. A solid majority of Alaskas electorate claims no party affiliation. Alaskans kept telling me that Alaskans vote for the person, not the party. So it was startling to see Palin emerge in the last days of August as an icon of the evangelical base of the Republican Party, and as a fierceoften vituperativepartisan scourge, mocking Barack Obamas character and positions. It was startling, too, to hear her, in her dbut speech to the Republican National Convention, reading a script that consistently distorted her own record. She said that she had put her predecessors jet for sale on eBay, which was true, except that this is how government property was often disposed of in Alaska, and the plane didnt sell online; it had to be unloaded through a private deal, at a loss of half a million dollars. Palin also said that she told Congress thanks but no thanks for the notorious Bridge to Nowherea Ted Stevens and Don Young earmark project that had long been a target of John McCains ridicule. (The bridge, which would have cost nearly four hundred million dollars, was intended to provide access from one island to an airport on a smaller island, with a population of fifty people.) In reality, Palin had supported the bridge in her gubernatorial race, even after Congress revoked the earmark, but abandoned it following the election and directed the money Alaska had received to other projects. And, of course, Palin touted her gas-pipeline project. I fought to bring about the largest private-sector infrastructure project in North American history, she said. And, when that deal was struck, we began a nearly forty-billion-dollar natural-gas pipeline to help lead America to energy independence. That was not entirely accurate. She was still waiting for the state legislature to release the five hundred million dollars shed promised the pipeline company to help pay for administrative costs. But the crowd loved it. Many of the delegates wore lapel buttons that said, Coldest State, Hottest Governor. That same week, Rick Davis, McCains campaign manager, announced, This election is not about issues. What mattered, he said, was the composite view that voters would form of the candidates. On a talk show, the Washington bureau chief of Time told Nicole Wallace, a McCain spokesperson, that it was still unclear whether Palin was ready to answer tough questions about domestic policy, foreign policy. Wallace laughed. Like from who? From you? And she asked, Who cares if she can talk to Time magazine?

Attacking the press is nothing new in the playbook of political defense, but it took a bold twist when the McCain campaign contrived to transform a family problemthe pregnancy of Palins unmarried seventeen-year-old daughter, Bristolinto a vindication of Palins Christian family values. Surely, it had not been part of McCains plan for his untested Vice-Presidential pick to start Day Four of her rollout by announcing Bristols plans to marry the babys father, Levi Johnston, who, as the Times reported, recently dropped out of high school. The campaign said that it was going public in order to quash offensive rumors that were circulating on the Internet: that Sarah Palins five-month-old baby, Trig, who has Down syndrome, was not really hers but Bristols, and that the Governor had faked her pregnancy in order to cover for her unwed daughter. This Faulknerian story had been making the rounds in Alaska for monthsI heard versions of it in Anchorage and Juneau within twenty-four hours of arriving in each cityand it derived from the peculiar circumstances surrounding Trigs birth. Sarah Palin had not announced her pregnancy until she was seven months along. A month later, she was in Texas to address a conference when her water broke. She decided to give the speech and then return to Wasilla to deliver the child. By way of explaining this all-day odyssey (most obstetricians advise against air travel in the eighth month, never mind during labor, and most airlines forbid it), Todd Palin later remarked, You cant have a fish pickera commercial fishermanfrom Texas. The Palin familys press release, congratulating Bristol and welcoming their prospective son-in-law to the family, was a way for the McCain campaign to suggest that the gutter press had so violated this familys privacy with its calumnies that it was necessary to violate the girls privacy to set the record straight. By castigating the press, the campaign was able to broadcast the family melodrama in a self-righteous manner. Even better, the story of the troubled teens of Wasilla, Alaska, managed to change the subject from a debate about John McCains seemingly impulsive abandonment of what had been the premise of his campaign: experience and national security. Sarah Palins makeover was just beginning, but the campaign had scored a critical victory: the press, in asking about the least-known potential President in recent memory, had been made to look contemptible. When, at last, Palin appeared at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, most of the forty million Americans who watched her on TV were seeing her for the first time.

The control of Palin by the McCain campaign was one of many ways in which it transformed her into someone largely unrecognizable to people who knew her in Alaska, where she hadnt shown a great interest in national economic issues other than energy policy, or in international affairs, and where she was viewed as more often seeking the attention of the press than avoiding it. For her first two weeks on the Presidential ticket, Palin was kept cocooned by handlers, except at rallies, where she read an adumbrated version of her Convention speech over and over, even as many of its claims were being debunked. When a Fox News anchor demanded to know when she could be interviewed, Rick Davis explained that he would allow access only to reporters who showed deference. A few weeks earlier, when I telephoned Palins office in Juneau and asked for a press officer, I was invited to meet the Governor the next day. The state legislature was in recess at the time, and I found Palin sitting sidesaddle on her receptionists desk, studying the receptionists family photographs. She wore slacks and a belted sweater-jacket, and her hair was piled and pinned atop her head in her trademark upsweep. She kept up the family chitchat as she led me to her office. Her press person had told me that I could have twenty minutes of the Governors time, but, once we were alone, she was in no hurry. We talked for about an hour before an aide poked her head in to announce that someone else was waiting. Palin wanted to be seen as someone eager to change things fast. Im halfway through my term, she said. Maybe you saw the clock as you walk in. It tells me how many days we have to make a difference. Ive got, like, eight hundred and forty-three days to make a difference left? Halfway through! As a public speaker, Palin was known for expressing goals and voicing good intentions with gusto, if with few specifics. As she talked about her hopes for Alaska, she often seemed to skip from slogan to slogan without ever touching solid ground. I mentioned at one point that I had met several Alaskans who described the states relationship to Washington as that of a colonyrich in resources, governed from afar, and dependent on that distant power to sustain itand I asked how the state could survive without the sort of federal appropriations that Ted Stevens had fought for relentlessly and that John McCain has made a cause of denouncing. I see us as the most unique state in the union, Palin replied. I sure wish that we could be recognized as the head and not the tail of the U.S., because we should be the headliterally and figuratively. She continued, Alaska could

lead with the energy policy, we should be the head. So I dont see us as a colony but just extremely unique, and I say Alaskans, too, we have such a love, a respect for our environment, for our lands, for our wildlife, for our clean water and our clean air. We know what weve got up here and we want to protect that, so were gonna make sure that our developments up here do not adversely affect that environment at all. I dont want development if theres going to be that threat to harming our environment. She paused for a moment and said that her administration had filed a friendof-the-court brief in an ongoing lawsuit related to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in 1989. Were putting our money where our mouth is to prove that were committed to the safe, responsible, environmentally friendly developments that must take place, she said. Otherwise, were never gonna convince Congress and the rest of the nation, especially people on the East Coast, who seem to make a lot of decisions for uswell never convince them that we are willing and able to develop to get in that position of being producers and contributors for the rest of the U.S. So we have to prove that. That answers the colonist type of question. Palin likes to talk about the environment, but her view on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the opposite of the one held by Congress and by McCain, who said, early in his campaign, As far as ANWR is concerned, I dont want to drill in the Grand Canyon, and I dont want to drill in the Everglades. This is one of the most pristine and beautiful parts of the world. Palin suggested that McCain might change his mind on the issue, as he has on the subject of offshore drilling. When it came to offshore drilling, she said, McCain now is evolved. At one point, she said, We love our polar bears. She had just got through explaining why she opposed a ban on aerial wolf shooting. In the past decade or so, Alaskas voters have twice rejected this practicethe chasing and gunning down of wolves from small planesand on both occasions the state reauthorized it. Now the anti-wolf-shooting crowd had forced a third referendum on the issue, and Palin, who kept a pair of wolf pelts hanging on her office wall, behind a cradle swing for Trig, was keen to see the initiative fail. Its not aerial hunting, she claimed. What the state has been engaged in for the past four to six yearsand I supportis predator control. Shoot the wolves, she said, and moose and caribou herds will increase, providing more food for Alaskans. That was the argument: Let the people who live off those herds not buy and import meat. In Alaska, a state that is equivalent in size to a fifth of the continental United States and doesnt have much agriculture, such self-reliance

hunting or fishing to feed yourself and your familyis known as subsistence, and subsistence is widely held by Alaskans to be a fundamental right. Its an emotional issue, Palin said. Polar bears were more of a pocketbook issue. Even as she professed her affection for them, Palin had, in early August, filed suit against Dirk Kempthorne, the United States Secretary of the Interior, seeking to reverse his decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. The animals were on the list because scientistsworking for the federal governmenthad found that the effects of global warming on arctic ice made it possible that polar bears would become endangered in the foreseeable future. Palin takes a wary view of such science. She has doubts that global warming is caused by human activity. She called the dire polar-bear population projections just not credible. The Interior Department had already allowed for oil and gas exploration in the polar bears habitat, but Palin saw the listing of the polar bear as an intolerable precedent. Then where do we go? she asked. Itll be another species and then another. Next its a seal, or next its a bird, or its a fish, and the next thing you know that would certainly lock up Alaskas ability to live by its statehood pact to develop its resources and contribute to the rest of the United States. In her inaugural address as governor, Palin pledged to put Alaska firstand now she is running in a Presidential campaign whose slogan is Country first. For a governor from another state, this might be an easy rhetorical adjustment, but Alaska is more like another countryand its most popular politicians, shady as some might otherwise be, are like patriots, Alaska patriots, who navigate the choppy narrows between the fear that the federal government will restrict Alaskans freedom and the fear that the federal government will cut them loose. Ralph Seekins, a former state senator who runs the Ford dealership in Fairbanks and serves on the Republican National Committee, told me, Theres a natural suspicion among most Alaskans of the federal government, and the leader of the resistance against that federal government is Ted Stevens. It was a curious description of a man who had done more than any other to wring from the federal budget the funds to make Alaska thrive and grow toward selfsufficiency. But it made sense. Confronted with the choice between subsistence and subsidy, the Alaska patriot has traditionally favored the pragmatic compromise: subsidized subsistence.

Sarah Palin seemed to understand this. Earlier this year, she wrote in a newspaper column, The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship. And, for all her talk of Alaska fending for itself, she told me, There isnt a need to aspire to live without any earmarks. The writing on the wall, though, is that times are changing. Presidential candidates have promised earmark reform, so we gotta deal with it, we gotta live with it, understanding that our senior senator, especiallyhes eighty-four years old, he is not gonna be able to serve in the Senate forever. We will not have that seniority back there anymore. Suddenly she called out, Alaskans, wake up! Then she went on, That means we have got to get ourselves in a position of seizing opportunities to develop and pay our own bills. Cause were not gonna see that largesse coming to our state as we had in all these years. Whether we like that or not or support that or not, thats reality. By speaking only of Stevenss age, Palin had skated around the possibility that his legal troubles might end his career in the Senate. She had not hesitated to call for state legislators to resign when they were indicted for corruption, and she had said that it was time for Don Young to go, even though he has not been indicted. But with Stevens she was uncharacteristically cautious. She said, I feel like I would be kind of stepping out of bounds, being extremely and prematurely judgmental of Senator Stevens when I dont know as much as I do know about our state lawmakers who, yes, once they were indicted, I said, You guys gotta step aside. Stevens has long been a favorite target of John McCains anti-pork campaign, so it must have been strange for McCain to see Stevens get a sizable boost in his prospects for relection after Palin joined the Presidential ticket. But that may not matter. Stevens is due to go to trial in Washington, D.C., between now and Election Day, and, if the case against him remains strong, he is not likely to return to the Senate in January. If Stevens loses, it will be as an Alaska patriot to the end, whereas if Sarah Palin finds herself on the winning ticket it will require her to have shifted her loyalty away from Alaska first. One day, I flew due west from Anchorage to the town of Bethel, on the flat, drab sprawl of waterlogged tundra that reaches between the deltas of the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers to the shore of the Bering Sea. Bethel, a town of some six thousand souls, is the mercantile and administrative hub for fifty-six Alaska Native villages staggered through the surrounding bush. There are no roads to Bethel; it can be reached only by sea and air, and the prices of goods for sale

there reflect the journeynine dollars and ninety-nine cents for a gallon of milk, seven dollars or more for a gallon of gasoline. When the economy is weak in Bethel, as it has been of late, the population dropssome people move to Anchorage or Fairbanks and others head upriver to their ancestral villages to live on fish and game and berries and bird eggs. I travelled an hour by boat up the Kuskokwim to the village of Kwethluk, a collection of rough wood shacks and a couple of Russian Orthodox churches, without plumbing or running water. There I met Max Olick, the local lawenforcement officer, a huge man with a wad of snuff under his lip and a cap that read Sheriff. Pretty soon its moose season, Olick said. One moose will carry me one year. We dont have pork chops and chicken. I hate chicken. My boy is different. He prefers something more than the native foods weve been having all our life. I dont know where I went wrong with him. He said, I told my wife we live in the Third World. She laughed. She said we have TV. I said what about water and sewer. Then he laughed. I asked him what he thought about Ted Stevens. Long as I can rememberforty yearsIve known his name, Olick said. Forty years, I voted for him. He was doing great for Alaska. He explained, Here in Kwethluk, theres about nine hundred and twenty people. We like Stevens because he knows what we want. What we care about is subsistence. He replenished his snuff and said, Stevens has been a great supporter of subsistence life style, economic development. Hes been in there so many years he deserves a chance to go at it one more term. But I dont think anyone can condone corruption in Washington, D.C. Olick thought about that awhile, and said, Im an old traditional guy that still believes in old traditional ways. But things change. Back in Bethel, I met a dentist, a man who ran a janitorial-supplies service, and a man who ran a fuel service. I asked them how they thought Bethel and the villages it supported would fare without Ted Stevens in the Senate, in a time without earmarks. The dentist said, Were fucked, and the janitorial-supplies man said, There will be ghost towns. The fuel-oil man pointed to a hard black, jagged, wedge-shaped object on his desk, and asked if I knew what kind of tooth it was. Mastodon, he said. *Correction, December 12, 2008: Stevens was not a member of the Armed Services Committee, as previously stated.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/09/22/080922fa_fact_gourevitc h?printable=true&currentPage=all#ixzz2d1sfJb8E

LETTER FROM SRI LANKA

TIDES OF WAR
After the tsunami, the fighting continues.
by Philip GourevitchAUGUST 1, 2005

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There was talk in Sri Lanka, not long after the tsunami, of an expensive coffin heading north. The story appeared in the press and was passed on in conversation, unencumbered by any trace of verifiable reality: Did you hear . . . a coffin, very fancy . . . what to think? Perhaps such a coffin existed, perhaps not. More than thirty thousand people had been killed on the island in the space of a few minutes when the Indian Ocean rose up and surged ashore under a bright, cloudless sky on the morning after Christmas; and Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the secessionist Tamil Tigers, who control a sizable swath of northern Sri Lanka, had not been seen or heard from since. The coastal town of Mullaittivu, where Prabhakaran had his military headquarters in a network of underground bunkers, had been largely erased by the sea. An announcer on the state-owned radio, the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, speculated hopefully that, if so much of Mullaittivu was gone, perhaps its most notorious resident might be, too. For thirty years, since he took up arms against the government, which is dominated by the islands Sinhalese Buddhist majority, Prabhakaran, the self-styled Sun God of the Tamil Hindu minority, has been the defining figure of Sri Lankan historya wearying chronicle of civil war, assassination, and terror. For a country dumbfounded by the senseless loss of life along its

coasts, the rumor of the northbound coffin attached to the mystery of his absence to suggest the possibility of a single meaningful death. Prabhakaran, who turned fifty last year, is one of the most bloody-minded and effective warlords in todays crowded field. Osama bin Laden is more infamous, on account of Al Qaedas global reach and sensational operations, but Prabhakaran and his Tigers, in their determination to carve out an independent Tamil state in the north and east of Sri Lanka, have been every bit as bold. The Tigers, whose extremist ethnic nationalism is essentially secular, are often credited with inventing suicide bombing, and although that claim is surely exaggerated, they did develop the sort of explosive suicide vests favored by Palestinian terrorists, and they refined the technique of using speedboats as bombs to ram large ships, which was employed in 2000 by Al Qaeda agents in Yemen against the U.S.S. Cole. In 1991, long before female suicide bombers became a fixture of Middle Eastern terrorism, the Tigers deployed the woman who blew up Indias Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. That was Prabhakarans most notorious hit, but his suicide squad of Black Tigers has claimed more than two hundred and sixty bombings in the last two decadesan average rate of nearly one a monthinjuring and killing thousands of people, the great majority of them civilians. Of course we use suicide bombers, a Tiger official who was overseeing humanitarian relief for displaced tsunami survivors near Mullaittivu told me. Because, as a revolutionary organization, we have limited resources. Prabhakaran depicts his struggle as a quest to reclaim his peoples historic homeland, but the idea of secession is actually a relatively recent phenomenon, a response to the governments discriminatory policies and its complicity in communal violence against Tamils during the decades following Sri Lankas independence, in 1948, from British colonial rule. Until the early nineteeneighties, most Tamils favored the establishment of a federal system that would grant them substantial local autonomy within a unified state; and, even as hope for a political solution gave way to Tamil militancy, armed struggle was widely seen as a means to force such an outcome. Prabhakaran, however, has always been hostile to the idea of power-sharing. He proclaims himself and his Tigers to be the only true representatives of Tamil political aspirations and has waged a systematic campaignevery bit as relentless as his war against the stateto eliminate Tamil rivals. Nevertheless, the Tigers have consistently had to resort to the forced recruitment of Tamil children, a practice barely distinguishable from outright abduction, to fill their fighting ranks and replenish their suicide brigades.

In Sinhalese, the name Sri Lanka means blessed land, and in its physical aspects the country is a tropical paradise, hemmed by palm-shaded beaches and, in its interior, fragrant with the florid vegetation of astonishingly varied landscapessalt marshes and mountain lakes, mist-shrouded tea plantations, glimmering paddies, and mahogany jungles. The contrast between the islands natural attractions and its repellently violent history was thrown into stark relief by the tsunami, which killed half as many people in one blow as three decades of war and terror had claimed. Yet this devastation was perfectly arbitrary, and it is a measure of the depth of Sri Lankas troubles that for this reason the tsunami was widely regarded there not only as a disaster but also as an occasion for hope. The President, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, articulated this unlikely optimism when she addressed the nation two days after the tsunami. Sri Lanka, she declared, had been incredibly humbled by the waves, which had dealt death and destruction to all ethnic groups indiscriminately. Never mind that Sinhalese, who count for nearly seventy-five per cent of the islands twenty million inhabitants, outnumber Tamils by roughly four to one, and that Tamils, in turn, outnumber the next largest minority group, Muslims, by three to one. Nature does not differentiate in the treatment of peoples, the President said, and she urged Sri Lankans to follow natures example. In fact, many had responded to the disaster by rushing to the aid of the afflicted without regard for their identity. There were stories of Sinhalese soldiers riskingand losingtheir lives in efforts to rescue Tamil civilians; of Tamil businessmen carting meals to displaced Sinhalese survivors; and of Muslims buying up clothes and medicines to hand out to Hindus and Buddhists. It was only later that Sri Lankans had time to register their surprise at their own unthinking decency, and their relief at this discovery was compounded by a sense that the tsunami had saved the country from an imminent return to war. Although a ceasefire between the government and the Tigers has held since early 2002, peace talks broke down the next yearwith the Tigers demanding what amounts to self-rule, and the government refusing to grant itand, in the unhappy deadlock that followed, both parties have been riven by internal disputes. On the government side, President Kumaratunga forged a new ruling coalition in April of last year with the Peoples Liberation Front (known by its Sinhalese initials as the J.V.P.), a small but aggressively divisive Communist party, which spikes its Marxism with an extremist strain of Sinhalese nationalism and Buddhist supremacism, and regards concessions to the Tigers as tantamount to treason. Kumaratunga, who first allied with the J.V.P. in 2001, has

acknowledged that her affiliation with the party was a devils bargain, made to retain power. This political realignment in Colombo, the capital, coincided with an armed revolt against Prabhakaran by one of his top commanders, a man known by the nom de guerre Colonel Karuna, who drew his support from his home area in eastern Sri Lanka, where Tamils had long felt exploited and ill served by the Tiger leadership. Karunas aim was to secure autonomy for eastern Tamils from both the Tigers and the government, and although he could not prevail militarily against Prabhakaran, he remains at largein hiding, and probably in exileand the Tigers have been unable to restablish dominion over large areas of the east. Karunas rebellion dramatized the threat that peace poses to Prabhakarans authority, and a month before the tsunami struck, when Prabhakaran delivered his annual Heros Day speech, he declared himself fed up with the stalemate. The Heros Day oration, which is delivered at night, in a cemetery for martyred Tigers, lit by flaming torches, is often Prabhakarans only significant public utterance in the course of a year, and his pronouncements have come to be seen as oracular. We are living in a political void, without war, without a stable peace, without the conditions of normalcy, without an interim or permanent solution to the ethnic conflict, he began. He accused President Kumaratunga of rejecting the prospect of peace through her unholy alliance with the J.V.P. The Sinhalese and the Tamils, he said, were more polarized than evertwo separate peoples with divergent and mutually incompatible ideologies, consciousness, and political goalsand he concluded, ominously, There are borderlines to patience and expectations. We have now reached the borderline. In the weeks before Christmas, assassinations and attacks involving Prabhakarans forces and Karuna sympathizers escalated steadily in the east. Some Sri Lankans cancelled vacations in order to be at home if the war resumed; others made plans to leave the country. We were running at the rate of about a murder a day until the tsunami came along, Father Harry Miller, an American Jesuit missionary in the devastated east-coast city of Batticaloa, told me. Batticaloa, and the surrounding province, which shares its name, was the epicenter of Karunas rebellion, a predominantly Tamil region where the ceasefire lines describe a confusing patchwork of government and Tiger territories. For dozens of miles before you reach Batticaloa city on the two-lane road that links it to Colomboa slow, eight-hour drive awaythe scrubby bush is punctuated by heavily fortified Army camps, and a pervasive military presence makes the government-controlled town feel

like a place under occupation. Miller had heard the rumors that Prabhakaran might be dead, but he was not surprised when the Tiger leader reappeared in midJanuary, without a word of consolation for his peoples losses. Miller did not share President Kumaratungas view of the tsunami as a cosmic corrective to what she called a country where every aspect of life has been politicized, much less as a providential opportunity. The prevailing sentiment in Batticaloa, he said, was We are victims again. Weve had flood, weve had wars, weve had drought, weve had a cyclone. Victims again. The defining catastrophe of post-colonial Sri Lankan history was an act of man, a law, promulgated in 1956, when the island was still called Ceylon. The law established Sinhalese as the sole official language (a status previously reserved for English). Sri Lankas Sinhalese and Tamils both trace their origins to migrations from India, and, despite their different languages and religions, their coexistence had previously been untroubled by ethnic violence. The 1956 law, however, effectively transformed the parliamentary democracy into an instrument of Sinhalese nationalism and excluded Tamils and other minorities from careers in public service, access to many educational opportunities, and other rights and privileges to which citizenship supposedly entitled them. The man behind the law was President Kumaratungas father, Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, the scion of a Sinhalese noble family, who was raised an Anglican and educated at Oxford. Although Bandaranaike had converted to Buddhism as a young man, he spoke English with greater ease than he did Sinhalese. In fact, he had to brush up on his native language before campaigning as a populist opposition leader, who mixed leftist rhetoric with nativism in order to tap the resentment of ordinary Sri Lankans toward the class from which he came, the British-educated lite. His Sinhalese-only policy coincided with celebrations in honor of the twenty-five-hundredth anniversary of the Buddhas enlightenment, and scholars tend to regard Bandaranaikes alienation of the Tamils as inadvertent. He could just as well have included the Tamil poor in that anti-English campaign, the human-rights lawyer Radhika Coomaraswamy told me in Colombo. Coomaraswamy is a Tamil, and she said, I dont see antiTamil sentiment at the core of the original Sinhalese nationalism. Tamils were just ignored, which may be an even greater insult. Bandaranaike was unprepared when outraged Tamils took to the streets to protest the law and were met with violence from Sinhalese inflamed by the jingoism he had preached. Tamils were beaten (some of them to death), their homes were set ablaze, and their businesses were ransacked. Bandaranaike could

not undo the damage. In 1957, he negotiated a pact with Tamil federalists that met many of their demands for regional autonomy. Sinhalese hard-liners protested, and in 1958 he repudiated the pact, and the country was again swept by violence, of which Tamils were overwhelmingly the victims. A year and a half later, Bandaranaike was shot dead by an apparently deranged Buddhist monk. Bandaranaike was succeeded, the following year, by his widow, Sirimavo the worlds first female Prime Ministerwho offered concessions to Tamil federalists and won their support during her campaign, then turned her back on them, triggering mass protests in the northern city of Jaffna. In 1962, the Army was sent in to quell the unrest, and although there was little violence between Sinhalese and Tamils during the next decade, the dispiriting effect of militarization in the north, coupled with official discrimination, was such that a generation of Tamils grew up with an acute sense of disenfranchisement. In the early nineteen-seventies, Sirimavo Bandaranaike hardened these feelings by elevating Buddhism to the equivalent of a state religion and by imposing harsh quotas on the number of Tamil students admitted to state universities. In the late sixties, half the students admitted to university programs in engineering and medicine were Tamils; by the end of the next decade, that number was closer to twenty per cent. In 1975, Velupillai Prabhakaran staged what he called his first major military encounter, when he shot and killed the mayor of Jaffna, a close associate of the Prime Ministers, who had been on his way to pray at a Hindu temple. Tamil militants had attempted to assassinate their politicians before, but none had succeeded, and Prabhakarans example inspired others to take up arms in the name of Tamil self-determination. Some joined his tiny band of Tigers, who supported themselves by robbing banks and smuggling weapons from India. Others enlisted with competing Tamil guerrilla factions, which began claiming credit for assassinations and ambushes of politicians, policemen, and soldiers. Sinhalese agitators set off a new wave of anti-Tamil riots in 1977, and again in 1981, when the Jaffna librarythe major repository of Tamil literature and historywas burned to a shell. Then, in July of 1983, the Tigers staged a carefully planned ambush of government forces near Jaffna, massacring thirteen officers. As news of the slaughter spread, the country was convulsed by the most hideous pogrom in its history, a wave of anti-Tamil violence so extreme that observers reached back to the horrors that accompanied Indias partition, in 1947, for a fitting comparison.

As many as two thousand Tamils were hacked, bludgeoned, torched, or beaten and kicked to death by mobs. In Colombo, Sinhalese criminals in the high-security Welikade prison were allowed to slaughter dozens of Tamil political prisoners, and two days later another massacre of Tamils occurred in the same prison. Nearly eighty thousand Tamils fled their homes to hastily established refugee camps during those weeks, which became known as Black July; others piled into boats to seek asylum in Indiathe first great wave of an exodus that has, over the intervening decades of war, created a global diaspora of hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils. Some Sinhalese were so disgusted by the horrors of 1983 that they, too, left the country. Johnny Attygale, a businessman whose father had served as Sri Lankas police commissioner in the sixties, told me that he had been driving to the beach when a couple of frenzied Tamils appeared in front of his car, pursued by a lynch mob. He packed the men into his trunk and drove them to safety, then packed up his family and moved to Australia. Bodies on the road, people being burned in the streethow do you explain that to your kids? he asked. To Prabhakaran, Black July was an affirmation of the Tiger causeproof that the only hope for Sri Lankan Tamils was to establish an independent homeland by force. The July holocaust has united all sections of the Tamil masses, he declared, and Tamil militants took to comparing their struggle to that of Palestinian nationalists and anti-apartheid South Africans. Indias Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, faced with a flood of Sri Lankan refugees and with discontent among sympathetic Indian Tamils, decided to train and arm Sri Lankas Tamil militants (not only Tigers but a number of other factions as well). Indias support for the rebels inspired more young Tamils to join the separatist fight, and Sri Lankans date the beginning of civil war to 1983, the year when the states claim to be the representative government of all the islands people appeared most thoroughly discredited. Yet, as with so many armed liberation movements, the more the Tigers pressed their advantages and consolidated their power as a military and political force, the more they came to resembleand then to exceedthe most repellent aspects of their enemies. Thirty years after Prabhakaran shot and killed the mayor of Jaffna, he is probably the worlds most prolific political assassin. But the paradox of his monomaniacal pursuit of a Tamil homeland is that Tamils have borne the brunt of his violence. Father Miller came to Sri Lanka from his home parish of New Orleans in 1948. It was a brand-new nation with a beautiful administrative structure, he told me. The British did a good job. They had trained people who knew how to keep

accounts and write and type and file and everything else. There were people whod studied in Oxford and Cambridge, and people trained at Sandhurst. Tea, rubber, and coconut plantations sustained a developing economy; a reliable rail system served the entire island; and most of the country was electrified. We used to call Bangladesh bad off, Miller said. We called them the basket case over the years. They never seemed to be able to get their act together. Weve got to their stage now. Theyve gone forward, weve fallen back. Miller was an undergraduate at Springhill College, a Jesuit school in Mobile, Alabama, when he volunteered as a missionary, and he packed his bags knowing that he was committing himself for life. Except for a stint in India in the early fifties, to complete his theological training, and a few years in other parishes in Sri Lanka, he has made his home in Batticaloa, teaching primary and secondary schooland for a decade serving as rectorat St. Michaels College, which is housed in a large Italianate building of ochre stucco and colonnaded terraces beneath red tile roofs, where he lives in a tower room, atop a steep and rickety wooden staircase. The office area of his L-shaped room is sparsely furnished, and the walls are barely adorneda few pictures of Jesus hang on nails, along with a cross and a crude folk-art mask. His living quarters are even more ascetic: there is a narrow cot, a hot plate and washstand, and a clothesline, which, when I visited, was draped with a duplicate of the outfit he was wearinga threadbare polo shirt and hiking shorts. Beneath his desk chair, a wooden prayer kneeler supported Millers sandalled feet. He is a small, vigorous man, with thick workmans hands and a face that might fairly be called Roman on account of its sharp-featured, weathered intensity. Despite his Louisiana roots, he has a New England accent (a peculiarity he acknowledges yet cannot account for), but the most striking feature of his speech is the way he uses the first-person plural when describing the Batticaloa Tamil community, with which he has come to identify. Ive been here long enough, he said. I say we when I talk locally. In the early days of the war, Miller told me, one of the Sri Lankan colonels here gave me a nickname. I was a white Tiger, because I was always arguing the side of the Tamil people against the government. At that time, in the early eighties, the fighting was all in the north. But the government regarded Batticaloa as enemy territory nonetheless, Miller said, and they came in and started arresting people right and left, in great numbers. Miller joined with other community leaders to document and contest instances of government abuse. In 1990, when the Tigers seized control of large areas of Batticaloa, Miller took to hounding them even more. I object to both sides, and Im talking on behalf of

the people who are victims, he said. He was particularly incensed by the Tigers forced conscription of Tamil children. They had put in a rule, he explained. Each family must give one child. And they were exacting that. He told me that when he went to the local Tiger commander to complain about a thirteen-yearold girl with a game leg and a fifteen-year-old boy with a terrible lung condition who had been taken from their families as recruits, the commander told him, I dont have time for these minor matters. Millers sympathy for Tamil grievances was equalled by his disdain for the Tigers. That leader, Prabhakaran, is a megalomaniac, and in anybodys books a mass murderer, he said. Let me tell you one story. Mother and father have about five kidsthree of them are girls, boys are younger fellowsand the Tigers go to the house, and say, Youve got to give us one of the children. The mother says, Never, never. The father says, What are we going to do? We have to give them one of the children, thats allwe dont have a choice. One day when the woman was away from home, they came and he was there, and he let one of the girls go. And the mother came back and she said, Wheres the kid? And he said, Well, they came and took her. She said, You gave her? He said, Yeah, what? She said, Thats not even your child. Now, they were not getting on well, and when she said, Thats not even your child, he went out and committed suicide. Thats the level of pressure that they were able to put on people. The Tiger commander in Batticaloa was Colonel Karuna, and when he turned against Prabhakaran, last year, the recruitment of children in his zone stopped. His declaration of independence inspired a number of Batticaloans to take to the streets and show their support by setting fire to the portraits of Prabhakaran that Karunas men had, until the day before, required them to hang in their homes, and, before he went into hiding, Karuna disbanded the childrens brigades. He sent them home, Miller said. The Tigers tried to get them back. They were going around in some of the villages with loudspeakers: Wed like to talk to you again, we need to bring things up to date, at least come and have a discussion with us. The tactic didnt work, but shortly after the tsunami unicef reported that Tiger recruiters were luring children from displaced-persons camps in the east. Father Miller wasnt surprised. Deep down inside, people realize that we havent crossed that border yet to where we can say that theres going to be peace, he said. Were going to go on killing each other, and there may come

some time when it becomes so totally desperate that we get some good sense. Im an optimist. Ceylonthe radiant, incomparable East, Mark Twain wrote when he paid a brief visit to the island in 1896, and his rhapsodic response to the place was typical of travellers accounts through the years:
All the requisites were present. The costumes were right; the black and brown exposures, unconscious of immodesty, were right; the juggler was there, with his basket, his snakes, his mongoose, and his arrangements for growing a tree from seed to foliage and ripe fruitage before ones eyes; in sight were plants and flowers familiar to one in books but in no other waycelebrated, desirable, strange, but in production restricted to the hot belt of the equator; and out a little way in the country were the proper deadly snakes, and fierce beasts of prey, and the wild elephant and the monkey. And there was that swoon in the air which one associates with the tropics, and that smother of heat, heavy with odors of unknown flowers, and that sudden invasion of purple gloom fissured with lightnings then the tumult of crashing thunder and the downpourand presently all sunny and smiling again.

You could find much the same sort of gushing, albeit less memorably rendered, in most of the leading travel magazines last year: feature after feature touting Sri Lanka, post-ceasefire, as a hot (in every sense of the word) destination, where the suspended war provided a titillating whiff of adventure. Sri Lankans are prone to similar raptures about the Edenic luxuriance of their land. Their literatureheat-stunned and gin-soakedis full of an aching autoexoticism. Yet this fond self-regard contains a painful element of what another Southern writer, William Faulkner, called a furious unreality, and nowhere is it more furious or unreal than in the Tiger-controlled territory. To get there, you must cross what amounts to an international frontier in the middle of the kilometre-wide no mans land that bisects the island from coast to coast along the ceasefire line. Although the government of Sri Lanka refuses to recognize it, the Tigers have established their own state, with customs officials, a border control, a uniformed police force, and a full complement of ministries. The sheds on the Tiger side of the border crossing, where travel documents are examined, are plastered with posters celebrating the exploits of suicide bombers, and staffed by uniformed female cadres with braided pigtails looped and gathered on their heads, like helmets. The landscape on this side is indistinguishable from the rest of Sri Lanka, except that it is so sparsely populated as to seem abandoned, which in large stretches it is. The war damage is most striking in Kilinochchi, the political and economic capital of the Tiger zone. Three years ago, when the truce went into effect, there was hardly a roof left on any structure along Kilinochchis main drag, and even now, after a fever of reconstruction, largely funded by overseas Tamil supporters of the war they have fled, ruins are everywhere. There are few private cars on the road, and a good many of them are

archaic Morris Minors, jerry-rigged to run on kerosene, at perilously slow speeds. At the center of town, a side street leads to a complex of ultramodern hotel-like buildings, which make up the various departments of the Tigers political commissariat. Here, the conspicuous absence of visible security measuresno guns or guardssignals the confidence of absolute authority. Tiger apparatchiks are notoriously wary of the press. But after the tsunami they launched a charm offensive on foreign reporters, earning highly favorable reviews of the efficiency with which they orchestrated relief efforts. So, one evening, I was granted an audience with the head of the Tigers political wing, S. P. Tamilchelvan, a slight, heavily mustached man, who is considered to be second only to Prabhakaran in the hierarchy. Tamilchelvan walks with a limp and the help of a cane, on account of an old combat injury. He does not speak English, or pretends not to (he clearly understands it). He received me in a bitterly air-conditioned conference room and was accompanied by his translator, George, an elderly rail of a man, who was extravagantly groomed, with gray hair slicked fiercely back, and profusions of equally gray hair sprouting from his ears in carefully combed tufts several inches long. Georges English was as eccentric as his coiffure. When I posed a questionfor instance, why had Prabhakaran failed to appear for weeks after the tsunami, giving rise to suspicions that he had been killed?Tamilchelvan would answer at great length in Tamil, and then George would deliver his own baroque stem-winder:
This is a story that has been in the spin for quite some time, not just since the tsunami but for two decades. Disappearance of the national leader takes place so many times, and people kill him several times, and there is a concerted effort on the part of the media in Colombo, and some racial elements in Colombo, political elements who have a wishful thinking of that to happen. So these are all planted by interested parties. Now we must understand the structure of the Liberation Tigers organization, the efficacy of the structure. How did it happen for a guerilla movement to transform itself into such a conventional army and while at the same time maintain structures that have been formulated to meet the day-to-day requirements of the people in a void that was made by the governments absence to do such things during the past twenty-five years? So efficacy of the structures is now indicated by the leaders commands being taken into account immediately, and the response that came forward from all the units of the Liberation Tigers organization. And one walks into the street and sees how efficiently the mechanism is functioning. . . . Our leader never cares to pose for photographs in occasions, and show the world that he is living and he is distributing and he is participating in the effort. Those are all done within a framework that he himself has formulated. . . . A totally unprecedented contingency like this has been met squarely by the Tamil people and the Tamil Liberation Organization. So our leader never bothers much about this type of cynical reporting about the leader being conspicuously absent in places where hes needed. He is there.

Tamilchelvan sat expressionless during this outpouring, which went on for nearly five minutes. When I mentioned that most Americans think of the Tigers, if at all, as suicide bombers, George told me that Tamilchelvan said that this was quite understandable, since Americans are not in a position to discern the truth of any equation, since they are not familiar with the political situation. He

urged me to consider that the government had deployed military personnel to attend to survivors of the tsunami in Tamil areas. It is the very same military that was instrumental in hundreds of thousands of people being massacred overnight and end up in mass graves, he said, in a fit of impassioned exaggeration, and he warned, If the administrators in Colombo do not think of removing that mind-setthe majoritarian, the supremacist, the military mindsetthen the paradigm is of course very gloomy. It was up to Colombo, he added, to make a decision whether the Tamil people are again going to be asked to fight for their rights, or whether there is going to be accommodatingness in the center for devolving and sharing power. On the way out of the conference room, Tamilchelvans press officer wrote a letter for me in Tamila laissez passerthat gave me permission to visit Mullaittivu, Prabhakarans seaside stronghold. I drove there the next day. Standing at the epicenter of the devastation, I could see from the surrounding grid of streets where block upon block of houses had stood, but what remained was just crumbled chunks of concrete, with here and there an isolated vestige of human design: a staircase lifting to nowhere, an iron gate opening to nothing, a bicycle twisted like a paper clip tossed aside by nervous hands, and a grand church signified by an ornate faade. The silence of the place was broken only by the relentless cawing of crows. A minivan pulled up to the wreckage of the church, and a party of clergymen in flowing white vestments emerged to inspect the damage. One of them, distinguished by a crimson sash as a bishop, stopped to chat with me. At the same moment, a barefoot, severely bow-legged man appeared, heading toward me. He wore an indigo sarong and a light cotton shirt, and his eyes were bright with madness. He did not stop until he was almost standing on my toes. He offered his hand, which was eerily limp and weightless, and began to speak. The sharp, sweet smell of palm toddy filled the narrow space between us. His voice was high and a little hoarse, and he went on at length, staring into my face. He is disturbed, the bishop explained. He lost everything. The man continued his address, but he sounded different. The bishop chuckled. He is talking no language, he said. Its just made-up sounds. The madman smiled at me. I smiled back. Suddenly he reached up and felt my hair, then drew his hand back in a salute and, without another sound, wandered off into the ruins. People have a real psychosis now, the bishop said. But who knew what that mans story was? Perhaps his mind had been swamped by the tsunami, or perhaps he had always been mad, Mullaittivus village idiot. Still, meeting him

there made Georges renditions of Tamilchelvans soliloquies seem less strange. Recalling Black July, the Tiger spokesman had said, Just because we were Tamils, we were assaulted, killed, and made to feel humiliated. To call ourselves Tamils was a matter that we were ashamed ofwe were made to feel so small. That made the youths of that day, in the year 1983, to decide that the pursuit of learning, education, for purposes of prospering in our personal lives has no meaning as long as our brethren get killed in this manner, at the hands of a cruel military. He seemed to be saying that the Tigers had chosen to fight because they felt they had no alternative. They had agreed to the ceasefire for the same reason that the government had, because neither side could win the war. As I drove through the barricades and out of Tiger territory, it was almost impossible to imagine how Sri Lanka might be put back together again. On my last day in Sri Lanka, I had lunch in Colombo with Dayan Jayatilleka, a Sinhalese political scientist and newspaper columnist. At one point, as he was telling me about himself, he smiled a little and said, Oh, by the way, one thing I did over the last twenty years, I was indicted as a terrorist, under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, during the Emergency. This was in 1983, when Jayatilleka was twenty-five. The year before, he had been a doctoral student studying revolutionary political theory at suny-Binghamton, but Black July inspired him to turn his learning into action. I not only had friends who diedclose Tamil friends who were killed in the Welikade jailI saw people killed on the street, and as a Sinhala I had a crisis of conscience, he said. Jayatilleka and his comrades got armed and trained in a very amateurish way and set out to become urban guerrillas. The idea was that the non-Tiger groups among the Tamils and the non-J.V.P. groups among the Sinhalese could link up and prevent this terrible polarization of fundamentalism on both sides, he said. It was very utopian, and it didnt work. Some of us died, some of us went undergroundlike me, I was three years undergroundsome of us did time. We were caught between the state and these fanatical movements, and we got crushed. In 1986, when Jayatilleka was on the run from his terrorism indictment, he heard that Tigers were burning other Tamil militants in the streets of Jaffna, and that a Sinhalese student leader had been caught and murdered by J.V.P. thugs. They cut his throat slowly. Apparently, they kept asking him where I was, Jayatilleka said. The shock of such killings sapped his appetite for armed struggle. When we started out, none of us ever thought wed ever be killed by other liberation fighters, he told me. We thought wed be killed by state forces, or tortured. We were all psyched up for thatthat was the way the

script was supposed to go. And then we were blindsided by the J.V.P. and the Tigers. In 1988, Jayatilleka negotiated an amnesty, and joined the government as a minister for Batticaloa province. He resigned after six months. We were doing atrocious things at the time to anyone suspected of Tiger associations, he said. He described entering the provincial office one day and finding a teen-age boy, lying bound and beaten, face down on the floor. I asked what he was doing there. They said, Oh, they were going to take him out to the swamp and shoot him in the back of the head. They didnt have a case against him of any kind. I managed to get him releasedbut how many more like him were there? That year, Jayatillekas close friend and political comrade Vijaya Kumaratungaa charismatic movie star, who had entered politics to promote a multi-ethnic, federalist policy for Sri Lankawas shot in the face and killed in his driveway. Although no one was ever tried for the crime, the J.V.P. is widely assumed to have been responsible, which made it all the more shocking to many Sri Lankans when Vijayas widow, now President Kumaratunga, allied with the party. Three days before Kumaratunga was elected, in December, 1999, she survived a Tiger suicide attack, which killed twenty-two others, wounded more than a hundred, and mutilated one of her eyes, but Jayatilleka, who despises the Tigers barbarism, does not believe that personal animus to one extremist enemy can justify an alliance with another. There is something that has been wrong for quite some time with the political system here, he said, and added, Its a zerosum game. Everybody here will ally with anyone else. Sri Lankas problem, as Jayatilleka sees it, is the absence of an overarching sense of national identity. Nobody in public life really talks about being Sri Lankan; there are only Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslims. By way of contrast, he cited India, a state held together by a political understanding of itself as secularist and federalist. Unlike Nehru, who had an idea of India, we went the other way, Jayatilleka said. Our nationalism wasnt national in the sense of pan-Sri Lankan. Our nationalism took a cultural formcultural, ethnic, religious. And, he said, Anybody who looked like a true nationalist unifier got shot. When I left Jayatilleka, I had an appointment to visit the Minister of Hindu Religious Affairs, Douglas Devananda, at his home office, a fortified compound on a quiet residential byway in central Colombo. The entry to the street was guarded by soldiers, who tugged aside a metal barricade to let me pass through an elaborate roadblock. Devananda, who spent many years as a Tamil guerrilla before he renounced violence and entered parliament, is the only former Tamil

fighter in the government, and he has survived more assassination attempts than Rasputin endured. His home was hidden behind high walls posted with watchtowers and an iron gate piled high with sandbags and blockaded by oil drums filled with concrete. As I approached on foot, a narrow shutter slid open in the gate, and two eyes and a nose appeared in the window. American? a voice asked, and I was admitted. Jayatilleka, who had received arms training from Devananda in the early eighties, had told me that I would find the minister surrounded by heavy iron, and, sure enough, a half dozen fidgety young men wearing submachine guns were huddled in the entryway. One led me through a labyrinth of short hallways that switched this way and that at ninety-degree angles. There were more men with guns at every corner. Outside, rain was threatening, and the air in Devanandas den was heavy with dampness. As we progressed, the smell of mildew grew stronger, and mold stains claimed ever larger patches of wall. We passed a screened-off antechamber filled with parakeets, an atrium with a bluetiled carp pond, and a dim room filled with tropical vegetation, where a chattering monkey sat on a rock clutching a gnawed orange. Finally, we reached a door studded with deadbolts, which clicked open by remote control from within, and there, at the back of a long, wide, windowless room, cluttered with furniture and stacked with papers, Devananda sat behind a desk: a big, bearded man, in a loose white V-necked undershirt and a green floor-length sarong, clutching two telephones to his head, one at each ear, while talking to a man standing next to him in a booming voice. We sat on a rattan living-room set, where an aide brought us orange soda. Jayatilleka had said of Devananda, When I needed a submachine, he gave me one, and, when I reminded Devananda of this, he let out a true belly laugh: Haha-ha-ha-hathose days! He had gone for his own training as a fighterin 1978, and again in 1984to Lebanon. P.L.O., Al Fatah, George Habash, he said. Devananda had been a prisoner in the Tamil wards at the Welikade prison in 1983, when Sinhalese inmates began massacring his comrades with iron bars and blades and bludgeons. He survived by fighting off the attackers, hand to hand. Four years later, following his amnesty, when Devananda had become a government officer, he was asked by Tiger prisoners who were staging a hunger strike to come and talk to them. When he entered their cell, he was surrounded and attacked. A metal spike was driven into the back of his skull. A Sinhalese surgeon saved his life, but he describes himself as only eighty-five per cent recovered. At one point during my visit, an aide brought him a vial with a

medicine dropper, which he used to lubricate his eyes. This is unnatural tears, he explained. If I want to cry, I put this, then I can cry. Ha-ha-ha-ha! He laughed again when he told me how last summer, on a day when he opened his office to his constituents, a young Tamil woman had refused to let his guards search her above the waist. Devananda told them not to seize her, in case she was wired as a bomb. Instead, he had his men lead her to a police station, where she blew herself up, killing four officers. It was the first suicide bombing in Sri Lanka since the ceasefire, but Devananda wasnt surprised. As a former guerrilla, he said, he knew Prabhakarans mind. It takes a snake to know a snake, he told me. He wriggled his hand through the air. Prabhakaran doesnt want peace, he wants p-i-e-c-ea piece of land to rule as a dictator, he said, and added, I tell Tamils in my community that earlier, when we fought for liberation, we were in an iron handcuff. If tomorrow the Tigers lead, its a golden handcuff. The difference is iron or gold, but the handcuff is the same. Devananda claims that eighty per cent of Tamils want a federal solution but that most are too terrorized by the Tigers to say so. In last years parliamentary elections, the Tigers bullied every Tamil candidate in the areas where they have influence to swear allegiance to Prabhakarans policies, and even then they resorted to fraud to insure victory for their candidates. Devananda read aloud from a report by European Union monitors, which said, If the election results in the north and east had been a critical factor in determining who formed the government, it would have raised questions about the legitimacy of the final outcome. The events that took place in this part of Sri Lanka during the course of this election are totally unacceptable and are the antithesis of democracy. Still, Devananda refused to call himself anti-Tiger. After all, he said, If, tomorrow, Velupillai Prabhakaran genuinely comes for talks, I may give up politics. But, in the next breath, he added, The reality is he wont come, and I also wont give up. Thinking as a snake who knows his kind, Devananda predicted that Sri Lanka would see a steady escalation of violence through the first half of this year, and so far he has not been wrong. The killings began again in February, when a spate of tit-for-tat assassinations involving Tigers and Karunas faction in the east broke the post-tsunami lull. The Tigers organized angry street protests, accusing the government of colluding with Karunas cadres, and of failing to negotiate a mechanism for distributing aid to tsunami victims in Tiger areas. Throughout the spring, whenever President Kumaratunga declared herself ready to negotiate such an accord, the J.V.P. denounced her as a traitor; and when at last she succumbed to international

pressure and agreed, in June, to an aid partnership with the Tigers, the J.V.P. quit the ruling coalition and persuaded the Supreme Court to suspend the pact, pending a review of its constitutionality. Meanwhile, in the north and the east, the killings have continued at a steadily intensifying ratewith a Tiger officer here, a couple of Karuna cadres there, and civilians inevitably picked off in the crossfire. Rather than bringing peace with unwanted force, the tsunami has become a new casus belli. On the evening of April 28th, a prominent Tamil journalist named Dharmeratnam Sivarama founding editor of TamilNet, a widely read news Web site that is largely sympathetic to the Tigerswas accosted by four men outside a Colombo police station, bundled into a jeep, and driven away. The next day, policemen, responding to an anonymous tip, found his body in a highsecurity area behind the Sri Lankan parliament. Sivaram, who also wrote for the mainstream English-language newspaper, the Daily Mirror, had received death threats four years ago, after state media denounced him as a Tiger spy, and again last year, after he wrote about alleged ties between the government and Karuna. In May, 2004, his house had been ransacked by forty policemen, who claimed to be looking for arms. Sivarams last column had been critical of Karunas faction, and the stench of government collusion that clung to the circumstances of his murder further inflamed Tamils in Tiger areas. There has barely been a day since without violence. The fascist enemy cannot be fought by imitating him. He can be fought only by maintaining a moral and ethical superiority, as exemplified in an open, pluralistic society, Dayan Jayatilleka wrote in his column, when he heard of Sivarams death. He counted the journalist as a friend, and his column concluded with an homage: Sivaram challenged us with his writing. He was an uppity Tamil: confident, aware of Sinhala society and political trends, knowledgeable of international affairs. He held up a mirror before us. He was the Other in our midst. Now that he is dead, this is a lonelier place. In his next column, Jayatilleka lashed out at the cowardice of Sinhalese commentators, who derided Sivarams ideas after he was dead, but never took him on in print when he was aliveor did so only in the safety of a language he couldnt respond in because he did not know it. Rather than blaming the dead journalist for failing to denounce the crimes of his side, Jayatilleka said, the Sinhalese should ask themselves what offenses they have chosen to ignore. He posed as the final question of his friends life a conundrum that belongs

equally to every side in every ethnic-nationalist conflict on earth: Had we been Tamil, are we sure we would not have been Sivarams?

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/01/050801fa_fact1?printable =true&currentPage=all#ixzz2d1slLnAY

LETTER FROM KOREA

ALONE IN THE DARK

Kim Jong Il plays a canny game with South Korea and the U.S.
by Philip GourevitchSEPTEMBER 8, 2003

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In 1866, the S.S. General Sherman, an ironclad schooner recommissioned for use in the China trade after service for the Union as a blockade runner in the Civil War, came sailing across the Yellow Sea and entered the mouth of the Taedong River on the west coast of the Korean peninsula. What the ships commander, a Captain Preston, was aftertrade or spying or pillage, or all threeremains a matter of speculation. Korea, a feudal kingdom ruled according to a strictly paternalistic Confucian code, was notoriously hostile to foreigners, and with reason. While a single dynasty had held the throne for five hundred years, the countrythe size of North and South Carolina combinedhad been incessantly squeezed and serially invaded by bigger, more powerful neighbors. Korea was the most racially homogeneous nation in Asia, and yearned to believe that it was self-sufficient. But, although its borders were sealed, it could not fend for itself, and Koreas kings had submitted to Chinese suzerainty, paying regular tribute to Chinas emperors in the Forbidden City, in exchange for being protected and otherwise left alone. To Western traders and missionaries, encouraged by the opening of Japan in 1854, Koreas xenophobic reputation as the last hermit kingdom exerted an immense temptation. Tales circulated of unseen wonders: miniature horses, giant birds, and tombs of solid gold encasing cadavers littered with precious gems. Never mind that French Jesuits who had infiltrated Korea

from China had never been heard from again. Captain Preston set out to be the first American to carry his flag into Korea, and, by all accounts, he was. As Preston and his crew (three Americans, an English missionary, and some twenty Chinese and Malay seamen) sailed up the Taedong, ignoring local demands to turn back, the Regent of Korea decreed that the invaders be driven out or killed. The battle was met not far from Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, where a war party had gathered on the riverbanks. The Shermans cannons were deadlier than the Koreans flaming arrows, and its armor was impervious to their heavier missiles, but the ship soon ran aground and would not come free. After four days of fighting, a Korean officer named Pak launched burning barges against its hull and set it aflame, forcing all aboard to throw themselves into the river, where they were captured by Korean fighters and either hacked to death at once or brought to shore for dismemberment by the jubilant crowds. Body parts were carried off as trophies, and Pak was acclaimed as a savior of the nation. In 1905, a Daily Mail correspondent, F. A. McKenzie, was shown the Shermans anchor chains hanging from the gates of Pyongyang, as a warning to all men of the fate awaiting those who would dare to disturb the peace of the Land of the Morning Calm. By McKenzies time, however, Korea had been cracked open to the outside worldinitially by diplomacy, through defensive treaties with expansive Western powers, and then by forceand the warning of the rusty chains rang with Ozymandian self-delusion. America was the first non-Asian country to win the welcome of the Korean court. In a Treaty of Amity and Commerce, signed in 1882, Washington pledged its good offices if Korea was threatened from abroad, and the king was said to have danced with delight when an American diplomat was posted to Seoul. Yet twenty years later President Teddy Roosevelt stood by when tsarist Russia, looking south from its booming Pacific frontier at Vladivostok, saw warm-water ports and Chinese weakness in Korea and moved troops into the peninsula. The Russians were soon driven out by imperial Japan, whose subsequent domination of Korea was brokered by Roosevelt in a deal that ultimately won him a Nobel Peace Prize. In this way, buffeted by the same foreign powers that its destiny still depends on, the antique kingdom of Korea was dragged into the twentieth century as a subject nation. When liberation came, with the Japanese surrender in the Second World War, the Soviet Union occupied the North and America the South, and, in a hasty move that was meant to be temporary, the country was cut roughly in half at the waist, along the thirtyeighth parallel.

The destruction of the Sherman might well have been forgotten were it not for official North Korean historians, who insist that the true hero of the great defense of the nation against the American imperialist buccaneers wasnt the officer Pak but, rather, a man named Kim Ung-u, a tenant farmer who begat a son named Kim Bo-hyon, a leader of the anti-Japanese resistance, who begat a son named Kim Hyong-jik, another freedom-fighting scourge to the colonial oppressor, who begat a son named Kim Song-ju, who became a partisan leader, andbegetting himself all over again under the nom de guerre of Kim Il Sungfulfilled his familys destiny and the nations by finally driving the imperialist foe from Korea, establishing the supreme revolutionary state of North Korea and begetting a son named Yuri, who also re-begat himself, as Kim Jong Il. These are the generations of the Kims that virtually every North Korean knows, at least sketchily. They make for a stirring tale of patriotic patrimony, yet the battlefield exploits that North Koreas court hagiographers attribute to Kim Il Sungs ancestors are entirely fictitious, and his own are fantastically exaggerated. In the nineteen-thirties, in Manchuria, where his father had run an herbal pharmacy, Kim Il Sung did fight as a Communist partisan, and for a time he even led his own small band of guerrillas there, distinguishing himself sufficiently to earn the highest honor from the Japanesea price on his head. But at the outset of the Second World War he retreated to the Soviet Union, and he spent the rest of the war years at a Red Army garrison near the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, where Kim Jong Il was born (hence the Russian name, Yuri). Although North Korean historians say that it was Kim Il Sung and his fighters who defeated the Japanese, and not the Americans, he didnt return to Korea until a month after its liberation, and he arrived in the uniform of the foreign occupier, as an officer in the Soviet Army. In fact, what is most remarkable about Kim Il Sungs ascent to the position of absolute power which he soon enjoyed in North Korea, and which Kim Jong Il has inherited by dynastic succession, is that there was nothing about his lineage or early career that marked him for such a future when he turned up in Pyongyang in 1945. As Dae-Sook Suh, a Korean-American historian of North Korea and biographer of Kim Il Sung, observes, Contrary to the efforts to build Kims image as a person coming from a long revolutionary tradition and dedicated parents, his image may be more resplendent if he is described as he was: a dragon from an ordinary well, so to speak. At least that would be closer to the truth. In North Korea, however, the truth has never been a matter of fact so much as an expression of the Kims whimfather and son. The great preponderance of

this so-called truth is a confection of outright liesnot merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unreality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their only reality. A North Korean who does not believe the states every claim is left with the void of dumb disbelief, for it is impossible in Kim Il Sung Nationas the North is sometimes described in its own proclamationsto find anything else to believe in. The people are my god, Kim Il Sung said, but it is before his towering statues that the people bow down and weep, his name that they must not take in vain, and his teachings that they must live byeven nowlest they be destroyed. Kim Il Sungs formal schooling ended in the eighth grade. After that, he lived in a realm of extremity, made up in equal measures of violence and MarxistLeninist indoctrination, and he was convinced that with the right mix of these measures one could make ones world as one wanted it to be. It was crush or be crushed. As he consolidated his control of the ruling Korean Workers Party in the late nineteen-forties, he set about lobbying his patron, Stalin, who had by then withdrawn Soviet forces from Korea, to consent to his taking over South Korea as well. Stalin urged Kim to be patient, but eventually gave him the nod. No sooner did the North begin to pour its army into the sleeping South, shortly before dawn on June 25, 1950, than Kim Il Sung proclaimed that the opposite had happened: America and its South Korean puppets had invaded, necessitating defensive action. Or, as the Party History Institute of the Central Committee put it, Comrade Kim Il Sung, the ever-victorious iron-willed brilliant commander, military strategic genius, went on the radio and called upon the Korean people to rise as one in the sacred struggle for wiping out the U.S. imperialist armed invaders and their stooges. The North overran the South until America mustered a United Nations mandate to repel the aggression and drove the Peoples Army back, overrunning the North all the way to the Chinese frontier, at which point Mao sent a million volunteers into the fight, and Stalin dispatched his air force and told Kim, who was ready to give up and sue for peace, to keep fighting. Three years and as many as three million war deaths later, Korea was right where it began: split along the thirty-eighth parallel. A cease-fire was signed, and a two-and-a-halfmile-wide demilitarized zone was carved across the peninsula along the line of partition. But there was no formal peace treaty. The Korean War had no winner, and fifty years later it is still not over.

Kim Il Sung declared victory nonetheless, and boasted of inflicting an ignominious defeat on U.S. imperialism and its running dogs. That was the line: North Korea had smashed the foreign invaders, killing three hundred and ninetyseven thousand American troops in the war (the actual number was thirty-six thousand), and, what was more, it had done so entirely on its own, under the correct leadership. The war was, in fact, a considerable victory for Kim Il Sung, but only domestically, insofar as it provided him with a pretext for tightening his control of the Party and the Partys control of every aspect of his subjects existence. Throughout the nineteen-fifties, in purge after purge, people accused of harboring even a flicker of anti-Party, counter-revolutionary disloyalty risked being killed, or imprisoned (usually with their families) in labor camps from which most did not return. It was Hitler who remarked that the masses will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The supreme fiction of North Korean propaganda, to which all other mystifications must conform, is the Kim dynastys account of the Korean War: attacked, defended, triumphant, unassisted. Surely, enough North Koreans saw enough of the war to know that it wasnt so. Their young men had rolled into the South virtually unresisted, Seoul was captured in three days, then the Chinese were everywhere, Russian MiGs and their pilots had fallen from the sky, and exactly what had been attained? But who would risk being crushed to speak such memories? My husband told me that Seoul was empty when he marched through, and he thought that was strange because he thought the U.S. and South Korea started the war, Lee Young-suk, a former North Korean nurse who escaped to China during the great famine of the nineteen-nineties, told me in Seoul. Even though he was in the military he believed that. Lee had reached the South after a grim ordeal as an illegal asylum seeker in China. At one point, her whole family had been arrested and handed back across the border to North Korean security agents, who singled her out for abuse because she was carrying a Bible. She had bribed her way out again with the rings from her fingers. Lee was small and strong, and her hands, which were in constant motion when she talked, were heavily stacked with gold ringsas a reminder and for security, should she find herself in such a fix again. Although Seoul is just thirty miles from the DMZ, Lee finds it bewilderingly unfamiliarhyper-modern, a sprawling megalopolis of more than ten million people (close to half the population of the North), a gray and hazy place of blinking neon reflecting dully off faades of steel and glass, an engine of wealth,

churning with commerce and high-tech gadgetry, where children chatter on cell phones in the subway, where more homes have broadband Internet service than anywhere else on earth, where you can say and hear and see and do and buy pretty much anything and everything you please. As a defector, one of just three thousand North Koreans to have reached the South out of hundreds of thousands who escaped to China, Lee had been given her apartment in Seoul by the government, a tiny one-bedroom in a poured-concrete apartment block, where she lives with her seven-year-old granddaughter. Although the furniture was cheap and mostly secondhanda fact shed tried to disguise by draping it with laceshe could not get over the ease and abundance she had found in her old age. I have everything, she said. But when she recalled her life in North Korea her voice carried the anger of someone who has been robbed of everything. Lee is sixty-seven years old. She had been a Party member since she was a girl, and her husband had retired from the Army in the early nineties as a highranking officer. Yet it was only when they reached China that they learned that the Korean War had been Kim Il Sungs idea. Our hearts broke when we realized we had given our lives to a lie, Lee said. Even until we crossed the border we kept our Party badges on, because we wanted to serve the Party. Still, Lee hadnt found it easy to let go of her beliefs. I hated Americans, because of all that indoctrination in the North, she said, and she had been frightened, in China, when her husband fell ill and some Americans turned up with medicine. Invaders, she had thought,total villains. But, she said, it wasnt true. They helped us a lot. Lee had found solace in Christianity. Her apartment was cluttered with votive objects, and when she said, I believed in the regime as if it had been a god, she extended her hand toward a large poster of Jesus that hung over her bed. Most modern dictators have been self-made men, and it is the particular affliction of North Korea that Kim Il Sung was a self-made deity. In his lifetime, state propaganda spoke of him as incomparable, omnipotent, and infalliblethe Clairvoyant, Koreas sun, the perfect brain, capable even of determining the weather (at least when it was good)and in 1998, four years after his death, the constitution was revised to install him as president for eternity. His son, Kim Jong Il, rules as much as a caretaker as he does as an heir; he is described merely as the central brain, and the morning star, a lesser light reflecting the suns glow. In the early seventies, the North Korean Academy of Social Sciences expunged the definition of hereditary rule from its Dictionary of Political Terminologiesa reactionary custom of exploitative societies, originally a

product of slave societies, later adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule. Yet even after he was publicly anointed successor to his fathers throne, in 1980, Kim Jong Il kept a low profile, tucked away in the regimes secret nerve centers, the Department of Propaganda and Agitation and the Department of Organization and Guidance. Confucius said, When your father is alive, observe his will. When your father is dead, observe his former actions. If for three years you do not change from the ways of your father, you can be called a real son. The junior Kim earned that title. Expect no change from me, he said after the Great Leader died, and for once he has kept his word. Kim Jong Il says that he regards the people as the most beautiful and excellent beings in the world and deeply worships them. But he doesnt trust them; his adoration, like a jealous lovers, is only rhetorically distinguishable from contempt. To maintain a kingdom of lies is to live in perpetual fear of being exposed, and the Pyongyang regime considers its insularity its proudest accomplishment, the key to its survival, and proof, as Kim Jong Il has said, that we have nothing to envy the rest of the world. Indeed, despite the heavy doses of Stalinist and Maoist jargon in its economic policies and Party doctrine, to speak of North Korea under the Kim dynasty simply as a Communist state is insufficient. In recent decades, references to Marxism-Leninism have steadily faded from its propaganda. Marx and Lenin were not Korean, and North Koreas ruling ideologyJuche, which means self-reliance or self-masteryis predicated on being independent from the claims or destinies of other revolutions. In its most obvious form, the Juche idea is a claim of radical autonomy: absolute political and economic independence for the Korean nation without any desire or need for traffic of any kind with other peoples. Kim Il Sung first promulgated this inward-turning, nativist ideology in 1955, when he officially distanced North Korea from Soviet patronage. The Kremlin regarded him as a canny ingrate. After all, with tens of thousands of American troops now perched on permanent high alert across the DMZ, there was no gainsaying North Koreas strategic significance as a Cold War buffer state, and no question that, despite Kims posturing, he would retain the vital support of Moscow and Beijing. Yet, even as North Korea grew ever more indebted to its Communist trading partners, the separatist teachings of Juche developed into Pyongyangs paramount doctrine, and the idea came to stand for something more grandiose and more inchoate than it had at first appeared. Juche is, finally, the religion of the Kim dynastya syncretic concoction of socialist theory, militarism, Confucianism,

shamanism, and the cult of personalityand it purports to carry the mystical power of revelation. (In 1997, Pyongyang officially withdrew from Christian time and placed North Korea on a Juche calendar, which marks the beginning of history as 1912, the year of Kim Il Sungs birth.) A vast quantity of largely incoherent prose attempting to explain Juche has been written in North Korea, but the effort collapses beneath its own weight. Even Bruce Cumings, the American scholar of Korean history and thought who has entered most deeply into Koreans self-perceptions, throws up his hands. The term is really untranslatable; the closer one gets to its meaning, the more the meaning slips away, he writes in Koreas Place in the Sun. For a foreigner its meaning recedes into a pool of everything that makes Koreans Korean, and therefore it is ultimately inaccessible to the non-Korean. Juche is the opaque core of North Korean national solipsism. Nowhere has Pyongyangs mythology of self-sufficiency been so painfully laid bare as in the record of the states economic devastation since the disappearance of the Soviet empire. In the mid-fifties, when Juche was introduced, North Korea, which had been the center of industrial development under the Japanese, was more prosperous than the predominantly agrarian South. But by 1970 the balance had shifted. Since then, the Souths economy has grown to become the twelfth largest on earth, while the Norths steadily declined and is now estimated to rank somewhere below Burundis. The North devoted the bulk of its limited resources to outdated heavy industry and military expenditures, imposing one antiquated Stalinist economic plan after another with such a radical disregard for markets that it became dependent on Soviet largesse to feed its people and supply its fuel. Then, suddenly, in 1991, there was no Soviet Union, and although China took up some of the slack, North Koreans discovered that self-reliance meant hunger, cold, and darkness. In his later years, Kim Il Sung built a medical institute in Pyongyang for the sole purpose of prolonging his life. There, surrounded by Western doctors and an army of nutritionists, masseurs, homeopaths, and the like, he was fed a diet of foods grown just for him, and a specially designed high-tech toilet analyzed his droppings. Meanwhile, across the countryside, his unaccountable scheme for bolstering the food supply by growing corn on the terraced slopes of vertiginous valleys was ending in catastrophe, as heavy rains washed the efforts away, clogging streams and rivers with silt, which in turn triggered flooding that wiped out perfectly good croplands. Industry was grinding to a halt, reduced to less than half its production capacity by lack of fuel and raw materials.

The news of Kim Il Sungs death in 1994 was greeted by wild public mourningseas of gaunt people in coarse cotton clothing and little caps, their hard faces riven by grief and streaming with tears. The soundtrack on the film clips is otherworldly, a deep owlish moaning. The intensity of this grief is made all the more haunting by the knowledge that Kim Il Sung had left his people destitute. The government rationing system came to shrink steadily after 1994, and people began to die of hunger in 1995, Kim Chol, a North Korean defector I met in Seoul, said to me. At first, they would give fifteen days food for a month. Then, after several months, they went to ten days for several months. And the rationing wasnt even steadyit went on and off and people waited and waited. Kim Chol is a university student, slight and slender, with bristling hair and gold spectacles. He speaks softly, in a measured monotone. But there was no mistaking his intensity as he shut his eyes and recalled, in language strikingly similar to Lee Young-suks, his parents sense that they had been betrayed by their god in the early nineties, when, as Party loyalists, they were granted permission to visit relatives in an ethnic-Korean enclave just across the frontier in northeast China. They returned in total shock with news that the North was to blame for Koreas division, and that Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il governed for themselves and not for the good of the country and its people. Kims father worked as a novelist at the steel mill in Chongjin, where he was required, under the supervision of a section of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation, to spend his days producing volume after volume of stories about the lives of factory workers. It was a respected job, but not well paid, Kim said. Because a writer is considered not an artist but a laborer, the family had been rewarded with a housing assignment in the best apartment building in the citya place reserved for lite steel workersspecifically built to show Kim Il Sung, to reassure him that all North Korean people were living well. The apartment had two rooms and a small balcony, cold running water, and electricity, but no heat in winter. Kim lived there with his parents and three older sisters for twenty years. Normally, one had to go to Pyongyang to see apartments of such high quality. Pyongyang is North Koreas model city, full of model schools and model hospitals and model people: residence is reserved for the Partys chosen, the political and military lite, the commissars and cadres and their most faithful followers, and the population is regularly cleansed of those deemed ideologically lax, as well as the old, the sick, the disfigured, and the lame, who are banished to the provinces and replaced by a fresh crop of loyalists. It is a city of

megalomaniacal architecture and public spaces: immense palaces and coliseums, grandiose boulevards (six, eight, ten lanes wide), towering monuments to the Great Leader, meandering greenways, prim topiary gardens, and skyscrapers (although the tallest is a shell, abandoned as structurally unusable during its construction). It is a city built to awe the rare emissaries from the outside world who are granted visas, and to glorify the Leader, who shuttles between his lavish palaces, unseen, in a darkened car that speeds down streets cleared for his passage. Kim Chol had no complaints as a child, at the Peoples Elementary School, where every pupil was drilled in air-raid procedure and taught to march. I was satisfied with everything until I graduated from secondary school, he said. Everything was O.K.not great, but security was provided for. Then his parents came back from their fateful trip to China and took him aside, and everything wasnt O.K. anymore. It wasnt only a question of the war, and the self-serving leadership, Kim Chol said. I also learned that in China people were living well and that South Korea was very rich, while North Korea was very poor. His parents didnt tell his sisters these things. To speak such truths to too many people, no matter how close, was suicide. Every North Korean is kept track of through a registry in Pyongyang that divides the populationnearly twenty-three million soulsinto three groups. At the top is the core class of Party members, the political and military lite who enjoy preference in education, employment, and virtually all other social and economic benefits, including food, clothing, and shelter; in the middle are the masses, the wavering class, composed of the peasants and workers who are tirelessly extolled in Party rhetoric but whose ration cards, before the famine, allowed them only dog meat when the core class got pork or beef; on the bottom is the impure or hostile class, in which the ideologically unsoundmembers of the pre-revolutionary exploiting class, former landowners, businessmen, proJapanese colonial collaborators, and people with family members who have defected to the Southare lumped together with the physically handicapped and common criminals. The core and impure classes count for about a quarter of the population each, the wavering class for the rest. At least until the early nineties, when this system began to break down, along with the economy, there were fiftyone subclasses, to which people were assigned based on a regular review and more refined analysis of their Party loyalty and ideological comportment in public and private life.

To insure that North Koreans know they are being watched without knowing by whom, the state maintains three separate internal security forces, which report to the leadership but not to one another; in addition, people who work together are usually assigned to live together in the same housing blocks, and to take part in nearly daily indoctrination and self-criticism sessions, from which nobody in North Korea except the Leader is exempt. Underpinning this whole apparatus the most invasive and pervasive scheme for creating a monolithic culture in historyis a principle of collective family responsibility that makes every member of a household accountable for the conduct of his immediate kin, so that the deviations of one are the calamity of all. The government doesnt just put one or two people in jailit puts all the family in jail, wiping everybody out, the innocent along with the guilty, as the broom wipes out the dirt, said a defector who called himself Chang Chol-wooan alias, assumed because he didnt want to bring trouble on his family in the North. Who, in such an order, could dare to speak, or even know, his own mind? Its an old storyhow, in the name of creating a classless society, Communist regimes have instead created new categories of social and political stratification and exclusion as rigid and crushingly unjust as Indias caste system or South African apartheid. But in the catalogue of atrocities and insult that have defined totalitarian states founded in the name of Marxism and Leninism, the crimes of North Korea stand out as the most unyielding and unrelieved expression of what can only be called savage Communism since the Khmer Rouge was driven from Cambodia. There is no saying how many North Koreans have been purged over the years, but the exact numberhowever staggeringis almost beside the point. While defectors tend to speak of the camps, from experience or hearsay or lifelong dread, as worse than death, the difference between being imprisoned and being free in North Korea is more one of degree than of kind. The entire place functions as a concentration camp, designed not only to keep its inmates captive but, equally, to keep the rest of the world out. In East Germany before the Communist collapse, a zone where topography prevented the penetration of radio and television signals from the West was known as a valley where they have no idea. All of North Korea is such a zone, not because of its mountainous landscape but because every radio and TV set is made to receive only one signal, Pyongyangs propaganda channel, which carries such messages as Today, the worlds people are consistently envious of our people, calling our people the people blessed with the leader. Kim Chol told me that his parents brought a radio back from China. At the border, they cut the

wires so it would only get North Korean broadcasting, he said. But I was studying electronics, and I reconnected it and began listening to South Korean radio at night under the covers. Although Kim no longer believed North Korean propaganda, he had been so deeply formed by it that he found the news from South Korea equally suspect. Listening to his hot-wired radio was a crime that could have landed his whole family in the camps, and he still didnt know how to determine what was real. I believed my parents, he said, but when I heard Seoul saying that one car company was producing a hundred new taxis I didnt believe it, because that meant there were taxis in South Korea, and for that South Korea had to be very very rich. Then again, when he saw clips on North Korean state television of violent student demonstrations in South Korea, he couldnt avoid the impression that South Korea looked better off. I would observe the clothes and the apartments in the background, and the clothes and houses were neat and great, Kim said. Evidently, he wasnt the only one whod noticed. Later, the North Korean broadcasters made the pictures blurry, he said. So you couldnt see the details, only the street fighting. One of Kim Jong Ils first policy initiatives after his fathers death in 1994 was to call on the United Nations World Food Program for help in feeding North Koreas famished population. At first, this request, which amounted to an admission of the states destitution, was seen as an astonishing softening of the Juche line. The sort of international assistance that would be required to compensate for the nearly fifty-per-cent food deficit in North Korea always comes with conditions from donorsfreedom of movement and control of distributionand creates pressure for political and economic reform on the recipient. But it quickly became clear that Kim Jong Il was not prepared to expose his country to the scrutiny of foreign agents just to keep the people from starving to death. On the contrary, the regime, having declared itself in need, appeared bent on preventing anyone from seeing the extent of the famine. The few, individually vetted foreign aid workers who received visas were mostly kept penned up in Pyongyang and allowed to visit rural areas only under the strict control of government handlers. What they saw on these guided tours perplexed them. Andrew Natsios, who is currently the head of usaid, was in North Korea at the time as an officer of the humanitarian organization World Vision, and he describes the problem in his book, The Great North Korean Famine:
Before expatriate relief workers entered a city or rural area to do their work, the local authorities swept the streets of any evidence of famine. Beggars, emaciated people, abandoned children, trash or debris, and

dead bodies were removed from the streets. People were told to stay indoors if they did not have presentable clothing to wear. One relief worker who spoke Korean watched a truck drive through a village just before the arrival of a visiting NGO [non-governmental organization] delegation, announcing over a loudspeaker that people should get off the streets. Only party members were permitted outside their homes to take their ration of food aid while the NGO food monitors were in the city. Put simply, the authorities had created one giant Potemkin village, designed to impress visitors but bearing little resemblance to the dark reality facing the population.

It was only as increasing numbers of North Koreans began crossing the shallowand for a good part of the year frozenTumen River into China, and talking to foreign journalists and aid workers there, that this masquerade began to be understood. The escapees described the North Korea that foreigners never saw as a wasteland, its factories shuttered, its tractors and trucks running on woodburning steam engines, its once efficient food-rationing system defunct, whole villages standing emptymass graves here, bodies lying uncollected there, and scavenging bands of skeletal orphans roving everywhere, gnawing on bark and leaves. Those who made it to China tended to come in tattered clothing, with pathetic shoes, or shoeless, with their feet wrapped in rags; few had much flesh on their bones, and their skin and hair was often blanched by malnutrition. Lee Young-suk, the former nurse, showed me pictures of herself and her husband, the retired Army officer, on the day they arrived in China; they were small people to begin with, and in the photos, seated beside a roly-poly Chinese priest who had given them shelter, they looked so shrunken they might have been mistaken for a childs toys. At first, we didnt intend to come, because all our family were Party members, so we were a well-off family, Lee said. But after Kim Il Sungs death our financial situation got very much worse. Her husband had no pension, there were no rations, and they had stripped their house bare bartering all their belongings for food. Even though we were retired and starving, we had to work for the Party. They called it social projects, working two hours for no pay at such things as early-morning indoctrination meetings and making fertilizer. But we didnt have much strength. Her husband was furious when Lee first suggested going to China for rice. But our eldest son had already gone to China, and a state security agent came looking for him. We lied, but they kept coming and asking. So one day my husband said this was getting dangerous and they could send us to prison. We ran away in August of 1997, crossed the Tumen River and went to a church there. They welcomed us. Lee became agitated as she spoke; she sat on the floor of her tiny bedroom in Seoul with her legs tucked under her, and she began to cry, quietlyalmost, it

seemed, ineptly, as if she didnt know how to cry, and disapproved of crying, and at the same time could not cry enough. My son who was shot to death in the militaryhis officer ordered him to steal pigs, she said. So he got angry and said, I came to the military for my countrys unification and for killing Americans, not to become a thief. They started to fight, and the officer knocked him down and shot him dead. She said it made her ill for days on end to think of her past, and the children and grandchildren she had lost. Then, just as abruptly, she stopped crying. I want to tell you about the deaths of my grandchildren, she said. We used to eat grass soup with grass powder and my grandchild asked for rice. I told her we couldnt have rice because we had to starve for ten days. Whenever I eat rice in South Korea, I feel very sad. Lees hands caught each other midair, and settled for a moment in her lap. Before I found God, I drank a lot, and I drank a lot of liquor in front of the graves of my children. I want to tear Kim Jong Il to deathtear him to death. My oldest sons wife and two of their children died of hunger. Their father had been working at a chemical-weapons factory, and they were starving. Two grandsons were starvingeight and ten years old. They went to a noodle seller, and begged. The noodle seller gave them some noodles. They ate and fell asleep on the shop floor. Then the owner killed them with an axe to put their meat into the noodles because pork was very expensive at the time. Refugees stories are often treated with suspicion as a source of reliable information on the places theyve fled. Desperate people, who have proved willing to risk just about everything to get out, may have reason to exaggerate, or to tell you what they think you want to hear, or to be pushing the agenda of one or another political faction to which they belong. But in the late nineties, as the number of malnourished North Koreans in northeast China swelled from the thousands to the tens of thousands and into the hundreds of thousands, their accounts of the conditions that had driven them to risk their lives and escape had a cumulative authority that defied disbelief. They came from every rank of society, they had no political program, they were in no way organized, they expected nothing for their woes. Their most pressing agenda was to get some rice. Whats more, the fact that they were therethat so many had got outwas, in itself, evidence of a radical breakdown inside North Korea. Many of the refugees had crossed the river in broad daylight, seemingly in plain view of guards who were too weak with cold and hunger either to notice or to care. The situation on the border was constantly changing. The same guards who were nowhere to be seen one day were out hunting the next, often crossing

into China to round up escapees, sometimes piercing their hands or noses to string them together and march them home. Those who were captured frequently escaped again, returning to China with the bruises and scars of prison beatings. It is a measure of what things are like in North Korea that those who have escaped invariably speak of their first impression of the peasant villages and factory towns of Chinas rough and underdeveloped northeast with a continuing sense of astonishment that just across a fifty-metre-wide river people could be living in such extraordinary wealth, with all modern comforts, and such freedom. It is estimated that starvation has killed between two and three million North Koreans in the past decadea tenth of the populationand has so stunted the generation of children who have survived that they may be considered full-grown if the tops of their heads reach the bottoms of their parents noses. When foreign governments and international organizations demanded greater transparency in exchange for food, Kim Jong Il warned that imperialist aid is a noose of plunder and subjugation, aimed at robbing ten and even a hundred things for one thing that is given. Many megatons of food aid did get through the stonewalling and doublespeak, and lives were saved by it. But by all accounts the bulk of it was hijacked by the state to keep the Party lite and especially the military fed and faithful, and what remained for the masses tended to be reserved for urban centers and handed out or withheld as a reward or punishment for individual recipients perceived loyalty to the regime. As more factories fell idle and were stripped down and carted off in their entirety, or as scrap, to be traded for food in China, Kim Jong Il cranked up the only non-military machinery he had leftideology, propaganda, the engines of Juche. True revolutionaries, the Party newspaper explained, sacrifice themselves on the glorious road of revolution with a clean revolutionary conscience because they also firmly believe that the revolutionary cause led by their leader is most just. But the passion North Koreans felt for Kim Il Sung, which was genuine, however misplaced and deluded, does not appear to have been transferred to Kim Jong Il, who is remote and secretive and lacks his fathers populist touch. He has only once spoken before the general public, at a military parade in 1992, when he was heard to blurt out, Glory to the heroic Korean Peoples Army. Each of North Koreas slogan campaigns in the famine years of the late nineties, which have been chronicled by Kongdan Oh and Ralph C. Hassig in North Korea Through the Looking Glass, was more sinister than the last. At first, North Koreans were told to draw on their inner resources, an idea whose vagueness was only underscored by its elaboration: The reserves for production

growth are in the heads of the people. When functionaries and working people are motivated to generate new ideas, reserves will emerge from here and there as a matter of course, and the work of exploring and enlisting reserves could take firm root as peoples own work. But apparently no new ideas came forth, and the talk from Pyongyang turned to tightening the belt for an arduous march, then a forced march to final victory, and finally a march to paradise. Party operatives were called upon to lead a more cultured and aesthetic life by cleaning up homes and workplaces, so as to make the whole society be firmly dominated by a merry and lively atmosphere to suit the demands of the realities of the new age of the Juche-oriented revolution we are in. When that failed, the people were encouraged to forget the present and look to eternity: Living today for tomorrow, the message went, and The more our generations undergo sufferings and shed sweat, the happier our future generations will be. Finally, as the famine peaked just before the turn of the century, apocalypse was celebrated as a desirable revolutionary end in itself: The spirit of suicidal explosion can be cherished only by those who thoroughly resolve to voluntarily choose death for the sake of the Party and the leader. The horrible weirdness of North Korea makes the place easier to parody than to make sense of, and it is folly to make too much sense of it. (Who can forget the cover of The Economist that carried a picture of a waving Kim Jong Il under the headline Greetings, earthlings?) For anyone not in their thrall or under their thumb, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il appear so monstrous and so aberrant that it is almost an insult to reason to acknowledge that their primitive, impoverished ideology is not an expression of madness. But the truth is scarier: from within the narrow parameters of its own fanatical self-interestand notwithstanding its lying, its wildness, its imprudence, its cruelty, its capriciousness, its paranoia, its messianic pretensions, and its desperationthe Pyongyang regime behaves rationally. Kim Jong Ils purpose as a ruler is to sustain his power by any and all means, and whether he believes his own propaganda is, at this point, irrelevant. Never has such a small, economically weak state succeeded in making such a big deal of itself for so long. That North Korea has done so is a consequence of the fact that, while Pyongyang demands that others leave it alone, it has never seen fit to return the favor. From behind its barbed wire, North Korea has been on a constant war footing for fifty years, maintaining one of the biggest armies on earth, with a million battle-ready men and the largest special-ops force anywhere, a hundred thousand strong. Since the Korean War, the North has repeatedly gone on the attack: kidnapping Japanese and South Korean citizens;

digging tunnels through the bedrock below the DMZ into South Korea, tunnels big enough for an invasion force to pass through at a rate of ten soldiers a minute; sending an assassination team to Seoul to kill the President; bludgeoning to death with axes two American officers in the Joint Security Area of the DMZ; blowing up and killing seven senior members of a South Korean delegation to Burma (four cabinet members, two top Presidential advisers, and an ambassador); initiating countless naval battles with Southern ships, resulting in numerous fatalities; sending a submarine to land commandos in the South; launching a missile over Japan. The list goes on. While the vast majority of these attacks have been aimed at South Korea, the chief target of Pyongyangs verbal assaults over the same half century has been the United States, the archenemy, and in the Norths propaganda it is Washington that is perpetually on the offensive. Even the mildest statements of Yankee disdain for the Kim dynasty are treated as acts of aggression, tantamount to declarations of imminent invasion. Of course, to be forever at war with such a powerful foe makes a small country feel bigger. And the febrile intensity of the Kims anti-American harangues has had a galvanic effect on North Koreans. In a typical outburst, in 1968, Kim Il Sung declared, The peoples of all countries making revolution should tear limbs off the U.S. beast and behead it all over the world. The U.S. imperialists appear to be strong, but when the peoples of many countries attack them from all sides and join in mutilating them in that way, they will become impotent and bite the dust in the end. Lately, Kim Jong Il has taken to issuing threats about bathing America in a sea of fire. North Korea is a desperado in the international arena, holed up in its enclave and taunting its enemies to come and get it. Kim Jong Il runs the place as a criminal syndicate, maintaining his kingdom with money earned primarily from arms trading, drug running, money-counterfeiting, and foreign aid. He spends the money on his own pleasureslavish feasts, flocks of dancing girls, barrels of fine wines and spirits, fleets of black Mercedes-Benz sedans to dole out as giftsand on the Peoples Army. The only thing the country still produces that has much export value is weaponry. A recently published National Geographic map of North Korea shows ten missile facilities, home to an impressive assortment of scuds and short-range and medium-range missiles. The Pentagon believes that a long-range missile is in the works, capable of carrying a warhead of several hundred pounds to Hawaii or Alaska, and a lighter payload to the Western half of the lower forty-eight. These missiles are for sale to anyone who cares to buy them, and selling them to other governments is perfectly legal, as the

Bush Administration was reminded after it was obliged earlier this year to allow an intercepted shipment of North Korean scuds bound for Yemen to continue on its way. The Federation of American Scientists has warned of Pyongyangs capacity to produce quantities of nerve, blister, choking and blood chemical agents, and the National Geographic map identifies eight chemical-weapons facilities above the thirty-eighth parallel. The North has been seeking nuclear weapons for at least forty years, and has had a nuclear-weapons program since the late seventies. In 1985, Pyongyang signed on to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows it to acquire nuclear reactors for energy production. It wasnt until 1992, however, that the North agreed to grant the I.A.E.A., the International Atomic Energy Agency, access to its plutonium-production reactors. The inspectors soon noticed discrepancies in Pyongyangs accounting of its reprocessing activities. The C.I.A. estimated that enough plutonium was missing to make an atomic bomb or two, and it has assumed ever since that North Korea has the bomb, though not yet the missile capability to deliver a nuclear warhead. That assumption is now widely shared, despite the general propensity to describe Kim Jong Il as seekingrather than already havinga nuclear arsenal. This rhetorical ambiguity reflects how little anybody knows about what Kim Jong Il is up to anybody, that is, except the Central Brain himself, who has so far exploited the Norths secrecy to keep the outside world uncertain and off kilter while he stagemanages the crises he creates. In Stanley Kubricks Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the fundamental principle of Cold War strategy is articulated by Dr. Strangelove in a spasm of sublime indignation: The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret. It would be fanciful to suggest that Pyongyang wanted the I.A.E.A. to discover its missing plutonium, but once the Norths capacity to make atomic bombs was revealed and Washington responded with alarm, Kim Jong Ilalready the master of Pyongyangs ceremonies as his father neared deathgrasped the tremendous international leverage that the mystery of his nuclear capability gave him at the moment of the Norths greatest historical weakness. The incoming Clinton Administration could only speculate about whether the North had the bomb, was on the brink of getting it, or was merely bluffing. Then, in the spring of 1993, when America revived joint military exercises and war games with the South Korean Armyan annual drill called Team Spirit, which had been briefly suspended as a good-will gesture

toward the NorthPyongyang threatened to gin up its own war machine and pull out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. There were murmurs in Washington about premptive strikes against North Koreas nuclear reactors, but Clinton dispatched negotiators instead. Nukes or no nukes, Kim Jong Ils true power of deterrence resides, as it has since the Korean War, in his conventional arsenalabove all, the eleven thousand artillery pieces that are dug into underground bunkers along the edge of the DMZ and aimed at South Korea, many of them within striking distance of downtown Seoul. It is possible that an attack could strike the Souths nuclear power plants, creating an instant dirty bomb. In 1994, Pyongyang signed a pact with Washington to remain engaged in negotiations. The Agreed Framework, as it is known, was based on the diplomatic conceit that the Norths nuclear program had never had military purposes but was intended merely for generating energy. Pyongyang pledged to freeze, and ultimately dismantle, its plutonium-production reactors, and to place these facilities under I.A.E.A. supervision. Washington promised to supply half a million barrels a year of heavy fuel oil for generating heat and electricity until a couple of energy-producing reactors, to be supplied by South Korea and Japan, were up and running. Economic and diplomatic relations were also supposed to be normalized, but, as Wendy Sherman, who was a special adviser on North Korea to President Clinton, recalls, the feeling in Washington was that the Agreed Framework was just a stopgap measure, pending fundamental change in North Korea. Everyone was so overwhelmed that a million or two million people were dying of starvation, the economy had clearly collapsed, the dynamics were changing, she said, adding, We just thought all of that would bring about the collapse of the North Korean government within two or three years. I think that was the conventional wisdom, and we were totally wrong. Seven years after the Agreed Framework was signed, the new Bush Administration essentially abandoned negotiations with Korea without proposing an alternative policy. The Agreed Framework was all but scrapped. (The promise of nuclear reactors and diplomatic ties had never been fulfilled anyway.) American officials said that they would not give in to nuclear blackmail or reward bad behavior. Early last year, as Bush was making the case for the war on terror, he included North Korea in his State of the Union address as one of the troika of states, along with Iraq and Iran, that constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. Kim Jong Il responded as if Bush had declared war, which was not so far-fetched in the climate of the moment. North

Koreas state news agency dubbed America the empire of the devil, and demanded a retraction. A period of talking trash ensued. Bush told a group of senators that Kim Jong Il is a pygmy who acts like a spoiled child at a dinner table and is starving his own people in a Gulag the size of Houston. Kims phrasemakers responded in kind, and Korea hands and editorialists the world over lamented that Bush had lost Korea through recklessness in a time of danger. Then, last fall, when the Bush Administration was mobilizing military and diplomatic resources in preparation for war in Iraq, Pyongyang acknowledged that it hadnt halted its nuclear-weapons program after all: a project to produce highly enriched uranium had been under way since 1998. Although Washington promptly cut off heavyfuel shipments to the North, its response to this unwelcome distraction from Iraq was little more than a shrug. North Korea, however, was determined not to be ignored. In short order, it threw out the I.A.E.A. inspectors, shut down their monitoring cameras, withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and declared that it was reprocessing the contents of some eight thousand spent fuel rods from its formerly frozen reactors. If thats true, the North now has the plutonium necessary to manufacturefor sale, or for usehalf a dozen atomic bombs in the coming months. Wendy Sherman said that she wasnt shocked to find out that Kim Jong Il had been cheating. I never trusted the North Koreans, she told me. I dont think one ever negotiates with them on the basis of trust. One negotiates with them on the basis of verifiable step-by-step processes where you know what youre getting and your expectations are relatively low over time. In fact, she said, I would expect them to continue to cheat, because theyre in a really bad place. But Sherman didnt see that as a reason not to negotiate. Did the Soviet Union cheat? Yeah. Did the Soviet Union think we cheated? Yeah. Are arms-control agreements perfect? No. The question is managing the riskswhether in fact the agreement gets you more than youve lost, and its always a tough choice. Throughout last winter and this spring, Kim Jong Il once again sought to shape the agenda, demanding a non-aggression pact with Washington as the only possible solution to the nuclear crisis. The Americans refused, insisting that there was nothing to talk about until North Korea gave up its nuclear ambitions, and that nuclear proliferation was not merely Washingtons problem but a threat to all the Northeast Asian countries. There was increasing talk in Tokyo of the need for a nuclear deterrent to maintain balance in the neighborhood, and the possibility of a militarily resurgent Japan and a broader regional arms race was

worrying to China, Russia, and South Korea. Beijing took the initiative, in April, hosting American and North Korean diplomats for a few days of talks. Washington touted North Koreas participation in a multilateral process as evidence that it had been chastened by the attack on Iraq a few weeks earlier, but perhaps the most decisive factor in bringing the North Koreans to the table in Beijing was that the Chinese temporarily shut the spigot of the Norths primary supply of fuel oil. As for Iraq, the North Korean state news agency responded to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by declaring that the lesson was clear: a nuclear weapon is the only way to keep the Americans at bay. Not surprisingly, the talks in Beijing in April broke down. Washingtons appetite for a confrontation with Pyongyang soured over the summer, as success in Iraq proved elusive. Nevertheless, Americas relative inattention to North Korea may end up looking like a deliberate policy after all, along the lines of what Victor Cha, a scholar of Korean affairs at Georgetown University, has described as hawkish engagement or coercive diplomacya strategy that holds out the prospect of talks under a persuasive threat of action, such as severe sanctions, or an embargo backed by a blockade, to begin with, and, beyond that, the prospect of overwhelming force. The Bush Administration has refused to allow Kim Jong Il to dictate the terms of discussion, thus obliging his neighbors to take up the slack. When China, Japan, Russia, and South Korea agreed this summer to join the United States and North Korea in a new round of talks, the North had to recognize that it could no longer presume on anyones friendship, or count on playing off the key powers in its orbit against one another. Even after the latest round of talks in Beijing, in August, there is no indication of how the gulf of mistrust between Washington and Pyongyang might be bridged, or which adversary might be more susceptible to the group pressure to blink. Mort Abramowitz, a former senior State Department official who recently co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations task force on North Korea, said that while the Bush Administration may now be willing to cut a deal with Kim Jong Il, its over-all attitude so far has been: You commit suicide and well talk to you. It is hard to believe, however, that Kim Jong Il will ever give up his nuclear capability. His weapons are all he has. A Western diplomat in Seoul described Korea to me as the peninsula of bad options. We were talking about how the Souths position as a hostage to the Norths artillery makes it a wild card in any attempt to address the nuclear crisis. Public sentiment in the Southmanifested in opinion polls and anti-American

demonstrationshas often seemed to sympathize with Pyongyangs complaint that it is the Bush Administrations hawkishness that is disturbing Koreas truce. This feeling, which is especially pronounced among South Koreans in their twenties and thirties, who have no memory of the Korean War, was exacerbated last year, following a road accident in which a U.S. Army vehicle struck and killed two South Korean girls. A Pew Research Center survey, released shortly before the multilateral talks began in Beijing at the end of August, found that South Koreans regard North Korea as a lesser danger to the region than do Australians, Americans, Germans, the British, and Canadians. Horace H. Underwood, the executive director of the Fulbright program in South Korea, recalled his surprise on visiting the United States last Christmas to find stories about North Koreas nuclear program on the front pages of newspapers in vanishingly small places that never have international news. In Seoul, he said, nobodys paying attention. Theyre worried about a parking spot. Underwood, who comes from a long line of Presbyterian missionaries in Koreahis father and grandfather were born there, and he has called Seoul home for most of his lifecouldnt decide whether the apathy about North Korea was a result of realism born of experience, or evidence of a nave and defensively willed obliviousness. Another longtime American resident of Seoul said, Underlying this is a strong sense of nationalism. Some people here feel an odd satisfaction when North Koreans launch a missile over Japan, or develop a nuclear weapon. You know, at least they can stand up for themselves. Despite initial reluctance, the South Korean government sent a contingent of noncombatant troops to join the American forces in Iraq this spring, but the government remains steadfastly neutral on the question of whether the North has nukes or is bluffing. Some people in the Bush Administration wonder why South Koreans dont take it a little more seriously, a Western intelligence officer said to me. After a moment, he had his answer: Its like so much of their historytheyre pinned between more powerful surrounding powers, and they dont know how to leverage their own interests. To be dependent for security on the foreigners their history has taught them to fear and suspectI guess we have to pardon them if this makes them a bit schizophrenic. Besides, he said, theyve been living with what we call threat denial for a long time, and youre always more vulnerable when youre not in touch with reality. What South Koreans fear more than the Norths weaponry is its economic weakness. After a brief spasm of sympathetic euphoria at the spectacle of the Berlin Wall being torn down, South Koreans watched German reunification with

a sense of horror at the sheer cost to capitalist West Germany of merging with the post-Communist East. West Germany had far greater resources and greater political stability than South Korea, while the Norths needs were almost immeasurably greater than East Germanys, and its population vastly more hapless. Indeed, South Koreans tend to view the three thousand North Korean defectors in their midst as a major social problem, perhaps because they represent a much larger possibility. These are people who have been socialized for fifty years into a completely totalitarian culture, and all of a sudden they have to make choices about their lives and have no clue how to do it. Not a clue, Wendy Sherman said. Well, imagine twenty-three million people having to do that. Even before the Soviet empires collapse, the Souths dictators and the conservative governments that succeeded them were hardly in a rush to assume the costs of reunification that their rhetoric called for. By the mid-nineties, as the conviction took hold among Southerners that they simply couldnt afford to absorb the wreck the North had become, it was easier to think of North Koreans as something less than the brothers they were always said to be, something more like distant bumpkin cousins. One wishful thought led to another: perhaps North Korea, in its weakened condition, shorn of its Cold War patrons, wasnt such a threat anymore; perhaps it really wanted to change, too, and just needed a helping hand. Kim Jong Il has cannily played the Souths fears to his advantage. He has reaped enormous financial and political support from the fact that, in 1987, after nearly forty years of dictatorial rule, South Korea made the transition to democracy, and the majority of its people now vote according to their pocketbooks. Never mind that South Koreas constitution proclaims national reunification to be the absolute objective of the republic, and that one Korea implies the same sacred mission in the South as it does in the North: victory over the impostor regime occupying the other half of the country. For the past five years, under two successive administrations, Seoul has abandoned its long-standing antagonism toward Pyongyang, adopting instead a policy of engagement, aimed at propping up North Korea with aid and trade. In practice, this means maintaining the Kim dynasty and the division of the peninsula for the foreseeable future. This sunshine policy was introduced in 1998 by Kim Dae Jung, who was elected President on a platform of peaceful coexistence with North Korea. D.J., as he is popularly known, had for much of the previous half century enjoyed a reputation as the most prominent domestic opponent of Seouls military dictators. Once in office, he promoted reconciliation as the stepping stone toward eventual

reunification perhaps in a generation or two. The key to this gradualist approach was economic incentives. As the North savored the benefits of its gentle opening, rail, road, and air links would punch through the DMZ; military de-escalation would follow; Pyongyang would recognize the rewards of market reforms, and perhaps even be enticed toward a relaxation of social control. That was the idea: to coax North Korea in a direction that would make it more like contemporary China, which has in the past decade replaced America as South Koreas biggest trading partner, and which also has no desire to see Pyongyang collapse. (China does not want to be flooded with refugees, or to have American troops move up from South Korea to its border.) The sunshine policy didnt address human rights or democracy. Business came first, and to speak of anything more sensitive was considered tantamount to giving up the game before it began. While the ultimate aim of the sunshine policy might be a more secure Korea, its most immediate objective was to prove its own value by winning Kim Dae Jung the opportunity to create a spectacular and emotionally charged image of a new Korean order: a handshake with the North Korean leader. D.J. said that it was his lifelong dream to be the first South Korean leader to set foot on North Korean soil, and in June of 2000 a childrens choir sang Our wish is unification as he flew off to Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il surprised Kim Dae Jung by venturing into public and greeting him at the airport. The Dear Leader, with his pompadour, short zippered jacket, and shades, presented himself as a puckish charmer, relaxed, courteous, statesmanly, the perfect host. (An astonishing number of South Koreans will tell you that Kim Jong Il is cute.) A brass band played; soldiers goose-stepped past bobbing red balloons; throngs of civilians, numbered in the hundreds of thousands, leaped and flailed, chanting their leaders name. The two Kims were seen holding hands. D.J. released a message saying, We are one people. We share the same fate. I love you all. Eleven million Korean families have been divided with the country at the thirty-eighth parallel, and the Southern delegation was permitted to bring along a few members of such families to meet with their relatives in the North. Scenes of these wailing, tearful, and painfully brief public reunions played over and over on South Korean TV, and the promiseperiodically fulfilled sinceof more and bigger reunions to come was held out as incontrovertible proof of the sunshine policys triumph. To be sure, North Korean handlers blocked South Korean reporters from venturing out of their hotel to have a look around in their free time. But the two

leaders concluded their talks with a joint declaration of agreementto continue a high-level dialogue to solve the question of the countrys reunification independently by the concerted efforts of the Korean nation responsible for it, to exchange prisoners, and to promote economic development through exchanges in all fields, social, cultural, sports, public health, environmental, and so on and the summit was celebrated in the international press. There is no going back now, the BBC announced. The worlds last Stalinist state has embarked on the road to ending its isolation. At the summits farewell lunch, Kim Jong Il teased, As far as drinking goes, Im a better drinker than Kim Dae Jung. As it turned out, he could afford to be: in order to make Kim Dae Jungs dream come true, officers of South Koreas giant Hyundai conglomerate, acting as the Presidents surrogates, had secretly and, under the Souths national-security laws, illegallytransferred a hundred million dollars of government money into Kim Jong Ils coffers. Six months after the two Kim summit, Kim Dae Jung travelled to Oslo to collect a Nobel Peace Prize. By the time he left office, early this year, however, the truth had come out: D.J. had effectively bought the meeting and, Koreans now say, bought the prize. His subsequent disgrace is all he has to show for itthat, and a lot of cronies under criminal investigation. The chief of Hyundais operations in North Korea jumped out his office window to his death this summer rather than submit to further investigation. But the sunshine policy lives on, albeit under the alias peace and prosperity. The phrase was coined by South Koreas new President, Roh Moo Hyun, who was elected to succeed Kim last year. Roh, a former human-rights lawyer, is the first South Korean President to have made no mention in his inaugural address of the restoration of the Korean nation. Our government does not emphasize unification, one of his top foreign-policy advisers told me. Our approach, our policy, is basically cautious in dealing with North Korea, he said, because North Koreas future has a great impact on our economic prosperity and political stabilityand, of course, security. Whether the South is more secure since abandoning its hostile stance toward the North is a matter of bitter debate. When Kim Dae Jung went to Pyongyang as a man of peace, he also went as a sort of conquering hero, operating on the assumption that the South had effectively won the Cold War in Korea and that its superior position allowed it to be magnanimous in hammering out the terms of the peace. But Kim Jong Il saw the South come knocking, laden with offerings, and recognized a supplicant pleading to be spared the burden of a pyrrhic victory.

He opened the door, and was happy to let Kim Dae Jung claim the credit for doing so. By declaring that the sunshine policy was merely a gentler strategy for wearing him down and finishing him off, the South offered him no incentive to change his ways, but it did suggest a clear counter-strategy: keep threatening to close the door, keep playing hard to get, keep asking for more kindness and greater gentleness. No wonder the Dear Leader was in such a jovial mood at the summit; Kim Dae Jung had just thrown him a lifeline. In exchange for hollow gestures, Seoul was prepared to expend enormous amounts of political capital and hard cash. That suited Kim Jong Ils understanding of proper inter-Korean exchange: the South gives and he takes. D.J. released dozens of political prisoners from the North, and Kim Jung Il sent back none. His attitude was: well see whos surrendering. To pursue the sort of policy that Rohs adviser described requires avoiding confrontation, regardless of Pyongyangs provocations, and above all indulging Kim Jong Ils hypersensitivity in the ultimate charade of East Asian politics: the saving of face. In mid-April, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights passed a resolution calling on Pyongyang to give full access to international investigators so that they could follow up reports of such systemic abuses as torture, public executions, forced-labor camps, all-pervasive and severe restrictions on the freedoms of thought, conscience, religion, opinion and expression, peaceful assembly and association and on access of everyone to information, and limitations imposed on every person who wishes to move freely within the country and travel abroad, as well as the mistreatment of and discrimination against disabled children. It was the first time the U.N. had addressed North Koreas human-rights abuses so formally and explicitly, and although South Korea had a seat on the commission, it did not vote for the resolution, or even abstain. South Korea simply didnt show up. Its just nonsensicalits incomprehensible, Kang Chol-hwan, a North Korean defector, said to me when we met in Seoul a few weeks later. Kang, the grandson of a devout Party loyalist, lived in comfort in Pyongyang as a little boy. He had adored Kim Il Sung. But in 1977, when he was nine years old, he and his family were purged and trucked off to the Yodok prison camp. Kang has written a memoir of his captivity, The Aquariums of Pyongyang, and he still isnt sure why they were sent there or why, after ten years, they were released. In his book, he describes with something of Primo Levis quiet authority how the brutality of the gulag is the ultimate refinement of the North Korean system.

Kang, who now works as a newspaper reporter in the South, regarded both the fanfare of the sunshine policy and the caution of Roh Moo Hyuns peace-andprosperity approach to the North as hopelessly nave, and as something worse than appeasement, more like capitulation. If the issue is protecting the Souths pocketbook, he said, then what about the South Korean stock markets five-percent plunge when North Korea admitted to having a nuclear-weapons program, and the enormous defense expenditures on both sides of the DMZ? If you want to talk about the economy of reunification, talk also about the savings, he said. And if South Korea thinks of absorbing North Korea and modernizing it, it should speak not of helping and charity but, rather, of investment. After the U.N. human-rights vote, he wondered, Why doesnt this government think about the situation it will face after unification when North Koreans ask why it didnt care about human rights, even though it was suggested by the rest of the international community? Kang was incensed that the South had softened its rhetoric about Pyongyang at the peak of the North Korean famine, when the North was at its most vulnerable and could not have survived without support. Until 1997, South Korean broadcasts criticized Kim Jong Il. But now, Kang said, when there are more radios than ever entering North Korea from China, and most people there are not sure whether their regime is right or not, whether Kim Jong Il can be believed and trusted or not, the messages they hear from Seoul leave them wondering if the South Korean government is really against them and pro-Kim Jong Il. Kang was in despair at official shortsightedness. He wanted to see regime change in North Korea. If the same situation happens in North Korea as Iraq, he said, then North Korea will collapse faster than Iraq, because in Iraq they have their Allah, but Kim Jong Il is a weaker self-made God. Before Kim Dae Jung went to Pyongyang in 2000, the only way a South Korean could get to spend time with Kim Jong Il was to be kidnapped at his order by his agents. In 1978, Shin Sang-ok, the Souths most famous movie director, was shoved into a car in Hong Kong, a burlap sack was placed over his head, and he was smuggled by ship to North Korea. His wife, Choe Eun-hui, a South Korean movie star, had been snatched a few weeks earlier. Shin spent the next five years in prison and reducation camps. For a time, he survived on a diet of corn flour and grass. When he was released, he was presented to Kim Jong Il, a fanatical cinaste who keeps a library of fifteen thousand films and had for years been directing his own propaganda movies. Kim reunited the director with his wife, took him to a movie studio, and told him to get to work. Shin and Choe

were both given a Mercedes-Benz; Shin was also given three million dollars a year to make films, and over the next three yearsuntil the couple escaped during a trip to Vienna in 1986he made seven features, including Pulgasari, a monster movie based on Godzilla that has become an international cult classic, and another movie that included North Koreas first onscreen kiss. The North Koreans were all talented and good people, he told me when I visited his studio in Seoul. Just two hundred or so were evil, and they were in charge. Shin, who is in his late seventies, cuts a dapper figure, lean and modishly tailored, with his hair swirled up from his high forehead in a shiny black wave. In North Korea, he was treated, following his release from prison, as a sort of royal pet and confidant. Kim Jong Il was a young guy who knew only Communist Korea, who thought with money and power people would stay there. He thought money could fix anything, Shin said, and added, Kim Jong Il tries to understand capitalism only through movies. James Bond was a favorite, and he liked Rambo also, and Friday the Thirteenth, and Hong Kong action movies. But he doesnt know what fiction is. He looks at these movies as if they were records of reality. Still, Shin found Kim to be smart and funny. He listened to me, because we were from South Korea, Shin said. Even though we criticized some things, he wanted us to be honest. Others would have been killed for speaking so honestly. While Kim regarded Hollywood fantasies as documentaries, he sometimes let on that he recognized North Korea to be a realm of make-believe. When Kim Jong Il let me meet my wife again after five years, there was a big party, Shin said. An all-male band played, then a second, all-female band came out, and the women band members cheered him. Kim Jong Il patted my hand and said, Thats all fake. He knew the people didnt respect him. When Shin and his wife escaped from North Korea, they carried with them secretly made recordings of private conversations with Kim Jong Il. On the tapes, Kim readily acknowledges that North Koreas brand of socialism is flawed; that its technology is at a kindergarten level; that its people lack enterprise and motivation because they are given none of the individual incentives that competition thrives on; and that anyone else in North Korea who said any of these things would be considered an ideological deviant, and purged. Shin spoke bitterly of the years he had lost in the North, yet even as he described Kim Jong Ils cynicism and called him an evil, controlling micromanager, most of his anger was reserved for Kim Dae Jung and Roh Moo Hyuns rapprochement with Pyongyang. Shin has written a memoir of his

kidnapping and sojourn in the North. It is titled Our Escape Isnt Over Yet, because, he said, South Korea is now sympathizing with North Korea, and its a dangerous situation. It appalled him that the suffering of North Koreans, which he had shared in prison camps, gets more attention in Washington than in Seoul. The human-rights situation in North Korea is ignored by South Korea, but the Bush Administration cares about it, he said. In South Korea, poor people made some money, and they became blind. The price of Seouls efforts to save Kim Jong Ils face is that bit by bit the South is losing its own. Shin believes that only a war could wake the South from its complacency and rescue it from disgrace. People would go sane if Seoul was a little damaged, he said. Few South Koreans share Shins enthusiasm for such a violent jolt, but a vocal minority has been increasingly successful in making the Souths adamant silence about the Norths human-rights record a source of embarrassment for proponents of peaceful coexistence. Shin is at work on a bio-epic about Genghis Khan, a movie that from his gloss sounds as if it will be loaded with metaphors for Koreas confused identity and contested loyalties. Genghis Khan in the story doesnt know who his father is, because his mother was kidnapped when she was pregnant, and so he always wonders who he is, Shin said. Then the same thing happens to his wife, and he doesnt know who his son is. Then he decides to unify his country. Theres a lot of action and violence. He also said, The story is very fun. One of the masterworks of modern Korean literature is a historical novel called The Poet, by Yi Mun-yol, which tells the life of Kim Pyong-yonbetter known as Kim Sakkat, Kim the Hata folk hero of the mid-nineteenth century, whose verse is still popular. The story begins when Kim is four. His grandfather, a royal administrator who was captured by a rebel band and joined its cause to save his life, has been recaptured by the Kings forces and sentenced to death as a traitor. Because the law extends such punishments over three generations, his sons and grandsons are also condemned. Kim and his brother survive in hiding, disguised as peasants, but the family is scattered and stripped of its noble standing. Even after they receive a royal pardon, the label a traitors descendants follows them as they move from place to place seeking refuge. Kim enters adulthood consumed by anger at the injustice of his situation, and longing to be restored to his former rank. When that proves impossible, he crowns himself with a conical bamboo hat of the sort that traditionally shadowed the faces of those in mourning, and becomes a solitary wanderer, and a poet.

Yi Mun-yol imagines his hero with a brooding tenderness that derives much of its power and fascination from the fact that his novel can be read not only as a fictionalized biography but as a fictionalized autobiography. Yi was born in Seoul, and he was three years old in 1950, when the North overran the city. Three months later, the Americans came through, and Yis father, an academic who had been jailed by the Japanese for his activities in the anti-colonial underground and had become a Communist, joined the Peoples Army as it retreated across the thirty-eighth parallel, telling his family not to worry, hed be back just as soon as the North won the war. Yi was one of five children, and when his father left, his mother took the family to stay with relatives in the rural southeast. At that time, during the war and immediately afterward, people known to have family in the North were sometimes shot, Yi told me when I visited him at his home, a sprawling compound in verdant hill country an hour from Seoul. His mother had preferred to keep moving, and during the next twelve years, until the government imposed a residency law that required South Koreans to register a fixed address, the family lived in at least seven different places. We would move late at night, Yi said, and it was very disruptive and frightening for me. It didnt help that several other members of Yis fathers family had gone North with him. Yis mother took in sewing and kept the family afloat by occasionally selling off parcels of ancestral land. For years, she clung to the belief that her husband would return, but Yi realized at an early age that it would be impossible for a man who had pledged his allegiance to Pyongyang to come back. The armistice line had been drawn, the DMZ was in place, children were already being taught anti-Communist propaganda in school, he said. So for Yi it was as it had been for Kim Sakkat. I was taught in school that the Communists are bad, and my father had chosen to go with the Communists, so in a way I must be bad, too, he said. But on the other hand this felt wrong, because I must love my family and they couldnt be bad. Yi is a stout man, with a big head and a great mop of hair flecked with gray. Since 1979, he has published twenty novels (many of them running to multiple volumes) and fifty short stories, and his workabout seventy volumes in all has earned him high critical acclaim and fantastic sales. (In South Korea, a country of forty-eight million, he has sold twenty-five million books.) Still, Yi considers himself a man apart from the mainstream of Korean literature. The reason for this is not so much the painful legacy of his fathers defection to the North but, rather, that in his efforts to come to terms with the Korean

predicament, and his place in it, Yi does not find much use for the dominant emotion of the nations cultural and political life, a condition known as han, which Koreans insist is uniquely Korean and has no proper equivalent in any foreign language. The word han actually comes from the Chinese, and as Gary Rector, a writer and editor who lives in Seoul and is one of the few Americans ever to be naturalized as a Korean citizen, explained, The Chinese character shows a heart and it shows a head thats turned away. Yi described han sentiment, somewhat dismissively, as a peculiar mixture of tragedy and comedy, and Rector, who was interpreting for me, elaborated: Han is an anger and resentment that build up, and at the same time a feeling of frustration or a feeling of desires that are unfulfilled. So resentment, frustration, bitter longing are lumped together. Other explicators stress hans cumulative nature, the steady accretion of a pattern of lesser injuries into one large and abiding sense of woundedness. Humiliation is a key ingredient of han, which is where its ironic or comic side comes into play: the self-mockery of the self-loving who are all too aware of their weakness. It is touted as a keenly Korean emotion because it recognizes the contradictions of the Korean experience: traditionally, the intense nationalism and yearning for purity, so close to German ideas of volk, coupled with an overwhelming experience of victimhood, and, for the past fifty years, the bitter reality of national division. Han at its tenderest is melancholic and wistful, and in its darker forms militant and vengeful; in either case it is freighted with dissatisfaction and the temptations of extremism. Yi, who describes himself as basically apolitical, prefers to acknowledge that theres always a kind of duality to our existence. Nevertheless, as he grew up grappling with the burden of his patrimony, he could not find a way to balance the competing public and private claims on his allegiance. When he was fifteen, Yi heard from defectors that his father had been purged. He had last been seen in 1954, a year in which Kim Il Sung was thinning the ranks of the Southern Labor Party, and it seemed certain that he had been killed or sent to a camp to die. For me that resolved the issue, Yi said. He had been reading about Communism, trying unsuccessfully to grasp its attraction for his father. The more he read, the more he came to accept the government line in the South, that Communism was an impossible choice. Learning that his father had been purged, and could be assumed to be dead, only confirmed this view. That doesnt mean that I gave up on my father, or no longer thought of him, he said.

The news brought relief, allowing Yi to think of his father as a man who had made a mistake, and only discovered it in the worst way. Then, in the mid-eighties, Yi received a letter from his father, who had spent thirty years in prison camps. He said he recognized at once that the letter was written by forcedictated by some government official telling him what to say: convince your son not to write any pro-American stuff and so onand much later he was able to confirm this impression. The letter mentioned that his father had a second family in the North, another brood of five children. Yi had no way to reply, even if he had wanted to. He could only imagine the lives of his half brothers and half sisters, and in 1994 he published a novella called An Appointment with My Brother. Writing in the first person, Yi describes a journey to Chinas northeast, where the narrator of the story goes to meet his father. The Korean-Chinese intermediary he has hired to enter North Korea returns with the news that his father has died, and offers instead to produce one of his sons. They meet in the morning, at the narrators hotel, with an instant shock of familial recognition, and at first their encounter is charged with the inborn antagonism that exists between half-brothers. Each seeks to assert his primacy in his fathers affections, and also his self-sufficiency as an adult. A current of North-South friction runs through the barbs. The narrator boasts about his wealth, and his brother expresses disdain for it as evidence of dependency on America. Both men revert to caricatures of their positions, exaggerating their personal and social credentials. Although the sparring soon fades, the stiffness persists when they head off to the banks of the Tumen River to face North Korea and perform the traditional Confucian commemorative rites for their father. By the time they part, they do so amicably, but the narrator drinks heavily into the evening, and shortly after he returns to his hotel room, his brother, also drunk, knocks on the door and asks to come in. How I hated you and envied you, he says, and he recalls how his family was restricted at every step, barred from advancement, denied admission to the better schools, held back in the Army. It was because of the blood relations Father had in the South, he says, adding, You and your family were to us not so much human beings as an invisible curse. The narrator is stunned: It was such a curious reversal. What I stood for to my brother was exactly what my father stood for to me in the days of my unfortunate youth. His brother goes on, reciting the hardships of life in the North, and telling of their fathers agony on his deathbed because there was no money left to buy painkillers. The narrator

muses, My dear brother, please stop. You have to live under that system for some time yet. If you cant get shoes that fit you, you have to make your feet fit your shoes. Of course its best to find shoes that fit your feet, but that is not always possible for everyone. The shoe shops of history are always run by unskilled shoemakers. There is no moral to Yis story, only the awareness that this is what Korea has come to: half brothers, living in their respective half countries, who have inherited a situation that neither one wants and that weakens them both, and binds them by keeping them apart. Its a situation that has to be improved, Yi said. But it worried him that the South was laying itself open, while the North remained a clenched fist. Its like the old fight between the sun and the windtheres a Korean tale about which one can make the wanderer take off his clothes. Yis Korean tale was Aesops fable. The sun does it by trying to heat him up, and the wind does it by trying to blow the clothes off. Of course, if the sun is going to win, the traveller mustnt know that thats the suns purpose. The traveller must simply take off his clothes. But in South Korea we have told them, Now were going to shine our light on you guys and be nice to you in order to make you open to us. Theyre not going to open up. Theyre going to take advantage of whatever you offer them, and thats it. What Im concerned about is that theyre not the ones who are taking off their clotheswere the ones who are taking off our clothes.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/09/08/030908fa_fact4?printable =true&currentPage=all#ixzz2d1stNDu7

PROFILES

THE OPTIMIST
Kofi Annan's U.N. has never been more important and more imperilled.
by Philip GourevitchMARCH 3, 2003

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From a distance, Kofi Annan's gray hair and goatee cast a hazy nimbus around his face, and his features appear as if in soft focus. At closer range, it is an easy face to look at, in no way extraordinary, and this is its advantage: it does not appear to be hiding anything, and at the same time it gives nothing away. The rest of him is of a piece, a model of equanimity. (Recently, when I asked about Annan's plans, one of his aides said, "We're trying to read his body language.

That means we have no idea.") Annan is a slight manfive feet nine, and trim with perfect posture and an unflappable air of amiable gravity. His impeccable tailoring, stately bearing, and elegant, expressive hands suggest a personal fastidiousness, even preciousness. He is, in fact, an aristocratin Ghana, where he was born and raised, his father was a traditional chief of the Fante people; through his mother, he is heir to the paramount chieftancy of the Akwamu. His wife, Nane Annan, is also of proud pedigree, a niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the martyred Swedish rescuer of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Like many complex people, Annan likes to describe himself as a simple man. He says he prefers to live life modestly and enjoys nothing so much as a hike in the country. He loves to dance, and he does so with the sort of undemonstrative panache that draws one's attention as if by seeking to deflect itthrough finesse and understatement, expressing warmth while manifesting cool. He is at once intensely present and personable and curiously detached. Annan was born a twin, and when I asked him about that, he said, "Yes, I had a twin, but she died about eight years ago. We were close, yah." A colleague who has worked with Annan for years expressed astonishment at this: "I've never heard him say he was close to anyone before." Annan has spent four decades working in the U.N. bureaucracy, and before he became Secretary-General, six years agothe first black African, and the first career U.N. man to hold the officehe and his wife lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, in the East River; now they look out on the river from their official residence, a grand brownstone on Sutton Place, the former mansion of J. P. Morgan's daughter, and they have become fixtures of New York society. Annan has appeared as a special guest on "Sesame Street," seeking to resolve a conflict between shag-carpeted puppets, and a double-page photo of the Annans embracing ran in the "Couples Issue" of Vogue in February. "There is a little bit of an element of a royal couple around them," Mark Malloch Brown, an Englishman who runs the U.N. Development Program and has counted the Annans as friends for nearly twenty years, told me. Malloch Brown used to work as an international political consultant, advising heads of state. "My guys slogged through the trenches, and by the time they got to be national leaders they had put their reputations on the line, they had lived through campaigns, they were battlehardened veterans. But royals sort of get there effortlessly, by accident of birth. Although Kofi and Nane came up through the ranks, they have a more gracious, divine-right-of-kings feel about them than the other Secretary-Generals I've known."

In the mid-nineties, Annan served as head of the U.N. Peacekeeping department for nearly four years, during which he oversaw the grim withdrawal of the U.N.'s force from Somalia, and the catastrophic failures of its missions in Bosnia and Rwanda. Nonetheless, he professes continued astonishment at the existence of evil. Since his elevation to Secretary-General in 1997, he has been charged by the U.N. Charter with looking after "the maintenance of international peace and security," and while that goal remains elusive, he exudes an uncanny sense of being at peace in himself. After all, as he never tires of pointing out, he has no practical political power. He controls no territory; he commands no troops; he cannot make or enforce laws; he cannot levy taxes; he exercises no administrative authority outside the U.N. bureaucracy, and he hasn't even got a vote in its General Assembly or on the Security Council. The Secretary-General, he says, is "invested only with the power that a united Security Council may wish to bestow, and the moral authority entrusted to him by the Charter"or, put more plainly, he has nothing but his voice. Annan's voice is a low, husky hush, like an amplified whisper, and there is an uncanny metronomic evenness to his speech. He sounds ancient, and yet the voice is full of vigor, a monotone without tedium, inflected only by the equatorial mid-Atlantic lilt of his accentas much West Indian, to an American ear, as West Africanwhich lends it a muted musical cadence. The effect is disconcertingly soothing. Annan can make the vaguest, most innocuous statements sound substantial and profound, and he can deliver his toughest, most challenging arguments without apparent argumentativeness. When he speaks, one-on-one or from a dais studded with microphones, he clearly feels himself to be speaking to the world, but he creates the impression of a man listening to himself, confirming that he agrees with himself as he goes, and allowing one to eavesdrop. In the complete absence of any discernible attitude in the quietly rumbling deadpan of his oratory, one is left with nothing to respond to but his words. The overriding theme of Annan's frequent public speeches is that the troubles of the world in our timewar, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, aids, refugees and economic migration, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and all other manner of woe and mischief that humanity is heir toare more than ever "problems without borders," and must be dealt with as such, internationally, lest we reap a whirlwind of Hobbesian mayhem. To anyone with a pessimistic view of history, the notion that our salvation depends on everyone's coming together for the common good may sound like a forecast of doom. But Annan,

who counts himself as a pragmatist, believes in the possibility of world order. Reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, he heard a wakeup call for his cause. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire," he said in Oslo, on accepting the Nobel Peace Prizeawarded jointly to Annan and to the U.N.in December of that year. "If, today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible." To illustrate his point, Annan evoked an image from chaos theory: "Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. This principle is known as the Butterfly Effect. Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own Butterfly Effectfor better or for worse." A year later, when I visited him in his office at the northeast corner of the thirty-eighth floorthe top floor, of courseof U.N. headquarters, Annan allowed that of late the human storms have been for the worse. His office is a spacious room, wood-panelled, with a large, surprisingly clean desk (no computer). One wall of the room is almost entirely glass, giving way to a vast and mesmerizing panorama across the East River of the roofscape and highway overpasses of Queens. It is a comfortable aerie; a pleasantly defiant memory of Cuban cigar smoke hung in the air. "The world is really a big mess," Annan said as we settled into his sitting area. "Wherever you turn you have problems." Iraq was obviously the most pressing issue for the U.N., but Annan seemed as concerned by the ravages of poverty, disease, ignorance, and misrule. "We have the global economic downturn, and of course you have the terrorist threats and the terrorist networks, which are spread very far," he said. "Even without these things, I always maintain that we have a serious crisis of governance. To govern in this atmosphere and take optimal and rational decisions, trying to deal with the hot issues while containing the others, is a really difficult thing. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I don't know where else a major crisis is going to come from, where it's going to break." Annan didn't sound alarmed; his voice was as mellifluous as ever. He is, above all, an optimist, and he spoke with something of a weatherman's confidence that even the most devastating tempests will pass. He is a master of talking politics without politicizing, naming names, or apportioning blame. This is partly standard diplomatic discretion and partly a taste for subtlety that is peculiarly suited to the ambiguities of his office. The U.N. is composed of a hundred and ninety-one sovereign governments. These member states, as they're

called, are Annan's employers, and, as his double-barrelled title indicates, his job is to serve them as the U.N.'s secretary, its chief administrative officer, and also as its general, its chief political operative. Together the member states form the General Assembly, which convenes in full each fall. The Assembly rides herd over the U.N.'s administrative functions, sets its internal agenda, and can also pass resolutions, which may have political influence but have no standing as law and no power of enforcement. For that, there is the Security Council, the U.N.'s political organ, which has only fifteen seats, ten allotted by an arcane political arithmetic to member states elected for two-year stints, and the remainder occupied since 1945 by five permanent members, known in-house as the P-5 China, England, France, Russia, and the United Stateswho alone enjoy the supreme power of the veto, and thereby dominate the Council's debates and decisions. The Security Council's resolutions have the authority of international law, and the Secretary-General is supposed to see that they are carried out. In addition, Annan is endowed with an independent political capacity, described vaguely in the Charter by a single sentence: "The Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security." In other words, he is expected to tell his bosses what he thinks they should be thinking about. But, at the same time, the Charter states that he must "not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization." So Annan must be independentnot neutral, exactly, for he must exercise judgmentserving all states while being beholden to none, interpreting the rules of the game as the world's hybrid coach and referee. Such unaligned evenhandedness is made unusually tricky because of the Council's limited membership and the concentration of its political powers in just a few hands. The U.N. is hardly the universally representative body of "international community" it purports to be. And if the P-5 rule the roost, America is the cock of the walk. In that, at least, the U.N. is truly a microcosm of global reality, and America's predominance has been the defining feature of Annan's tenure. "The rest of the world is trying to live in the shadow of the U.S., and they come to him and hope he will explain the U.S. to them, and hope he will explain them to the U.S.," Nader Mousavizadeh, a close aide to Annan, told me. When Annan took office, with the blessings of the Clinton Administration after it unceremoniously killed the relection bid of his Egyptian predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, there was much grumbling in the international press that he was

Washington's poodle. That is no longer the view. "He appears to be everybody's Secretary-General," Sergei Lavrov, the Russian Ambassador to the U.N., said, although he was quick to add that it would be folly for Annan to ignore America's clout. Annan's most important diplomatic mission as Secretary-General may well have been his first, which took him to Capitol Hill in 1997, wherein exchange for a promise, since fulfilled, to streamline and consolidate the U.N. bureaucracyhe persuaded Jesse Helms to release nearly a billion dollars of America's U.N. dues that had been held back for years. "The United Nations needs the United States to achieve our goals, and I believe the United States needs the United Nations no less," Annan has said. But, even when it pays its way, Washington does not always feel the need of the U.N. so keenly. With its distrust of what Thomas Jeffersonin his first inaugural address, two hundred years agocalled "entangling alliances," the United States has always taken a selective approach to international coperation, which puts Annan in a delicate position. "We need to be careful, and the U.S. also needs to be careful," he told me, adding, "One may not be happy with the U.N. today, or the Council today, because one is not getting one's way. But tomorrow one is going to need that organization." Yet, there was little the U.N. could do but cringe when the Bush Administration repudiated the Kyoto agreements on global environmental standards and withdrew from the newly established International Criminal Court. After September 11, 2001, the United States turned to the Security Council for support for the war in Afghanistan, but Washington's selective approach to multilateralism created resentment abroad, even among long-standing allies. Throughout the summer of 2002, Bush ratcheted up the threat of invading Iraq and getting rid of Saddam Hussein, alone or in a lonely coalition with England. He began challenging the American preference for deterrence and containment of foreign threats in favor of premptive action, and he argued that, since there were already more than a dozen valid Security Council resolutions on the books demanding that Saddam Hussein disarm, no further U.N. authority was needed. Such American unilateralism was hardly a recent, Republican innovation. "Three times Clinton did what many of the Democrats are now saying Bush can't do," Richard Holbrooke, who served as U.N. Ambassador during Clinton's second term, reminded me recently. "He did it in Bosnia in '95, in Iraq with Desert Fox in December of '98, and in Kosovo in '99. In the two Balkan cases he had no Security Council authority," Holbrooke said, adding: "In the case of Iraq, December '98, the U.N. was starting its meetings when they got

the word that the bombing had begun, and Clinton simply said, 'Well, I'm bombing under U.N. authority because Iraq's in material breach.' " Since the end of the Gulf War in 1991, American and British warplanes have been bombing military targets in and around the "no-fly" zones in Iraq, and although these actions have no U.N. mandate, they have been tolerated by the Security Council. But now Bush was talking about conquering Iraq, and virtually every other country in the Assembly opposed the idea. Even within the Administration, and among prominent voices in the Republican foreign-policy establishment, there was increasingly open disapproval of moving against Iraq unilaterally, or at all, and opinion polls showed that the American people, too, wanted the U.N. involved. By Labor Day, Bush had taken to saying that war could wait, but this was hardly a great concession, considering that it would take nearly six months to mobilize and position the forces necessary for the proposed attack. On September 12th, Bush addressed the opening session of the General Assembly, and nobody in the hall that day knew what he would say. By convention, Annan spoke first. In recognition of the drama of the occasion, he had given the White House copies of the text of his speech the day before, and, in a break with protocol, advance copies were also made available to the press to insure that Annan's remarks were not completely eclipsed by those of Bush. "Choosing to follow or reject the multilateral path must not be a simple matter of political convenience," Annan said, and he invoked the example of the U.N.mandated Gulf War as a reminder that "when states decide to use force to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations." He made it clear that multilateralism does not simply mean doing America's bidding: "The existence of an effective international security system depends on the Council's authority, and therefore on the Council having the political will to act even in the most difficult cases, when agreement seems elusive at the outset." He used the word "multilateral" nine times in the course of his speech, before mentioning Iraq by name, and when he did he steered a delicate middle course between pleasing the Assembly's antiwar constituency by describing the resumption of weapons inspections as "the indispensable first step" to resolving the crisis, and acknowledging Washington's underlying view of where the blame for the standoff lay: "I urge Iraq to comply with its obligations for the sake of its own people and for the sake of world order. If Iraq's defiance continues, the Security Council must face its responsibilities."

Annan's speech was a hit, but Bush stole its thunder. "We created the United Nations Security Council, so thatunlike the League of Nationsour deliberations would be more than talk, and our resolutions would be more than wishes," he said, and that swift mention of the Leaguethe U.N.'s disgraced predecessor, which dissolved into oblivion on the eve of the Second World War, after failing to respond to Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopiacut to the quick. The trouble with Iraq, Bush said, was not an American beef but a clash between Saddam's regime and the U.N. He recited the demands of past resolutions on Iraq, and quoted from the U.N.'s own reports to show how they had been systematically violated. "All the world now faces a test, and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment," Bush said. "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?" It was Saddam who was subverting the organization through unilateral action, he explained, and he proposed that the Security Council pass a new resolution, demanding immediate and unconditional compliance with all previous resolutions, and making the alternative clear: that "a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power." The choice, Bush said, was between fear and progress, and he ended as he had begun, in a spirit that was equal parts challenge and invitation: "We must stand up for our security, and for the permanent rights and the hopes of mankind. By heritage and by choice, the United States of America will make that stand. Delegates to the United Nations, you have the power to make that stand as well." The Assembly responded with tremendous relief that Bush hadn't simply written them off. Shashi Tharoor, a longtime deputy to Annan who is now Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information, said that the President had "come out very much smelling like roses." Annan's take was, characteristically, more reserved. He agreed that the current Iraq crisis represented "a crucial moment for the organization," but he did not care for the suggestion that the U.N. might go the way of the League of Nations. "I think that was overstating the case," he said to me. What most impressed him about Bush's performance was the response in the General Assembly: "Every speaker who got up and spoke after the President said Iraq has to coperate, Iraq must disarm." The United States had never threatened regime change so convincingly, but Annan had heard tough talk about Iraq before. In February of 1998, during a similar crisis, he had taken it upon himself to go to Baghdad to negotiate with Saddam directly. U.N. weapons inspectors had been in Iraq for nearly seven

years then, a period marked by significant early successes in finding and dismantling Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical arsenal, and at least an equal degree of frustration at the hands of deceitful and obstructionist Iraqi officials. But they had reached a deadlock with the regime. At issue were eight sprawling complexes to which the Iraqis forbade access, declaring that they were "presidential sites." According to the resolutions that mandated the inspections, this was a meaningless objection: inspectors were to go wherever they chose, whenever they felt like it. The United States responded to the impasse by threatening to bomb Saddam into submission, a prospect France and Russia angrily opposed. When Annan got word from Yasir Arafat that Saddam might be willing to negotiate, he let it be known that he was on his way. Madeleine Albright, who was then Secretary of State, urged him to put off the trip, and when he said he was going anyway President Jacques Chirac of France loaned him his jet. Chirac asked the Secretary-General to extend his personal greetings to Saddam and to express his great esteem for Iraq. On his arrival in Baghdad, Annan spoke of his mission as a "sacred duty." But diplomacy can be foul work. He and Saddam shook hands. They smoked cigars together; they drank orange juice. Annan told Saddam he was a leader of scope and "courage," a "builder," who had brought Iraq into the modern age, and reconstructed it after the Gulf War, and who now had the opportunity to save it from being pounded by American bombs, if only they could come to terms. Saddam returned the compliments, and, with their rapport thus established, the two men cut a deal: Iraq would not be bombed, and the weapons inspectors could get on with their task, albeit more gingerly. U.N. press officers played the meeting as a triumph of peacemaking, and Annan himself emerged from the encounter in an uncharacteristically boastful, veni, vidi, vici mood. Before he left Baghdad, Annan told a reporter that Iraq had been "demonized" by the international community and that the world was as isolated from Iraq as Iraq was from the world. On his return to Paris he received a hero's welcome at a state dinner, where Chirac raised his glass and praised him for averting the next world war. Back in New York, much of the staff at the United Nations poured out of the building to hail him, although the weapons inspectors stayed at their desks. (They thought they'd been sold out.) Annan told the adoring throng that he had not been alone but surrounded by the world's prayers. And he spoke the line that has dogged him ever since, saying of Saddam Hussein, "He's a man I can do business with."

In fact, Saddam had given Annan the business. The Security Council quickly approved the Baghdad agreement, and, while Clinton officials grumbled publicly about the details, there was considerable relief in Washington at not having to go through with the bombing. In short order, however, Iraq was reneging on its promises and throwing up hurdles to inspections. Six months after Annan's trip, in August, the Iraqis announced that they would no longer coperate with inspections. At the end of October, 1998, Baghdad ordered the inspectors to stop all activities. Before long, Washington told the inspectors to pack up and leave in a hurry. A few days later, a fleet of American and British heavy bombers were in the air, less than an hour from their Iraqi targets, when Annanwho had been trying once again to get the Iraqis to reverse their defiant positionreceived a letter from Saddam agreeing to let the inspections resume. At very nearly the last minute, the White House called the planes back, and for a few weeks the inspectors did resume their dance with the Iraqis, which in early December once again ground to a halt. On the sixteenth of that month, the bombing began. "This is a sad day for the United Nations and the world," Annan said, and he added, "It is also a very sad day for me, personally." The air raidsdubbed Operation Desert Foxlasted four days. A year later, the Security Council adopted a resolution imposing a new inspections regime, and periodically in 2000 and 2001 Annan sought to revive talks with Iraq to gain the inspectors access. But Iraq stonewalled, and last July he let the dialogue collapse. Annan does not regret going to Baghdad in 1998. After all, the alternative was bombing, and, as he said to me, "After the bombing, then what?" Four years later, he had his answer. "Now we're all sitting back and saying, What has happened in the meantime? What did Saddam do during the four years that the inspectors were not there? This implies that the inspectors had an impact and were able to disrupt or at least prevent the Iraqis from doing what they would have liked to do." But it wasn't the bombing that stopped the inspections; Saddam did, and he emerged from the encounter according to his definition of victory: "insuring your enemy does not get what he wants." The bombs were punishment after the fact, part of a new strategy, known by Madeleine Albright's phrase, "to keep Saddam Hussein in his box." Thereafter, a former U.N. Iraq hand told me, "Clinton policy was to leave it for the next lot." Now the next lot had come to the U.N., and nobody was asking Annan to go back to Baghdad, nor did he volunteer. In 1998, he had taken the worst drubbing of his career at the hands of American critics in Congress and the press, who charged him with everything from hapless navet to willful appeasement to

serving as an Iraqi asset. "I know that some people on the Hill have a different idea as to how Iraq and President Saddam Hussein should be handled. That is not my concern," Annan said at the time, and he added, "The U.N. is not in the business of taking out any president. In our organization that is illegal." "Kofi's big mistake was coming back from Baghdad and making too much of a thing about a great act of diplomacy with a dictator," a former Clinton State Department official said, adding, "I think he learned something from it, which is you've got to be extraordinarily careful when you're doing this, and avoid a lot of the theatrics and the color commentary, because you're going to piss somebody off who you're going to need." Annan certainly kept a much lower profile last fall. He didn't even tell anyone in his Secretariat what he was doing when he picked up the phone two days after Bush's speech and invited himself to a meeting of foreign ministers from the Arab League, who had gathered in the margins of the General Assembly. "We suddenly found him leavingwhere is he going?" his chief of staff, Iqbal Riza, recalled. "I told them I wanted to attend their meeting because they were pretty worried about what was going on, and it wasn't enough for them to be worried," Annan said. "They had to send a message to Saddam, that this is a new situation and he should not just play games." The Iraqi foreign minister was at the meeting, and the next day Annan received word that Saddam was willing to allow the inspectors back, without any conditions. He helped the Iraqis draft a letter saying as much, and he announced the breakthrough on September 16th. There were no crowds at the door this time around, no talk of sacred duties. The feeling at the U.N. was that there is nothing quite like the looming threat of overwhelming unilateral action to make multilateralism work. Iraq's abrupt reversal in September caught everyone off guard. Experience offered no reason to believe in it, but the momentum of the course Bush had set left no alternative. And, strikingly, even as America has appeared to be marching for six months now along an inexorable path to war, since those few days at the U.N. in September when Annan set the tone and Bush raised the stakes, the story of the Iraq crisis in the Security Council has been entirely technical. In negotiating a new resolution, the Americans and the British had originally wanted any Iraqi violation of the weapons-inspection regime to be punishable by force, and the French, backed by Russia and a comparatively disinterested China, wanted to require that a second resolution be passed before military action might be taken. In the end, they agreed that the Council would at least have to be consulted and given a chance to debate the issue before Iraq incurred what the

resolution rather coyly called "serious consequences." Although Iraqi regime change was not on the Council's agendaofficially, the issue was disarmamenteverybody knew what that phrase meant, and the steady massing of American forces in and around the Persian Gulf insured that nobody would forget. Annan's part in this debate was to stay in the background, talking constantly by phone with the Council ambassadors and the foreign ministers and heads of state of the P-5, urging patience and endurance in the negotiations. Colin Powell, who calls Annan a good friend, frequently speaks with him several times a week. "He is open, he listens, he doesn't roll over, and he always tries to do what's right," Powell said to me. "In the toughest of times, he is always there to give us a sanity check." Annan's guiding interest was to preserve unity on the Council, whatever it should decide, and on November 8th, when the Council passed Resolution 1441 with a vote of fifteen to zero, the feeling in the room was that at least for the momenteverybody had won. The U.N. had redeemed itself, Powell said"It showed its relevance, it showed its importance"and he added, "If a war comes it won't be because George Bush wanted a war, or Kofi failed to stop a war. It's because Saddam Hussein was responsible for a war." After all, he told me, "Diplomacy is always a little bit harder than just saying, 'This is what I want to doeverybody fall in.' It is a body of sovereign nations, not a rifle platoon that you can order around." But wars are always waged in the name of peace. In this case, nobody seriously doubted that the Iraqis had been pursuing their weapons programs, or believed that they would comply sufficiently with the resolution to satisfy the Bush Administration. So while reviving inspections was the only chance of averting a war, wasn't it also a way of giving international authority to a war? In order to keep the United States in the U.N., had the U.N. boxed itself in? "I do worry about that," Annan said. "That bothers methat the U.N. may be used as a rubber stamp, yah. I think there will come a time where the line might be drawn, where there may be divisionsserious divisions which may not be bridgeable." But when the U.N.'s two highest idealsmultilateralism and peacestand at odds, how does one choose? As a rule, a former political adviser to Annan said, "Kofi would say better a legitimate war than disunity and a sidelined U.N. In this respect, he's truly a son of the system, an institutional man." When Kofi Annan was a boy in the Gold Coast, as Ghana was known under British rule, the big idea was independence. He was just nine in 1947, when India's example inspired members of the colony's educated and professional

classes to form a party, the United Gold Coast Convention, to campaign for selfrule. The party hired a secretary named Kwame Nkrumah, who soon became and remained, until Annan came to prominencethe world's most famous Ghanaian. Nkrumah's story is instructive, because it formed the backdrop for Annan's coming of age, and because it is a story of a deliberate political life, driven by ambition, defiance, and fixed ideas, which makes it entirely unlike Annan's story. Nkrumah, the son of a village goldsmith, was a schoolteacher who scrimped and saved to buy a ticket to America, where he enrolled in a black college, experienced segregation, earned a bachelor's degree in economics and sociology, worked in a soap factory, preached in black churches, read Marx and Lenin, earned a bachelor's degree in theology, sold fish in Harlem, did graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania, slept on park benches, washed dishes on a cruise ship, earned a master's degree in education, joined the Freemasons, taught Greek history, then moved to London, published a pamphlet ("Towards Colonial Freedom"), wrote most of a thesis on logical positivism for a Ph.D. in philosophy, joined a salon whose habitus included future African independence leadersHastings Banda (Malawi), Kenneth Kaunda (Zambia), Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), and Julius Nyerere (Tanzania)and returned to Ghana in 1947, at the age of thirty-eight, with an idea: nonviolent boycott. The next year, after joining in a peaceful march for autonomy in Accra, the capital, during which people were shot dead by police, Nkrumah was arrested and thrown in jail. In 1949, after he was released, he started his own movement, the Convention People's Party, renouncing the gradualist approach of his former employers and demanding full independence at once. Years of marches, boycotts, rallies, private debates, arrests, and releases followed. In March of 1957 Ghana, with Nkrumah as its leader, became the first sub-Saharan African colony to be granted independence. In that same year, Annan graduated from Mfantsipim, a boarding school for boys, the country's oldest and most prestigious secondary school. Its Web site boasts of "many influential products," an "uncounted number of men of unexampled distinction," and Annan of course is first among them. The school was founded by the Methodist Church and run, in Annan's time already, by Africans, who followed a standard British curriculum and colonial ethos. Students were taught that come Christmas snow was not unusual; they played cricket; they wore uniforms with neckties"shorts and sports and all that," Annan said. This was his Ghana, a crossroads culture, the mid-twentieth-century version of globalization (as always, a function of empire). Although his father was a Fante nobleman, his standing as a chief was largely honorary. He worked

as an executive of the United Africa Company, a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch multinational corporation Unilever. The job kept his household on the move from city to city: a few years in Kumasi, a few years in Accra, a few years in Bekwai. Home for Annan was no fixed place. Annan had three sisters, two older and his twin. Being a twin in Ghana, he said, was not as big a deal as it can be elsewhere in Africa: "In Benin, for example, you cannot say no to a mother of twinsyou have to give her everything she wantsand in other places they try to kill them. For us it's O.K. It was a bit special at that time." But he did not elaborate. Annan is not given to talking much about his family or his early years. He does not shy away from the subject, but the way he recounts his memories of Ghana is curiously impersonal, as if he were summing up someone else's life or something he had read in a book. Perhaps this is because he has lived outside the country for all but two of the past forty-four years. Although he says, "I think Ghana is still home," he tends not to speak of himself so much as a Ghanaian but, more universally, as an Africanan inheritance he characterizes fondly and selectively as a deliberative approach to life, marked always by a breadth of mind and generosity of spirit. "I feel profoundly African, my roots are deeply African, and the things that I was taught as a child are very important to me," he told me. "Growing up in Africa, you had lots of people around youcousins, aunts, grandparents, and friends of the familyso there always were people to talk to, people to seek advice from, people to play with, and a sense of friendship and love." He seemed eager to extract a connection between his earliest influences and his current life as a diplomat. "Patience was very much part of the culture," he said. "And this is why I sometimes find it very difficult to understand the African dictators of today, because in traditional African society people discussed issues. They talked and talkedyou know, the tradition of palaver, you go under the tree and you talk. If you can't solve the problem, you meet the next day and you keep talking till you find a solution. The Africans have an incredible capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation and hospitality. I see the Africa I grew up in in somebody like Mandela, who is able to forgive and to reconcile. I don't see it in these brutal leaders." Unlike Nelson Mandela, who is also of aristocratic pedigree, Annan took no part in his country's liberation. "I was too young to be involved personally," he said. The only rebellious action he likes to recall from his youth is a hunger strike he staged to protest the quality of the food at his boarding school, and it worked: the menu was improved. But defiance has never been Annan's style, and while

politics fascinated him, the tug of ideology found little traction. He was not disposed to taking sides. In boarding school, he told me, he and his friends "were quite engaged, quite informed, following the struggle," and he said, "Sometimes we even role-played: who would belong to which party, and this sort of thing, arguing the point." Forty years after his graduation, and Ghana's independence, in his first months as Secretary-General, Annan sent a brief congratulatory message to be read to the graduating class of Mfantsipim, in which he recalled a lesson from his days there:
Once, I remember, Reverend Brandful took out a large white sheet with a black dot in the middle, draped it over the blackboard and asked us: "What do you see?"

We all answered: "The black dot." "Why only the black dot?" he responded. "Why only the negative? What about the vast white spaces around?" He was reminding us to always look beyond the obvious and beneath the surface, to bear in mind the larger picture, not to focus just on the blemishes. He was teaching us also to remember that there is more than one side to a story, and more than one answer to a question. Annan's executive assistant in the Secretariat, Elisabeth Lindenmayer, is a Frenchwoman who was born in Africa, in a small village in the bush of colonial Upper Voltanow Burkina Fasowhere her father was stationed as a paratrooper. Lindenmayer has known Annan for nineteen years and worked at his side for more than a decade. She retains a deep affection for the continent where she spent her youth, and she offered an anthropological interpretation of her boss's faith in multiple perspectives. "It's very African to believe in symbols, in things that you don't see, in the unquantifiable," she said. Still, it is difficult to have things more than one way, and when it came to the political drama of his youth, Annan was genuinely undecided. "My father was with the United Gold Coast Convention, not with Nkrumah's party but the other group," he told me, "and as a young man I think I was influenced by the discussions going on at home with my father and his friends, and others. But at the same time I was also emotionally drawn to the struggle for independence, and some of the statements Nkrumah was makingthat we must stand on our own, we must have our own destiny in our hands." By Annan's account, it was only after the fact, when the British government was gone and there were Ghanaians in charge, that he grasped the full import of the liberation struggle. "We suddenly realized that change was possibleyou know, this big

important thing, the independence that seems so far away, that you've heard people talk of for years, suddenly it's there, we get it," he said, and he added, "Not only is change possible but one can effect change, one can be a participant, one can be a change agent and play a role. It was a very exciting and electrifying period, and of course we all felt that we had a role to play in building the new nation." Then, after a moment, he said, "When I joined the U.N."in 1962"I said, maximum two years and I'll go back. And here I am, forty years later." Even after Nkrumah took power, his people used to summon his followers to action with the call: "Come and express your anger!" This would not have stirred a response in Annan, to whom anger is so nearly alien that he cannot quite account for its absence in his makeup except by rationalization. While he admits to occasional passing spasms of frustration or impatience, he dismisses anger as "a negative energy" and says, "I think when you have so much to do you can't really afford it. So to be rancoring, and let it linger, and be grumpy, and bear grudges, and all thisit's something that has never been part of me, because I find not only is it not necessary but it takes a lot out of you, it distracts." Within the Secretariat, Lindenmayer is known as the only person to have ever seen Annan thoroughly lose his cool, and that was long before he had surfaced in the public eye, back in the eighties, when he was running the U.N.'s office of human resources, and the conduct of the appointment-and-promotion committee ignited his displeasure. "If somebody does not get angry often and suddenly gets very angry, I can tell you it's very powerful," Lindenmayer told me. She stiffened in her chair. "He was like a lion roaring, he was so angry at them," she said, and she went on, "I tell you, he's angry with his whole bodywith his eyes. His anger comes from every single part of him. His voice goes down. It takes a register, like an organ, which is the lowest one. It's very, very frightening when he gets angry." Others speak of once or twice seeing Annan's eyes narrow in a flicker of annoyance, but these are rare sightings, and tend to be mentioned with proprietary pride, as evidence of the speaker's inside position. As a rule, people who have worked or spent time with Annan are as much at a loss to explain his imperturbability as he is. Sir Brian Urquhart, who served in the U.N. Secretariat from 1945 to 1986, and has written extensively about the organization, put the problem as succinctly as anyone. "Why he doesn't get angry, God only knows, but he doesn't, and up to a point that's a great thing," Urquhart told me, but, he said, "It's very hard to tell what Kofi thinks about people, because he's such a

nice chap. I mean, for example, if I was him, I'd be furious with Saddam Hussein, after the way he monkeyed with him in 1998." So it was without a hint of bitterness that Annan said to me, "I was disappointed by the way things turned out in the end, once we'd achieved independence." That feeling came with time, and mostly from a distance. In the first flush of his awakening to the world's limitless possibilities for change, Annan went on to study at the University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, where he quickly became vice-president of the national student union, and he wound up at a meeting of West African student leaders in Sierra Leone. There, somebody suggested that he apply to a program, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, to give young Africans with leadership promise the opportunity to study in America. He did, and in the fall of 1959 he arrived in St. Paul, Minnesota, on a scholarship to Macalester College, a small liberal-arts school with a strong internationalist tradition and the unusual custom of flying the U.N. flag below the Stars and Stripes. He was twenty-one years old, it was his first trip overseas, and the plan was to stay a year, then "go back and make a contribution." But he did so well at Macalester that the school gave him a second year's scholarship to complete his degree as an economics major, and in this way, with each opportunity abroad leading to the next, his plan to make a life in Ghana kept getting postponed. Annan had arrived in America just as the civil-rights movement was gathering force with marches, sit-ins, and boycotts, and he says it struck him as "almost a continuation" of what he'd witnessed at home. "The culture was different, the approach was different, but the objective and the desire was the same. So you could empathize," he told me. Once again, he followed the local developments with interest, without feeling any involvement. His closest friend was a Swiss political scientist, Roy Preiswerk, who took an avid interest in the issues of decolonization, and became a pioneer in development studies. Once when they were out walking with a Korean friend along the banks of Minnehaha Creek, they were accosted by a group of young drunks, who passed by in a boat and began shouting, "What's this black doing here? Go back where you came from!" Annan recalls that his friends were angrier than he was. "It was interesting to see," he said. In the summer of 1961, a young adviser to foreign students at Macalester started a program to take some of his advisees on extended road trips through the American hinterland. He called the operation Ambassadors of Friendship, after the car that was donated to him for the trip, a Nash Ambassador, and Annan was

one of the four students to join him on the excursion. They travelled for two months, and Annan recalls going into a restaurant and seeing two waitresses whispering to each other. He heard the older tell the younger, "You tell them, you tell them," and, he said, "She almost rushed to us and blurted it out'I'm sorry, we don't serve blacks.' " What struck him was her embarrassment, and, telling the story, he chuckled softly, as if he were embarrassed for her. Susan Linnee, a Minnesotan who established a lifelong friendship with Annan in those years, and who is now the Associated Press bureau chief in Nairobi, remembers hearing a much more pointed story from that trip: "They went somewhere and Kofi needed a haircut. The guy said, 'We don't cut niggers' hair,' and he said, 'I'm not a nigger, I'm an African,' and the guy said, 'That's O.K., come on, siddown'and cut his hair." What struck Linnee about this was "the difference between Africans' and African-Americans' thinking about race." She said, "Kofi didn't think about it. It was never a question of race for him," and she noticed that it was the same for a Nigerian aristocrat he hung around with. "They didn't think they were in any way involved. They didn't even think of colonialism as a matter of race," she said. "Kofi in his entire life never experienced anything that was any kind of struggle. I think he thought it was nice that Ghana became independent, but there was never any sense of drama to it." Then as now, Linnee found Annan to be, above all, "a facilitator," someone who sought the common ground among people and tried to bring them together. He liked America. He felt at ease here, as he felt everywhere. He was quick of mind and body, and set a record for the sixty-yard dash at Macalester that stood for many years. Linnee remembers him at parties, teaching people to dance the Hi-Life. "He's the ultimate smooth dancer, where nothing moves," she said. In the autumn of 1961, Annan grew his beard. He had moved on to Geneva on a Carnegie fellowship to do graduate work in economics, and he stopped shaving his chin and upper lip until the goatee appeared. "People now think it is part of his elegant look," said Georges Abi-Saab, an Egyptian who was in Annan's circle at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva and is now a professor emeritus there. "At that time it was a symbol, a kind of distinctive sign. It was a Lumumba beard, and many of the young African people had this Lumumba beard." Patrice Lumumba, the first (and last) popularly elected leader of the Congo, was killed in January of 1961, and the crisis in the Congo, which triggered one of the first massive and agonized U.N. military interventions, dominated the international headlines, especially when U.N. Secretary-General

Dag Hammarskjld was killed in a plane crash on a diplomatic mission between warring factions there. Both men quickly acquired the status of martyrs, and although Annan now speaks frequently of the influence of Hammarskjld, it was Lumumba who captured his imagination at the time. "Lumumba symbolized African nationalism and progressive nation-buildingeven if he didn't live up to it," Abi-Saab said to me, and he recalled with passion those days when Third Worldism and the nonaligned movement"a kind of progressive open nationalism"were in the air. "That was the context in which we met," he said of Annan, and he added, "It was a period of euphoric optimism among young people of the Third World, who thought they could change their countries and participate in changing the world. That was the general atmosphere, and he was very much in that trend." Abi-Saab, who described himself as "a bit of a purist" in political matters, is impressed that Annan kept his beard. Few Africans from that period did, and he likes to think the facial hair means that the Secretary-General has remained loyal to the ideals of his youth. But the more he talked, the more it became clear that Abi-Saab was unsure exactly where Annan had stood in the politically charged debates of their student days: "He could perceive what others say, and perhaps with hindsight I'd say also what others want. Most of us have our sympathies and antipathies. Kofi, on the other hand, was someone who was on good terms with everybody. And this proved to be a great asset for him. I thought, and I still believe, he had his own convictions, and he believed in them and so forth. But he was not very aggressive in expressing them or defending them in a way that hurt the others. He always had a very smooth touch." Abi-Saab allowed that memory can be distorted by intervening impressions, and he said, "We were all much more passionate then. Life somehow cools you down." But he wondered whether a life spent in the U.N., a system that exists in the name of principle yet survives by compromise, might not be especially cooling, and he said of Annan, "Remember that he spent from 1962forty yearsin the machine, and he has been a consummate user of the machine as well as being part of it." When I told Annan that I'd spoken to Abi-Saab, he remembered the heated debatesabout "how we were going to change the world"with his bearded friends in Geneva. "It was sort of the folly and dreams of the young," he said, and once again he spoke of his disappointment in the betrayed promises of independence. "There was disillusionment in the sense that we could have done much better," he said. "We could have given our people a much better life and

we failed them. I mean, when you take my own country at the time of independence, we had in economic terms about the same situation as Malaysia. We had almost the same amount of reserves in the bank, and you look at where Malaysia is today and where Ghana is today, and I say it's a question of instability and mismanagement." Like so many bold liberation leaders, Nkrumah was a bad president. The monomania that had served him in revolution translated, when he sat in the statehouse, into dictatorship and unhappiness for Ghana: a cult of personality, a clampdown on free expression, economic decline, extreme corruption, and finally, in 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to China, a military coup. He died in exile in 1972, and returned home in a coffin. Annan didn't leave Ghana to escape misrule. A chance encounter had presented him with an opportunity, and he told himself he would return better prepared to help his country. He went to Geneva in the same spirit. He had no political aspirations, nor did he impress those who met him and admired him as notably ambitious. His mind was practical; in pursuing his degrees in economics, he anticipated following his father into the business world. But, as his own scope broadened during his student years in America and Europe, he watched his prospects at home steadily shrinking; at the same time, he saw that he was valued as an African in the international sphere. The United Nations was growing fast, absorbing newly decolonized nations. Nineteen-sixty had been the Year of Africa, with sixteen new states from the continent admitted to the General Assembly, and the Charter requires that the U.N.'s staff be hired to reflect as closely as possible its membership. In the early summer of 1962, when Annan left graduate school to become an administrative and budget officer at the headquarters of the World Health Organization in Geneva, he entered the U.N. bureaucracy with P-1 status, the lowest possible rank in the international civil service, and for nearly thirty years he ascended through the administrative and management hierarchy, a functionary who quickly mastered each new task put before him and drew no public attention. Annan did not commit himself to the organization all at once. He still wanted to do his bit for Africa, and in 1965 he arranged to get posted to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to work at the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa. He spent six years there, just as the Organization of African Unity was being created. "There was lots of political energyelectricity in the air," Annan said. "All these leaders came to Addis to talk about Africa and its development, and we were on the economic side, and you could see that if we all did what we were supposed to and pooled our efforts and worked well, we could make a difference."

In fact, Ethiopia was sliding into desperation under the corrupt reign of Emperor Haile Selassie. By the time Annan packed up to leave, in 1971, thousands of Ethiopians were facing famine in regions that had fallen into Selassie's disfavor. Even as a hub of pan-Africanist enthusiasm, Ethiopia presented a troubling scene. Among the continent's new leaders who passed through Addis, those who worked for the common good were outnumbered by abusive despots. The late sixties and early seventies were the glory days of such men as the self-deifying kleptocrat Mobutu Sese Seko, of Congo (or Zaire, as he came to call it); the lunatic President for Life (later Emperor) Jean-Bdel Bokassa, of the Central African Republic; and Milton Obote, of Uganda, who had connived with his Army chief, Idi Amin, to stage a coup and reinstall himself as a military dictator in 1966, only to be ousted for real by Amin in 1971. Annan's gloss on his Ethiopian sojourn is typical of the way he speaks of his first three decades with the U.N., which are summed up on his two-page official biography in a single long sentence that consists entirely of a selective list of his successive job titles. For most of this dimly lit time in his career, the U.N. was largely hamstrung by the divisions of the Cold War. The paralysis was most pronounced on the Security Council, where the great powers of the P-5 used their opposing vetoesor threats of a vetoto control most matters in which they had a stake. As a diplomatic salon, the U.N. served the crucial function of keeping the superpowers talking to one another, and in confrontations like the Cuban missile crisis the public debate may have helped avert a world war. But there was no question of seeking, or failing to seek, a resolution when America went to war in Vietnam, or when the Soviet Union took over Afghanistan. The Council's deadlock in those decades extended equally to the myriad wars fought by Soviet and American proxies elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. The General Assembly took up some of the political slack, but such actions as the passage of a resolution equating Zionism with racism served as a reminder that even when multilateralism functions, majority consensus is no guarantee of sobriety, or proof against hostile intentions. Inevitably, the effects of Cold War factionalism and stalemate among the U.N.'s member states tainted the organization's internal order as well. Following the death of Hammarskjld in 1961, the office of Secretary-General was filled by bland figures who commanded little reverence from their staffs and who understood that the first requirement of their job was to keep a low profile. Within the international bureaucracy, it was a time of stagnation, and if demoralization and corruption were not the rule, neither were they exceptional. A

post at the U.N. was regarded as a cozy sinecure, with good pay, a diplomatic passport, and bankers' hours. Jobs were frequently traded as political favors, and at times were simply bought and sold. For those who were content merely to keep their desks clean, a sense of serving a worthy larger purpose lightened the burden of idleness. But for anyone animated by a desire for consequence, the U.N. system in the sixties, seventies, and eighties could often be a source of frustration and restlessness. In 1971, when Annan left Ethiopia, he took a year's leave to pick up a master's degree in management, as a Sloan Fellow at M.I.T. Although he returned to serve the U.N. for a series of brief postingsin New York, with a peacekeeping force in Egypt, and with the High Commissioner for Refugees in Genevahe could not forget that he had once intended to pursue a very different life. Annan's year in Minnesota had turned into fifteen years as an expatriate, and in 1974 he accepted an offer to manage the Ghana Tourist Development Company, setting up hotels along the coast. He was then married to a Nigerian woman (his first wife); he had a daughter, Ama, and a son, Kojo; Susan Linnee remembers Annan telling her that when they arrived in Ghana his daughter's response was "Daddy, why are there so many black people here?" He had gone back"to see, to help," he saidbut it was a bad time; Ghana was under military rule, and he did not find himself at home. "So after a couple of years, I left again," he told me, adding, "I think probably if I had felt when I went to Ghana that there was space and I could do what I thought can be done and could find like-minded people for us to work together, I probably would have stayed, I probably would not have returned to the U.N." Shashi Tharoor, the Under-Secretary-General, described Annan's foray into the Ghanaian business world, and his retreat from it, as "emblematic of the way people like he and I feel, that one of the reasons we want to serve the international system is we've grown up in societies which need the international system to work well." When Annan signed back on at the U.N. in 1976, it had been fourteen years since he entered the system, and it would be fourteen more before he was tapped for his first political mission. With the end of the Cold War, in the late eighties, the Security Council was suddenly able to find common ground on many outstanding crises. All at once, it seemed, the Council was dispatching U.N. missions everywhere: to end the war between Iraq and Iran; to oversee the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan; to supervise elections in Namibia and Nicaragua; then on to El Salvador, Cambodia, and Mozambique. The Council's decision to authorize the use of force to reverse

Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 reflected its newfound spirit of international coperation. The violation of the sovereignty of a nation was what the organization had been created to oppose. Annan had risen to the post of Assistant Secretary-General in charge of personnel. It was in that capacity that he was sent to Baghdad during the buildup to the Gulf War, to seek the release of hundreds of U.N. international staffers, and other foreign workers, who were being held hostage. He succeeded, and was sent back to Baghdad the next year, after the warnow as the chief financial officer of the U.N. systemto work out a blueprint for the "oil for food" deal. Then, in 1992, Boutros Boutros-Ghali appointed him to the No. 2 post in the newly established Department of Peacekeeping Operations. A year later, he became Under-Secretary-General in charge of the whole department. The speed with which Annan was handed these new responsibilities was a reflection not only of his capabilities but also of the improvisational approach of the U.N. Secretariat to the unprecedented burden of its multiplying missions. In 1989, peacekeeping had been handled by a suboffice of the political department, staffed by six people who oversaw around fifteen thousand troops, whose main task was to monitor front-line truces in such places as Cyprus and Kashmir. Four years later, when Annan took over the portfolio, there were thirteen U.N. peacekeeping missions in the field, with fifty-four thousand troops, and many of the newer missions were in countries where there was no real peace to keep: Cambodia, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, and, within the year, Rwanda. With the exception of the mission to Cambodia, which was able to claim a deeply compromised success before it withdrew, all of these operations would meet with catastrophe on Annan's watch, at the end of which he was elevated to SecretaryGeneral. It was "a baptism of fire," Iqbal Riza, his chief of staff, told me, and for anyone less steadfastly uninflammable it might have been an immolation. History is largely a saga of unfinished business. So, on the Monday morning last November when the first team of United Nations weapons inspectors to visit Iraq in four years stepped onto the tarmac at Saddam International Airport in Baghdad, Kofi Annan was in Sarajevo, telling three women representing the Mothers of Srebrenicaan association of survivors of the 1995 massacre in the U.N.-designated "safe area"that he was happy to have the opportunity to meet them. "I know the tragedy you've been through," he said. "It is something that one can never forget." Annan kept his opening remarks at the meeting brief. "I want to hear from you," he said. "I want to hear about your concerns. It's a

difficult and a painful situation. We can't turn the clock back, so we have to collectively see how we can best deal with the situation and move forward." The slaughter of as many as seven thousand Bosnian Muslims, nearly all of them male, in Srebrenica, in July of 1995, was the largest genocidal massacre in Europe since the Nazis were forced to stop exterminating Jews. And, as Annan later observed, in a report that he presented to the General Assembly in November of 1999:
The fall of Srebrenica is also shocking because the enclave's inhabitants believed that the authority of the United Nations Security Council, the presence of
unprofor

[U.N. Protection Force] peacekeepers, and the

might of nato airpower, would ensure their safety. Instead, the Bosnian Serb forces ignored the Security Council, pushed aside the unprofor troops, and assessed correctly that airpower would not be used to stop them. They overran the safe area of Srebrenica with ease, and then proceeded to depopulate the territory within forty-eight hours. Their leaders then engaged in high-level negotiations with representatives of the international community while their forces on the ground executed and buried thousands of men and boys within a matter of days.

The report quotes from the indictment for war crimes of the former Bosnian Serb President, Radovan Karadzic, and his Army chief, Ratko Mladic, and tells of "scenes from hell, written on the darkest pages of human history" at Srebrenica: "thousands of men executed and buried in mass graves, hundreds of men buried alive, men and women mutilated and slaughtered, children killed before their mothers' eyes, a grandfather forced to eat the liver of his own grandson." Srebrenica was just one of six safe areas established by the U.N. under Security Council mandates during the Bosnian war, and as many as twenty thousand people were killed in these enclaves. The U.N. safe areas were among the most unsafe places on earth in the mid-nineties. Seven years after the slaughter was brought to an end by nato bombing and the Dayton peace accords, Annan was in Sarajevo to mark the closing of the U.N. mission there, and his visit with the Mothers of Srebrenica was the last event on his schedule. "Yes, there is peace, but there is no justice," the first mother told him. "With the United Nations in our country, we got our bordersthey have done a lotbut there are still many things to be done. You know that Karadzic and Mladic are still at large." Despite a five-million-dollar reward offered by the State Department, the two men continue to live in the former Yugoslavia, unmolested by nato troops. "We know it is not the job of the U.N. mission to arrest them here," the woman said to Annan, "but we kindly ask you as a human being, because you meet a lot of people, to tell those people that this is really becoming ridiculousthat even small children now realize that it's a game."

Another mother said that twenty-two of her family members were still missing, among the more than five thousand victims of Srebrenica whose remains have never been found. "If they did not have the right to live, please help us to find their bodiesto bury them in dignity as every human being deserves," she said. She reminded Annan that in the Netherlands there was still an ongoing inquiry into the massacre. Dutch troops made up the unprofor contingent that essentially handed Srebrenica over to Mladic. "Mr. Kofi Annan," she said, "if we ask you to come there and say what you know as a human being, not as a politician, would you do that?" In his report, Annan had acknowledged that, as the head of peacekeeping, he was among those responsible for the abandonment of the people of Srebrenica. But, despite the prominence of his position, he remained in the background of the horror. The retreat of U.N. missions in the face of slaughter had by then become an agonizingly familiar spectacle, and Annan had learned to keep a low profile as a technocratic middleman in the machinery of international dysfunction. The excited, can-do spirit of the immediate post-Cold War period at the U.N. had been effectively extinguished in October, 1993, when eighteen American soldiers were killed in Somalia. A week later, the U.S.S. Harlan County, a Navy ship carrying peacekeepers to Haiti, was greeted by a lightly armed mob of protesters on a dock in Port-au-Prince and retreated back to sea. "The impression has been created that the easiest way to disrupt a peacekeeping operation is to kill Americans," Annan complained early in 1994, following a talk in New York in which he rebuked the Security Council for following America's lead and recoiling from its commitments. A few months later, at the start of the genocide in Rwanda, the Clinton Administration called for the complete withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers there, even though no American troops were involved. The force was reduced from twenty-five hundred to two hundred and seventy men, who could do little more than watch as eight hundred thousand people were massacred in a hundred days. As the U.N. ricocheted from one killing field to another during this period, its effectiveness was hobbled not only by the difficulty of mustering troops and matriel but by the Security Council's antipathy toward crossing "the Mogadishu line" from strictly neutral peacekeeping to overt taking of sides. In Bosnia, as in Rwanda, however, passive neutrality was tantamount to complicity with the perpetrators of "ethnic cleansing" and mass murder. "We will not just swallow the fact that we were protected by the U.N. and were betrayed anyway," one of the Mothers of Srebrenica told Annan. "We really believed the United Nations.

And what happened? They deceived us." She thought that the U.N. should pay the survivors some sort of compensation. The mothers interspersed their toughest sentiments with expressions of gratitude for Annan's attention, and for the solicitousness and assistance given them by his emissaries in Sarajevo over the years. But, for all their cordiality, there was not a word of forgiveness in their remarks, and Annan did not ask for it. "I feel your pain, and I understand what you've gone through," he said. "What you went through was not anything any of us can pardon." He called the suggestion that the U.N. had a responsibility to the survivors, and should pay them compensation, "a novel idea." But it would require Security Council approval, he said, and"quite frankly, speaking honestly, not to raise your hopesI don't think they will entertain that thought." Annan's impressively detailed report on Srebrenica describes the enfeebling process of triangulation among the Security Council, the U.N. Secretariat, and unprofor troop contributors and commanders, but its ultimate effect is to obscure rather than to clarify individual responsibility. Individual actors are more often identified in the narrative by job title than by name. The profusion of these actors, and of the more broadly anonymous institutions or governments they represented, along with the combined weight of their misjudgments, overcautiousness, gullibility, and sheer cowardice in the face of a party of notorious ethnic cleansers and exterminators who had repeatedly hoodwinked them in the past, creates an impression of collective responsibility that comes uncomfortably close to a spirit of collective exculpation. In this respect, the report simultaneously exposes and replicates multilateralism in its most unctuous form, as a theatre of international damage controla diplomatic safe area. What is missing, even more than a precise attribution of responsibility, is any notion of accountability, which is what the Mothers of Srebrenica seemed to be asking for. Although Annan struck a tender note of reckoning in his farewell remarks to the mothers, it was not their plight that preoccupied him but that of the U.N. "In the kind of conflict we saw here, the third party has a vital role," he said. "What is worse is when nobody cares or pays any attention. The third party who gets up and says, 'This is enough, this cannot be acceptable, this cannot go on,' and tries to take steps to help, has an impact on encouraging the victims to fight, to resist, and to carry on. Sometimes they may be around to bear witness. They may not be able to resolve the conflict and solve all the problems, but it doesn't mean that they didn't try. It doesn't mean that the involvement of the third party focussing attention on the issue and getting the people to fight back is not something that

we shouldn't treasure. I really wish things could have turned out otherwise, but the intentions of coming to help and coming to assist were good." The "safe areas," however, weren't established to provide international witnesses to slaughter, much less to encourage anyone to fight back. They were set up as sanctuaries for the defenseless. The people of Srebrenica were assured that they would not be abandoned, and then the U.N. forces handed them over to their killers, without a word of protest from the Security Council or the Secretariat. Of course, as Annan said, in order to fail one first has to take steps to try to help. But to treasure the effort regardless of the results is kindergarten talkor, worse, the language of martyrdomand suggests a profound reluctance to acknowledge the nature of war. Elisabeth Lindenmayer said that Annan has often told her that he learned a lot from being an athletemost important, how to lose. "And to live is to learn how to lose as well," she said. "So everything becomes a lesson for him." Time and again, in talking to Annan's colleagues and friends, I was told that he has an ability to focus selflessly on the issues at hand, and on the interests of the U.N., which he truly believes are the interests of the world. "With Kofi it's never about him," John Ruggie, a political scientist at Harvard who worked as an adviser in Annan's Secretariat for four years, said. "His ego's just not involved." This is always spoken of as a virtue, and in many aspects of private and public life it is. But war calls also for martial values, pride, a personal stakenot just in your own life but in your cause, which in the U.N.'s case is every noncombatant's life. In his remarks to the Mothers of Srebrenica, Annan was speaking not only of Srebrenica but, more broadly, of Bosniaand, yes, during the war the U.N. presence was, over all, much better than nothing. Is that really an acceptable standard for the man Lindenmayer calls "the moral conscience of the world"? The sound bite that hit the international wires from Annan's visit to Sarajevo in November came from a press conference he had given at the parliament, where he called upon Saddam Hussein to comply with U.N. resolutions "for the sake of his people, regional stability, and world order." The Mothers of Srebrenica were last century's news, and Annan's visit to them was a courtesy call. On the same day, Korea announced for the first time that it had developed nuclear weapons; Israeli troops were battling Palestinians in Hebron and Gaza; a plan for the reunification of Cyprus that Annan had put forward a week earlier was being debated by Greeks and Turks; and the Nigerian government was trying to calm its people about a territorial dispute with Cameroon that Annan was also trying to mediate. There were riots in Colombia, troops in the streets of Caracas,

antigovernment demonstrations in Haiti, a crackdown on dissent amid rumors of civil war in Kyrgyzstan. Annan's true business is conducted with ambassadors, foreign ministers, prime ministers, and presidents. To keep in touch with his constituents, the governments of member states, he spends roughly a third of each year travelling; last year, he visited fortyfive countries, at least half a dozen of them twice. As he calls on one head of state after another, he frequently points out that the United Nations was not founded in the name of governments but of "we the peoples." For the U.N. to fulfill its mission, he said in his Nobel lecture, it must "focus, as never before, on improving the conditions of the individual men and women . . . whose claims to the most fundamental rights have too often been sacrificed in the supposed interests of the state or the nation." Whether the problem is "ethnic cleansing" or poverty, he said, "What begins with the failure to uphold the dignity of one life all too often ends with a calamity for entire nations." And he said to me, "It is very difficult to look around the world, at the suffering of people who can't even speak up, who don't have a say in decisions affecting their own future." But in Sarajevo, three such individuals had been gathered before him, and they did not need to be told about the cost of being ignored. A few weeks after the publication of the Srebrenica report, Annan presided over the release of a similar report on the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The story of Rwanda is not only more appalling than that of Srebrenica on account of its scale but also because the outside world's disengagement from Rwanda was not the sort of tragedy of careless good intentions that Annan described in Sarajevo. It was a matter of deliberate policy, and for the Clinton Administration the evasion of the world's post-Holocaust commitment to prevent genocide could not properly be called a failure. Washington's policy was to leave Rwanda to its own devices, and in that it was successful. Nor did the United States have a hard time persuading the rest of the U.N. to back off. France's position, as a protective patron of Rwanda's genocidal regime, was at least as compromising to the formulation of a credible international response. In fact, Rwanda itself had a seat on the Security Council, and its representative was accorded all diplomatic respect as he baldly lied about the crimes of his government. The story of Rwanda offers crushing proof that unity on the Council is no safeguard against cravenness. Unlike the Srebrenica report, which was commissioned by Annan and prepared by U.N. investigators, the Rwanda report was the work of an independent panel. And while it identified the overriding source of the U.N.'s failure as "a lack of resources and a lack of will" coming

from the member states, the Rwanda report named names, and it found that the actionsand, more important, the inactionsof the Secretariat and of Annan's peacekeeping department had, at crucial junctures, facilitated the indifference of the Council and of the member states in general. In 1998, the year before the report was released, Annan had visited Rwanda, and addressed the parliament. His audience was composed almost entirely of people who had been targeted for death. They applauded heartily when a government minister introduced him with a lengthy dressing-down. Annan tried to shrug this off. "The guest is always the prisoner of the host," he remarked, and then read his speech. "We must and we do acknowledge that the world failed Rwanda at that time of evil," he said. "The world must deeply repent this failure." But he drew the fury of his listeners when he went on to remind them, in scolding terms, that Rwanda's horror "came from within," and that Rwandans had to get their own house in order. A presidential spokesman denounced him as "arrogant," and top members of the country's post-genocide government boycotted a state dinner in his honor. It did not help Annan's case that in unscripted remarks during the same trip he dismissed questions about the way he and his deputies at peacekeeping headquarters had downplayed an astonishingly precise warning about an impending extermination campaignand plans to kill peacekeepers at the outsetsent to them by the U.N. force commander in Rwanda three months before the genocide began. "This is an old story which is being rehashed," he said. He also made the astonishing declaration that he felt no need to apologize personally in Rwanda, because, he said, "I have no regrets." But a year later, after the report took him to task for failing to brief the Secretary-General and the Security Council about the force commander's warning, and described his failure to follow up on the information as "incomprehensible," he said: "All of us must bitterly regret that we did not do more to prevent it. On behalf of the United Nations, I acknowledge this failure and express my deep remorse." His response was still carefully impersonal. Annan's habit of speaking in the name of the U.N. when he is criticized, and of casting the collective burden of the organization's failures on the shoulders of the world at large, stands in stark contrast to his willingness to take credit when there's praise to be had. It is a deeply ingrained reflex among U.N. officials to blame the member states for the organization's failures, just as the member states blame the U.N. for theirs. Invariably, there are well-founded grievances on both

sides of this seesaw of complaint, but they cannot properly be judged by the same standards. Michael Barnett, a political scientist who served at the American mission to the U.N. during the Rwandan catastrophe, and who has written a book called "Eyewitness to a Genocide," put the problem precisely. "To be cynical, I expect very little of member states," Barnett told me. "I don't necessarily expect the United States or France to rush into every killing field. That's not how they understand their purpose. But I do expect U.N. officials to act in a way that reflects an idea of the greater moral burden of the international community. They escaped scrutiny for years, because it was thought, Hey, these are U.N. officialswhy wouldn't they do their very best? Everybody bought the line that they did everything they could. And they bought it themselves. There's lots of blame to go around, but I worry that their failure to really account for how they conducted themselves means that they haven't internalized it." Given Annan's sphinx-like demeanor, it is difficult to tell what he has internalized. "I've never seen him flustered by professional setbacks," Shashi Tharoor told me, with admiration. "I remember at one point we were talking about something we'd been attacked for in PeacekeepingI can't even remember what it wasand Mr. Annan said, 'Children only throw stones at trees that bear fruit.' It's a lovely line because it means that we're being criticized because we're doing something." Tharoor described Annan's decision to accept and publish the Rwanda report as an act of "courage," which is an opinion widely shared in the Secretariat. When I mentioned this to Sir Brian Urquhart, he said, "Well, maybe it was courageous, but it was also an extremely shrewd move." After all, in quite literally bringing the skeletons out of the closet, the report created the impression that the U.N. had nothing to hide. A number of Annan's closest associates told me that they believed their boss was treated unfairly in the Rwanda report, because nothing he could have done in the months before the genocide would have made the member states a jot more willing to act when the killing began. This amounts to saying that the genocide was inevitable, and that the peacekeeping mission was useless from the outset. Annan himself said much the same thing when we talked on the evening before he left Sarajevo. In his view, whether the member states knew in advance that a genocide was being planned is immaterial. "I say, when they knew, what did they do?" he told me. "They went to Rwanda, picked up their nationals, and left." By then, however, all hell had broken loose. On the first day of the massacres, ten U.N. blue-helmets were killed, just as Annan had been warned; and, as Annan

never tires of saying, there is a world of difference between preventive peacekeeping in a permissive environment and attempted peace-enforcement in the teeth of a full-blown conflagration. Even if Annan's decision to keep his force commander's warnings to himself did no measurable harmand that is a big, and unprovable, ifthe fact remains that not doing wrong is a far cry from doing the right thing. The Security Council's pusillanimity in the face of the slaughter is not in dispute, but what are we to make of Annan's certainty that it would have been pointless to raise the alarm months earlier? How can he know when he didn't even try? "Maybe we were overly cautious," he said. Annan's Nobel Peace Prize shocked many of those who remembered the dead in Rwanda and Srebrenica. Yet, as an institutional man, it is not his soul but the soul of the U.N., if one can speak of such a thing, that concerns Annan, and it is in this capacity that he was awarded his share of the Nobelnot for ending or preventing wars but, as the citation said, for being "preeminent in bringing new life to the Organization." This revitalization is largely a consequence of getting Washington to pay its dues, and of the reorganization of the U.N. bureaucracy. But, beyond staving off bankruptcy and stagnation, Annan's larger mission of reform has been to salvage the U.N. from demoralization and marginalization by reversing the legacy of his peacekeeping years. To that end, his agenda has been propelled, where it might have been expected to be dragged down, by his intimate experience of past failures. According to Richard Holbrooke, Annan got his job because of his willingness, in the summer of 1995, to look beyond the narrow habits of conventional peacekeeping. In August of that year, in the wake of the Srebrenica massacre and of a mortar attack on civilians in an outdoor market in Sarajevo, Annan agreed to nato's aerial-bombing campaign, which finally drove the Serbs to the negotiating table at Dayton. Until then,nato airpower had been hamstrung by what was known as a "dual key" arrangement with the U.N., whereby both the Secretary-General and the nato command had to approve any air strikes, and Boutros-Ghali had vetoed all but the most limited pinprick bombing, for fear of appearing to take sides. But when Boutros-Ghali was travelling, Annan was left in charge of the U.N. key. "When Kofi turned it," Holbrooke told me, "he became Secretary-General in waiting." "I think we cannot live through some of the things that we lived through in the nineties without being affected, without being changed," Annan said to me in Sarajevo. He was staying at the Holiday Inn, where a decade earlier, at the start

of the war, the U.N. had set up its first offices just one floor away from the headquarters of Radovan Karadzic. Through the open window of Annan's suite, the sound of church bells mixed with the crackling wail of an evening call to prayer from a mosque. "I must say, to come back to Sarajevo today and see how they have rebuilt the city and to see people in the streets, when it used to be empty when you drove in from the airportbuildings without roofs, burned down, charred . . ." He trailed off. "You ask yourself," he said, "How can human beings be so wicked and brutal? Where is our conscience? Where's our humanity? How can this happen? And where was the rest of the world? Couldn't we have done more? Did we do enough? We were here, but was it enough?" The only possible answer was no. But Annan was more interested in the question: Why not? And to that his answer was, as always: The member states didn't want to. During the Rwandan genocide, Annan had set off a brief flap among African diplomats when he suggested to Le Monde that the reason African governments weren't contributing troops to peacekeeping was that they "probably need their armies to intimidate their own populations." During our talk in Sarajevo he reminded me that, in establishing the Srebrenica "safe area," the U.N. had originally asked for nearly thirty-five thousand peacekeepers to maintain it but was able to muster fewer than eight thousand from member states. At the same time, he said, the mandate kept shifting, and donor governments kept dithering about their commitments to the mission. Faced with such "dishonest" maneuvers, he said, "The U.N. gets set up and then it's blamed. And also you relieve the conscience of people, thinking, We've done something, we've sent in the U.N., even if it's a man and a half." Under the circumstances, he told me, "We should tell them, 'We can't do this.' We should give them the honest assessment of what we need. The decision is theirs." For Annan, the chief lesson of the past decade is that the U.N. must say no to impossible missions and insufficiently supported mandates. "Peacekeepers must never again be deployed into an environment in which there is no cease-fire or peace agreement," he said, in the conclusion of his report on Srebrenica. "If the necessary resources are not providedand the necessary political, military and moral judgments are not madethe job simply cannot be done." Of course, crises like Bosnia and Rwanda will continue to arise, and over the years Annan has argued that sovereignty must not be allowed to serve as a shield when a government turns against its civilians. In such cases, he supports "humanitarian intervention"military action to protect endangered people. Annan has even

suggested that premptive military action may be justified to avert the threat of a massive slaughter or a genocide. ("Oh dear," Colin Powell said, chuckling, when I mentioned this to him. "Then why do we get beat up?") As long ago as 1994, while the killing was still in full swing in Rwanda, Annan said that "if there is going to be another enforcement mission . . . it's likely to be the Desert Storm modelwhere the Security Council would authorize a group of member states to take all necessary means to correct or redress a situation." That is precisely the model that has been in play since he became Secretary-General. Annan was unhappy when nato states, faced with the threat of a Russian veto, bypassed the Security Council to intervene in Kosovo, but after the fighting the Council gave what amounted to retroactive approval to the action by placing the territory under U.N. administration. In East Timor, the Australians led a regional coalition that brought an end to the killings, pillage, and arson of Indonesian soldiers and militiamen run amok, and a U.N. administration then presided over the newborn country's transition to self-rule. In Afghanistan, the Council authorized the force led by the United States that drove the Taliban and Al Qaeda from power. And in early February the Council dispatched French and West African troops to attempt to enforce a tenuous peace treaty in the Ivory Coast. Annan has been supportive of each of these interventions. But the reliance on ad-hoc coalitions of national armies to take on the missions that the U.N. is incapable of managing leaves the organization more dependent than ever on the will of its member states. In each of the most recent cases, the primary military force in the campaign has come from countries with strong historical or strategic interests in the region. For places that lack such an appeal, there is no new model, and that means that much of Africa, in particular, is more orphaned than ever. For the past three years, Annan has been unable to raise a force of even seven thousand troopsthe number that failed to hold Srebrenicato beef up the U.N.'s minuscule peacekeeping mission in Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, where it is estimated that two to three million people have died since 1998 as a result of civil war and foreign occupation. Annan's overriding objective in reconceiving peacekeeping strategy was, as he said, to protect the U.N. from getting set up and blamed, and in this he has been remarkably successful. Since he took office, there have been no more false promises of protection made under the U.N. flag, no further infamies in the field, no more sagas of recrimination between the Secretariat and the member states. The record is clean, and its cleanliness has done much to restore trust in the U.N.,

and to bolster Annan's stature as a reformer and as a guardian of world order. Yet, as the case of Congo makes plain, the greater security of the U.N. does not necessarily translate into greater security for endangered peoples. It is estimated that more people have been killed in the fighting in Congo each month than have died in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the past two and a half years. Since the beginning of this year, tens of thousands of Congolese civilians have been displaced from their homes, and U.N. investigators have recently confirmed that rebel forces in the Ituri forests of the northeastern Congo have been massacring, raping, and even eating the Pygmies who have dwelt there for centuries. When I asked Annan how he thought the U.N. would respond if a situation like Rwanda in 1994 were to develop suddenly in Africa today, he said, "I'm not sure. I'm really not sure. I'm really not sure that it would shape up differently. I'm really not sure that the international community and countries with capacity would be ready to go. I was asked this by a young Rwandan woman when I gave a lecture at the Kennedy School, and I said, 'I wish I could give you the assurance, but I can't.' Honestly, I couldn't, and I can't today. But it doesn't mean I should give up." The paradox of Annan's tenure as Secretary-General is that he has strengthened the U.N. by diminishing its pretensions and ambitions to exercise the sort of power that sovereign states exercise. Indeed, he has succeeded in making a virtue of the organization's practical weakness. The U.N. no longer does what it cannot do properly, so it no longer invites expectations that it cannot fulfill, but it has grown in stature as a hub of diplomacy, where the most important matterswar and peaceare debated, negotiated, and at times, at least temporarily, resolved. What the U.N. offers its membersits primary product, as it wereis legitimacy. Annan's political credo is pure multilateralism. The Security Council's decree is international law, and anyone who acts outside it is an outlaw in the international community. That is what he means by legitimacy: the U.N. seal of approval. Annan's position is unambiguous, or so it seemed, anyway, until George Bush laid down his challenge in the General Assembly in September. Bush wanted the U.N.'s approval, but he did not ask for legitimacy. He believed that he already had it, because Saddam had flouted so many U.N. resolutions, and he was inviting the U.N. to legitimate itself. Bush purported to be suing for peace, and for a time it was not only imprudent but impossible to say that an American invasion of Iraq was inevitable. After all, by submitting to the diplomatic process, Bush opened himself to the remote possibility that Saddam would

comply so fully with weapons inspections as to moot the prospect of war. But there was little doubt as to what Bush expected once the inspectors got to work: either Saddam would obstruct them or they would find his weapons, and one way or the other, in short order, the Iraqis would be shown to be in "material breach" of the Council's resolutions. Even Annan, who made no secret of his hope that the resumption of inspections might avert war, expressed little confidence in Iraqi cooperation. "It's difficult to say what Saddam thinks would be a positive outcome," he said over breakfast in Washington a few days after Resolution 1441 was passed. "The only guide I could have is they keep saying they have no weapons of mass destruction, which nobody believes." The debate over the passage and implementation of Resolution 1441 in the following months was as much about the fate of the U.N. as an arbiter of legitimacy as about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. "If the U.S. walks away from the table and acts unilaterally, there's a very good risk that the U.S. won't walk back, and that's a big challenge to the Security Council," a European diplomat said. "So it's a game of chicken. The U.N.'s all about consensus, and if the U.S. comes and says, 'Our way or no way,' it's very unpleasant." Considering the stakes for the U.N., he said, "This is a conflict that could turn out to be about the way the world is orderedby shared rules or by a return to a world of great powers." On his way back to New York from the Balkans, just before Thanksgiving, Annan stopped in Paris for a lunch of red mullet, squab, cheeses, and terrific twelve-year-old wines, with President Jacques Chirac, at the lyse Palace. They finished off with a mandarin ice, and descended for a brief "press encounter" in a baroque ballroom, ornately pilastered and gilded, with lots of cherubs in the ceilings. Annan said that full Iraqi compliance with Resolution 1441 was "the only way to avoid a military conflict in the region," and Chirac rumbled that "all outcomes are possible" if the Iraqis failed to meet their obligations. "For the Europeans, building on the lessons of two world wars, sovereignty is in a sense shared. We are building our European destiny together," the French Ambassador, Jean-David Levitte, told me in Paris. "A euro is shared sovereignty. Would you consider sharing the dollar with the Mexican and the Canadian? Give them a say in the future of the dollar? Of course not. Sovereignty for you is paramount. For us it's a value which must be shared in the world of today and even more tomorrow. So for us the U.N. is not a problem." Leaving aside Chirac's historical softness on Saddam, and French oil interests, it was somewhat implausible for a diplomat from one of the most

fiercely nationalistic and independent-minded countries in the world to suggest that sovereignty is a matter of indifference. Levitte got at the deeper truth about his government's position, it seemed, when he said, "We need the U.S. in the U.N., fully participating. Otherwise, everybody loses." For, just as the Security Council can serve as a check on America's freedom to project its power abroad, France's permanent seat on the Council amplifies its importance on the international stage. When the U.N. was established, France was a global power by virtue of its empire, with colonies in Indochina, the South Pacific, and across north and west Africa. Now, shorn of its overseas dominions, France would be just another midsized European power (albeit with nuclear bombs) if it weren't for the extraordinary leverage of its veto on the Council. Bush's professed willingness to go it alone in Iraq posed a threat to the French, but they welcomed the debate as an opportunity to exercise some influence. "We were so happy when we heard Bush's speech on the twelfth of September," Levitte said, and he added, "So now what we hope for is that President Bush will act according to what was agreed. The rule of the game is very clear." In Washington's view, too, the rules were clear: comply or die. But the Bush Administration's eagerness for U.N. collaboration in its campaign against Saddam sent a message that counteracted its high-noon rhetoric and endowed the Council's multilateralist mission with more immediate relevance than it has had since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Never, in the intervening years, had the U.N. been more important as a forum for international debate; and never had it been more imperilled by the prospect of being left on the margins of the action. Annan played his part in the drama by preserving a tone of perfect impartiality, stumping simultaneously for peace and for the unity of the Council. But with each passing month, as Saddam remained defiant and Bush kept massing forces around Iraq, the two principles appeared increasingly incompatible, and Annan began speaking of a grim day of reckoning ahead for the multilateralist order. The Bush Administration's patience for diplomacy seemed unlikely to endure much beyond the onset of the crippling heat of the Arabian summer in the latter half of March, and as Washington intensified its pressure on the Council to gird for war, the French mounted a diplomatic counter-offensive. It was no longer just the fate of the U.N. that was at stake in the transatlantic rupture. The broader multilateralist order of the Western world, represented by nato and the European Union, appeared to be coming apart at the seams. On February 14th, when Hans Blix reported that Iraq was still not fully and actively coperating but might yet come around, the French foreign minister's impassioned plea for more time drew

applause from spectators in the Council gallery. Rather than hardening the international rift between hawks and doves, however, this moment of triumph for France gave way almost immediately to a cooling-off period. Washington, still in lockstep with London, delayed demanding a timetable for the diplomatic endgame or a new resolution that would authorize the use of force, and France, feeling that it had been paid attention tothat it had demonstrated the limits of Yankee power and proven the world to be multipolar after alljoined with the European Union in thanking the Americans for exerting the military pressure on Iraq that made inspections possible, and reaffirming that all options were open, even war. But, speaking for himself, Chirac made it clear that a Council veto was also possible. Annan still spoke of a peaceful way out of the crisis, as long as everyone involved stuck to the technical and legal terms of the Council's resolutions. The onus was on Baghdad, of course, but while travelling in Europe late in February Annan urged the European Union and nato allies to "lower the decibels, avoid the tendency to turn on each other, and focus on Iraq." He spoke of the E.U. and nato not as independent centers of global power but almost as if they were subsidiaries of the U.N. whose tussles were getting in the way of the broader international cause. "If they had accepted the primacy of the Security Council and said, 'The Council is dealing with it, and we don't have to get involved here,' they wouldn't have had all these divisions," he told me. He used what were, for him, particularly sharp words about Washington and London's lofty justifications for an assault on Baghdad. "Quite frankly, some of the recent arguments about wars of liberation, and of moral law . . . these are issues that the Council has never discussed. For the Council, the issue is disarmament, and all these other issues muddy the waters, and the public gets confused, and the Security Council and the U.N. members get confused." In the absence of any new discoveries of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration has groped for an alternative casus belli: a link between Baghdad and Al Qaeda, Saddam's cruelty to his own people, democratization of the Middle East. But, like any legal system, the Security Council cannot sustain such extraneous arguments and must focus on the case before it, and despite Annan's past talk of supporting "humanitarian intervention" to bring dangerous tyrants to heel, he has carefully avoided making such a case against Saddam. Still, as Hans Blix made clear on Valentine's Day, even by the loosest interpretation of Resolution 1441, Iraq remains in contempt of international law; and, by all accounts, Saddam's defiance was strengthened by the antiwar

speeches that followed Blix's report. This leaves the Security Council in the same bind Bush placed it in in September, when he confronted it with its own logic and proposed that for the first time in history the world should go to war in defense of U.N. resolutions. For now, a U.N. diplomat observed, "The United States is having a problem with the Council similar to the one Blix contends he's having with the Iraqis. They're getting coperation on process but not on substance. Ultimately, process will not be enough, not for Blix and not for the United States, and that will be the U.N.'s moment of truth." Despite the threats of irrelevance, the bitter fraying of old alliances, and the possibility that instead of preventing war the Security Council will legitimate a campaign that few of its members believe to be desirable or just, the Iraq crisis has been a tremendous boon to the U.N. Whether out of hope or desperation, public opinion is far better disposed to entrusting the decision on whether to go to war against Saddam to the Security Council than to the White House. "In the past, one would have expected only politicians and diplomats to refer to the Security Council, or say we have to go to the Security Council," Annan said to me. "But now, incredibly, you see the peoples of the world, in whose name the Charter was written, saying, 'Don't ignore the Security Council.' And this is not just outside the United States but even in the U.S." Annan wants the Council to take a unified positionand if that means war, so be it. If peace cannot be preserved, then Annan will stand for international order. In the logic of the United Nations, every war should be, in effect, a world wara collective quest for collective securityand as one of Annan's aides put it to me, "No one sees a way out." Another member of the Secretariat put it a bit less gloomily. "I suspect we may all look back on this period as a time when the world sought to show it has an influence over what the U.S. is ultimately going to do in Iraq, when in reality that influence is marginal. That said, the importance of the U.N. for future crises should not be underestimated." After all, he said, "Next time the world needs to come together to address a global threateven if we can't agree on how to do itthis is where it will happen. Where else?"

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/03/03/030303fa_fact1?printable =true&currentPage=all#ixzz2d1t1b9et

LETTER FROM ZIMBABWE

WASTELAND
Comrade Mugabe is clinging to power, and taking his country down with him.
by Philip GourevitchJUNE 3, 2002

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Fifteen years ago, Richard Pascall, a professional hunter and safari guide, bought a fifty-two-thousand-acre farm near the village of Turk Mine, in Matabeleland, the western region of Zimbabwe, and began raising a herd of African black rhinoceroses. He went about this in the usual way: fencing in a large patch of bush (eighty per cent of his land), releasing some rhinos onto it, and leaving them to their own devices. Thats about all there is to rhino-culture: if water is scarce, as it is in Matabeleland, you pump some of it for the animals, and if poachers are to be feared, as they are wherever rhinos range, you establish patrols to keep them at bay. Beyond that, you stay out of the way and hope the rhinos will be fruitful and multiply, because they are among the most endangered animals on earth. Since 1970, when seventy thousand black rhinos roamed the continent, poachers and habitat destruction have depleted their numbers by ninety-six per cent, and today just twenty-seven hundred survive. By contrast, Pascall started out with eleven rhinos, and by the turn of the century he had thirty. His farm, Gourlays Ranch, where he lived with his wife, Carol, and two daughters, was considered one of the most successful rhino-salvage efforts in Africa subsidized by foreign investors and contributors, valued at thirty million dollars, and protected under Zimbabwean law as a wildlife conservancy. But two years ago, when a man who called himself Hitler Hunzvi turned up at the gate, leading a gang of more than a hundred armed vigilantes, the Pascalls suddenly found themselves as endangered as their mammoth wards. Hunzvi claimed the Pascalls land in the name of the Zimbabwean people, and advised Pascall to surrender if he didnt want worse things to happen to him. Pascall stood his ground. There was a scuffle. Pascall wore a pistol in a shoulder holster, and, as Hunzvis men grappled to disarm him, the gun discharged twice. Nobody was hit, but the shots heightened the tension. Hunzvis men entered Pascalls house, where the walls are heavily hung with the trophy heads of big game. They made him open a safe in which he kept his hunting rifles, and helped themselves to a dozen. Im a born-again Christian, Pascall told me recently, and I sincerely believe that day I had angels all round me, because they should have killed me. Hunzvis raid on Gourlays was filmed by a cameraman from Zimbabwes state-controlled television, and in pictures the crux of the confrontation was plain to see: the Pascalls are white, and their attackers were black. Hunzvi was the head of the national association of liberation war veterans, who in the nineteenseventies had fought for black-majority rule against the white-supremacist regime of Rhodesia, as the countrya British colonywas then known.

Independence had come in 1980, but twenty years later, although whites counted for less than one per cent of the countrys twelve million citizens, they still controlled most of its wealth, and just forty-five hundred white farmers held title to seventy per cent of the prime agricultural land. In seeking to liberate the Pascalls property by force, Hunzvi purported to be fulfilling the revolution he had fought forand, as the presence of the state television made clear, he was doing so with the blessing of President Robert Mugabe. Hunzvi, however, was not a veteran of any combat. He had spent much of the war in Poland, where he trained as a doctor and married a local woman who later left him and wrote a memoir, White Slave, in which she remembered her husband as a wife-beating, unfaithful, vain sadist. Back in Zimbabwe, Hunzvi managed in the early nineties to insinuate himself into the state bureaucracy, and, as an assessor for the War Victims Compensation Fund, doled out subsidies to injured veterans. Within a few years, he had bankrupted the fund by awarding huge sums for scurrilous complaints to a veritable Whos Who of President Mugabes ruling clique. (Mugabes brother-in-law, for example, received seventy thousand dollars for ulcers and a scar on his left knee.) At the same time, Hunzvi began mobilizing mobs to stage street demonstrations in Harare, the nations capital, demanding pensions and a host of other benefits for veterans. Many of Hunzvis followers were plainly too young to have fought in the seventies, but the spectacle of rebellious liberation fighters embarrassed Mugabe, who had come to power at independence as a liberation hero. When the scandal of the war victims fund was made public, and Mugabe realized how deeply the rot reached into his court, he cut a deal with Hunzvi which has defined Zimbabwean history ever since: every war veteran would get a hefty onetime disbursement, followed by a lifetime monthly check, as well as free medical care and free access to educationand, above all, land. The demand for land had been Hunzvis final coup: he threatened to lead his men into the bush to wage war and seize white-owned farms if Mugabe did not capitulate. After all, Mugabe had promised during the independence struggle to grant every black Zimbabwean some acreage as a reward for victory. Over time, however, he had proved less interested in resolving the land issue than in exploiting it as a bully pulpit from which to deflect attention from the predatory corruption of his ruling party, ZANU-P.F. (Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front). His schemes for redistributing farms had been consistently reckless, illegal, and destructive, each bringing greater suffering than the last to the rural poor it purported to serve. Much of the best land seized by the

government wound up in the hands of Mugabes cronies; farm laborers were left unemployed and homeless; productive farms were laid to waste; and impoverished Zimbabweans who were given plots were not given legal title but were simply allowed to subsist as squatters. Under the circumstances, Mugabe regarded Hunzvi not as a menace but as an ally, and announced plans to nationalize roughly half of the remaining white farmland in the country, without compensation. The combined effects of the governments payout to the war veterans and the devastating blow to commercial agriculturewhich accounted for half the countrys foreign-exchange income and more than a quarter of its jobsplunged Zimbabwes already beleaguered economy into chaos. The currency lost nearly half its value overnight; international investors and aid donors bolted; and many whites who had been sufficiently content with their privilege that they had stayed out of politics since independence began making common cause with reformminded black activists. In February of 2000, when Mugabe unleashed Hunzvis war veterans to occupy white-owned farms by force, the action was clearly understood as punishment for white support of the nascent opposition party, the M.D.C. (Movement for Democratic Change), which had just led a successful campaign to defeat a new constitution that would have expanded Mugabes already extraordinary powers. It was the first time Mugabe had been rejected by voters, and, with parliamentary elections looming in June of 2000, the assault on whites was accompanied by a less publicized but often more brutal campaign of violence against black oppositionists and sympathizers. Zimbabweans who thought that Mugabe had paid off Hunzvi to keep him quiet found themselves wondering who had ultimately copted whom. Richard Pascall had no doubt about it. He was an active M.D.C. supporter, and his farm was among the first in Matabeleland to be invaded. After surrendering his rifles, he had watched Hunzvis men go on a rampage around his property, looting blankets and radios from the homes of his ranch staff. The staff had fled in terror, but a young black neighbor who wandered into the housing area during the attack was beaten up and carried off by the veterans. Hunzvi himself didnt stay long at Gourlays; he had other farms to invade, and he was busy, too, running a medical clinic outside Harare which was used as a torture center, where naked M.D.C. supporters were beaten on the bottoms of their feet and subjected to electric shocks. Hunzvi died last year, apparently of AIDS and malaria, but his war veterans have continued his campaign. More than a hundred of his followers

remain encamped on the Pascalls ranch, claiming patches of land for themselves and selling off plots to local villagers. Weve had to adapt to a form of coexistence, Pascall told me, when I visited the place one afternoon in February. His safari business had collapsed, but he refused to leave his rhinos. I speak the language fluently. I grew up here with these people as playmates. So its a give-and-take, but mostly we give and they take. Robert Mugabe is seventy-eight years old, and has repeatedly vowed to stay in power for the rest of his life. In this spirit of relentlessness, he has made it a crime, punishable by six months in jail, for two or more people in Zimbabwe to meet and discuss politics without obtaining a permit from the police at least four days in advance. The permit is just a nicety; the Public Order and Security Act (POSA), which elaborates the offense, allows the police to bar whomever they like from attending even an authorized political discussion, or to break it up at any time without explanation. To be sure, the law doesnt prohibit a person from conducting a solitary monologue about politics, but anyone doing so must be careful what he says, since POSA also makes it a crime, punishable by a big fine and a year in jail, to make a false statement engendering hostility towards or causing hatred, contempt or ridicule of the President, or, indeed, to make any statement about or concerning him that is abusive, indecent, obscene or false. The sharpest sting of this last stipulation is in its tailin the choice of the word or to qualify the word falsewhich tells you that even an irrefutably true criticism of the President is grounds for arrest and punishment. Comrade Mugabe, as he likes to be called, was running for relection when he signed POSA into law, in January, and his message to voters could not have been clearer: Put up and shut up, or else. Zimbabweans were alarmed but not surprised. Officially, Zimbabwe remains a parliamentary democracy, but in reality Mugabe presides over the country as a tyrant in the classical sense of the word: an autocrat who rules exclusively for his own gratification, with contempt for the common good. Although he has continued to stage elections in order to maintain a veneer of international legitimacy, his preferred vote-winning strategies have always been intimidation and terror. Despite the brutal campaign in the parliamentary elections of 2000, however, the M.D.C. had succeeded in sweeping fifty-seven of a hundred and twenty contested seats, and now Mugabe was desperate. The Presidential election was to be held in mid-March, and for the first time in his political career he was running as the underdog candidate, trailing the M.D.C. leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, a former trade-union boss, by

substantial margins. Zimbabweans finally appeared to have had enough of a regime that had transformed what was once one of Africas most prosperous countries into a domain of bloody disorder with one of the fastest-shrinking economies on earth. The annual inflation is close to a hundred and fifteen per cent. The national treasury is bankrupt. The Army is engaged in a futile intervention in Congos civil war, at a cost of dozens of lives and an estimated million dollars a day. The health-care system is essentially defunct, and, with a quarter of the population infected with AIDS, the funeral business is among the countrys last remaining growth industries. When Mugabe said of Zimbabwe last year, This is my territory and that which is mine I cling [to] unto death, his subjects might well have wondered whether he was speaking of their death: the life expectancy of Zimbabweans has fallen by some fifteen years during his tenure, and now hovers around forty. Sixty per cent of Zimbabweans are unemployed, and those who have jobs earn, on average, less than they did at independence. The rest of the population scrapes by on less than a dollar a day, which might still buy a bellyful if the crippling effect of the farm invasionscompounded this year by regional droughthadnt created drastic food shortages, raising the prospect of imminent nationwide famine. Unable to run on his record, Mugabe sought instead to run from it, by rallying his crumbling black base around the spectre of a common enemy: the whites. He didnt care that ninety-seven per cent of M.D.C. voters and candidates were black. Behind these human superficies, he told the ZANU-P.F. central committee in July of 2000, Tsvangirais party represented the resurgence of white power and the revulsive ideology of return to white settler rule. In his view, the new opposition was just the old Rhodesian enemy got up in blackface, an imperialist fifth column, sponsored by Londonwith help from Washingtona counter-revolutionary Trojan horse contrived and nurtured by the very inimical forces that enslaved and oppressed our people yesterday. And at his first rally of this years campaign he declared, We are in a war to defend our rights and the interests of our people. The British have decided to take us on through the M.D.C. . . . We went to war; we went to prison; we have suffered over the years; but we are not afraid of the struggle. We will not run away. You can count on us to fight. Tsvangirai, for his part, preached a strict gospel of nonviolence, rule of law, economic reform, pluralism, withdrawal from Congo, friendly relations with Western aid donors, and legal and equitable land redistribution, and he never let

Mugabe forget that his status as the incumbent was a staggering campaign handicap. Tsvangirais rallieswhen he was not barred from holding them, as he often waswere defiantly festive affairs, with much song and dance. A burly man, with a fearless, jovial air, he came across as a populist, and drew his greatest support from urbanites and the young. (Two out of three Zimbabweans are under the age of twenty-five, and have no memory of colonialism.) But the M.D.C.s mild-mannered message of reform often sounded nave in the face of ZANUs violence. In the runup to the elections, more than a hundred M.D.C. members and supporters were murdered, and thousands more were beaten, tortured, or raped by ZANU-P.F. thugs, often operating in complicity with the police and with Zimbabwes Central Intelligence Organization. M.D.C. officials and candidates were arbitrarily arrested, and harassed with absurd criminal charges. (Tsvangirai himself was a target of assassination attempts, and in the final weeks of the campaign was accused of plotting to kill Mugabe, and booked for treason.) Oppositionists homes and offices were ransacked and, not infrequently, fire bombed. Reporters and editors in Zimbabwes independent press corps were subjected to the same treatment, while many foreign reporters and their news organizations were either expelled from the country or refused accreditation to work there. As the election campaign intensified, ZANU-P.F. youth militias fanned out across the country, setting up roadblocks, where voters who could not present a party card were beaten and informed that their votes would not be secret: to support the M.D.C. was to risk death, the militia said, and the lesson was underscored by the slogan Vote ZANU-P.F. and live. Toward the end of February, with three weeks to go before the voting, I flew into Bulawayo, Zimbabwes second-largest city and the capital of Matabeleland, and was given a two-week tourist visa. As a stronghold of M.D.C. support, Bulawayo was a community suspended between hope and dread. I was curious about the whites, a vestigial population. They thought of themselves as Zimbabweans first and Africans more generally, but although there were distinct differences between their culture and the European culture from which they had derived, the differences between their world and that of their black neighbors and compatriots were even greater. Many were giving up on Zimbabwe, and emigrating; sendoff partiesdour affairshad become far more frequent among them than births, weddings, and funerals. Tens of thousands of blacks with the means to get out have also fled in recent years, adding a severe brain drain to Zimbabwes woes. But many black Zimbabweans in exile hope to return if conditions improve. For whites, departure

is almost always permanenta surrender, or a cutting of losses, and one need not indulge in colonial nostalgia, or overlook the injustice of white affluence, to recognize that the loss is Zimbabwes as well. For all his fine talk of economic indigenization and black empowerment, Mugabe has betrayed the promises of liberation and self-determination, and, faced with the evidence of his failure, he has come to behave toward his country like a vicious child with a toy he has broken, smashing away at it as if to prove that if he cannot make it work he can make sure that it never forgets to whom it belongs. You know whats at stake? the Bulawayo businessman said to me. Survival. He was in his early forties, a chain-smoker, with a scrappy manner, a small man with a big voice, and he had a habit of setting up his statements with questions. You want to know how people feel here right now? Theres only one word. Threatened. Threatened. Blacks and whites are shit-scared. Theres another word, too, said his wife, who was the same age and same height as he. Hopeful. Goddam right, he said. Shit-scared and hopeful. Blacks and whites. The businessman and his wife are white. Both were working hard for an M.D.C. victory. We sat in their kitchen, where the traffic was heavy, with dinner cooking, children coming and going, and visitors appearing at the door: a white farmer friend, with news of the latest war-veteran activity near his farm; a black M.D.C. candidate arranging for the businessman to drive him through his rural constituency on a campaign swing; and a white man with a fistful of e-mailencryption software for the family computer. Meet the I.T. man for the coverts, the businessman said. You see, everybodys doing his bit. Every half hour, he jumped up and went into his den to check the TV news headlines. Mugabe had just expelled the head of a European Union election-observer team, calling him an illegal alien and accusing him of political cheek. Just as Africans arent invited to referee the legitimacy of European elections, the President said, the conduct of Zimbabwes vote would be judged by observer teams from southern Africa and elsewhere on the continent, notably Nigeria. The European Union had responded by imposing smart sanctions against the regime, targeting Mugabe and his inner circle by freezing their assets in the E.U., barring them from travelling there, and sending their children home from some European schools. Too little, too late, argued M.D.C. leaders, who had been calling for such measures for years. The businessman agreed. He considered it racist to suggest that African elections should be judged by African standards, and it angered him especially that the government of South Africa, the regional

superpower, was conspicuously reluctant to criticize Mugabe, even as Zimbabwes decline was causing its own economy to suffer. There was never any chance that the election would be either free or fair, yet, between Tsvangirais popularity and Mugabes strong-arm tactics, nobody could say what the outcome might be. Early in Februar y, Mugabes information minister, Jonathan Moyo, had declared, We should not demean the African struggles for liberation by using the fiction of democracy. The businessman also considered the election to be about something much larger than Zimbabwea make-or-break situation for all Africaand he said, If democracy prevails here, the First World better take note and come to the party, because its southern Africa thats being saved. Then he said, You know, the militias are camped two miles from here in a schoolfifty or more of them, ZANU-P.F. youth. Whats that about? Kids putting up campaign posters? No. Intimidation. Its just total harassment and intimidation. Id heard about the militia presence the day before, from Fletcher Dulini, the M.D.C.s national treasurer, who told me about attacks hed encountered on a recent campaign swing: a brick through a windshield, a log swung at the door of his car as it passed, the police refusing to intervene when the candidates complained. This is their strategy, Dulini said of ZANU-P.F. agents. That sort of psychology that is a kind of mental torturethey do it just to waste our time and keep us from campaigning about the issues. Twice during our conversation, his cell phone rang with reports of attacks on M.D.C. offices in Harare. Dulini spoke of these things with a chipper, goes-with-the-territory air, but the third time his cell phone rang he hung up in an anxious mood, and left immediately. His wife had just seen a militia mob milling near their home. Half an hour later, as I drove through Dulinis neighborhood, I came around a bend and there they were: twenty or thirty young men on either side of the road, jostling along in a pack at a hurried, agitated pace, silhouetted in the dusk. I drove through the gantlet they formed, and they paid no attention, but a mile farther on I realized that my chest and jaw were still tight. Later still, I met a twenty-three-year-old gardener and M.D.C. sympathizer, who had been abducted by ZANU-P.F. thugs a week earlier from a local shopping center. He and another man were beaten for several hours, then loaded into a truck, blindfolded, and driven into the bush, where they were made to lie on the ground and roll from side to side while ten men took turns whipping them. Finally, they were stripped naked, and left by the roadside. The gardeners back was crosshatched from his shoulders to his waist with stringy scabs that were starting to knit into scars.

Mugabes a piece of work, and he deserves to be in prison with Milosevic, the businessman said. Zimbabweans often spoke of Mugabe and Slobodan Milosevic in the same breath, especially to say what the businessmans wife told me: Two years ago, it was watching Milosevic go down that moved us to think, Oh, maybe that could happen herenonviolent change. Actually, two years ago it was the no vote on the constitution that changed it for me, the businessman said. People here stood up and said no. Seeing that they could do thatthat was powerful. The businessman and his wife seemed to draw strength from talking of courage and possibility. But toward the end of the evening we moved into the den to watch a special television report being broadcast from South Africa about prelection violence committed in Zimbabwe in recent weeks by ZANU-P.F. militants. The images were grim: lacerated bodies, punctured bodies, brown bodies bruised charcoal black. There was a woman who had been whipped for trying to protect her husband from a whipping. The woman was carrying her daughter in her arms, and the babys cheek had been torn open by a barbed-wire lash. We have to talk about what to do, the businessman said. I want the kids out of the country. His wife agreed that if Mugabe remained in power Zimbabwe was no place to raise children, but the prospect of leaving upset her as much as the thought of staying. What would you do? she asked. On the eve of the election, I received an e-mail from the businessmans wife, reminding me of another time when whites and blacks were both scared and hopeful: April 18, 1980, Zimbabwes independence day. After seven years of war, the white-supremacist Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, had done what he had sworn he would never do in a thousand years, and yielded to black-majority rule. In Harare, the British flag flying above the state house was taken downthe last time it flew over an African colonyand nobody knew what to expect. Any number of whites, filled with Smiths propaganda images of black Marxist guerrillas bent on avenging historical wrongs, pictured themselves slaughtered in their beds. But Mugabe went on television and read a speech that is still remembered throughout Africa and abroad as one of the great declarations of the age. In the name of reconciliation, he issued what amounted to a blanket amnesty to everyone on all sides of the recent conflict, and declared that he would draw a line through the past. The businessmans wifes e-mail consisted of a short excerpt from that speech:

If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and an ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. . . . The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten. If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lesson the past has taught us, namely that oppression and racism are inequalities that must never find scope in our political and social system. It could never be a correct justification that because the whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power. An evil remains an evil whether practiced by white against black or black against white.

Mugabe, who was reared in Jesuit mission schools and has half a dozen college and university degrees to his namethree of them earned by correspondence during ten years spent in Rhodesian jailshas always been described as a hard man to know, bitter and secretive by nature. That he is devoid of charm is indisputable. Even on his election posters, he appeared lonely and joyless: an old man, with a thin scolding mouth and frightened eyes fixed behind big spectacles in a blank, distant stare, angrily shaking a raised fist. But, for all his high-blown anti-colonial and Marxist rhetoric, he is famously opportunistic on most matters of political principle, at once hard-nosed and capricious, a man of his word, whose word is forever changing. In his intolerance for dissent, however, he is absolute and unyielding, and, once the Rhodesian state had been dismantled, he recognized that whites were no longer a threat to him. On the contrary, he needed them to maintain the economy while he established his power. Although a hundred thousand whiteshalf of the white populationhad left Zimbabwe by 1985, those who stayed prospered. Anthony Lewis, writing in this magazine a year after independence, described an Alice-in-Wonderland quality in the attitude of white Zimbabweans toward Mugabe: He was the chief villain. Now he is the person on whom white hopes rest, the man of moderation and authority. Mugabes conciliatory racial stance also served as a convenient smoke screen in 1982, when he sent a special division of his army into Matabeleland, the home territory of the man who was then his chief political rival, Joshua Nkomo, in a bid to silence dissent there forever. The unittrained and equipped by North Korea, in a gesture of revolutionary solidaritywas known as the Fifth Brigade, but it is better remembered by the name Mugabe gave it: Gukurahundi, which means the rain that washes the chaff away in advance of the spring rains. Some of the measures we shall take are measures which will be extra-legal, Mugabe told parliament as he prepared for the operation, adding, An eye for an eye and an ear for an ear may not be adequate in our circumstances. We might very well demand two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye. This proved to be a gross understatement. During the

Gukurahundi terror, at least twenty thousand civilians were slaughtered, while many more were driven from their homes, flogged, starved to the brink of death, raped, or, at least, forced to witness such atrocities, and even to pretend to celebrate them in song and dance. (First you will eat your chickens, then your goats, then your cattle, then your donkeys. Then you will eat your children, and finally you will eat the dissidents, a Gukurahundi officer told villagers who had been deliberately cut off from food supplies.) The dead were generally disposed of in unmarked mass graves, and survivors were assured that if they ever spoke of their ordeal they could expect a similar fate. The terror was brought to a halt only in 1987, when Nkomo, who had fled into exile, signed a unity pact, and what remained of his party was subsumed into Mugabes, transforming Zimbabwe into a de-facto one-party state. For the next decadeuntil Hitler Hunzvi loosed his mobs on the streets of Hararefew Zimbabweans dared to oppose the regime, and those who did were easily copted, or, if that tactic failed, crushed. Indeed, looking back, many Zimbabweans will tell you that if Mugabe had stepped down, as many in his party had urged him to do, at the time of the last Presidential elections, in 1996, he would probably be remembered forgivingly, as he likes to imagine himself, as a hero of liberation, and an eminent African statesmanif not a Nelson Mandela, whose all-eclipsing nobility Mugabe bitterly resents. He would certainly not rank among the infamous dictators for whom he has expressed admiration over the years: Nicolae Ceausescu, of Romania; Kim Il Sung, of North Korea; Enver Hoxha, of Albania; and Mengistu Haile Mariam, of Ethiopia, who is wanted for crimes against humanity at home and now lives under political asylum in Harare. But ever since Mugabes pact with Hunzvi and the war veterans, he has steered a course of pure destruction. The staple food of Zimbabwe is maize. People eat it as a milled cereal boiled into porridge, and they regard it in the way that Asians regard riceas essential. But since the farm invasions began, in 2000, commercial farmers have seen their harvests drop by at least forty per cent a year, and by mid-February there was no maize to be found in most stores. (It didnt help matters that war veterans had seized control of grain distribution, and that maize was being trucked to ZANUP.F. rallies as bait to lure the crowds.) Zimbabwe has long been known as the regions breadbasket, and neighboring countries were also feeling the pinch. Total food deficit, a white farmer Ill call JoJo said. Its going to kill southern Africa.

Already, farmers were slaughtering their livestock because the government had proclaimed maize a strategic resource and confiscated animal-feed reserves. Chicken and egg production is plummeting, JoJo said, adding, Think of it from a livestock point of view, and its symbolic of the rest of the country. There are ninety thousand pigs in this country. Slaughter them now, and itll take four to five years to get pork back up to speed. Same with everything. He went on, We used to have a strategic reserve of maize of eight hundred thousand tons, and that was untouchable. Last year, the government sold it to get foreign currency to buy fuel. Why did they run out of fuel? The story is they stole it all. Corruption. JoJos farm is about fifty miles northwest of Bulawayo, a spread of forty-two thousand acres in the low rolling veldt that flattens out toward the frontier with Botswana and the Kalahari sands. His family has been on the place since 1896, and JoJo figures that three-quarters of it is now occupied, by some fifteen hundred people. Shortly after his land was invaded, in mid-April of 2000, one of his neighbors, a white farmer named Martin Olds, was murdered by war veterans. We were warned that armed people had moved into the area, and Id been tipped off that he and I were possible targets, JoJo said. We all moved into one house here, but he was on his own. We were alerted at 6:20 A.M. that hed been surrounded. When we tried to get to help him, they had roadblocks in the way and we were shot at. Eventually, the police came and let us in, saying he was still firing indiscriminately. But in fact he was dead. JoJo didnt want to dwell on the incident. Theyd murdered a couple of white guys in the east, in Mashonaland, so they had to murder a couple here to send the message. JoJo had been heavily involved in the parliamentary election campaign in 2000 as an M.D.C. activist, but this year he said, Were lying low. If we didnt, wed be slaughtered. He said hed lost count of how many times his family had been threatened, but as part of his survival strategy he has learned over the past two years not to blame the squatters personally for their presence on his land. After all, he said, Not one resettled African has title. Its a monumental cock-up. Theyre just being dumped on the land. Theyre victims, in their own way, as much as we are. Still, he took some pride in comparing the squatters droughtstricken maize patchessunburned leaves rattling on dry, stubby stalkswith his own well-irrigated acreage, with its tall, fat-eared yield. They dont know what theyre doing, he said, adding, What I hate is how impotent I feel impotent because weve been closed down to help people that are starving, impotent to help development, impotent to get out and help the opposition.

JoJo lives in a house that his grandparents built in the nineteen-twenties, a place redolent of the colonial idyll, with floors carpeted in leopard skins and a maid who brought tea in a Spode china pot (rosebud chintz) with a Wedgwood cup, saucer, and sugar bowl. At night, JoJo produced some port, and said, I think every Zimbabwean white farmer appreciates by now the need for major land reform, but none of us can identify with the way its being done. He told me that hed have no problem giving up as much as half of his land, as long as he could give his expertise along with it, so that resettled blacks had some hope of agricultural success. In the morning, he drove me for several hours around his property: chicken houses; maize fields; a large area of low sandy soil laced with drip-irrigation hoses, where paprika, a highly lucrative export crop, is grown; a refrigerated room where fresh peas awaited shipment to London green markets; a machine shop; the farmworkers housing; and a school and medical clinic. It was a small village. I was amazed at how much of it remained operational after two years of occupation, but JoJo said hed been reduced to little more than subsistence farming. It cannot be in the national interest to destroy this, he said. Weve had sixty to eighty of these war-vet guys beating at the gate with axes, and Ill sit down and offer them tea and talk to them, because what are your alternatives? If you lose your cool, thats what they want. I think the government is terribly frustrated that were still here. They thought wed all just pack up and leave. Hed been tempted. I was offered six million U.S. dollars for this property four years ago, before all this started, and we debated it. But were Africans. This is our life. One afternoon, in Bulawayo, I stopped by the office of David Coltart, a constitutional and human-rights lawyer, who is also an M.D.C. parliamentarian and the partys shadow minister of justice. Coltart is the only white in the shadow cabinet, and he takes evident pride in the fact that the constituency that sent him to parliament is ninety-five per cent black. He had just come off a campaign swing, and was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he seemed less concerned by his personal danger than by the number of people he had encountered at his rallies who expressed a desire for revenge against ZANU-P.F. in the event of an M.D.C. victory. What we face at many political meetings is people saying, Will you please just look the other way for forty-eight hours? he said, adding, We simply cant start off in the same way that Mugabe left off.

So far, M.D.C. supporters had, with relatively few exceptions, abided by the partys strict policy of nonviolence, and Coltart believed that revenge attacks could be prevented if a firm clear message of change is articulated. Washington Sansole, a local black lawyer and an M.D.C. supporter, wasnt so sure. The ordinary people who have been subjected to these beatings and intimidationsthey are going to be thirsting for blood, he had told me. Paul Themba Nyathi, the M.D.C.s shadow minister for local government, took a middle view. The appetite for revenge was great, but he said, I think it can be prevented, because it comes from a sense of helplessness that makes people seek satisfaction by inflicting pain back on their tormentors. If we can give them some hope as an alternative to Robert Mugabe, who always built the country on hate, I think its possible to keep from mayhem. But its going to be very difficult. Coltart was busy designing a legal framework for an M.D.C. government to address the abuses of the old regime. Mugabe had always been a champion of amnesties and pardons; he had issued them in the name of unity after each phase of bloodshed in his political progress: at independence, following the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland in the eighties, and after every national election in the past decade. Coltart was eager to bring this culture of impunity to an end, but he said, Regarding Robert Mugabe himself, weve been placed under enormous pressure by the international community to insure that he is allowed to retire peacefully here. The international pressure came from other African countries. Tsvangirai had made it clear to Mugabe that he would be allowed to exit without humiliation, but Coltart remained troubled by the prospect of a policy that results in relatively low-level people being prosecuted when the top architects go scot-free. To address that tension, at least partially, Tsvangirai had promised to establish a truth commission. The idea, Coltart told me, was not only to hold hearings on the Mugabe era but to examine the countrys vexed history all the way back to November 11, 1965, when Ian Smith issued a unilateral declaration of independence from the British Empire and declared a state of emergency, in a bid to preserve white rule forever. On that day, Coltart said, The white government became illegal, and many of the crimes committed since then are better understood in that context. He felt that the time had come to bring whites to speak and make whites reckon with their part in abuses. Ian Smith, who is now eighty-three and still lives in Zimbabwe, is unrepentant for the brutality of his apartheid-style police state. At Oxford two years ago, he stated his position plainly: The more we killed, the happier we

were. We were fighting terrorists. Smiths undimmed extremism can seem like a template for Mugabes own racist outbursts, but his defiant posture is almost universally reviled by the fifty thousand or so whites who have chosen to stay on in Zimbabwe. Indeed, everyone I spoke toblack and whiteagreed that, despite Mugabes best efforts, there is very little overt racial conflict in Zimbabwean life. The truth of the matter is that blacks know that whatever hardships have come about in the past twenty years have not come about because of whites, Washington Sansole said. That race thing is a red herring. Coltart went further. He suggested that Mugabes attacks on whites had actually served to make many whites feel more Zimbabwean than everalbeit defensively. Thats been, I think, the miracle of whats happened in Zimbabwe, he said. For twenty years, the vast majority of whites were completely disengaged from political life in the country and disengaged from the vast majority of black people. They lived in little white islands, and, quite frankly, I think racist beliefs were deeply rooted and remained unchallenged. The irony is its taken this drama for people to realize that there are just some absolutely outstanding black people. Certainly, it is a faith akin to Coltarts that had kept farmers like JoJo, and Richard Pascall, the rhinoceros rancher, on their occupied land, and dreaming of developing it further once Mugabe was gone. Down the road from Pascalls place, however, I met a couple whose farm had been so thoroughly pillaged by squatters that they had no hope of restoring it. Theyd had no income for a year, and had just enough savings to keep themselves in Scotch whiskey until the election. The only reason they stayed on, they told me, was that they had nowhere to go. In anticipation of escalated violence in the event of a Mugabe victory, many farmers were sending their wives and children to safe houses in town, but this couple refused to consider such a separation. I will never leave my husband. If he goes, I go, the woman told me, and the man said, My wife doesnt shoot so good, but shes a helluva good loader. If it came to such a battle, the couple had no doubt that theyd lose. But the fantasy of taking a stand was all they had left. One thing Mugabe has done is teach people to hate, the woman said. Forty years in this country, and even with that bloody war I didnt hate them. Now I hate them. I had two boys hanging off the back gate last week, begging for food. They were so bloody hungryand I turned my back on them. I did, and its a bloody shame, and its Mugabes prime achievement.

Mugabe is not one for admitting to error, but a week before the election he held a rally in Bulawayo, where he confessed to having made the great blunder of his political life, when, on assuming power in 1980, he gave his famous speech, seeking reconciliation with whites. We made a mistake when we showed mercy, he said, adding that he had acted as a fool but was wiser now. And, at his inauguration, two weeks later, he made sure not to repeat the mistake of magnanimity in victory, although he did offer Zimbabweans an opportunity to submit to his domination once again in the name of unity. The election itself was a mockery, even by Africas degraded standards. As many as a million potential voters had been systematically excluded by the government from voting, while voter rolls were inflated in ZANUP.F.strongholds, and the violence and intimidation continued right through the balloting process: hundreds of opposition poll watchers were arrested, and hundreds more were beaten or otherwise physically prevented from going about their task. In the end, on March 13th, Mugabe claimed victory by a margin so preposterous that it was apparent his ballot-box stuffers had been overzealous, and only the most jaded and cynical of foreign observersnotably South Africas mission, whose members seemed to have forgotten that they themselves had been assaulted during the campaign by ZANU-P.F. thugsfound qualified terms for approving the vote as free and fair enough. Well done, Zimbabweans. . . . We have dealt a stunning blow to imperialism! Mugabe declared, as he promised to accelerate his landredistribution program, and made special thanks to the African leaders who had stood by him in solidarity. The next morning, Zimbabwe awoke to the news that another white farmer had been shot dead by war veteransthis time on a farm that Mugabes sister had been making moves to acquireand the following afternoon the country was suspended from the British Commonwealth. In the weeks since the vote, Zimbabwe has fallen out of the international headlines, but it has not fallen quiet. If anything, the level of state-sponsored violence has escalated. M.D.C. activists and independent journalists are arrested almost daily, more than two hundred white farmers and twenty thousand black farmers have been expelled from commercial farmlands, food supplies have been kept from tens of thousands of people in areas that voted for the opposition, while thousands more have been displaced from their homes by the violent rampages of vengeful war veterans, police, and soldiers. Not long ago, I received another e-mail from the wife of the businessman in Bulawayo. In earlier post-election messages, she had sounded depleted but

upbeat, convinced that the outrageousness of Mugabes victory, combined with the fact that change had to come someday, meant that change would still come sooner than later. Now she didnt sound so sure. Without preamble, she wrote:
I WANT TO LIVE IN AFRICA, FUCK IT!!! The uncertainty of tomorrow and the broken dreams of what could be are soul destroying. In the meantime Ive been on a rampage chucking out all unnecessary clutter, accumulated over seventeen years of life. Is this my subconscious speaking? How does one discard Ovids Metamorphoses1984, University, Professor Budick?!? I remember one of the farmers wives saying she had twenty minutes to pack. She stood before her cupboard and finally left all but the photographs. Thats all we need really.

Shes still there, but a week later I received four e-mails at once from exactly the sort of farmers wife she describedCarol Pascall, of Gourlays Ranch. The first e-mail said:
The squatters disarmed us yesterday. They now have in their possession four shot guns, two .308 rifles, one .22, and one handgun. The police were notified and their reply was that they had no vehicle. We contacted them this morning once more and once more there is no vehicle available. Last night one of our sheep was slaughtered and a few more are running around with stab wounds. My daughter Juliet leaves for university in South Africa today. All that keeps me going is knowing that there are many people out there who are going through absolute horror, something I cannot even begin to imagine and I will not let evil rule the day. We need to make a stand.

The next e-mail said:

As I sit and write this now, we are sitting a hundred and twenty kilometres from town, the police are not responding, and we have at least two hundred and fifty squatters, youths and war vets on the farm who are threatening to kill us. They have successfully chased away all our labor. They are at this very moment putting grass and branches around the compound houses in order to burn them down. The roads are barricaded. Please pray for us. I am sorry this is disjointed, but at this moment all I can think about is that we are most probably going to be killed tonight. Not a nice thought.

The third e-mail said:

We had the remainder of the workers sleep in our house and cottage last night. We armed as many as possible and we all took it in turns to be on guard. The workers houses were not burned down last night. This morning at first light we once more phoned the police for a reaction. They said at 5:30 this morning that they were coming, we are still waiting. In the meantime the remainder of the workers have left without their belongings as the squatters have forbidden them to take anything with them. We have been told that we must leave without anything. We are stalling for time, hoping and praying that the police will react. In the event that they do not, not only will we lose everything but the workers stand to lose all their worldly belongings as well. I wish I could describe the looks on their faces. . . . The roads are still barricaded and manned by the squatters. They have moved more people onto the farm. . . . Richard seems to be spending all his time puking his heart out. What do we do? . . . I believe that we must remain strong and remain here. . . . What started all of the nonsense is

that we are a black-rhino conservancy. . . . A big bull died last week due to fighting, as the animals are now compressed into a small area and the bulls areas are overlapping. We did what we were supposed to do according to the law and contacted a government vet and National Parks. The vet came out to ascertain the cause of death, and National Parks collected the horn. That was on Sunday. On Monday all hell broke loose as the squatters now decided that they own the rhino and they want the trophy fee for these animals and we should have consulted with them prior to calling the vet and National Parks.

The fourth e-mail said:

The police arrived here and attempted to keep the peace. They said that they could not sort out this matter, as it is political. We need to talk to the local squatters, as this is where all land problems etc. are now sorted out. This came as a shock as this means that we no longer have a government or law and order. Some of the youths exposed themselves to my daughter and once more we are told it is political. The squatters and war vets are now running the country. We have managed to buy ourselves time and will be off the farm in seven days time. All our workers have left. . . . I must admit that last night the demonic forces were tangible. Our lock and chain on our security gate has been stolen. . . . The squatters have told us that we are to hand all our weapons in to the local police. I do not feel safe about that. Today one of our horses came in with two cable snares around her neck. Another horse came in with evidence of having had a snare on her neck. This has all happened since Monday, as this is when our game guards were disarmed and called in. I shudder to think what will happen to the black rhino and game left on the farm.

Beneath this last message, Carol Pascall had pasted an article by Chris McGreal, the Guardians southern Africa correspondent. Under the headline ZIMBABWE STRUCK BY NEW REIGN OF TERROR, he described the ordeal of a black woman near a town called Nembudziya, who had been taken from her home by a soldier. The soldier threatened to shoot her, but forced her instead to perform oral sex on him, while her two-year-old watched, then smacked her in the face with his pistol, and so on. McGreal provided a litany of such abuses, performed by soldiers on house-to-house rampages across Zimbabwe: Six people have been murdered in political violence in Zimbabwe since the election, but a reluctance to kill outrightperhaps because torture and rape attract far less attentionis the only restraint shown by the troops and militia. Men, too, were forced to have sex with each other; others were branded with hot irons or hung upside down from trees. All of this had been going on before the election as well, and with the desired result: Mugabe had outpolled Tsvangirai in this district by two votes to one. It struck me as remarkable that Carol Pascall, holed up in her farmhouse at her computer, with a mob raging at her gate, should have bothered to attach this story to her own. By comparison with what her black compatriots were suffering,

her own plight seemed almost comprehensible, and that seemed to be exactly her point.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/06/03/020603fa_fact1?printable =true&currentPage=all#ixzz2d1t8RtRZ