Every Issue of The Monthly to your door: Subscribe Online

Respond to this Book Review
Washington Monthly Home Page

May 2000

Me Against My Brother By Scott Peterson Routledge Click on the title to buy the book

There was probably no more harrowing assignment for a foreign correspondent in recent years than sub-Saharan Africa during the early 1990s. The abrupt end of the Cold War, mounting pressures for democratization, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism all unleashed destabilizing forces that resulted in an era of unprecedented carnage. Yet unlike the recent wars in Kosovo and the Persian Gulf, access to the battlegrounds was largely unhampered. For anyone with the stamina and the courage to get around, that posting was a reporter's dream---and nightmare.

Scott Peterson is just such a journalist. As the Nairobi-based correspondent for Britain's Daily Telegraph and a photographer for the Gamma Liaison agency, he covered the fall of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and Somalia's subsequent disintegration into anarchy and famine. He witnessed the intervention to feed the starving and the disastrous pursuit of the warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. In between, he somehow found the time to make frequent forays to Sudan, where a little-noticed conflict between the Islamic government and Christian and animist southern tribes has resulted in two million deaths in two decades. Along the way, he was attacked by machete-wielding mob in Mogadishu, shot at by the rebel army in Kigali, shelled by Sudanese forces and nearly done in by a bout of cerebral malaria contracted in the Rwandan bush.

Now Peterson has produced an extraordinary book about his years on the front lines. Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda is Peterson's very personal account of that catastrophic era on the African continent. Vividly written and deeply researched, filled with compassion and moral indignation, the book takes its place alongside Keith Richburg's Out of America, Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down as one of the indispensable works about that time.

Peterson's account of the Somali debacle is probably the most detailed study of the country's disintegration at the hands of its feuding warlords and of the well-meaning but hapless United Nations peacekeeping operation that followed. He begins his tale with the final days of Siad Barre, whose bloody dictatorship set the stage for the country's collapse into rival clan-based fiefdoms. Mogadishu, the capital, became the lawless domain of teenage militiamen stoked on Œqat,' who raced around the ruined city in souped-up stolen vehicles known as "technicals," armed with an awesome array of weaponry. Into this vacuum stepped Aidid, a brutal killer who was nevertheless arguably the only man strong enough to unite Somalia. Peterson traces the series of missteps that turned a U.S.-led humanitarian mission into a bloody urban war against him.

It is hard to argue with Peterson's central thesis that the arrogance and bungling of top U.S. military and political officials---notably Jonathan Howe, the supremely naive ex-Admiral who became obsessed with arresting Aidid, even spreading Wild West-style "Wanted" posters throughout Mogadishu---led America headlong into a quagmire. His reporting breaks some new ground, including a fascinating account of the spy vs. spy gamesmanship between the American military and Aidid's Habr Gidir clansmen during the warlord's months as a fugitive. Still, some of Peterson's conclusions are debatable. The author faults U.S. special envoy Robert Oakley, for example, for cozying up to Somali faction leaders during the American humanitarian intervention in December 1992, rather than pushing immediately for disarmament. But such a policy would almost assuredly have provoked Aidid and other warlords, and it is highly dubious that President Bush would ever have authorized such a risky mission.

Like many other western correspondents, including this writer, Peterson was mesmerized by Somalia's stark beauty and hallucinogenic violence---yet he steers clear of the macho tone that defines so much writing about the country. His tone is measured, compassionate, and evocative, whether describing the air of paranoia at the fortress like U.N. headquarters or the smell of the capital: "a mix of hot sea and salted, rotting ocean waste and the decomposing refuse of sweating human beings."

The United Nations' humiliating failure in Somalia, of course, set the stage for what was undoubtedly the organization's low point; its abject abandonment of Rwanda. Peterson's descriptions of those 100 days of bloodshed will be familiar to readers of Gourevitch's award-winning book. Peterson's prose is less elegant, but his account of the genocide possesses a greater sense of immediacy. For Peterson was present nearly every step of the way: flying into Kigali on a U.N. plane days after the massacres began on April 6, touring the ravaged countryside with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, talking his way through roadblocks manned by drunken Hutu militiamen, and following the French army as it launched a last-ditch military operation---dressed up as a humanitarian crusade---to save the Hutu regime. The author presents little new analysis here, but his descriptions are unforgettable. In one highly effective set piece, Peterson wanders through President Juvenal Habyarimana's abandoned palace, using the detritus he finds in the inner sanctum of the dead dictator to launch into an exploration of the three pillars of the genocide---the Catholic Church, the French government, and the regime's proponents of "Hutu Power."

Me Against My Brother is a depressing book. Squeamish readers may have trouble with the relentless descriptions of rotting corpses, the smell of death, and numerous scenes of violence. Yet nothing feels gratuitous. Still one longs for more analysis and perspective, for a deeper inquiry into the reasons that states such as Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan collapse. Are there threads that tie these places together, or does each stand alone as a unique example of societal failure? Are such physically and psychologically devastated nations capable of renewal, or are they condemned to a relentless cycle of violence? Peterson leaves such questions largely unanswered. He ends the book with a tiny scene of hope---a mother and daughter, Tutsi survivors, at play among the ashes of Rwanda. But coming at the tail end of a long litany of woe, one senses that Peterson finds that moment hollow.