Africa’s Bloodied Fields And A Breakup

Anjan Sundaram, as a young journalist, tried to walk a different journey. After ten years of hard reporting from Central Africa for The New York Times, Associated Press and others, he chose to live a quiet life in a quiet town called Shippagan, Canada, with his little kid and loving wife. His wife too was a war correspondent/radio journalist in Congo, and, while she sent him quick radio messages from the conflict zone, he would file his stories. In a cosy house full of warmth and love, feeling the breath of his daughter on his face, he was happy. At least, he thought he was happy.

Then arrived the simmering unrest in his inner life, seducing him to an unknown journey trapped on the delicate edge between life and death, on a difficult and tough terrain. This was a journey surrounded by bloodshed and mass murder, treachery, hatred, the acidic smell of rotting bodies on the streets, hordes of pigs taking over a village, every man seemingly a killer and an enemy, and the acrid smell of sweat which stuck to his shirt like bad breath and perennial premonitions.

He rediscovered the Central African Republic, ravaged by a civil war, and where no one would dare to go and report. The reporter’s instinct was to go out there and write about it. The father and husband refused to accept this instinct. Nat, his wife, resolved the dilemma. She said, he must go. And that she too would have come along to this twilight zone, if it had not been for Raphaelle, their daughter.

Hence was born the book, Breakup: A Marriage in Wartime (Simon and Schuster, Rs 699, pg 185). Writes Noam Chomsky about the book, “A compelling journey of hatred and horror, of compassion and courage. I can hardly imagine the bravery it took to compile this invaluable record.”

Writes Sundaram, “The road forced me to look ahead, leading away from my anchor, but offering the potential of connection with strangers. I needed home, and wanted it, but gladly departed from it. And I realized that I had built my home because I was afraid, as a place in which to hide when I feared the world’s capriciousness.”

So there he was with Lewis, a dogged activist working for Human Rights Watch, Thierry, another journalist who was waiting for a chance to hit ground zero, and Suleiman, who, perhaps, turned out to be a spy for the ruthless and pampered Muslim generals, just about 15 per cent of the population, who were killing the majority Christians en masse, burning down their villages, and destroying all they could see, including petrol pumps.

The Christians had fled, but regrouped in the jungles as armed and impoverished guerillas, now in their thousands, launching fatal underground attacks on a jittery and ill-equipped Muslim army. They were waiting for their time when they will overtake the country, and its capital, submerged in eternal darkness, Bangui.

The international fig leaf was thereby a predictable pattern. France, the African Union and the UN had sent their peacekeeping force – to protect the usurper-dictator and his stooges. Once a French colony, looted, plundered and ravaged, the French flag few atop Bangui’s airport, like a farce flying in the sky.

ALSO READ: The Afghanistan Papers Uncover A Dirty War

Writes Sundaram about the vicious musical chair, “The Republic had suffered five coup d’etat and various foul play since its independence from France in 1960. Barthelemy Boganda, the country’s independence hero, had died in a mysterious plane crash, some say, planned by the French. His successor, David Dacko, was ousted in 1965. His successor, Jean-Bedel Bokassa, was ousted in 1979 by the French, who flew Dacko back to Bangui and reinstalled him as president. Dacko was ousted a second time by General Andre Kolingba, who organized elections in which Ange-Felizi Pattase was elected, only to be ousted in 2003 by the former army chief of staff,  Fracnois Bozize, who was then overthrown by the Seleka rebellion in 2013.”

Next destination: Gaga. A massacre in a Christian village. Unseen and unheard by the world. Reporting is not allowed.

“They asked, ‘Do people know what is happening to us’? It struck me how important it was, for them, that we had arrived here. They were hungry and injured, yet, they didn’t ask for food or medicines. They asked the same question that Holocaust survivors had put to those who liberated the Nazi concentration camps during World War! Did others know what happened to them? If others knew, there was hope.”

He moved from one guerilla zone to another in the forests, across destroyed homes, negotiating with Muslim commanders, quietly taking his notes on one massacre after another, while smoke and gunshots filled the air. He and his friends almost got shot by a 300-strong rebel army in the jungles, but they escaped, using bluff and bluster.

Once in a conflict zone, when shooting had stopped, “A group of schoolgirls appeared on the street, walking in a line, laughing, wearing their pink school uniforms. They carried note-books on their heads and held plastic lunch boxes. They made the boulevard feel calm.”

Reading this passage, I was suddenly reminded of Srinagar in curfew, after the army clampdown in August 2019, mobiles jammed, media censored, internet shut, traumatized and isolated people in the Valley, total silence, and the beautiful Dal Lake condemned in an expanse of rippling loneliness. One morning, as I tentatively ventured out, a group of schoolgirls crossed the street. “Good morning,” they said. For a solitary and sublime moment, the world had suddenly turned sweet.

There were moments of redemption for Sundaram. There were brave and angelic human beings on both sides, who supported people beyond religion and faith, unafraid amidst the terror of death, in terribly difficult conditions, against all odds. Most of them were killed once the rebels captured the capital. Anjan kept them close to his heart, as he turned back, to his home, and love.

Indeed, after the rebels attacked Bangui, of the 140,000 Muslims out there, only about one thousand were left. Rest were butchered, or, they fled. This time, foreign journalists dropped in, and western newspapers splashed the ‘story’ on front pages.

“Muslims’ bodies were dismembered like they were toys. The war became an international spectacle. The overt attacks had a purpose: to publicly eliminate Islam from the country’s national identity…”

In a dark irony, America, the Western nations, and the UN, termed the genocide – ‘ethnic cleansing’. A genocide would have meant immediate and urgent international intervention.

“Exactly 20 years before, in Rwanda, the US and UN had avoided calling a genocide a genocide, and so they didn’t send in the troops necessary to stop the killings,” writes Sundaram.

He filed his reports for the magazines. He told the entire story to Nat. He felt drained. Empty. The war had taken its revenge on the journalist.

The cold Canadian small town became too restricted and alienating. He had no friends there. Nat had become detached. All communication seemed to have frozen. He wanted to move again, perhaps to Cambodia. She did not want to leave her roots. The hell-fire of a ravaged landscape, embedded in his reporter’s notebook, had destroyed a beautiful relationship.

“How would I live? For whom? These questions had lost their simple answers, and even their meaning,” writes Anjan. “Would another anchor present itself, allowing me to moor myself, and from there, again live?’

(Anjan Sundaram is the award-winning author of Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship, and Stringer: A Reporter’s Journey in the Congo. He has also reported for the Granta, The Guardian, the Observer, Foreign Policy, Politico, Telegraph and The Washington Post. He did his PhD in journalism from the University of East Anglia.)

The Afghanistan Papers Uncover A Dirty War

Only a free and unrestrained Press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free Press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell.
US Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, in his concurring opinion in New York Times Co. V. United States, also known as the Pentagon Papers Case, June 30, 1971.

Two weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers at the World Trade Centre in New York, a reporter asked a “straightforward” question to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon briefing room in Arlington, Washington DC, while “the building still smelled of smoke and jet fuel from when American Airlines Flight 77 exploded into the west wall, killing 189 people…”

The question: “Would US officials lie to the news media about military operations in order to mislead the enemy?”

In response, Rumsfeld paraphrased a quotation from Winston Churchill: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” He explained how the Allies, prior to D-Day, ran a disinformation campaign called ‘Operation Bodyguard’ to ‘confuse’ the Germans about when and where the invasion of western Europe would take place in 1944. He thereby replied: “The answer to your question is, no, I cannot imagine a situation. I don’t recall that I’ve ever lied to the Press. I don’t intend to, and it seems to me that there will not be reason for it. There are dozens of ways to avoid having to put yourself in a position where you’re lying. And I don’t do it.”

Two years later, Rumsfeld might have forgotten his self-righteous statement. In what are called ‘snowflakes’ by his staff,  among hundreds of classified memos, “comments or instructions” dictated by him between 2001 and 2006 “to his underlings”, one says almost two years after the ‘war’ started: “I have no visibility into who the bad guys are in Afghanistan.” This was a complaint made by Rumsfeld to his intelligence chief.

His successor, Robert Gates, went one step further: “We don’t know the jack shit about Al-Qaeda,” he is reported to have said

If there was a ‘Big Botch-Up’ in Kabul with Joe Biden at the helm recently, the war in Afghanistan is like an endless serial opera of morbid ‘Botch-Ups’ and ‘Goof-Ups’ at the highest levels across the American establishment, and its formidable war apparatus. The war strategy had gone all wrong, the nation-building rhetoric was fake, and drugs and corruption had become entrenched in the Kabul establishment. And all this ‘jack shit’ happened under the watch of successive presidents: George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump.

In what is clearly a journalistic bombshell, perhaps as big as the ‘Pentagon Papers’ on Vietnam and the Watergate Scandal with its Deep Throat, Washington Post and its seasoned investigative reporter, has exposed, in a 346 page hardback, chapter after chapter of highly volatile disclosures, which will be highly embarrassing and shocking for the US establishment and its civil society. ‘The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War’ by Craig Whitlock, published by Simon And Schuster, is a big story, a big breaking news investigation, first revealed in parts by The Washington Post in 2019. The book was globally launched on August 31, 2021.

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A seasoned journalist, Whitlock worked for seven years as a beat reporter covering the Pentagon and the US military for The Washington Post. He has covered four secretaries of defense and five war commanders, traveling with the top military brass to Afghanistan and around the neighbourhood many times. Earlier to that, he was on the ground for six years as a Washington Post foreign correspondent, reporting on terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle-East, North Africa and Europe. He has been a three-time ‘finalist’ for the Pulitzer Prize.

Says Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon correspondent, “The Afghanistan Papers is a gripping account of why the war in Afghanistan lasted so long. The missed opportunities, the outright mistakes, and more than anything, the first-hand accounts from senior commanders, who only years later acknowledged they simply did not tell the American people what they knew about how the war going.”

“Craig Whitlock has forged a searing indictment of the deceit, blunders, and hubris of senior military and civilian officials, with the same tragic echoes of the Vietnam conflict. The American dead, wounded, and their families, deserved wiser and more honourable leaders,” said Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent of the National Public Radio.

“Like many journalists, I knew Afghanistan was a mess,” writes Whitlock. “I had grown dismissive of the US military’s hollow statements that it was always making progress and on the right track. The Washington Post and other news organizations had exposed systemic problems with the war for years… But I wondered if everyone had missed the big picture. How had the war degenerated into a stalemate with no realistic prospect for an enduring victory? The US and its allies had initially crushed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in 2001. What went wrong?”

He writes, “Unlike the war in Vietnam, or the one that would erupt in Iraq in 2003, the decision to take military action against Afghanistan was grounded in near-unanimous public support. The United Nations Security Council unanimously condemned the ‘horrifying terrorist attacks’ and called on all countries to bring the perpetrators to justice. Even hostile powers expressed solidarity with the US. In Iran, thousands attended candlelight vigils and hardliners stopped shouting ‘Death to America’ at weekly prayers for the first time in 22 years. With such strong backing, US officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war. Yet, leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield… From Washington to Kabul, an unspoken conspiracy to mask the truth took hold…”

ALSO READ: Future Of Afghanistan

Over the years, despite delayed responses and official obstacles, Whitlock obtained thousands of classified, secret and unpublished documents, testimonies, interviews, oral and written evidence. They are a damning indictment of the American top brass, including revealed by those who were themselves big players in this war machine which killed thousands, including civilians, across the tragic spectrum.

In a startling exposure, documents unearthed by The Washington Post reveal that George W Bush did not even know the name of his war commander in Afghanistan! He, apparently, did not want to make time to meet with him.  

The Afghan war cost reportedly $1 trillion or more in the 20 years of total mismanagement and organized corruption. More than 775,000 American troops were deployed. Generals have admitted that they fought the war without a functional strategy: “There was no campaign plan. It just wasn’t there,” complained Army Gen. Dan McNeill. He was the US commander twice during the Bush administration.

Other officials disclosed that the US “flubbed the war from the start”. “We did not know what we were doing,” said Richard Boucher, Bush administration’s top diplomat for South and Central Asia. “We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking,” said Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, White House war czar under Bush and Obama.

“Lute lamented that so many US troops had lost their lives. But, in a shocking departure from convention for a three-star general, he went further and suggested that the government had squandered those sacrifices…” writes Whitlock in the foreword.

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction, 2,400 lives lost,” Lute said, “Who will say this was in vain?”