The Anthropology of Atrocity

The African catastrophe gnaws and gnaws at the moral imagination of every decent person in the West. And for good reason. Put starkly, the bad news from the continent seems exponentially worse than that coming from any other part of the world, and the good news, such as it is, is in such short supply. In an era when, burst stock market bubble or no burst stock market bubble, the received wisdom in the rich world is that globalization will sooner or later make every part of the world better off, Africa seems to stand as the terrible exception.

Some more optimistic voices have insisted that this vision is far too pessimistic and accused those who accepted it of racism. But with war rampant, AIDS on the march even in South Africa, the country that seemed to embody, in the aftermath of apartheid, a more decent and more hopeful African future and the Rwandan genocide still scarring the collective conscience, how is it possible to be optimistic?

Even leaving the horrors of Africa to one side, what can be done about the fact that with 10% of the world’s population, Africa has only 3% of its trade and 1% of its gross domestic product? This almost total economic marginalization in the world economy is enough by itself to induce despair.

Of course, like old generalizations, this vision of an African apocalypse is itself a vast oversimplification. Nothing in history is inevitable, and it may well be unfair to lump together such disparate tragedies as the Rwandan genocide, butchering in Sierra Leone, an endless war of race and religion in Sudan and the AIDS epidemic. And yet it is telling that even those writers and activists who are most outraged by what they call Afro-pessimism and rail against what they consider an over-generalized media account themselves seemed hard-pressed to make the countervailing case. The specialist literature is replete with articles that begin with savage denunciations of the racism and ignorance of the Afro-pessimist only to follow on with accounts of the African situation that are, if anything, as grim or grimmer than anything writers like Robert Kaplan, Keith Rich-berg, or I (for all that divide us) have ever produced.

It seems clear that Bill Berkeley, a human-rights activist and a journalist with a long and distinguished career of reporting from many of the most dangerous and horrifying places in Africa, intended his new book, “The Graves Are Not Yet Full,” as an antidote to what he calls this “conventional American conception of Africa as a unitary landscape of unremitting despair.” He adds angrily that “not all the news from Africa is bad, and much of it is hopeful.” He is certainly at least partly right, even if some of the good news concerning a certain measures of democratization in some African countries is being undermined by the catastrophic effects on both the economy and society by the spread of AIDS.

Although Berkeley’s book is a serious and impassioned effort to buttress the case of the Afro-optimist, its real importance lies elsewhere. For far from concentrating on the hopeful news, what Berkeley has done, in a series of brilliantly reported vignettes, is to try to understand the deep underlying causes of the worst cases of ethnic and political strife in Africa--Liberia, Sudan, Congo, South Africa in the death throes of apartheid--and offer a way of thinking about these disasters that serves the cause of hope rather than of despair.

Berkeley’s premise is that ethnic conflict in Africa is best thought of as a form of organized crime. The “culture” driving Africa’s “conflicts,” he writes, “is akin to that of the Sicilian Mafia, or of the Crips and the Bloods in Los Angeles, with the same imperatives of blood and family that bind such gangs together.” The point is important to him first and foremost because he wants to refute the notion that the Rwandan genocide or the butchery in Liberia over the last decade has been the result of either irrational violence--the so-called primitivism hypothesis still so depressingly common in Western accounts of African wars--or of, quoting a particularly mindless assertion made by Time magazine about Rwanda, a “simple tribal meltdown.”

For Berkeley, almost the reverse is the case. His reporting has led him to the belief that, as in the Balkans, what appeared at first glance to be explosive and irrational surges of violence are in fact careful, plotted and orchestrated campaigns by individuals Berkeley unselfconsciously calls evil leaders bent on fomenting civil conflicts either for personal gain or to hold onto power. And the last contribution he makes to our understanding in “The Graves Are Not Yet Full” is in illustrating this broader argument with a series of what might be called profiles of the perpetrators.

Some are African leaders such as Liberia’s current president, Charles Taylor; head of the South Sudanese rebels John Garang; and the late Mobutu Sese Seko, who, backed by France and the United States, ruled Congo for more than three decades, driving it to ruin. Others Berkeley seems to view as pawns, or, as he puts it, “creatures of evil.” This category includes the South African Zulu leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi, who, in Berkeley’s view, was a collaborator in the South African apartheid regime’s effort to foment anarchy through the illusion that the strife between the supporters of the African National Congress and Buthelezi’s Inkatha freedom party represented a likely South African future should white rule come to an end. Finally, Berkeley focuses on two white officials. The first, more predictably, is Buthelezi’s paymaster, Gen. Pieter Groenewald, the former chief of South African military intelligence. The second, more controversially (and to my mind not entirely convincingly), is Chester Crocker, assistant secretary of state for African affairs during the Reagan administration. Berkeley, in an argument somewhat reminiscent of the one made recently by Christopher Hitchens about Henry Kissinger, seems to view Crocker as at least morally guilty of crimes against humanity for his support of the murderous Doe regime in Liberia in the 1980s.

What unites these figures, in Berkeley’s account, is their lack of repentance--and, as Berkeley himself notes, their banality. Indeed, on a certain level “The Graves Are Not Yet Full” can be read as a kind of African codicil to Hannah Arendt’s celebrated argument, written at the time of the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, about the banality of evil. Berkeley’s rogues’ gallery blandly denies all responsibility for the catastrophe their actions have unleashed, and for that matter insist that they have no regrets. That they should do so is unsurprising. Even during the Nuremberg trials, after all, most of the Nazi leaders remained unrepentant, yet there’s something peculiarly sickening about the equanimity of these men who have the blood of thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands on their hands.

In his unwavering focus on the perpetrators and architects of atrocity, Berkeley restores a measure of reality to the understanding of African events. Although it is humanly entirely understandable that outsiders would want to focus on the victims, such a focus actually illuminates very little. Our compassion may be mobilized, but our intelligence is not, and we come out of a situation--the crisis in Sierra Leone, say, or the latest round of massacres in Burundi--understanding as little as we did when we first became aware of it. There is an axiom among relief workers that there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. Essentially, Berkeley is making the same claim. Only by looking at the men who caused this terrible suffering, by trying to understand why they committed or fomented these crimes, is there any hope of putting an end to the violence and the horror.

About this he is unquestionably correct. But although Berkeley’s premise is unarguable and his descriptive powers superb, he is less persuasive when he becomes prescriptive. Here, his long history of working as an investigative reporter for human-rights organizations may have somewhat harmed his judgment. “There are,” he writes, “many challenges for Africans to surmount if they ever hope to reverse the multiple afflictions besetting their continent.... But none is more important than justice, and none will amount to much at all in the absence of justice.”

These are fine words that eloquently reflect the views not only of mainstream Western human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch but of many African activist groups as well that the only sure antidote to tyranny is justice. And it would be wonderful--and wonderfully consoling--if that were true. But is it? To put it charitably, the evidence is mixed. Berkeley takes as his point of departure the Nuremberg tribunals. But surely it can be argued that the reason the Nuremberg judgments had the force they did was because they took place in the context of Germany’s defeat and allied occupation. Whether it is the Balkans or Africa, no such conditions exist today. The current situation is that of justice taking place, to the extent that it has, in a political vacuum. That in itself should have tempered Berkeley’s optimism when, in his concluding chapter, he writes about the Rwandan genocide through the prism of the trial of Jean-Paul Akayesu, a local official who helped carry out the slaughter.

But there are deeper, less pragmatic issues at stake as well. The human-rights movement and writers like Berkeley who accept its worldview have been drawn to thinking about political violence in terms of crime in large measure so as to oppose the doctrine of collective guilt. They have argued, rightly (as a doctrine it goes back to the philosopher Karl Jaspers’ distinction between collected guilty and collective responsibility), that only individuals can be held legally accountable for crimes, not entire peoples. The model, which Berkeley himself itself echoes when he compares African political violence to the Mafia or to street gangs in L.A., equates political violence with crime. In other words, it judicializes our understanding of the world.

This may be heartening but alas, it is wrong. To say that Mobutu was essentially no different than Vito Corleone, as Berkeley does is fundamentally ahistorical if not anti-historical. One could say the same thing about any leader from the past, from Oliver Cromwell to Robespierre, who murdered his own people. And in this view, all bloody wars, violent revolutions and, yes, tyrannies are simply crimes awaiting the appropriate tribunal.

Perhaps one day, if there ever is a world government able to enforce standards that have real legitimacy across the globe rather than simply the certification of activists and international lawyers, such a view will make sense. In a world of nation-states and of ideological and moral disagreement--that is, in the world we live in and are likely to continue to live in for a very long time--it does not. Despite Berkeley’s impassioned effort, the truth remains that his overarching metaphor of violence in Africa is crime. And the judicialization of understanding what it entails actually diminishes our ability to comprehend, rather than expand it. “The Graves Are Not Yet Full” is a tour de force, and as reporting it is essential reading for anyone concerned with understanding Africa. But it also is an exercise in wishful thinking both about history and about the role of justice in human affairs.