Annals of Economics
Rational Irrationality
The real reason that capitalism is so crash-prone.
by John Cassidy October 5, 2009
In finance, actions can be both individually prudent and collectively disastrous.
On June 10, 2000, Queen Elizabeth II opened the high-tech Millennium Bridge, which traverses the River Thames from the Tate Modern to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Thousands of people lined up to walk across the new structure, which consisted of a narrow aluminum footbridge surrounded by steel balustrades projecting out at obtuse angles. Within minutes of the official opening, the footway started to tilt and sway alarmingly, forcing some of the pedestrians to cling to the side rails. Some reported feeling seasick. The authorities shut the bridge, claiming that too many people were using it. The next day, the bridge reopened with strict limits on the number of pedestrians, but it began to shake again. Two days after it had opened, with the source of the wobble still a mystery, the bridge was closed for an indefinite period.
Some commentators suspected the bridge’s foundations, others an unusual air pattern. The real problem was that the designers of the bridge, who included the architect Sir Norman Foster and the engineering firm Ove Arup, had not taken into account how the footway would react to all the pedestrians walking on it. When a person walks, lifting and dropping each foot in turn, he or she produces a slight sideways force. If hundreds of people are walking in a confined space, and some happen to walk in step, they can generate enough lateral momentum to move a footbridge—just a little. Once the footway starts swaying, however subtly, more and more pedestrians adjust their gait to get comfortable, stepping to and fro in synch. As a positive-feedback loop develops between the bridge’s swing and the pedestrians’ stride, the sideways forces can increase dramatically and the bridge can lurch violently. The investigating engineers termed this process “synchronous lateral excitation,” and came up with a mathematical formula to describe it.
What does all this have to do with financial markets? Quite a lot, as the Princeton economist Hyun Song Shin pointed out in a prescient 2005 paper. Most of the time, financial markets are pretty calm, trading is orderly, and participants can buy and sell in large quantities. Whenever a crisis hits, however, the biggest players—banks, investment banks, hedge funds—rush to reduce their exposure, buyers disappear, and liquidity dries up. Where previously there were diverse views, now there is unanimity: everybody’s moving in lockstep. “The pedestrians on the bridge are like banks adjusting their stance and the movements of the bridge itself are like price changes,” Shin wrote. And the process is self-reinforcing: once liquidity falls below a certain threshold, “all the elements that formed a virtuous circle to promote stability now will conspire to undermine it.” The financial markets can become highly unstable.
This is essentially what happened in the lead-up to the Great Crunch. The trigger was, of course, the market for subprime-mortgage bonds—bonds backed by the monthly payments from pools of loans that had been made to poor and middle-income home buyers. In August, 2007, with house prices falling and mortgage delinquencies rising, the market for subprime securities froze. By itself, this shouldn’t have caused too many problems: the entire stock of outstanding subprime mortgages was about a trillion dollars, a figure dwarfed by nearly twelve trillion dollars in total outstanding mortgages, not to mention the eighteen-trillion-dollar value of the stock market. But then banks, which couldn’t estimate how much exposure other firms had to losses, started to pull back credit lines and hoard their capital—and they did so en masse, confirming Shin’s point about the market imposing uniformity. An immediate collapse was averted when the European Central Bank and the Fed announced that they would pump more money into the financial system. Still, the global economic crisis didn’t ease up until early this year, and by then governments had committed an estimated nine trillion dollars to propping up the system.
A number of explanations have been proposed for the great boom and bust, most of which focus on greed, overconfidence, and downright stupidity on the part of mortgage lenders, investment bankers, and Wall Street C.E.O.s. According to a common narrative, we have lived through a textbook instance of the madness of crowds. If this were all there was to it, we could rest more comfortably: greed can be controlled, with some difficulty, admittedly; overconfidence gets punctured; even stupid people can be educated. Unfortunately, the real causes of the crisis are much scarier and less amenable to reform: they have to do with the inner logic of an economy like ours. The root problem is what might be termed “rational irrationality”—behavior that, on the individual level, is perfectly reasonable but that, when aggregated in the marketplace, produces calamity.
Consider the freeze that started in August of 2007. Each bank was adopting a prudent course by turning away questionable borrowers and holding on to its capital. But the results were mutually ruinous: once credit stopped flowing, many financial firms—the banks included—were forced to sell off assets in order to raise cash. This round of selling caused stocks, bonds, and other assets to decline in value, which generated a new round of losses.
A similar feedback loop was at work during the boom stage of the cycle, when many mortgage companies extended home loans to low- and middle-income applicants who couldn’t afford to repay them. In hindsight, that looks like reckless lending. It didn’t at the time. In most cases, lenders had no intention of holding on to the mortgages they issued. After taking a generous fee for originating the loans, they planned to sell them to Wall Street banks, such as Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs, which were in the business of pooling mortgages and using the monthly payments they generated to issue mortgage bonds. When a borrower whose home loan has been “securitized” in this way defaults on his payments, it is the buyer of the mortgage bond who suffers a loss, not the issuer of the mortgage.
This was the climate that produced business successes like New Century Financial Corporation, of Orange County, which originated $51.6 billion in subprime mortgages in 2006, making it the second-largest subprime lender in the United States, and which filed for Chapter 11 on April 2, 2007. More than forty per cent of the loans it issued were stated-income loans, also known as liar loans, which didn’t require applicants to provide documentation of their supposed earnings. Michael J. Missal, a bankruptcy-court examiner who carried out a detailed inquiry into New Century’s business, quoted a chief credit officer who said that the company had “no standard for loan quality.” Some employees queried its lax approach to lending, without effect. Senior management’s primary concern was that the loans it originated could be sold to Wall Street. As long as investors were eager to buy subprime securities, with few questions asked, expanding credit recklessly was a highly rewarding strategy.
When the subprime-mortgage market faltered, the business model of giving loans to all comers no longer made sense. Nobody wanted mortgage-backed securities any longer; nobody wanted to buy the underlying mortgages. Some of the Wall Street firms that had financed New Century’s operations, such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, made margin calls. Federal investigators began looking into New Century’s accounts, and the company rapidly became one of the first major casualties of the subprime crisis. Then again, New Century’s executives were hardly the only ones who failed to predict the subprime crash; Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke didn’t, either. Sharp-dealing companies like New Century may have been reprehensible. But they weren’t simply irrational.
The same logic applies to the decisions made by Wall Street C.E.O.s like Citigroup’s Charles Prince and Merrill Lynch’s Stanley O’Neal. They’ve been roundly denounced for leading their companies into the mortgage business, where they suffered heavy losses. In the midst of a credit bubble, though, somebody running a big financial institution seldom has the option of sitting it out. What boosts a firm’s stock price, and the boss’s standing, is a rapid expansion in revenues and market share. Privately, he may harbor reservations about a particular business line, such as subprime securitization. But, once his peers have entered the field, and are making money, his firm has little choice except to join them. C.E.O.s certainly don’t have much personal incentive to exercise caution. Most of them receive compensation packages loaded with stock options, which reward them for delivering extraordinary growth rather than for maintaining product quality and protecting their firm’s reputation.
Prince’s experience at Citigroup provides an illuminating case study. A corporate lawyer by profession, he had risen to prominence as the legal adviser to Citigroup’s creator, Sandy Weill. After Weill got caught up in Eliot Spitzer’s investigation of Wall Street analysts and resigned, in 2003, Prince took over as C.E.O. He was under pressure to boost Citigroup’s investment-banking division, which was widely perceived to be falling behind its competitors. At the start of 2005, Citigroup’s board reportedly asked Prince and his colleagues to develop a growth strategy for the bank’s bond business. Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary, who served as the chairman of the board’s executive committee, advised Prince that the company could take on more risk. “We could afford to seek more opportunities through intelligent risk-taking,” Rubin later told the Times. “The key word is ‘intelligent.’ ”
Prince could have rejected Rubin’s advice and told the board that he didn’t think it was a good idea for Citigroup to take on more risk, however intelligently it was done. But Citigroup’s stock price hadn’t moved much in five years, and maintaining a cautious approach would have involved forgoing the kind of growth that some of the firm’s rivals—UBS and Bank of America—were already enjoying. To somebody in Prince’s position, the risky choice would have been standing aloof from the subprime craze, not joining the crowd.
In July, 2007, he intimated as much, in an interview with the Financial Times. At that stage, three months after New Century’s collapse, the problems in the subprime market could no longer be ignored. But the private-equity business, in which Citigroup had become a major presence, was still thriving, and Blackstone, one of the biggest buyout firms, had just issued stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Prince conceded that a collapse in the credit markets could leave Citigroup and other banks exposed to the prospect of large losses. Despite the danger, he insisted that he had no intention of pulling back. “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated,” Prince said. “But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”
The reference to the game of musical chairs was a remarkably candid description of the situation in which executives like Prince found themselves, and of the logic of rational irrationality. Whether Prince knew it or not, he was channelling John Maynard Keynes, who, in “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money,” pointed to the inconvenient fact that “there is no such thing as liquidity of investment for the community as a whole.” Whatever the asset class may be—stocks, bonds, real estate, or commodities—the market will seize up if everybody tries to sell at the same time. Financiers were accordingly obliged to keep a close eye on the “mass psychology of the market,” which could change at any moment. Keynes wrote, “It is, so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs—a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops.”
Keynes’s jaundiced view of finance reflected his own experience as an investor and as a director of an insurance company. Every morning, in his rooms at King’s College, Cambridge, he spent about half an hour in bed studying the financial pages and various brokerage reports. He compared investing to newspaper competitions in which “the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.” If you want to win such a contest, you’d better try to select the outcome on which others will converge, whatever your personal opinion might be. “It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest,” Keynes explained. “We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. And there are some, I believe, who practice the fourth, fifth and higher degrees.”
The beauty-contest analogy helps explain why real-estate developers, condo flippers, and financial investors continued to invest in the real-estate market and in the mortgage-securities market, even though many of them may have believed that home prices had risen too far. Alan Greenspan and other free-market economists failed to recognize that, during a speculative mania, attempting to “surf” the bubble can be a perfectly rational strategy. According to orthodox economics, professional speculators play a stabilizing role in the financial markets: whenever prices rise above fundamentals, they step in and sell; whenever prices fall too far, they step in and buy. But history has demonstrated that much of the so-called “smart money” aims at getting in ahead of the crowd, and that only adds to the mispricing.
Markus Brunnermeier, an economist at Princeton, and Stefan Nagel, an economist at Stanford, obtained data from S.E.C. filings for fifty-three hedge-fund managers during the dot-com bubble. In the third quarter of 1999, they discovered, the funds raised their portfolio weightings in technology stocks from sixteen to twenty-nine per cent. By March of 2000, when the Nasdaq peaked, the funds had invested roughly a third of their assets in tech. “From an efficient-markets perspective, these results are puzzling,” Brunnermeier and Nagel noted. “Why would some of the most sophisticated investors in the market hold these overpriced technology stocks?” We know that many such investors had no illusions about the prospects of the financial products they traded. But their strategy was to capture the upside of the bubble while avoiding most of the downside—and, with timely selling, many of them succeeded.
Because financial markets consist of individuals who react to what others are doing, the theories of free-market economics are often less illuminating than the Prisoner’s Dilemma, an analysis of strategic behavior that game theorists associated with the RAND Corporation developed during the early nineteen-fifties. Much of the work done at RAND was initially applied to the logic of nuclear warfare, but it has proved extremely useful in understanding another explosion-prone arena: Wall Street.
Imagine that you and another armed man have been arrested and charged with jointly carrying out a robbery. The two of you are being held and questioned separately, with no means of communicating. You know that, if you both confess, each of you will get ten years in jail, whereas if you both deny the crime you will be charged only with the lesser offense of gun possession, which carries a sentence of just three years in jail. The best scenario for you is if you confess and your partner doesn’t: you’ll be rewarded for your betrayal by being released, and he’ll get a sentence of fifteen years. The worst scenario, accordingly, is if you keep quiet and he confesses.
What should you do? The optimal joint result would require the two of you to keep quiet, so that you both got a light sentence, amounting to a combined six years of jail time. Any other strategy means more collective jail time. But you know that you’re risking the maximum penalty if you keep quiet, because your partner could seize a chance for freedom and betray you. And you know that your partner is bound to be making the same calculation. Hence, the rational strategy, for both of you, is to confess, and serve ten years in jail. In the language of game theory, confessing is a “dominant strategy,” even though it leads to a disastrous outcome.
In a situation like this, what I do affects your welfare; what you do affects mine. The same applies in business. When General Motors cuts its prices or offers interest-free loans, Ford and Chrysler come under pressure to match G.M.’s deals, even if their finances are already stretched. If Merrill Lynch sets up a hedge fund to invest in collateralized debt obligations, or some other shiny new kind of security, Morgan Stanley will feel obliged to launch a similar fund to keep its wealthy clients from defecting. A hedge fund that eschews an overinflated sector can lag behind its rivals, and lose its major clients. So you can go bust by avoiding a bubble. As Charles Prince and others discovered, there’s no good way out of this dilemma. Attempts to act responsibly and achieve a coöperative solution cannot be sustained, because they leave you vulnerable to exploitation by others. If Citigroup had sat out the credit boom while its rivals made huge profits, Prince would probably have been out of a job earlier. The same goes for individual traders at Wall Street firms. If a trader has one bad quarter, perhaps because he refused to participate in a bubble, the results can be career-threatening.
As the credit bubble continued, even the credit-rating agencies, which exist to provide investors with objective advice, got caught up in the same sort of competitive behavior that had persuaded banks like Citigroup, UBS, and Merrill Lynch to plunge into the subprime sector. Instead of adopting an arms-length approach and establishing a uniform set of standards for issuers of mortgage securities, the big three rating agencies—Fitch, Moody’s, and Standard & Poor’s—worked closely with Wall Street banks, and ended up giving AAA ratings to financial junk. But under the rating industry’s business model, in which the issuers of securities pay the agencies for rating them, the agencies are dependent on Wall Street for their revenues.
Before Goldman Sachs, say, issued a hundred million dollars of residential-mortgage bonds, it would pay an agency like Moody’s at least thirty or forty thousand dollars to issue a credit rating on the deal. As the boom continued, investment bankers played the agencies off one another, shopping around for a favorable rating. If one agency didn’t think a bond deserved an investment-grade rating, the business would go to a more generously disposed rival. To stay in business, and certainly to maintain market share, credit analysts had to accentuate the positive.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma is the obverse of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand, in which the free market coördinates the behavior of self-seeking individuals to the benefit of all. Each businessman “intends only his own gain,” Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” “and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” But in a market environment the individual pursuit of self-interest, however rational, can give way to collective disaster. The invisible hand becomes a fist.
In February of 2002, the Millennium Bridge was reopened. The engineers at Ove Arup had figured out how the collective behavior of pedestrians caused the bridge to sway, and installed dozens of shock absorbers—under the bridge, around its supporting piers, and at one end of it. The embarrassing debacle of its début hasn’t entirely faded from memory, but there have been no further problems.
It won’t be as easy to deal with the bouts of instability to which our financial system is prone. But the first step is simply to recognize that they aren’t aberrations; they are the inevitable result of individuals going about their normal business in a relatively unfettered marketplace. Our system of oversight fails to account for how sensible individual choices can add up to collective disaster. Rather than blaming the pedestrians for swarming the footway, governments need to reinforce the foundations of the structure, by installing more stabilizers. “Our system failed in basic fundamental ways,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner acknowledged earlier this year. “To address this will require comprehensive reform. Not modest repairs at the margin, but new rules of the game.”
Despite this radical statement of intent, serious doubts remain over whether the Obama Administration’s proposed regulatory overhaul goes far enough in dealing with the problem of rational irrationality. Much of what the Administration has proposed is welcome. It would force issuers of mortgage securities to keep some of the bonds on their own books, and it would impose new capital requirements on any financial firm “whose combination of size, leverage, and interconnectedness could pose a threat to financial stability if it failed.” None of these terms have been defined explicitly, however, and it isn’t clear what the new rules will mean for big hedge funds, private-equity firms, and the finance arms of industrial companies. If there is any wiggle room, excessive risk-taking and other damaging behavior will simply migrate to the unregulated sector.
A proposed central clearinghouse for derivatives transactions is another good idea that perhaps doesn’t go far enough. The clearinghouse plan applies only to “standardized” derivatives. Firms like JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley would still be allowed to trade “customized” derivatives with limited public disclosure and no central clearing mechanism. Given the creativity of the Wall Street financial engineers, it wouldn’t take them long to exploit this loophole.
The Administration has also proposed setting up a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, to guard individuals against predatory behavior on the part of banks and other financial firms, but its remit won’t extend to vetting complex securities—like those notorious collateralized debt obligations—that Wall Street firms trade among themselves. Limiting the development of those securities would stifle innovation, the financial industry contends. But that’s precisely the point. “The goal is not to have the most advanced financial system, but a financial system that is reasonably advanced but robust,” Viral V. Acharya and Matthew Richardson, two economists at N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, wrote in a recent paper. “That’s no different from what we seek in other areas of human activity. We don’t use the most advanced aircraft to move millions of people around the world. We use reasonably advanced aircrafts whose designs have proved to be reliable.”
During the Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act was passed in order to separate the essential utility aspects of the financial system—customer deposits, check clearing, and other payment systems—from the casino aspects, such as investment banking and proprietary trading. That key provision was repealed in 1999. The Administration has shown no interest in reinstating it, which means that “too big to fail” financial supermarkets, like Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, will continue to dominate the financial system. And, since the federal government has now demonstrated that it will do whatever is necessary to prevent the collapse of the largest financial firms, their top executives will have an even greater incentive to enter perilous lines of business. If things turn out well, they will receive big bonuses and the value of their stock options will increase. If things go wrong, the taxpayer will be left to pick up some of the tab.
Executive pay is yet another issue that remains to be tackled in any meaningful way. Even some top bankers have conceded that current Wall Street remuneration schemes lead to excessive risk-taking. Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, has suggested that traders and senior executives should receive some of their compensation in deferred payments. A few firms, including Morgan Stanley and UBS, have already introduced “clawback” schemes that allow the firm to rescind some or all of traders’ bonuses if their investments turn sour. Without direct government involvement, however, the effort to reform Wall Street compensation won’t survive the next market upturn. It’s another version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Although Wall Street as a whole has an interest in controlling rampant short-termism and irresponsible risk-taking, individual firms have an incentive to hire away star traders from rivals that have introduced pay limits. The compensation reforms are bound to break down. In this case, as in many others, the only way to reach a socially desirable outcome is to enforce compliance, and the only body that can do that is the government.
This doesn’t mean that government regulators would be setting the pay of individual traders and executives. It does mean that the Fed, as the agency primarily responsible for insuring financial stability, should issue a set of uniform rules for Wall Street compensation. Firms might be obliged to hold some, or all, of their traders’ bonuses in escrow accounts for a period of some years, or to give executive bonuses in the form of restricted stock that doesn’t vest for five or ten years. (This was similar to one of Blankfein’s suggestions.) In one encouraging sign, officials from the Fed and the Treasury are reportedly working on the details of Wall Street pay guidelines that would explicitly aim at preventing the reëmergence of rationally irrational behavior. “You don’t want people being paid for taking too much risk, and you want to make sure that their compensation is tied to long-term performance,” Geithner told the Times recently.
The Great Crunch wasn’t just an indictment of Wall Street; it was a failure of economic analysis. From the late nineteen-nineties onward, the Fed stubbornly refused to recognize that speculative bubbles encourage the spread of rationally irrational behavior; convinced that the market was a self-regulating mechanism, it turned away from its traditional role, which is—in the words of a former Fed chairman, William McChesney Martin—“to take away the punch bowl just when the party gets going.” A formal renunciation of the Greenspan doctrine is overdue. The Fed has a congressional mandate to insure maximum employment and stable prices. Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach has suggested that Congress alter that mandate to include the preservation of financial stability. The addition of a third mandate would mesh with the Obama Administration’s proposal to make the Fed the primary monitor of systemic risk, and it would also force the central bank’s governors and staff to think more critically about the financial system and its role in the broader economy.
It’s a pity that economists outside the Fed can’t be legally obliged to acknowledge their errors. During the past few decades, much economic research has “tended to be motivated by the internal logic, intellectual sunk capital and esthetic puzzles of established research programmes rather than by a powerful desire to understand how the economy works—let alone how the economy works during times of stress and financial instability,” notes Willem Buiter, a professor at the London School of Economics who has also served on the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee. “So the economics profession was caught unprepared when the crisis struck.”
In creating this state of unreadiness, the role of free-market ideology cannot be ignored. Many leading economists still have a vision of the invisible hand satisfying wants, equating costs with benefits, and otherwise harmonizing the interests of the many. In a column that appeared in the Times in May, the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the author of two leading textbooks, conceded that teachers of freshman economics would now have to mention some issues that were previously relegated to more advanced courses, such as the role of financial institutions, the dangers of leverage, and the perils of economic forecasting. And yet “despite the enormity of recent events, the principles of economics are largely unchanged,” Mankiw stated. “Students still need to learn about the gains from trade, supply and demand, the efficiency properties of market outcomes, and so on. These topics will remain the bread-and-butter of introductory courses.”
Note the phrase “the efficiency properties of market outcomes.” What does that refer to? Builders constructing homes for which there is no demand? Mortgage lenders foisting costly subprime loans on the cash-strapped elderly? Wall Street banks levering up their equity capital by forty to one? The global economy entering its steepest downturn since the nineteen-thirties? Of course not. Mankiw was referring to the textbook economics that he and others have been teaching for decades: the economics of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. In the world of such utopian economics, the latest crisis of capitalism is always a blip.
As memories of September, 2008, fade, many will say that the Great Crunch wasn’t so bad, after all, and skip over the vast government intervention that prevented a much, much worse outcome. Incentives for excessive risk-taking will revive, and so will the lobbying power of banks and other financial firms. “The window of opportunity for reform will not be open for long,” Hyun Song Shin wrote recently. Before the political will for reform dissipates, it is essential to reckon with the financial system’s fundamental design flaws. The next time the structure starts to lurch and sway, it could all fall down. ♦
Monday, October 5, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
International Man of Misery
by Ron Rosenbaum Apr 22 2009
The global economy is in free fall, but do-gooder Jeffrey Sachs, formerly known as Doctor Shock, is still trying to end poverty and save the world. Can he? Can anybody?
Jeffrey Sachs
1. Do-Gooders Are...IrritatingTokyo: The Palace Hotel. Breakfast with Jeffrey Sachs.
Admit it: Do-gooders are irritating. They make the rest of us seem so self-serving, selfish, and self-absorbed. And of course—for the most part—we are, but who likes to be reminded of it? Yes, millions are starving to death in Africa, but we’ve got our own problems to worry about now. Yet the do-gooders still want to make us feel guilty about famine somewhere far off. Irritating.
But take a moment and consider the plight of Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most prominent poverty fighters, America’s intellectual do-gooder-in-chief. Even when the West was flush with cash, his was no easy task: maniacally crisscrossing the globe, going from one poverty confab to another, trying to get the do-gooder bureaucracies of the world on the same page. Now that we’re in economic free fall? Forget it.
Nobody wants to hear about the eternal “plight of the poor” or what seems like an endless series of famines and slaughters. An estimated $500 billion in aid has been funneled into Africa in the past half-century, and it was never enough. There were always well-meaning types like Sachs, coming around again and again with a metaphorical begging bowl for some new plan or other that would finally fix things and allow us to cross an item off our bucket list: “Cure poverty—done.” ( View a slideshow featuring some of Jeffrey Sachs' celebrity friends.)
But now we’ve got people being forced out into the streets in the great cities of the West, and we’ve got to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to thank the bankers for bankrupting our economy, for god’s sake. Who wants to hear about starving children?
I’d been wondering about the dynamics of do-gooderism even before the crash, back when I had breakfast with Sachs in Tokyo at the Palace Hotel (named after the nearby Imperial Palace) in March 2008. Sachs, the PowerPoint man for Bono and Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Angelina Jolie, had let me accompany him on one of his high-level begging missions to Japan. ( View a graphic outlining Jeffrey Sach's grueling itineary.)
It was a surreal scene that morning. People wearing full-face, high-tech surgical masks and garbed in business attire drifted through the hotel lobby, acting as if that combination weren’t a bit weird or ominous. I thought there must have been some post-atomic Japanese horror movie being filmed nearby until Sachs explained.
It was not fear of breathing in germs, pollution, or radiation-tainted air that motivated the mask wearers, he said. Rather, it was a manifestation of the admirable politesse of Japanese culture: Those who had a cold or the flu wore a mask to better avoid infecting others.
Still, instinctively, it was hard not to feel disapproved of—that the masks were a reproof, as if the wearers were protecting themselves from our uncleanliness. I came to think of this as a kind of metaphor for the way one feels in the presence of all types of do-gooders; it’s as if they’re wearing invisible masks to protect themselves from the cynical, inertial moral contagion of our indifference.
Sachs himself doesn’t give off that vibe of do-gooder disdain. His is not the guilt-tripping emotionalism of a Sally Struthers trudging through the muck of a third-world village on a late-night TV ad, swatting flies away from children with famine-swollen bellies, rubbing our noses in the stench of our unconcern.
No, Sachs is careful to make understated appeals to reason, logic, and economic theory. His two bestselling books, The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, are replete with challenging charts and eye-glazing graphs. Here’s where we are; here’s where the differential equations say we can be, saving the starving from Sally Struthers.
Sachs is, after all, a supreme rationalist, a numbers man among bleeding hearts, an economist with a PhD from Harvard and one of the youngest professors ever to get tenure there. He now heads up his own academic mega-think tank, Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He is poverty’s chief public intellectual, the go-to guy when, say, Charlie Rose wants to get serious about the poor. He has been called “the most important economist in the world” by the New York Times Magazine. The Daily Telegraph referred to him as a dispenser of “moral medicine.”
There are doubters, though: policy critics within the “dev biz,” as some insiders call the global antipoverty development institutions. Indeed, Sachs is at the center of a great debate—actually, several linked and probably interminable and unresolvable great debates—over the eternal poverty questions: How bad are things, really? Has the half-trillion dollars funneled into Africa in the past 50 years helped, or—as Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, among others, says—has it actually hurt?
How could it hurt? By distorting the political culture of Africa—fattening corrupt kleptocrats who have diverted untold billions away from the needy and into Swiss bank accounts and crippled their countries’ progress toward self-sufficiency. In other words, the question is whether the corrupt political culture in these poverty-stricken nations must be reformed before aid can make a difference, or whether aid and accompanying development can reform the political culture.
Certain of Sachs’ critics within the dev biz dismiss him as “one of the world’s most gifted self-publicists” flogging “superficially attractive but deeply flawed ideas,” as former World Bank official David Ellerman puts it. He says that Sachs’ prescriptions rely on top-down, neocolonial, interventionist solutions that have failed in the past.
Meanwhile, Naomi Klein, an antiglobalization writer and activist, calls Sachs “Doctor Shock.” She accuses him of having a dark past in which he prescribed not “moral medicine” but “shock therapy” economics for populations that were already too stunned to resist.
Other critics blame him and his whiz-kid colleagues—the so-called Harvard boys, including Obama’s economics guru Lawrence Summers—for missing a historic opportunity more than a decade ago in post-Soviet Russia. The disastrous attempt to turn a titanic collectivist economy into a capitalist democracy virtually overnight—an attempt that “privatized” the Russian economy into poverty, oligarchy, and gangsterism in the ’90s—gave capitalist democracy a bad name and paved the way for Putinism and renewed political and even military hostility, as evidenced by the invasion of Georgia. Will Sachs be remembered for saving the world in Africa or setting it on the path to destruction in Russia?
Sachs calls the reporting on his role in Russia “unfair” and even “ridiculous,” but no doubt he’s a global player: He’s one of the few individuals who can be both credited with a plan for global salvation and blamed for the renewed potential for global destruction.
But we like our do-gooder icons to have problematic pasts, don’t we? It allows us to fit their lives into our favorite contemporary narrative: redemption. Reputational rehab. Becoming the Sally Struthers of intellectuals has allowed Jeffrey Sachs to largely erase his identification with the Russian fiasco and become the white knight of do-gooders, or at least their Don Quixote.
Nonetheless, what Sachs is quick to call the cynicism of his critics can, at times, get under his skin. When it happens, it comes as a bit of a surprise, because on the surface he seems a mild, unassuming, just-the-facts-ma’am type, at least in the presence of a reporter. His undramatic manner is reflected in his emphatically bland garb, the Midwestern flatness of his voice, and the hairpiece-looking (but in fact real) haystack atop his head, all of which suggest not some Northeast Corridor slickster but rather a Corn Belt farm-implements salesman. But once in a while, one can hear what sounds like a combination of injury and outrage in his voice when he gets going on the topic of those who question his solutions.
“I find the level of cynicism among thinking people unacceptably high,” he told me over the phone shortly before the Tokyo trip. “What I don’t really appreciate is the complacency of thinking people—in the sense that there are a lot of very well-trained people who should know better. And if they don’t like my ideas, they should at least feel some responsibility to not just naysay but come up with other ideas. But not to accept 10 million children dying every year of extreme poverty?”
Note that figure of “10 million children,” the ones “dying every year of extreme poverty.” That’s the rhetorical club he wields against cynics, citing it without melodrama during long disquisitions on the conditions necessary to abolish extreme poverty. “Extreme poverty,” by the way, is a technical term in the jargon of the poverty-industrial complex. It doesn’t simply refer to those who are really, really poor. It is the threshold that defines the “bottom billion” of the world’s poor, the ones who earn less than a dollar a day. Extreme poverty—according to the Sachsians, at least—differs from ordinary poverty because the extremely impoverished are so poor, they lack the ability to lift themselves out of the “poverty trap,” another key Sachsian term. That phrase refers to the quicksand of disease, drought, and famine that renders a population unable to escape poverty by their own efforts.
The human cost: approximately 10 million children a year. We never see them appear and disappear from the planet. They may as well be 10 million miles away. Sachs doesn’t tell weepy sob stories about them. He just mentions the number and leaves it up to us to make of it what we will—or to convict ourselves of callousness if we use the abstract number to hold the suffering at arm’s length.
2. The Willy Loman of Antipoverty ProductsSeeing Sachs in action in Tokyo was useful for thinking about these questions. I sat in on about a half-dozen meetings and a shabu-shabu luncheon in the basement restaurant of a Tokyo skyscraper with foreign-ministry officials and got a sense of how Sachs does his job—saving the world and all that—on a daily basis. It’s low-key, collegial, often technical and intellectual, but when you come down to it, Sachs is the Willy Loman of the dev biz. He’s got a six-point program to restore antipoverty programs after the crash. No, two six-point programs. (Point three of program two: “The dollar will need to depreciate relative to a basket of Asian currencies, a tricky maneuver but no less important for that.”) He has 80 Millennium Villages, demonstration communities in underdeveloped sub-Saharan Africa that need investment at a time when nobody’s investing, even in developed countries. He needs R&D funding for giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the desert that he thinks could solve the renewable-energy problem. On and on.
So at the heart of the do-gooder’s job is incessant travel to do-gooder conferences, public and private, to sell a line of goods. He just got in from Norway, he said in Tokyo. “Norway was a meeting on climate change hosted by the minister of foreign affairs,” he told me over the breakfast buffet at the Palace Hotel. “Since they do such good things, and I have so many links with them, when they called I just had to squeeze it in.”
It’s all about those links. After Tokyo, he’s off to Shanghai and then to South Korea, where a member of the Jeffrey Sachs do-gooder mafia has just been elected prime minister. “The new prime minister is a longtime friend and colleague of mine,” Sachs says. “He is the mentor, in many ways, of the secretary general”—United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon—“who was his deputy, and he’s now acting as special envoy, and suddenly he became prime minister just a couple of weeks ago, and I told him I was going to be in Asia and would like to stop by.”
“At this stage of my life”—Sachs is 54—“it’s actually quite remarkable to see so many colleagues from graduate school or from early days in senior positions. Bob Zoellick and I worked together at Harvard, and he’s of course president of the World Bank now. But we go back 30 years. Today, a classmate of mine was nominated to be deputy governor of the central bank of Japan.” It’s not that Sachs is well-connected. He is the connection.
While he’s known for his association with celebs like Bono and Angelina Jolie (MTV made a documentary called The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa), it’s this government-NGO-academia-think-tank-consultant network that powers the Sachs machine. He makes the connections between the PowerPoints and the power people.
3. Monetizing the Western ConscienceEven in good economic times, altruism is a hard sell. Good luck getting anything out of Congress, where foreign aid has long been about as popular as child porn and which has lately reserved its largesse for the bankers who destroyed our economy.
Still, you have to admire the shrewd way in which Sachs has managed to find a chink in the armor of some of America’s largest private corporations. He divulges his strategy one afternoon at his elegant Upper West Side townhouse, which he shares with his wife, Sonia, and their three children. Columbia University bought the property when it lured him from Harvard in 2002; the university, not Sachs, owns it. It’s an enviable if not showy abode, the walls of which are covered with intricately patterned Bolivian woven fabrics.
The secret of his pitch to corporate America is the way he has sought to put a price on meaning. A low, low price.
He has intuited that, deep down, we all would find a greater sense of meaning in life if we believed that we were engaged, even at a distance, in saving 10 million children a year. Sachs is offering that at rock-bottom rates.
“If my theory is right, and just 1 percent of what we have could make the transformative difference abroad?” he says. “First of all, a lot of people are willing to spend 1 percent on meaning, you know. If it turned out that really you need 10 percent or 15 percent of what we have” to end extreme poverty, “then it’s going to have to be someone else giving a sermon, probably about salvation and fire and brimstone. But if it’s just 1 percent, you can see so many pathways.”
If my theory is right... Of course, there’s that little matter.
But through strength of will, savvy publicity, and a boost from the U.N., Sachs has pushed his agenda to the fore, to the bestseller lists, to Charlie Rose and the New York Times editorial page. For better or worse, the Sachs plan is the most visible one on the table.
What does it consist of? In patchwork charity efforts of the past, “humanitarian rescue” has meant parachuting in vaccination teams here, distributing seed stock there, but with little coordination. As Sachs’ PowerPoint presentation shows, if you bring five or six key elements together, you reach critical mass—the antipoverty tipping point—and you boost the victims of extreme poverty over the threshold to ordinary poverty, where they are able to make a transition to sustainable living, if not immediate prosperity. That’s what he says he has already accomplished with his Millennium Villages in sub-Saharan African nations.
“These are all previously existing villages,” Sachs told me. “They were impoverished, hungry, and basically devoid of infrastructure and public services at the start of the project.” Sachs persuaded the U.N. to endorse his “quick-impact” program to put the villages on the road to sustainability in 2005. He got key funding from the government of Japan and from private philanthropists he roped in himself, as well as from the U.N. By 2006, after the Sachs blitz, villages like Sauri, in Kenya; Koraro, in Ethiopia; and Mwandama, in Malawi, were seeing food-production increases of 5, 8, and 15 times, respectively.
The idea is that once these villages—which now incorporate a total of about a half-million people, he says—reach economic self-sufficiency, they begin to spread, attracting government and private investment.
Critics have disagreed; one called the Millennium Villages “development Disneylands,” public-relations showcases. But Sachs says what they really show is that it would cost less than seven-tenths of a penny from each dollar of the developed world’s gross national product to end extreme poverty.
“You’ve monetized the Western conscience, right?” I found myself asking Sachs, almost plaintively. “You’ve put a price on how little it would cost to feel good about ourselves.”
“I guess it’s true,” he said. “I’m trying to give people no excuses not to do this.”
When he talks to companies, his pitch is all about talent recruitment and “reputational costs.” He says, “These businesses are finding that when they go to the campuses in the U.S.” to recruit, “often the first thing they hear is, ‘So what are you doing in Africa?’ And they’re stunned. ‘What do you mean, what are we doing? We’re not doing anything in Africa.’ And the students say to them, ‘Well, I want to work for a company that’s doing something in Africa, because I think that’s important.’ And so many companies have come to me and said, ‘We want to do something in Africa; otherwise we can’t recruit.’ It’s very practical.”
Everyone benefits, Sachs says. He allows the companies to buy a good reputation, which recruiters can then sell to the best and brightest in the talent pool.
“I’ve heard it over and over again from CEOs, who say, ‘We’re so happy we’re doing this. It’s the most meaningful thing our business has done, and I can’t tell you how much employee feedback I’m getting and how exciting this is,’ ” Sachs says. And he’s not talking about small fry. “We’re working with General Electric, which has equipped clinics and surgical units and so forth in all of these extremely poor communities, and with fantastic results. And with Ericsson, they’re providing the cell-phone and internet connectivity in all of the village areas, and it’s just a phenomenally—it’s breakthrough technology. To go from a completely isolated world—no electricity, no road, no contact, dying of extreme poverty—to having cell-phone connectivity, which means emergency-health-delivery services, being able to call for one of a hundred reasons, including figuring out what market prices are in three potential places where an output might be transported.
“And KPMG, they’re doing a lot of due diligence and investment-environment and business-environment analysis in these small cities near the villages where we’re working. So they’re using their absolute core business, consulting and accounting acumen, to help cities that most people have never heard of—Kumasi, Ghana; Kisumu, Kenya; or Akure, Nigeria—get their business environment straightened out so that foreign investment can come in. Becton Dickinson has helped us with a lot of diagnostic equipment and support, and Novartis has provided antimalaria medicines to the communities, and Sumitomo Chemical has provided long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets. And the list really does go on.”
Is this the way the world will end poverty? Will Sachs get a Nobel? Or will the crash crush his hopes? Will he turn out to be just another Quixote whose failure leaves the field once again to Sally Struthers? Before getting into these matters, perhaps now is the time for a brief PowerPoint-like presentation of the life of Jeffrey Sachs up to that morning in Tokyo.
FIRST SLIDE: Here’s young Jeffrey Sachs growing up in a Detroit suburb, practicing card tricks. His parents were civil-rights activists who inculcated him with reverence for F.D.R. and the New Deal’s use of government intervention to alleviate a downward spiral into misery that free markets alone could not cure. (Sound familiar?)
“I’m a product of a household that is a product of the New Deal,” Sachs told me. “If you look back, that for me is a watershed of good political sense—of how to make a civil society and how to make a peaceful, coherent society that addresses urgent needs and at the same time takes the benefits of free markets. Back to college, I’ve believed in a mixed economy.”
NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Sachs at Harvard, dazzling his elders to such an extent that, at age 29, he becomes one of Harvard’s youngest tenured full professors ever (I hear he did well on his SATs too), being called upon by the government of Bolivia to cure its 14,000 percent yearly inflation rate.
At Harvard, he said, he was powerfully influenced by iconic liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, disciple of economist John Maynard Keynes and the Keynesian tradition of mixed capitalism and government intervention.
Perhaps one reason Sachs emphasizes the F.D.R.-J.K.G.-J.M.K. connection is that critics like Naomi Klein have argued that, in his Bolivian and Eastern European interventions, Sachs had been seduced by the doctrines of Galbraith’s archrival, Milton Friedman, the strict laissez-faire theorist whose “Chicago boys” used “shock therapy” to privatize Chile’s economy without objecting strenuously to the death squads that enforced their “free-market reforms.”
NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Poland, a Sachs success story—after some travail. The trade union Solidarity called in Sachs almost immediately after it took over the government from the Communist Party. In one of Sachs’ favorite stories, he told the union it could save the economy from collapsing under the weight of a $40 billion foreign debt load by just refusing to pay. In a moment that Sachs is obviously fond of recalling, he said, in effect, “Just send all your creditors a postcard telling them the new regime is not honoring any Communist-era incurred debt.” Not a single zloty. It worked!
NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Sachs defending the collateral damage incurred by his sudden “transformations” of collapsing economies, the kind of thing his critics call shock therapy. (In Bolivia, the government kidnapped and sequestered labor leaders to prevent them from interfering with Sachs’ draconian revamping of the economy—“junta-lite” tactics, Naomi Klein called them.) “When a guy comes into the emergency room and his heart’s stopped,” Sachs said, “you just rip open the sternum, and you don’t worry about the scars that you leave. The idea is to get the guy’s heart beating again.”
NEXT SLIDE: There are a lot of debates about how big a role he played in post-Soviet Russia and how much of the blame he deserves, but most agree that it wasn’t a pretty sight by the end. Sachs—along with the other Harvard boys, as they came to be called, à la Friedman’s Chicago boys—parachuted in and convinced Boris Yeltsin’s economic team of “reformers” that rather than move gradually, they needed to privatize immediately, mainly by selling off state assets and giving citizens soon-to-be-useless vouchers to buy stock in the privatized companies that resulted.
It was, by almost all accounts, a horror story. Sachs told me that he feels he’s been victimized by unfair reporting about his role.
I had heard he was touchy about it, and the most I could get out of him was this: “I just think we made a lot of mistakes.” He left it a little unclear who “we” were, suggesting that the key mistake was the Harvard boys’ excessive optimism that the U.S. government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund would cobble together a Marshall Plan-type rescue of Russia in the name of capitalist democracy. They wouldn’t miss a once-in-history opportunity like that, would they? In fact, they would, and they did.
4. Bono and Moron InsuranceNEXT SLIDE: Close-up on Bono, around the year 2000, when he was making the transition from singer-songwriter to would-be saint, getting deeply involved with Africa and antipoverty efforts.
Then, Bono meeting Sachs. “My great friend Bobby Shriver,” Bono wrote in his introduction to Sachs’ The End of Poverty, “had advised me to meet [Sachs] in order to know what I was talking about before I went up to Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of Jubilee 2000”—Bono’s third-world debt-cancellation campaign. (Gotta love “my great friend Bobby Shriver.” Bono has picked up the rhetoric of the rich, presumably the better to help the poor.)
Here we see the template for the transaction that has allowed Sachs to put his solutions—his agenda—in the forefront of the public mind, even if some economists don’t consider him to be in the forefront of his profession. (“He’s not even a development economist,” one grumbled to me. “He’s a macroeconomist.”) Sachs is moron insurance for aspiring saintly celebs who want to be do-gooders but don’t want to be seen as celeb airhead do-gooder clichés. In return, the celebs shine their light on Sachs’ projects, like the Millennium Villages, which are photo-op lures for the novice celeb do-gooder. This arrangement may have reached its apogee with MTV’s 2005 documentary about Sachs and Angelina Jolie in Africa.
NEXT SLIDE: 9/11. “My response to September 11 was that I wanted to do something more for the United Nations, and I thought it was particularly urgent and a dangerous time, and I wanted to support multilateral processes,” Sachs said. “And at the same time, Columbia was trying to recruit me. Kofi said, ‘Come as my adviser on the Millennium Development Goals and organize an effort,’ and Columbia University offered me the Earth Institute position, and so after 31 years, I said goodbye to Harvard.”
5. Quixote or Card Sharp? There was a moment in the Palace Hotel in Tokyo that morning that threw into relief the issues raised by Sachs and his critics. We had adjourned from the breakfast room to the lounge, where Sachs was meeting with then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s science adviser.
Sachs is trying to make the transition from being known mainly as a poverty-development person to someone who can straddle the looming divide—death match, really—between the poverty-development do-gooders and the climate-change do-gooders. The rapid development that has raised literally billions of people out of extreme poverty in India and China has been dependent on dirty coal-burning plants. The climate-change people want to reduce dirty-energy use, but doing so, say some of the poverty people, risks cutting off the means of raising starving people out of extreme poverty. Look what happened when the climate-change do-gooders’ cry for biofuels led to land once used for food crops being shifted to growing plants to make fuel: soaring food prices, food riots, starvation spreading again.
Sachs knows of some ingenious ideas for dealing with the energy crisis, one of which he discussed with the science adviser: giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the Sahara desert. According to Sachs, with the right technology, you could focus the glare of sunlight off the desert sand and use the heat to boil water to drive enough energy-producing turbine generators to power all of Europe.
Well, I’m no techie, but it sounded a little far off in the future, if not utterly undoable, to me. (Where does the water come from?) Nonetheless, there was something about the grand, visionary reach of it. It suddenly captured what I found appealing about Sachs: He’s Don Quixote, and the giant parabolic mirrors—the analogy is not precise—are his windmills.
But then, after the meeting with Fukuda’s science adviser, came the revealing moment. I’d asked Sachs what he did in his downtime during his globe-trotting “endless tour.”
Sachs was silent. Then one of his chief assistants, Joanna Rubenstein, prompted him.
“There is sleight of hand,” Rubenstein said.
It turns out, Sachs is something of a card sharp, or anyway a clever trickster with cards.
Sachs didn’t look entirely happy with this disclosure. He says it just kind of happened, his learning to do card tricks. He’d spent a lot of time with cards as a young devotee of bridge.
Still, this unexpected Music Man sharpie side of him dramatizes the divide in the dev biz regarding Sachs: Should we place our confidence in him, or is he a kind of confidence man in the do-gooder trade whose main skill is making himself the center of attention?
“If ending poverty is so easy, why hasn’t it been done?” William Easterly, Sachs’ most vocal opponent, asks. Easterly, a former World Bank official now at New York University and the Brookings Institution, wrote a well-received book called The White Man’s Burden, which accused Western aid programs of being neocolonialist.
And later during that day in Tokyo, I thought I picked up skepticism from some of the earnest Japanese poverty bureaucrats to whom Sachs was appealing for funding for more Millennium Villages, among other projects.
Sachs wanted to encourage the Japanese government to promote private investment in Africa, particularly in ventures that would bring added support and “sustainability” to his development villages and the surrounding areas. The Japanese seemed to me to be politely suggesting that the political culture of these nations (none of which were named) had to change before Japanese businesspeople could be persuaded to set up shop there and provide markets for the products of the Millennium Villages. I got the impression Sachs, on the other hand, believed that successful development was the very thing that could bring about an economic transformation of the political culture of these places—or at least that those 10 million starving children couldn’t wait until after the political culture was changed to be saved. It’s the perennial chicken-and-egg question of antipoverty economics.
It’s difficult for an outsider to judge the different sets of facts and interpretations of facts that each side uses. Even one of Sachs’ allies, Oxford’s Paul Collier, says that Sachs “has overplayed the importance of aid” and that Easterly “is right to mock the delusions of the aid lobby.” On the other hand, Collier says, Easterly “exaggerates the downside and again neglects the scope for other policies.”
True, waiting for trial-and-error, pragmatic, self-generated development sounds far more holistic than Sachs’ interventionist approach. But even his opponents will concede that to wait for the right political and economic culture to evolve before getting vaccination teams and antimalarial medicine into stricken villages is not justified.
Some of Sachs’ successes have been undeniable—particularly his role in implementing the U.S. anti-AIDS and antimalaria campaigns and in advancing the “green revolution” in seed stocks that has allowed once-infertile drylands to feed millions who otherwise would have starved. Such achievements have allowed Sachs to transcend his controversial past. It fits the redemption narrative.
But that’s the past. The future is looking bleak.
6. The Billionaire BegathonOne afternoon in his townhouse in March 2008, months before the crash of the global economy, Sachs was telling me about how exhausting it was to fit the pieces together to get the funding for his programs, how much effort it took to get governments, NGOs, and corporations on the same page.
In a kind of despair, he spoke about what I like to call his billionaire-begathon fantasy.
Sachs said there were going to be 1,100 billionaires on that year’s Forbes list and their assets would be something like $4.2 trillion. If they allowed him to manage their money, he said, he could show them how they could end extreme poverty all by themselves without the rest of us lifting a finger.
“They wouldn’t have to give away a cent,” Sachs said. He’d just need the interest: “They could just put half their assets into an interest-bearing trust.” He’s done the math. “That would be $2.1 trillion, and 5 percent payment on that would be $105 billion a year. That would do the job. Actually, that would be quite good.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“I’m getting ready to go door-to-door,” he said, at least half seriously.
Still, I kind of like Sachs’ idea for a billionaire begathon: fast, efficient, no more global-poverty confabs. But when I spoke to him a month into the Obama administration, he conceded that the crash had wiped out so much wealth that even his fantasy was, in effect, defunded: This year, Forbes listed just 793 billionaires, worth a total of $2 trillion.
He’s back to doing multipoint programs for the G-20 nations. He emailed me a 45-page, small-type proposal, “Smallholder Food Production and Poverty Reduction: Principles for a Financial Coordination Mechanism (FCM) to Support Smallholder Farmers.”
On the phone, he was talking a mile a minute, dancing as fast as he could, describing the multitude of effects that the economic crisis has had, about how “it’s been a very, very tough few months. With African economic growth cut in half, cuts in foreign aid, everything has been made more urgent, especially the food crisis, and I’ve been spending a major amount of time trying to mobilize desperately needed funding for peasant farmers, and—it’s just overwhelming.” He uses phrases like “shockingly difficult” and “nightmare” and wonders aloud, almost hopelessly, why, when trillions are being thrown around, a few billion can’t be found to fight the extreme poverty that kills 10 million kids a year.
I took it all in, and later I found myself wondering, Why does he do it? Especially now, when it seemed to me the subtext of all these new six-point proposals and 45-page G-20 programs is that everything he’s built up in the past decade is sliding down the tubes, and he’s engaged in a desperate Sisyphean effort to roll the rock up the hill from the bottom again.
I can’t read minds. But I have a feeling that at least part of the answer to
why he does it is because he can, and because there are not too many others who can hold the whole miserable picture in their mind and, instead of giving up hope, translate the misery into salvific equations.
It’s probably hopeless, even more now than it was before, but he does it because, I suspect, he thinks no one else could.
And he just doesn’t want to leave the job to Sally Struthers.
by Ron Rosenbaum Apr 22 2009
The global economy is in free fall, but do-gooder Jeffrey Sachs, formerly known as Doctor Shock, is still trying to end poverty and save the world. Can he? Can anybody?
Jeffrey Sachs
1. Do-Gooders Are...IrritatingTokyo: The Palace Hotel. Breakfast with Jeffrey Sachs.
Admit it: Do-gooders are irritating. They make the rest of us seem so self-serving, selfish, and self-absorbed. And of course—for the most part—we are, but who likes to be reminded of it? Yes, millions are starving to death in Africa, but we’ve got our own problems to worry about now. Yet the do-gooders still want to make us feel guilty about famine somewhere far off. Irritating.
But take a moment and consider the plight of Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world’s most prominent poverty fighters, America’s intellectual do-gooder-in-chief. Even when the West was flush with cash, his was no easy task: maniacally crisscrossing the globe, going from one poverty confab to another, trying to get the do-gooder bureaucracies of the world on the same page. Now that we’re in economic free fall? Forget it.
Nobody wants to hear about the eternal “plight of the poor” or what seems like an endless series of famines and slaughters. An estimated $500 billion in aid has been funneled into Africa in the past half-century, and it was never enough. There were always well-meaning types like Sachs, coming around again and again with a metaphorical begging bowl for some new plan or other that would finally fix things and allow us to cross an item off our bucket list: “Cure poverty—done.” ( View a slideshow featuring some of Jeffrey Sachs' celebrity friends.)
But now we’ve got people being forced out into the streets in the great cities of the West, and we’ve got to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to thank the bankers for bankrupting our economy, for god’s sake. Who wants to hear about starving children?
I’d been wondering about the dynamics of do-gooderism even before the crash, back when I had breakfast with Sachs in Tokyo at the Palace Hotel (named after the nearby Imperial Palace) in March 2008. Sachs, the PowerPoint man for Bono and Bill Gates, Kofi Annan and Angelina Jolie, had let me accompany him on one of his high-level begging missions to Japan. ( View a graphic outlining Jeffrey Sach's grueling itineary.)
It was a surreal scene that morning. People wearing full-face, high-tech surgical masks and garbed in business attire drifted through the hotel lobby, acting as if that combination weren’t a bit weird or ominous. I thought there must have been some post-atomic Japanese horror movie being filmed nearby until Sachs explained.
It was not fear of breathing in germs, pollution, or radiation-tainted air that motivated the mask wearers, he said. Rather, it was a manifestation of the admirable politesse of Japanese culture: Those who had a cold or the flu wore a mask to better avoid infecting others.
Still, instinctively, it was hard not to feel disapproved of—that the masks were a reproof, as if the wearers were protecting themselves from our uncleanliness. I came to think of this as a kind of metaphor for the way one feels in the presence of all types of do-gooders; it’s as if they’re wearing invisible masks to protect themselves from the cynical, inertial moral contagion of our indifference.
Sachs himself doesn’t give off that vibe of do-gooder disdain. His is not the guilt-tripping emotionalism of a Sally Struthers trudging through the muck of a third-world village on a late-night TV ad, swatting flies away from children with famine-swollen bellies, rubbing our noses in the stench of our unconcern.
No, Sachs is careful to make understated appeals to reason, logic, and economic theory. His two bestselling books, The End of Poverty and Common Wealth, are replete with challenging charts and eye-glazing graphs. Here’s where we are; here’s where the differential equations say we can be, saving the starving from Sally Struthers.
Sachs is, after all, a supreme rationalist, a numbers man among bleeding hearts, an economist with a PhD from Harvard and one of the youngest professors ever to get tenure there. He now heads up his own academic mega-think tank, Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He is poverty’s chief public intellectual, the go-to guy when, say, Charlie Rose wants to get serious about the poor. He has been called “the most important economist in the world” by the New York Times Magazine. The Daily Telegraph referred to him as a dispenser of “moral medicine.”
There are doubters, though: policy critics within the “dev biz,” as some insiders call the global antipoverty development institutions. Indeed, Sachs is at the center of a great debate—actually, several linked and probably interminable and unresolvable great debates—over the eternal poverty questions: How bad are things, really? Has the half-trillion dollars funneled into Africa in the past 50 years helped, or—as Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo, among others, says—has it actually hurt?
How could it hurt? By distorting the political culture of Africa—fattening corrupt kleptocrats who have diverted untold billions away from the needy and into Swiss bank accounts and crippled their countries’ progress toward self-sufficiency. In other words, the question is whether the corrupt political culture in these poverty-stricken nations must be reformed before aid can make a difference, or whether aid and accompanying development can reform the political culture.
Certain of Sachs’ critics within the dev biz dismiss him as “one of the world’s most gifted self-publicists” flogging “superficially attractive but deeply flawed ideas,” as former World Bank official David Ellerman puts it. He says that Sachs’ prescriptions rely on top-down, neocolonial, interventionist solutions that have failed in the past.
Meanwhile, Naomi Klein, an antiglobalization writer and activist, calls Sachs “Doctor Shock.” She accuses him of having a dark past in which he prescribed not “moral medicine” but “shock therapy” economics for populations that were already too stunned to resist.
Other critics blame him and his whiz-kid colleagues—the so-called Harvard boys, including Obama’s economics guru Lawrence Summers—for missing a historic opportunity more than a decade ago in post-Soviet Russia. The disastrous attempt to turn a titanic collectivist economy into a capitalist democracy virtually overnight—an attempt that “privatized” the Russian economy into poverty, oligarchy, and gangsterism in the ’90s—gave capitalist democracy a bad name and paved the way for Putinism and renewed political and even military hostility, as evidenced by the invasion of Georgia. Will Sachs be remembered for saving the world in Africa or setting it on the path to destruction in Russia?
Sachs calls the reporting on his role in Russia “unfair” and even “ridiculous,” but no doubt he’s a global player: He’s one of the few individuals who can be both credited with a plan for global salvation and blamed for the renewed potential for global destruction.
But we like our do-gooder icons to have problematic pasts, don’t we? It allows us to fit their lives into our favorite contemporary narrative: redemption. Reputational rehab. Becoming the Sally Struthers of intellectuals has allowed Jeffrey Sachs to largely erase his identification with the Russian fiasco and become the white knight of do-gooders, or at least their Don Quixote.
Nonetheless, what Sachs is quick to call the cynicism of his critics can, at times, get under his skin. When it happens, it comes as a bit of a surprise, because on the surface he seems a mild, unassuming, just-the-facts-ma’am type, at least in the presence of a reporter. His undramatic manner is reflected in his emphatically bland garb, the Midwestern flatness of his voice, and the hairpiece-looking (but in fact real) haystack atop his head, all of which suggest not some Northeast Corridor slickster but rather a Corn Belt farm-implements salesman. But once in a while, one can hear what sounds like a combination of injury and outrage in his voice when he gets going on the topic of those who question his solutions.
“I find the level of cynicism among thinking people unacceptably high,” he told me over the phone shortly before the Tokyo trip. “What I don’t really appreciate is the complacency of thinking people—in the sense that there are a lot of very well-trained people who should know better. And if they don’t like my ideas, they should at least feel some responsibility to not just naysay but come up with other ideas. But not to accept 10 million children dying every year of extreme poverty?”
Note that figure of “10 million children,” the ones “dying every year of extreme poverty.” That’s the rhetorical club he wields against cynics, citing it without melodrama during long disquisitions on the conditions necessary to abolish extreme poverty. “Extreme poverty,” by the way, is a technical term in the jargon of the poverty-industrial complex. It doesn’t simply refer to those who are really, really poor. It is the threshold that defines the “bottom billion” of the world’s poor, the ones who earn less than a dollar a day. Extreme poverty—according to the Sachsians, at least—differs from ordinary poverty because the extremely impoverished are so poor, they lack the ability to lift themselves out of the “poverty trap,” another key Sachsian term. That phrase refers to the quicksand of disease, drought, and famine that renders a population unable to escape poverty by their own efforts.
The human cost: approximately 10 million children a year. We never see them appear and disappear from the planet. They may as well be 10 million miles away. Sachs doesn’t tell weepy sob stories about them. He just mentions the number and leaves it up to us to make of it what we will—or to convict ourselves of callousness if we use the abstract number to hold the suffering at arm’s length.
2. The Willy Loman of Antipoverty ProductsSeeing Sachs in action in Tokyo was useful for thinking about these questions. I sat in on about a half-dozen meetings and a shabu-shabu luncheon in the basement restaurant of a Tokyo skyscraper with foreign-ministry officials and got a sense of how Sachs does his job—saving the world and all that—on a daily basis. It’s low-key, collegial, often technical and intellectual, but when you come down to it, Sachs is the Willy Loman of the dev biz. He’s got a six-point program to restore antipoverty programs after the crash. No, two six-point programs. (Point three of program two: “The dollar will need to depreciate relative to a basket of Asian currencies, a tricky maneuver but no less important for that.”) He has 80 Millennium Villages, demonstration communities in underdeveloped sub-Saharan Africa that need investment at a time when nobody’s investing, even in developed countries. He needs R&D funding for giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the desert that he thinks could solve the renewable-energy problem. On and on.
So at the heart of the do-gooder’s job is incessant travel to do-gooder conferences, public and private, to sell a line of goods. He just got in from Norway, he said in Tokyo. “Norway was a meeting on climate change hosted by the minister of foreign affairs,” he told me over the breakfast buffet at the Palace Hotel. “Since they do such good things, and I have so many links with them, when they called I just had to squeeze it in.”
It’s all about those links. After Tokyo, he’s off to Shanghai and then to South Korea, where a member of the Jeffrey Sachs do-gooder mafia has just been elected prime minister. “The new prime minister is a longtime friend and colleague of mine,” Sachs says. “He is the mentor, in many ways, of the secretary general”—United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon—“who was his deputy, and he’s now acting as special envoy, and suddenly he became prime minister just a couple of weeks ago, and I told him I was going to be in Asia and would like to stop by.”
“At this stage of my life”—Sachs is 54—“it’s actually quite remarkable to see so many colleagues from graduate school or from early days in senior positions. Bob Zoellick and I worked together at Harvard, and he’s of course president of the World Bank now. But we go back 30 years. Today, a classmate of mine was nominated to be deputy governor of the central bank of Japan.” It’s not that Sachs is well-connected. He is the connection.
While he’s known for his association with celebs like Bono and Angelina Jolie (MTV made a documentary called The Diary of Angelina Jolie and Dr. Jeffrey Sachs in Africa), it’s this government-NGO-academia-think-tank-consultant network that powers the Sachs machine. He makes the connections between the PowerPoints and the power people.
3. Monetizing the Western ConscienceEven in good economic times, altruism is a hard sell. Good luck getting anything out of Congress, where foreign aid has long been about as popular as child porn and which has lately reserved its largesse for the bankers who destroyed our economy.
Still, you have to admire the shrewd way in which Sachs has managed to find a chink in the armor of some of America’s largest private corporations. He divulges his strategy one afternoon at his elegant Upper West Side townhouse, which he shares with his wife, Sonia, and their three children. Columbia University bought the property when it lured him from Harvard in 2002; the university, not Sachs, owns it. It’s an enviable if not showy abode, the walls of which are covered with intricately patterned Bolivian woven fabrics.
The secret of his pitch to corporate America is the way he has sought to put a price on meaning. A low, low price.
He has intuited that, deep down, we all would find a greater sense of meaning in life if we believed that we were engaged, even at a distance, in saving 10 million children a year. Sachs is offering that at rock-bottom rates.
“If my theory is right, and just 1 percent of what we have could make the transformative difference abroad?” he says. “First of all, a lot of people are willing to spend 1 percent on meaning, you know. If it turned out that really you need 10 percent or 15 percent of what we have” to end extreme poverty, “then it’s going to have to be someone else giving a sermon, probably about salvation and fire and brimstone. But if it’s just 1 percent, you can see so many pathways.”
If my theory is right... Of course, there’s that little matter.
But through strength of will, savvy publicity, and a boost from the U.N., Sachs has pushed his agenda to the fore, to the bestseller lists, to Charlie Rose and the New York Times editorial page. For better or worse, the Sachs plan is the most visible one on the table.
What does it consist of? In patchwork charity efforts of the past, “humanitarian rescue” has meant parachuting in vaccination teams here, distributing seed stock there, but with little coordination. As Sachs’ PowerPoint presentation shows, if you bring five or six key elements together, you reach critical mass—the antipoverty tipping point—and you boost the victims of extreme poverty over the threshold to ordinary poverty, where they are able to make a transition to sustainable living, if not immediate prosperity. That’s what he says he has already accomplished with his Millennium Villages in sub-Saharan African nations.
“These are all previously existing villages,” Sachs told me. “They were impoverished, hungry, and basically devoid of infrastructure and public services at the start of the project.” Sachs persuaded the U.N. to endorse his “quick-impact” program to put the villages on the road to sustainability in 2005. He got key funding from the government of Japan and from private philanthropists he roped in himself, as well as from the U.N. By 2006, after the Sachs blitz, villages like Sauri, in Kenya; Koraro, in Ethiopia; and Mwandama, in Malawi, were seeing food-production increases of 5, 8, and 15 times, respectively.
The idea is that once these villages—which now incorporate a total of about a half-million people, he says—reach economic self-sufficiency, they begin to spread, attracting government and private investment.
Critics have disagreed; one called the Millennium Villages “development Disneylands,” public-relations showcases. But Sachs says what they really show is that it would cost less than seven-tenths of a penny from each dollar of the developed world’s gross national product to end extreme poverty.
“You’ve monetized the Western conscience, right?” I found myself asking Sachs, almost plaintively. “You’ve put a price on how little it would cost to feel good about ourselves.”
“I guess it’s true,” he said. “I’m trying to give people no excuses not to do this.”
When he talks to companies, his pitch is all about talent recruitment and “reputational costs.” He says, “These businesses are finding that when they go to the campuses in the U.S.” to recruit, “often the first thing they hear is, ‘So what are you doing in Africa?’ And they’re stunned. ‘What do you mean, what are we doing? We’re not doing anything in Africa.’ And the students say to them, ‘Well, I want to work for a company that’s doing something in Africa, because I think that’s important.’ And so many companies have come to me and said, ‘We want to do something in Africa; otherwise we can’t recruit.’ It’s very practical.”
Everyone benefits, Sachs says. He allows the companies to buy a good reputation, which recruiters can then sell to the best and brightest in the talent pool.
“I’ve heard it over and over again from CEOs, who say, ‘We’re so happy we’re doing this. It’s the most meaningful thing our business has done, and I can’t tell you how much employee feedback I’m getting and how exciting this is,’ ” Sachs says. And he’s not talking about small fry. “We’re working with General Electric, which has equipped clinics and surgical units and so forth in all of these extremely poor communities, and with fantastic results. And with Ericsson, they’re providing the cell-phone and internet connectivity in all of the village areas, and it’s just a phenomenally—it’s breakthrough technology. To go from a completely isolated world—no electricity, no road, no contact, dying of extreme poverty—to having cell-phone connectivity, which means emergency-health-delivery services, being able to call for one of a hundred reasons, including figuring out what market prices are in three potential places where an output might be transported.
“And KPMG, they’re doing a lot of due diligence and investment-environment and business-environment analysis in these small cities near the villages where we’re working. So they’re using their absolute core business, consulting and accounting acumen, to help cities that most people have never heard of—Kumasi, Ghana; Kisumu, Kenya; or Akure, Nigeria—get their business environment straightened out so that foreign investment can come in. Becton Dickinson has helped us with a lot of diagnostic equipment and support, and Novartis has provided antimalaria medicines to the communities, and Sumitomo Chemical has provided long-lasting insecticide-treated bed nets. And the list really does go on.”
Is this the way the world will end poverty? Will Sachs get a Nobel? Or will the crash crush his hopes? Will he turn out to be just another Quixote whose failure leaves the field once again to Sally Struthers? Before getting into these matters, perhaps now is the time for a brief PowerPoint-like presentation of the life of Jeffrey Sachs up to that morning in Tokyo.
FIRST SLIDE: Here’s young Jeffrey Sachs growing up in a Detroit suburb, practicing card tricks. His parents were civil-rights activists who inculcated him with reverence for F.D.R. and the New Deal’s use of government intervention to alleviate a downward spiral into misery that free markets alone could not cure. (Sound familiar?)
“I’m a product of a household that is a product of the New Deal,” Sachs told me. “If you look back, that for me is a watershed of good political sense—of how to make a civil society and how to make a peaceful, coherent society that addresses urgent needs and at the same time takes the benefits of free markets. Back to college, I’ve believed in a mixed economy.”
NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Sachs at Harvard, dazzling his elders to such an extent that, at age 29, he becomes one of Harvard’s youngest tenured full professors ever (I hear he did well on his SATs too), being called upon by the government of Bolivia to cure its 14,000 percent yearly inflation rate.
At Harvard, he said, he was powerfully influenced by iconic liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith, disciple of economist John Maynard Keynes and the Keynesian tradition of mixed capitalism and government intervention.
Perhaps one reason Sachs emphasizes the F.D.R.-J.K.G.-J.M.K. connection is that critics like Naomi Klein have argued that, in his Bolivian and Eastern European interventions, Sachs had been seduced by the doctrines of Galbraith’s archrival, Milton Friedman, the strict laissez-faire theorist whose “Chicago boys” used “shock therapy” to privatize Chile’s economy without objecting strenuously to the death squads that enforced their “free-market reforms.”
NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Poland, a Sachs success story—after some travail. The trade union Solidarity called in Sachs almost immediately after it took over the government from the Communist Party. In one of Sachs’ favorite stories, he told the union it could save the economy from collapsing under the weight of a $40 billion foreign debt load by just refusing to pay. In a moment that Sachs is obviously fond of recalling, he said, in effect, “Just send all your creditors a postcard telling them the new regime is not honoring any Communist-era incurred debt.” Not a single zloty. It worked!
NEXT SLIDE: Here’s Sachs defending the collateral damage incurred by his sudden “transformations” of collapsing economies, the kind of thing his critics call shock therapy. (In Bolivia, the government kidnapped and sequestered labor leaders to prevent them from interfering with Sachs’ draconian revamping of the economy—“junta-lite” tactics, Naomi Klein called them.) “When a guy comes into the emergency room and his heart’s stopped,” Sachs said, “you just rip open the sternum, and you don’t worry about the scars that you leave. The idea is to get the guy’s heart beating again.”
NEXT SLIDE: There are a lot of debates about how big a role he played in post-Soviet Russia and how much of the blame he deserves, but most agree that it wasn’t a pretty sight by the end. Sachs—along with the other Harvard boys, as they came to be called, à la Friedman’s Chicago boys—parachuted in and convinced Boris Yeltsin’s economic team of “reformers” that rather than move gradually, they needed to privatize immediately, mainly by selling off state assets and giving citizens soon-to-be-useless vouchers to buy stock in the privatized companies that resulted.
It was, by almost all accounts, a horror story. Sachs told me that he feels he’s been victimized by unfair reporting about his role.
I had heard he was touchy about it, and the most I could get out of him was this: “I just think we made a lot of mistakes.” He left it a little unclear who “we” were, suggesting that the key mistake was the Harvard boys’ excessive optimism that the U.S. government, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund would cobble together a Marshall Plan-type rescue of Russia in the name of capitalist democracy. They wouldn’t miss a once-in-history opportunity like that, would they? In fact, they would, and they did.
4. Bono and Moron InsuranceNEXT SLIDE: Close-up on Bono, around the year 2000, when he was making the transition from singer-songwriter to would-be saint, getting deeply involved with Africa and antipoverty efforts.
Then, Bono meeting Sachs. “My great friend Bobby Shriver,” Bono wrote in his introduction to Sachs’ The End of Poverty, “had advised me to meet [Sachs] in order to know what I was talking about before I went up to Capitol Hill to lobby on behalf of Jubilee 2000”—Bono’s third-world debt-cancellation campaign. (Gotta love “my great friend Bobby Shriver.” Bono has picked up the rhetoric of the rich, presumably the better to help the poor.)
Here we see the template for the transaction that has allowed Sachs to put his solutions—his agenda—in the forefront of the public mind, even if some economists don’t consider him to be in the forefront of his profession. (“He’s not even a development economist,” one grumbled to me. “He’s a macroeconomist.”) Sachs is moron insurance for aspiring saintly celebs who want to be do-gooders but don’t want to be seen as celeb airhead do-gooder clichés. In return, the celebs shine their light on Sachs’ projects, like the Millennium Villages, which are photo-op lures for the novice celeb do-gooder. This arrangement may have reached its apogee with MTV’s 2005 documentary about Sachs and Angelina Jolie in Africa.
NEXT SLIDE: 9/11. “My response to September 11 was that I wanted to do something more for the United Nations, and I thought it was particularly urgent and a dangerous time, and I wanted to support multilateral processes,” Sachs said. “And at the same time, Columbia was trying to recruit me. Kofi said, ‘Come as my adviser on the Millennium Development Goals and organize an effort,’ and Columbia University offered me the Earth Institute position, and so after 31 years, I said goodbye to Harvard.”
5. Quixote or Card Sharp? There was a moment in the Palace Hotel in Tokyo that morning that threw into relief the issues raised by Sachs and his critics. We had adjourned from the breakfast room to the lounge, where Sachs was meeting with then-Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s science adviser.
Sachs is trying to make the transition from being known mainly as a poverty-development person to someone who can straddle the looming divide—death match, really—between the poverty-development do-gooders and the climate-change do-gooders. The rapid development that has raised literally billions of people out of extreme poverty in India and China has been dependent on dirty coal-burning plants. The climate-change people want to reduce dirty-energy use, but doing so, say some of the poverty people, risks cutting off the means of raising starving people out of extreme poverty. Look what happened when the climate-change do-gooders’ cry for biofuels led to land once used for food crops being shifted to growing plants to make fuel: soaring food prices, food riots, starvation spreading again.
Sachs knows of some ingenious ideas for dealing with the energy crisis, one of which he discussed with the science adviser: giant arrays of parabolic mirrors in the Sahara desert. According to Sachs, with the right technology, you could focus the glare of sunlight off the desert sand and use the heat to boil water to drive enough energy-producing turbine generators to power all of Europe.
Well, I’m no techie, but it sounded a little far off in the future, if not utterly undoable, to me. (Where does the water come from?) Nonetheless, there was something about the grand, visionary reach of it. It suddenly captured what I found appealing about Sachs: He’s Don Quixote, and the giant parabolic mirrors—the analogy is not precise—are his windmills.
But then, after the meeting with Fukuda’s science adviser, came the revealing moment. I’d asked Sachs what he did in his downtime during his globe-trotting “endless tour.”
Sachs was silent. Then one of his chief assistants, Joanna Rubenstein, prompted him.
“There is sleight of hand,” Rubenstein said.
It turns out, Sachs is something of a card sharp, or anyway a clever trickster with cards.
Sachs didn’t look entirely happy with this disclosure. He says it just kind of happened, his learning to do card tricks. He’d spent a lot of time with cards as a young devotee of bridge.
Still, this unexpected Music Man sharpie side of him dramatizes the divide in the dev biz regarding Sachs: Should we place our confidence in him, or is he a kind of confidence man in the do-gooder trade whose main skill is making himself the center of attention?
“If ending poverty is so easy, why hasn’t it been done?” William Easterly, Sachs’ most vocal opponent, asks. Easterly, a former World Bank official now at New York University and the Brookings Institution, wrote a well-received book called The White Man’s Burden, which accused Western aid programs of being neocolonialist.
And later during that day in Tokyo, I thought I picked up skepticism from some of the earnest Japanese poverty bureaucrats to whom Sachs was appealing for funding for more Millennium Villages, among other projects.
Sachs wanted to encourage the Japanese government to promote private investment in Africa, particularly in ventures that would bring added support and “sustainability” to his development villages and the surrounding areas. The Japanese seemed to me to be politely suggesting that the political culture of these nations (none of which were named) had to change before Japanese businesspeople could be persuaded to set up shop there and provide markets for the products of the Millennium Villages. I got the impression Sachs, on the other hand, believed that successful development was the very thing that could bring about an economic transformation of the political culture of these places—or at least that those 10 million starving children couldn’t wait until after the political culture was changed to be saved. It’s the perennial chicken-and-egg question of antipoverty economics.
It’s difficult for an outsider to judge the different sets of facts and interpretations of facts that each side uses. Even one of Sachs’ allies, Oxford’s Paul Collier, says that Sachs “has overplayed the importance of aid” and that Easterly “is right to mock the delusions of the aid lobby.” On the other hand, Collier says, Easterly “exaggerates the downside and again neglects the scope for other policies.”
True, waiting for trial-and-error, pragmatic, self-generated development sounds far more holistic than Sachs’ interventionist approach. But even his opponents will concede that to wait for the right political and economic culture to evolve before getting vaccination teams and antimalarial medicine into stricken villages is not justified.
Some of Sachs’ successes have been undeniable—particularly his role in implementing the U.S. anti-AIDS and antimalaria campaigns and in advancing the “green revolution” in seed stocks that has allowed once-infertile drylands to feed millions who otherwise would have starved. Such achievements have allowed Sachs to transcend his controversial past. It fits the redemption narrative.
But that’s the past. The future is looking bleak.
6. The Billionaire BegathonOne afternoon in his townhouse in March 2008, months before the crash of the global economy, Sachs was telling me about how exhausting it was to fit the pieces together to get the funding for his programs, how much effort it took to get governments, NGOs, and corporations on the same page.
In a kind of despair, he spoke about what I like to call his billionaire-begathon fantasy.
Sachs said there were going to be 1,100 billionaires on that year’s Forbes list and their assets would be something like $4.2 trillion. If they allowed him to manage their money, he said, he could show them how they could end extreme poverty all by themselves without the rest of us lifting a finger.
“They wouldn’t have to give away a cent,” Sachs said. He’d just need the interest: “They could just put half their assets into an interest-bearing trust.” He’s done the math. “That would be $2.1 trillion, and 5 percent payment on that would be $105 billion a year. That would do the job. Actually, that would be quite good.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“I’m getting ready to go door-to-door,” he said, at least half seriously.
Still, I kind of like Sachs’ idea for a billionaire begathon: fast, efficient, no more global-poverty confabs. But when I spoke to him a month into the Obama administration, he conceded that the crash had wiped out so much wealth that even his fantasy was, in effect, defunded: This year, Forbes listed just 793 billionaires, worth a total of $2 trillion.
He’s back to doing multipoint programs for the G-20 nations. He emailed me a 45-page, small-type proposal, “Smallholder Food Production and Poverty Reduction: Principles for a Financial Coordination Mechanism (FCM) to Support Smallholder Farmers.”
On the phone, he was talking a mile a minute, dancing as fast as he could, describing the multitude of effects that the economic crisis has had, about how “it’s been a very, very tough few months. With African economic growth cut in half, cuts in foreign aid, everything has been made more urgent, especially the food crisis, and I’ve been spending a major amount of time trying to mobilize desperately needed funding for peasant farmers, and—it’s just overwhelming.” He uses phrases like “shockingly difficult” and “nightmare” and wonders aloud, almost hopelessly, why, when trillions are being thrown around, a few billion can’t be found to fight the extreme poverty that kills 10 million kids a year.
I took it all in, and later I found myself wondering, Why does he do it? Especially now, when it seemed to me the subtext of all these new six-point proposals and 45-page G-20 programs is that everything he’s built up in the past decade is sliding down the tubes, and he’s engaged in a desperate Sisyphean effort to roll the rock up the hill from the bottom again.
I can’t read minds. But I have a feeling that at least part of the answer to
why he does it is because he can, and because there are not too many others who can hold the whole miserable picture in their mind and, instead of giving up hope, translate the misery into salvific equations.
It’s probably hopeless, even more now than it was before, but he does it because, I suspect, he thinks no one else could.
And he just doesn’t want to leave the job to Sally Struthers.
Monday, January 5, 2009
Jonathan Harr - Lives of the Saints
A Reporter at Large
Lives of the Saints
International hardship duty in Chad.
by Jonathan Harr January 5, 2009
1. THE WAR SEASON
Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.
This is what Aiméry Mbounkap tells me on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2007. Mbounkap works as a site planner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He is a robustly built man of about thirty, an architect by training and saturnine by disposition. We are sitting in the common room of a U.N.H.C.R. field office situated on the eastern frontier of the African nation of Chad, thirty-five miles from the Darfur border. Along that border, the U.N.H.C.R. oversees the operation of twelve refugee camps with a population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Sudanese who have fled to Chad to escape death, mayhem, and ethnic cleansing.
The rainy season in Chad ended more than a month ago. Now that the rutted, undulating roads are again passable, it is the season of war. Aiméry Mbounkap’s preoccupation with bad moments that arrive unexpectedly is the result of reports, as yet unconfirmed, about a column of Chadian rebels gathering to the south of here. The rumors have come from the nearby village market and they are perfectly plausible, given that war has broken out in Chad with near-seasonal predictability every year at this time in recent years.
This field office is one of six U.N.H.C.R. outposts ranged along the eastern frontier of Chad. The compound consists of two sandy, sun-scorched acres, several low, whitewashed buildings, and a cluster of thatch-roofed huts where seven international staff members live and work. The national staff—some thirty Chadian employees—report here to work every day but live outside the compound. The field office meets the U.N.H.C.R.’s minimum security standards for eastern Chad, which call for a wall two metres high strung with razor wire, a metal gate, and a contingent of security guards, called CopGuards. The guards are dressed in black uniforms, which is meant to give them a menacing paramilitary aspect, but they are unarmed (by U.N. regulation), barely trained, and mostly teen-agers. Their job, for which they are paid around two dollars a day, consists in opening and closing the gate and keeping watch at night.
The Chadian rebel groups, of which there are at least half a dozen, formed largely along ethnic and familial lines, are not known to single out aid organizations for attack, but they are loosely organized, indifferently disciplined, and well armed. Some rebels, and also some Chadian Army recruits, have been known to freelance as hooligans and coupeurs de route—highway bandits—when they are not soldiering. The week before I arrived, in the middle of a sprawling refugee camp three miles from this field office, a U.N.H.C.R. worker named Ali Abderaman watched two young men in white robes walk past the Toyota Land Cruiser in which he and a driver were sitting. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Abderaman saw the men pause, exchange a few words, and come back. To talk, he thought, but they drew out AK-47s concealed in their robes and pointed the muzzles at his head.
A photograph of that Land Cruiser, with its blue U.N.H.C.R. logo, is tacked like a forlorn memento on a bulletin board in the field office. Ali Abderaman, frightened but uninjured, last saw it heading overland, across the desert scree, in the direction of the border. Since October of 2005, more than eighty-two vehicles—from Oxfam, CARE, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, and various entities of the United Nations, such as the World Food Program and UNICEF—have been stolen or hijacked on the eastern frontier, usually in daylight on the open road, or in refugee camps, and occasionally at night, when armed men assaulted a compound.
The field offices of relief organizations present alluring targets for men with guns. Parked in the courtyard here are five Land Cruisers and one large truck, all kept in a state of good repair by a team of mechanics. The communications room is full of satellite and VHF radio equipment, items of particular value in a region where there are no telephone lines, cell-phone service, or other means of communication. The office of Gervais Koutangni, the chef de bureau of this field office at the time of my visit, contains a safe full of cash, sometimes as much as thirty thousand dollars, to pay sundry expenses.
The United Nations classifies eastern Chad as a level-E duty station, the most extreme of its five hardship categories. In the normal rotation, these employees must remain here for at least two years before they can apply for another duty station. They receive hardship pay and, for every six weeks in country, one week of leave, which they are required to take for their psychological well-being.
In the common room, Aiméry Mbounkap continues his lamentations. He returned only yesterday from his week of leave, at home in Cameroon with his wife and children. Now he glumly faces the prospect of another six weeks here. He tells me that several months ago a group of Sudanese rebels were encamped in the hills nearby, perhaps so that the soldiers could visit their families in the refugee camp. Mbounkap frequently heard the crackling of small-arms fire.
The governments of Chad and Sudan have repeatedly denounced each other for supporting rebel groups—accusations that are manifestly true, as the President of Chad, Idriss Déby, well knows. Years ago, Déby himself built and commanded a rebel army from a base in Darfur. On November 10, 1990—the war season—Déby swept across the border to depose the existing regime. Ever since, one Chadian warlord or another has tried to do the same to him.
I leave Aiméry Mbounkap and cross the dusty courtyard. It is autumn here, a hundred degrees under the noon sun, but the air is bone-dry and tolerable in the shade. A CopGuard lets me out the compound door into a terra-cotta landscape, a hard-baked alkaline terrain of rust-colored rock and thorny scrub, broken now and then by stretches of shifting sand. Two hundred yards down the road, a Chadian family lives in a small cluster of tukuls, mud-brick dwellings with conical thatched roofs. It is a suburb of the village proper, which is half a mile distant, beyond a grove of mango trees.
Three other relief organizations also have small outposts here, near the U.N.H.C.R. field office. I cross the street and enter the World Food Program compound, where I am billeted in a tukul of my own. Francis Béré, the chef de bureau and the only other person who lives in this compound, convenes his Chadian workers here every morning, and in the evening he fixes himself dinner on a small stove and eats alone.
“There is trouble,” he announces grimly. “The rebels have come into Hadjer Hadid.”
Hadjer Hadid is a small village sixteen miles to the south, where there are two large refugee camps with nearly fifty thousand inhabitants. I ask Béré what happened when the rebels came into the village.
“It’s market day in Hadjer Hadid, and the rebels came in and fired their weapons,” he says. “Not at anyone, just in the air. People ran away, and the rebels looted the market.”
He is interrupted by a call on his radio. He answers and listens without saying anything. It’s a report from one of his Chadian workers in Hadjer Hadid.
“The gendarmes at the camps ran off,” Béré tells me. Small contingents of armed Chadian gendarmes, paid by the U.N.H.C.R., are assigned to maintain order at each refugee camp. “One of the gendarmes was caught by the rebels,” Béré adds. “I think he is dead now.”
Are the gendarmes fighting the rebels?
Béré laughs softly. “No, they just take off their uniforms and disappear. They are hiding from the rebels.”
Béré is forty-one, from Burkina Faso, where he has a wife and three children, the youngest a year-old boy. He is afflicted with loneliness. When he goes home on leave, his young son does not recognize him. His last duty station, in Pakistan, was also non-family.
Gervais Koutangni, the U.N.H.C.R. chef de bureau, lumbers toward us. He is a big man, slow-moving. Retirement is still some years off but visible on his horizon. He sits heavily in a chair across from Béré. “The rebels have a hundred vehicles occupying Hadjer Hadid,” he says. “We don’t know what will happen, what they will do. If they will do anything.”
Béré thinks it unlikely that the rebels will stop here. At least, he says, they did not last year, when he watched a heavily armed column speed by on the main road, not a hundred yards from the compound. They were headed seventy miles west of here to do battle with government forces in Abéché, one of the largest cities in Chad, and also the administrative center for the relief organizations with field offices on the frontier. When the rebels finally withdrew, two days later, the streets of Abéché were littered with the smoking hulks of military vehicles and dozens of dead. The U.N., which had evacuated some of its personnel, lost a million dollars’ worth of blankets, tents, medical supplies, and communications equipment. Thieves ransacked the World Food Program warehouses and made off with five hundred tons of provisions meant for the refugee camps.
“Headquarters told me to prepare an evacuation plan,” Koutangni says. “We have five vehicles, four drivers, eighteen people to take out. What do you have?” he asks Béré.
“Two vehicles and the truck,” Béré says. “Two drivers.” He falls into silent calculation. “Twelve people to take out.”
“You are part of the evacuation plan,” Béré tells me. “According to headquarters, you will go with the World Food Program.”
II. FIRST RESPONDERS
T he great diaspora from Darfur began in the spring of 2003, when the government of Sudan, led by a regime of Arab supremacists, embarked on a campaign to crush an uprising by the black African farmers of Darfur. The government’s strategy was to obliterate the villages in which the rebellion had arisen. The favored tactic was to drop rudimentary bombs—fifty-five-gallon drums packed with explosives and scrap metal—from old Antonov cargo planes, followed by an assault on the villagers by mounted Arab militias known as the janjaweed, the “demons on horseback.” The janjaweed killed those who had not fled into the bush, poisoned wells with their corpses, raped girls and women, set buildings ablaze, destroyed stocks of food and seed, trampled fields, and hacked down fruit trees.
Tens of thousands of villagers, most of them women and children, set off across the bleak Sahel landscape in search of refuge. Many dispersed throughout Darfur, and others headed toward the border with Chad. They arrived in Chad with few possessions, and camped on the outskirts of villages and towns. For the most part, the Chadian villagers greeted them with compassion, offering water and food. The refugees hoped to return soon to their homeland, but, as the months wore on, more refugees arrived, bearing horrific accounts of janjaweed atrocities in one village after another.
The carnage in Darfur continued for many months before it became known to the outside world. At its headquarters in Geneva, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees did not begin tracking the movements of the refugees until the late summer of 2003. That fall, it sent a team to investigate.
The first team was followed by a second, an Emergency Response Team led by Yvan Sturm, a forty-five-year-old Swiss national and a veteran of many dangerous and chaotic refugee situations. He had a lean, muscular build, short-cropped hair the color of metal filings, and a passport that bore entry and exit stamps from the following killing grounds: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somalia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burundi, Rwanda, and Zaire. In his spare time, he climbed mountains.
“I decided to go with a small team, just six other people,” Sturm told me. “I wanted to take a look at the situation, and I wanted to be able to move fast.” In Geneva, he chose the specialists he would need, going through a roster of forty U.N.H.C.R. volunteers who had recently completed a rigorous training program in the forests of southern Germany. For ten days, these men and women had lived in tents and faced simulated confrontations with armed groups, courtesy of the German Ministry of the Interior and the federal police. They were trained in dealing with angry crowds and hostile checkpoints, hostage situations, travel in rough terrain, setting up communications networks, and, of course, planning and building refugee camps. For the Chad operation, Sturm had in mind several people of varied expertise who had reportedly worked well together during the exercise. He needed someone skilled in security, someone in telecom, another in logistics, one in administration, and an expert in the legal rights of refugees.
Before Sturm’s departure from Geneva, a Beechcraft King Air, a twin-engine turboprop that the U.N.H.C.R. had stationed in the Congo, was requisitioned. He instructed the crew to fly the plane to N’Djamena and await his arrival. He arranged to have shipped to Chad several Thuraya satellite phones, VHF radios, laptop computers, and a fax machine. Those supplies came from a vast emergency stockpile in Copenhagen. The warehouse also contained twenty fully equipped Toyota Land Cruisers and large quantities of supplies for refugees—two hundred and fifty thousand blankets, tens of thousands of rolls of plastic sheeting, canvas tents, and kitchen sets with aluminum pots, bowls, cups, and plates—items that Sturm could begin distributing once he understood the dimensions of the crisis on the Chadian frontier.
Sturm flew from Geneva to Paris, where Air France still maintained the only commercial flight from Europe to Chad, a legacy of its French colonial past. At Charles de Gaulle airport he met the other members of his team, who had flown in from disparate parts of the world. They left Paris at six o’clock that evening, arrived in N’Djamena at midnight, and disembarked into the African heat and clouds of mosquitoes. Sturm saw the Beechcraft from Kinshasa parked on the tarmac.
Sturm’s team faced enormous logistical problems. Chad occupied an area three times the size of Germany and had less than seven hundred miles of paved roads, with two traffic lights in N’Djamena, neither of them functioning. The country was landlocked, the nearest port six hundred miles away, in Cameroon. The capital was a vast slum of seven hundred thousand people, the sky at dusk a purpuric haze from the smoke of wood cooking fires, the exhaust of ancient colonial-era vehicles, and windblown sand. In gullies alongside unpaved city streets, goats rummaged in trash and human excrement. The rest of the country had no electrical grid, no water or sewage system. Chad ranked fifth from the bottom in a U.N. index of human development. Three-quarters of the population of nine million were illiterate. Nearly one out of two people did not live to age forty.
The country was plagued by lawlessness, ethnic strife, widespread corruption, and political instability. In the years since Idriss Déby had seized power, he had engineered fraudulent elections, enriched himself, and dispensed favors to his inner circle.
The extraction of oil in southern Chad held the promise of alleviating the country’s extreme poverty. To bring the oil to market, Déby entered into an agreement, in 2000, with the World Bank and several oil companies to finance a pipeline to the Atlantic terminals in Cameroon. In exchange, Déby agreed to use most of the oil revenues to build schools, hospitals, and roads. The oil brought more than a billion dollars a year to Déby’s regime. He spent much of it on the military, fending off rebel armies. The rest was lost to corruption, shoddy, half-built projects, and numbered bank accounts outside Chad. In September of 2008, the World Bank withdrew from the project.
The events in Darfur have a direct bearing on the political instability in Chad. The Sudanese government supports the Chadian rebels with bases in Darfur and with money. The possibility of a successful coup d’état by one or another of the rebel groups raises the spectre of a regime even worse than Déby’s. As a Western diplomat in Chad told me, “This government is one-man deep. If he goes, the country falls into absolute chaos.”
From N’Djamena, Sturm and his team flew four hundred miles across Chad to Abéché, a hundred miles from the Darfur border. The French military maintains an outpost there and had just finished paving a runway to accommodate a pair of Mirage jets. Sturm’s team moved into a house and an adjoining building, which they used as a temporary headquarters. He hired a Land Cruiser and, early one morning, departed on a four-hour journey overland to the frontier with Sudan.
In mid-afternoon, he arrived in Adré, a town of ten thousand inhabitants directly across the border with Darfur. Travelling along the border, he saw hundreds of people encamped in makeshift shelters of reeds and straw, with rags and tattered blankets suspended overhead on sticks. Under the midday sun, the temperature could soar to a hundred and ten degrees. Dry winds and sand storms parched the terrain and sucked moisture from anything animate. Women and children dug deep into the sand of the dry riverbeds to find water and foraged miles into the countryside collecting wood to sell at the markets. As Sturm and his team continued along the border, the hundreds became thousands. About seventy-five per cent were women and children, hollow-eyed and lank-skinned from hunger and despair and fatigue. Interviews conducted later by Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders told of families being burned alive in their homes, and of men who had been forced to watch, in the moments before their own deaths, as their wives and daughters were raped. Some refugees had been there for months, and more came every day. Every so often, they saw in the distance a column of black smoke rising from another burning village. In the month before Sturm’s arrival, thirty thousand new refugees had crossed into Chad. The total number gathered along the four-hundred-mile border with Darfur, by rough estimates, came to seventy-seven thousand.
Sturm had a pragmatic cast of mind. The scene evoked in him a sense of urgency, but it neither shocked him nor caused him great distress. “I had been involved in other situations that were just as bad, even worse,” Sturm told me. Years earlier, in Goma, eastern Zaire, he’d been part of a team trying to cope with a million refugees and an outbreak of cholera that, at its peak, had killed seven thousand people a week.
“What preoccupied me most was water,” Sturm said. “It’s like gold in that region. The wind and sand will dry you up within two hours. Second, I had to get them away from the border to safety. The janjaweed were making raids across the border, stealing cattle and killing people.”
Sturm spent that night in Adré, where Doctors Without Borders had opened a small clinic. The immediate task was to get food, water, and temporary shelter to the refugees, and then begin the process of registering them, finding out precisely how many there were and where they had come from. To accomplish that, Sturm had to set up several field offices at intervals along the border and bring in people and equipment to run those offices. He and his team had to identify potential sites for refugee camps, which required negotiations with the Chadian government and the tribal chiefs among the refugees. Technical experts—hydrologists and engineers—had to be brought in to determine whether those sites had sufficient water to support thousands of refugees. The land had to be cleared, tents set up, water pipes laid, latrines dug. The U.N.H.C.R. attempted to place the refugee camps at least fifty kilometres from zones of conflict. To transport the refugees to the camps, Sturm had to assemble an armada of vehicles and get them across Chad, over hundreds of miles of rocky roads, to the Darfur border.
By the following week, support staff had begun to arrive in Abéché and on the frontier. Supplies were en route from the warehouse in Copenhagen and from other stockpiles in Gibraltar and Kenya. With money and technical assistance from the U.N.H.C.R., a Chadian government commission registered and interviewed refugees along the border. Teams of technicians came from Norway and Germany to search for water, drill wells, and plan campsites. The Italians sent a medical unit to work alongside the Chadian Red Cross and the Dutch and Belgian divisions of Doctors Without Borders. The Germans took charge of managing a fleet of Land Cruisers and heavy trucks brought in by the U.N.H.C.R., Sweden, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The operation that began with Sturm and his crew of six grew, within a span of weeks, to dozens, and within a few months to hundreds. Many were Chadian national staff members, their salaries paid by the U.N.H.C.R. Sturm spent half of his time in the office in Abéché coördinating the various parties, going to the camps whenever he could. In less than two weeks, thousands of refugees had received blankets, kitchen sets, jerry cans for water, and plastic tarpaulins. Sturm heard that in the village markets the tarpaulins handed out by the U.N.H.C.R. were showing up for sale at the equivalent of twenty-five dollars apiece. Some of the recipients—mostly women and children—may have sold the tarps, but Sturm also got reports that men from outside the camps were taking these and other items by force. He called a halt to the distributions and accelerated efforts to get the camps in working order.
The first refugee camp, known as Farchana, for the village nearby, officially opened on Saturday afternoon, January 17, 2004. The German and the Norwegian engineers had prepared the site, bulldozed a road, and overseen the assembly of tents into discrete blocks separated by lanes and footpaths. The first arrivals—a hundred and forty-eight women, children, and the elderly—came aboard a convoy of four trucks and one bus from the village of Ouendalou, south of Adré. The camp was intended to accommodate eight thousand refugees. In time, that figure grew to more than twenty thousand.
III. THE THREE “M”S
Shortly after I arrived in Chad, I met a young woman who worked for a large, well-known humanitarian organization. She and another woman, a colleague, were sitting in rattan chairs on the veranda of the Hotel Meridien in N’Djamena, a building that dated to French colonial days—the sort of place where ceiling fans twirl slowly overhead and gardeners are always tending the lawn and the bougainvillea. The young woman—I will call her Carole—had been in Chad for two months, on her second foreign assignment for the humanitarian organization. In many ways, she fit the profile of young, well-educated aid workers: in search of adventure in an exotic locale, and inspired by a vague desire to do good. Some end up devoting their lives to the work. Many more come and go within six months or a year.
Carole was stationed far to the east, in Abéché, a town once known among aid workers as a place of drunken weekend revelries and romantic flings. But, with rebel armies now roaming the eastern landscape, the government had declared a state of emergency in Abéché and imposed a six-thirty curfew, strictly enforced by checkpoints and pickups full of soldiers with AK-47s and RPGs.
Carole was twenty-nine, with shoulder-length blond hair. She had the dull, glazed eyes of someone who has witnessed an accident that she cannot get out of her mind. She listened to my questions and replied coherently, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She fell silent when the conversation did not directly involve her.
She lived in a compound in Abéché that was maintained by her aid organization and, like the U.N.H.C.R. field offices, was walled, razor-wired, and CopGuarded. “It’s me and three guys,” she told me. “At breakfast, we talk about the day ahead. At 7 A.M., we’re driven out to the office, a concrete building with three air-conditioned rooms. We’re at our desks by seven-fifteen. At six o’clock, we’re driven back to the guesthouse for dinner, and we continue working after dinner. I go to sleep at eight-thirty or nine. Day after day after day like this—it’s like being in a prison. I’m starting to lose my mind. I’m no good to anyone if I’m feeling that way.”
Carole had come to N’Djamena to stay with a friend for a few days and regain her equilibrium. The friend cast an occasional concerned glance at her. She was only a few years older than Carole, but she had many more years of experience in Africa.
As near as I could figure, Carole’s friend was utterly fearless. One night, she took me to a tiny restaurant run by two Chadian women. She drove through the dark, chaotic streets of N’Djamena in her agency’s jeep, past sheds and mud-brick buildings where groups gathered around small cooking fires, past an endless procession of people along the road, all coming into view and going out again as the headlights swept by. The restaurant was in a dim, stony courtyard lit by kerosene lanterns, and consisted of a few plastic tables and chairs. She knew the women who ran the place and greeted them warmly. She ignored the cold stares from a table of men drinking beer in the shadows.
Over a meal of fried plantains and bony fish from the Chari River, she told me that, among the variety of aid workers, two broad categories stood out: the runners and the seekers. The runners were fleeing their past lives; the seekers were looking for adventure or enlightenment. She was a runner, she said, but offered no details.
She went on to say that she had reached a point in her life where she must make a choice. She was thirty-three, young enough to return to her country and try to establish a life with marriage, children, and a home. Or she could continue on as she was, with reassignments every few years and little chance for marriage and children. “Look around,” she said, “and you’ll see that this business is full of women thirty-five to forty-five who are strong, competent, good at what they do, and single.” She had never had a long-term relationship. She must make a choice, she said. It seemed to me that she already had.
Another aid worker in N’Djamena, in her early thirties, told me that there was a more cynical categorization—the three “M”s, she called it: missionaries, misfits, and mercenaries. Missionaries and misfits I understood, but not mercenaries. “This can be a well-paying business, depending on the organization you work for,” she explained. “If you work for the U.N.—and just about everybody wants to work for the U.N.—your salary is not taxed, you get hardship pay, time off, and a lot of your expenses are covered. Especially if you come from Africa, or any developing country, it’s very difficult to find a job that pays as well.”
Serge Malé, who is French and a medical doctor by training, runs the U.N.H.C.R.’s operations out of a dilapidated colonial-era villa near the center of N’Djamena. Sixteen months in country when I met him, he found that every day brought to his door a fresh crisis of one sort or another—“le problème du jour,” he called it. He appeared to relish the problems. “My philosophy,” he told me, “is don’t take yourself seriously, but do what you do seriously.”
I was one of Malé’s smaller problems of the day. He was trying to arrange a ride for me on a U.N.H.C.R. plane to Abéché. His real aim, however, was to impress upon me his view of the refugees. “People tend to treat them as a group, one more camp of twenty thousand refugees,” he said. “But they have names, hopes, lives, loves. You have to see them as individuals.”
When I reached Abéché, I saw that the U.N.H.C.R. compound there had grown from the building occupied four years earlier by Yvan Sturm and his team to encompass four contiguous properties and a dozen buildings, all surrounded by an eight-foot wall crowned with helices of concertina wire. Seventy-six people, not counting the drivers and the CopGuards, work there full time, in air-conditioned offices—most of them cramped, with two or three desks jammed together. There is an environmental officer, a water-and-sanitation officer, a food-and-nutrition officer, a fleet manager, and a public-information officer, who has an assistant. There are officers for finance, administration, registration, community services, supply, telecom, and gender protection, along with assorted deputies, clerks, and assistants.
The chef de bureau was Catherine Huck, who had been ten months in country. The six U.N.H.C.R. field offices strung along the eastern frontier report to her, and she reports to the U.N.H.C.R. country headquarters, in N’Djamena. Huck is French and in her mid-forties, and has blond hair cropped at ear length and wears tortoiseshell spectacles. She has spent much of her adult life working for the U.N. Her tour of duty in Chad, like that of most international employees, is two years, although some stay longer. “Two years is O.K.,” she told me. “Not one more day.”
The U.N.H.C.R. staff in Abéché oversees the work of most other aid organizations. Even the largest and best known receive money from the U.N.H.C.R. to carry out operations in Chad. (Two exceptions, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, prefer to work on their own.) The aid organizations must file regular reports with the U.N.H.C.R., explaining how and to what effect the money has been spent. People here evaluate those reports and file their own reports and financial assessments, which go to headquarters in N’Djamena, where reports on the reports are written and dispatched to headquarters in Geneva.
As a consequence, most people in this compound spend most of their time in front of their computers or in meetings. Because of the dusk-to-dawn curfew, there is, in any event, little else to do apart from work. Even in broad daylight, almost no one sets foot outside.
Angele Djohossou, from Benin, was the senior protection officer for the refugees, a position of rank in the U.N.H.C.R. hierarchy, even if the organization likes to consider itself non-hierarchical. Her job, which requires a law degree, is to insure the refugees’ physical safety and their legal rights under the 1969 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention. Of late, her main preoccupation has been domestic violence and rape, a daily occurrence outside the refugee camps when women collect wood for cooking and to sell.
Angele came to Chad directly from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. She was first assigned to run the U.N.H.C.R. field office in Bahai, in northern Chad, on the edge of the Sahara. Of all the difficult places in Chad, Bahai is the most difficult, desolate and windblown, with fierce sand storms that last for days, and unrestrained banditry. The living conditions for aid workers are primitive, with little privacy, no fresh fruits or vegetables, and temperatures ranging from freezing at night to a hundred and twenty degrees during the day. The field office was neither air-conditioned nor heated.
On transferring to Abéché, after fourteen months in Bahai, Angele sought space to live. She rented a large house near the U.N.H.C.R. compound. She lived there for seven months, until an evening in July, when six men with Kalashnikovs broke through the front gate and overpowered the two CopGuards on duty. The house came with a gardener, whom Angele called Baba. “He was old—no one knew how old,” Angele recalled. “He looked about ninety. He didn’t do very much, but he was kind.”
The bandits shot and killed the gardener. Angele happened to be in Togo, on her week of leave, and learned of the robbery and murder in an e-mail from Abéché. On her return, she never again set foot in the house. She moved into the main compound, where Catherine Huck and a few other senior staff members lived.
Among the eight or nine white Land Cruisers parked in the courtyard of the Abéché compound, I noticed one with a faded blue insignia, hands reaching around a stylized globe, and, under that, the faint words “Aide Publique au Développement.” Those words had been scrubbed into near-invisibility, and the vehicle now bore a fresh U.N.H.C.R. insignia.
I asked the fleet manager, Anastase Makembera, about the old insignia. “It belonged to the Japanese,” he told me. “They left it behind.”
Why did they leave? I asked.
He shrugged. “They thought it was too dangerous to stay.”
The Japanese had encountered several dangerous situations. A few years earlier, a Japanese aid group had been engaged in planting trees in the Farchana refugee camp, the first camp to open. According to one account, they enlisted the help of the refugees, some of whom apparently construed tree planting as a sign that the authorities intended to keep them permanently in the camps—no longer refugees but internees. Within the confines of the camp, this inference was quickly adopted as gospel. On July 13, 2004, an angry crowd gathered around the mystified Japanese aid workers and their saplings. Things got out of hand, and the Japanese fled, bruised and bloody, two injured seriously enough to be hospitalized.
Riots erupted throughout the farchana camp. Three days later, the contagion spread to another camp, twenty-five kilometres south. In that camp, the cause was different—rumors that several aid workers were spies for the Sudanese government—but the effect was the same, and relief organizations were forced to withdraw their workers from both camps. Order was finally restored when Chadian armored vehicles entered the farchana camp in search of the instigators. They left carrying the bodies of two refugees, one of them a woman. The circumstances of their deaths have never been explained.
The task of assisting some thirty-three million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people in more than a hundred and ten countries around the world costs the U.N.H.C.R. about $1.2 billion a year. The bulk of that sum comes from voluntary contributions made by wealthy nations. The top ten donors account for eighty-five per cent of the agency’s budget. The United States is the largest contributor, followed by the European Commission, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Managing this money, accounting to donors for its expenditure, and overseeing the agency’s far-flung operations requires a bureaucracy. Like most bureaucracies, the one created by the U.N.H.C.R. has evolved into a cumbersome apparatus. The agency’s job is to take care of refugees, a task that is full of uncertainty and peril. But it also has to raise money for its operations, supervise its staff, and report to its donors. In the perverse way of bureaucracies, these secondary tasks, less fraught with uncertainty and peril than refugee situations and thus seemingly more manageable, have assumed an importance equal to, and in some instances greater than, the job at hand. That, at least, is the conclusion of a lengthy analysis commissioned by the U.N.H.C.R. and published in 2005. According to the analysis, called “The State of U.N.H.C.R.’s Organization Culture,” the agency “has a tendency to behave as though its primary purpose is, for example, to create reports, arrange staff movements and keep itself funded,” rather than “protecting and assisting refugees.”
IV. THE CAMP
The U.N.H.C.R.’s “Handbook for Emergencies” lays out general rules for how refugee camps should be set up—one tent per family of four to six people, set on a plot of land the approximate footprint of a small suburban ranch house, enough space for both the tent and a small garden. The family plots are grouped into “communities” of sixteen families, separated by footpaths or narrow lanes, and these, in turn, are grouped into “blocks” and, finally, into “sectors.” Each sector, block, and community is identified by a number or a letter. In theory, every person in every refugee camp has a precise address.
I went to the Bredjing refugee camp, near the village of Hadjer Hadid, in the company of Comlan Spero, from Benin, who had been eighteen months in country. We travelled from the U.N.H.C.R. field office in Farchana in a convoy of four other Land Cruisers, a fifty-minute journey on a washboard road of rock and sand, ruts, furrows, and yawning potholes, a goat path of a road known for armed robberies and carjackings. In accordance with U.N. regulation, the convoy had an armed escort of Chadian gendarmes, their vehicle, fuel, salaries, and VHF radios paid for by the U.N.H.C.R.
At the entry of the Bredjing camp the gendarme emerged from a makeshift guardhouse, lifted the gate pole across the road, and waved the convoy past, into a vast panorama of tents and mud-brick habitations, rising and falling away into the distance with the undulations of the landscape. At last count, the Bredjing camp had 30,390 inhabitants, the most populous refugee camp in Chad, and twice the size the U.N.H.C.R. had originally intended. It dwarfed every Chadian town and village within eighty miles.
We drove down a broad road to the center of the camp. Smaller roads and footpaths branched off the main road and disappeared into the dense maze of dwellings. The tents, with their faded blue U.N.H.C.R. insignias, had become tawny-colored and mottled from being scoured by sand storms and baking in the sun. They were intended to last a year, perhaps two with care, but most of them had given shelter for three years and the fabric had started to split and tear apart. The refugees had defined their plots of land by erecting reed fences around the perimeters. Some fences were elaborate, the reeds tightly woven into a houndstooth pattern. Others were simpler, unwoven, the reeds merely piled between vertical sticks planted in the ground. A few were in disarray, on the verge of collapse, as if the inhabitants had taken ill or succumbed to despair.
The U.N.H.C.R. office stood in a barren clearing near the center of the camp. It was a small rectangular brick building with peeling white stucco and a corrugated metal roof. Its two rooms contained several straight-backed chairs, a narrow wooden bench, and a table with a delaminating plywood top. The walls were streaked with tobacco-colored stains from the rains. The grit of sand was underfoot and on every surface.
Spero convened a brief meeting with his Chadian workers. He oversaw the community-service programs in Bredjing and in two other refugee camps, an assignment that covered everything from the schooling of children to the care of the elderly and the infirm.
As the others set off on their rounds, I accompanied Spero to the nearby office of the Chadian government’s refugee agency, which exercised extensive bureaucratic jurisdiction over the lives of the refugees. Camp registration, food-ration cards, travel permits, births, deaths, marriages, and separations all fell under its purview.
Outside the agency’s office, in the scant shade of two gnarled acacia trees, a hundred or more women, many tending babies, sat on mats or on the bare ground. They wore robes of vibrant hues—emerald greens, crimson reds, lemon yellows. A long line of women, with a scattering of old men and teen-age boys, formed at the front door. Inside, the order of the line broke down and petitioners crammed in, bodies tight against one another, heads craned over shoulders. They were awaiting an audience with the Chadian officials.
Seeing Spero, one of the Chadians rose from his desk with a big smile. He was a short, lean, muscular man in his forties who was dressed in a dark-green suit and street shoes polished to a high gloss. On his wrist was a large gold watch. His name was Vito Ngomnalta. His understudy, a man fifteen years his junior, wore a T-shirt and sat at the second desk, a cigarette in his mouth, squinting as he riffled through a stack of several hundred blue ration cards.
Ngomnalta freed a chair next to the desk and invited me to sit down. Hundreds of pages of printed forms, some with passport-size photographs appended, lay stacked on the desk.
There were numerous births every month. Every birth had to be registered on the ration cards. Women in polygamous marriages were entitled to ask for a separation, a bureaucratic formality, so that they could have ration cards for their own children. Travel outside the camp required a permit. And then, at the end of the month, there was a registration check of everyone in the camp.
For every petitioner, Ngomnalta and his understudy searched through the stacks of paper or the piles of tattered blue ration cards. The women crowded into the room, babies at their breasts. Most were solemn. Others were dull and listless. Some were fierce-eyed, angry, and impatient, and made no effort to disguise their mood. It was like a D.M.V. in a land where people had no motor vehicles.
Every so often, in the interest of crowd control, Ngomnalta would rise from his desk, stomp around, and wave his arms. He appeared to have mastered the demeanor of a low-level bureaucrat. He was by turns haughty, authoritative, harsh, and dismissive.
A teen-age boy, perhaps eighteen, wearing dusty jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, sat before Ngomnalta and proffered a tattered page. A travel permit, necessary for exiting and entering the camp, it was folded in half and then in quarters. The boy opened it delicately, like the wings of a butterfly. Examined by many hands at many checkpoints, it had split along the four creases.
Ngomnalta took it from the boy, gave it a glance, and spoke to him sharply. The document had expired twelve days ago.
The boy replied, a worried look in his eyes: yes, he knew that it had expired, and would like to have another.
Ngomnalta shook his head dismissively. From what I gathered, it was the boy’s duty to make this application for renewal before the expiration of the permit. Whatever the problem, Ngomnalta slapped the document face down atop a thick stack of papers. Case closed.
The boy began to appeal, but Ngomnalta motioned him to be on his way and summoned the next person in line.
Throughout his audience, the boy had maintained a deferential bearing. But as he rose from the chair his eyes smoldered with anger. He glared openly at Ngomnalta, but Ngomnalta either did not notice or was immune to this sort of venom.
One day, in another refugee camp called Treguine, I sat outside with Spero in the shade of a thorn tree. Nearby was a crude brick schoolhouse from which came the sound of children’s voices during their lessons.
Spero was explaining how the refugees managed to create an economy in the camps. Every camp has a market, with stalls in which goods of every sort—food, tools, cloth—are bought, sold, and traded. To make money, the refugees grow vegetables in their gardens, or collect wood, an everyday necessity for cooking that now required ever longer foraging trips into the countryside. Some hire themselves out to work in the Chadians’ fields, and some work for the World Food Program unloading fifty-kilo sacks of grain. Others are more entrepreneurial. In many refugee camps, barbers have set up shops, cafés offer tea and fruit juices, and millers have machines to mill the wheat and other grains distributed by the World Food Program. In nearly every camp, there is at least one entertainment center, with a television hooked up to a satellite dish and powered by a small generator. On any given night, fifty or sixty people pay to watch the news and a movie in Arabic.
Spero had never seen an entertainment center in action. All U.N. personnel, and those of every other relief organization, must leave the refugee camps by four-thirty every afternoon. At night, the camps belong to the refugees.
Late one afternoon, I found myself in an empty U.N.H.C.R. office in one of the camps. Outside, the sky was a dome of blue and the sun beat down like a hammer. Everything crackled with dryness. The oils of my hands had evaporated, my fingers and palms were fissured and scaled with dead skin. To avoid the sun, I stood inside the doorway and watched people pass by in the shimmering heat.
An old woman appeared at the end of the porch and eyed me. Her robes of yellow and green were frayed and soiled. She had a stick for walking, gnarled and crooked, stripped of its bark. She said something to me—in Arabic, I presumed—and mounted with difficulty the single concrete step to the porch. I nodded to her and smiled, and she stumped toward me. In front of me, leaning on her stick, she asked me a question.
I shrugged and said, “I’m sorry, I do not speak Arabic.”
She nodded sagely and began a long dissertation. Her face was deeply lined, her eyes rheumy, the sclera yellow. Her shawl had slipped back on her head, and I saw that her gray hair was arranged in neat rows of small tight braids. She extended a hand, the palm cupped.
Just then, a young man in long white robes and a white immah, a loose turban, saw us and came over to the porch. I nodded to him and asked if he could tell me what the woman was saying. I asked in French, having become habituated to speaking with Chadians, who are Francophone.
“I speak a little English,” he said to me.
He told me that his name was Muhammad Yusef. Then he addressed himself to the woman. He spoke in a gentle voice, barely above a whisper.
The old woman was sagging against the doorframe. I said to the young man, “Let’s go inside so she can sit.”
The woman dropped heavily onto a bench and leaned forward on her stick. Muhammad Yusef sat in front of her, erect, on a straight-backed chair. His white robes were freshly ironed and impeccable. He was uncommonly handsome, his features clean and sharply etched. He listened to the old woman with respect and dignity.
“She is alone,” he told me. “Her family have all died in the war. She has no one here to help her.”
The woman lifted her hand and made another comment.
“Also, she would like a new tent.”
There was nothing I could do for this woman, apart from giving her some money. In substance and in many details, her story was the story of almost everyone in this camp.
From my pocket I withdrew a handful of Chadian coins and placed them in the woman’s hand. She put her hand to her chest and thanked me, levered herself up, and went out the door into the sunbaked terrain.
I sat inside the darkened room with Muhammad Yusef. I asked him how he had learned English. He attended an English class in the camp, he said, taught once a week by an elderly Darfurian man. The class was not sponsored by a humanitarian organization, and the teacher did not work for free. Each student had to pay him half a day’s wages per class.
“Where do you get the money?” I asked.
He told me that he works whenever he can, usually in the fields. The harvest season had just ended. A day’s labor yielded him about six hundred C.F.A.s, or about $1.30.
At the door of the room, another woman appeared, this one middle-aged and stout, wearing robes of red and yellow. She spoke to Muhammad Yusef, who again listened calmly and without interruption.
“She is also poor,” he told me. “She has seven children. She does not have a husband. He died. She does not work, because she cannot leave the children alone.”
“Where is she from?” I asked.
The woman spoke at length. “She is from a village near Misterei,” Muhammad Yusef said. “When the janjaweed killed her husband, she came here. She has been here three years.”
These were the salient facts, the bare particulars of her situation, shorn of details. The woman looked to be in her mid-forties. She held within her the memories of childhood and family, marriage and birth, violent death and flight. And, now, a life uprooted within a refugee camp. Tonight, she will cook for her children. Tomorrow, she or one of her daughters will stand in line to fetch water at the spigot closest to her block, and venture out of the camp in search of firewood. Even if we spoke the same language, I would never comprehend the demons she wrestled with as she tried to sleep at night.
I had no more coins. I pulled out a bill, a thousand C.F.A.s—a little more than a day’s wages in the fields—and pressed it into her hand.
In her place was another woman. Behind her was yet another, and then a third. They had formed a line. I had become an unofficial bureau of appeal, a non-governmental organization of one. If I remained, the line would grow to twenty, thirty women, waiting in turn for an audience.
I stood and walked toward the next woman waiting at the door. She addressed Muhammad Yusef sharply, clearly protesting that she had not yet been heard. Her mouth was set and her eyes blazed with indignation. Muhammad Yusef tilted his head slightly, smiled, and replied to her in a soft voice. Despite his tone, I suspect that he was chastising her for her demeanor.
“No, I want to hear her,” I told him.
The woman composed herself and began to speak. “Her son is ill,” Muhammad Yusef said. “She takes him out every day to get air. The janjaweed shot him, and he has a bullet near his heart and cannot get up.”
“How old is her son?”
Muhammad Yusef listened to the woman, nodding.
“Her son is twenty-two years old. The doctor told her that she must take him to Abéché, to the hospital, but she has not been able to.”
I pulled some bills out of my pocket and handed her a C.F.A. note. I gave the next two women a bill apiece, and, stepping outside, saw an endless vista of tents.
V. THE BATTLE OVER THE HILL
The rebel army of a hundred vehicles that had entered the village of Hadjer Hadid on Saturday afternoon and disrupted the market had identified itself as the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development. Its leader, Mahamat Nouri, had once been President Déby’s defense minister. His army was the largest and best equipped of the rebel groups.
At dawn the next morning, I was awakened by the shriek of two fighter planes, the French Mirages, passing low overhead. I went out to the courtyard and saw that Francis Béré was already in his office.
“The rebel column is on the move,” he told me. It had left Hadjer Hadid and was on the main road to Abéché, having bivouacked at a tiny village called Abou Goulem, just six miles away.
The Mirages screamed above us again, banking off to the south. Béré and I stood outside watching them. “The French are doing reconnaissance for the Chadian government,” he said. “Every move the rebels make is known to the Army.”
The problem that preoccupied Béré now was evacuation. With a hundred heavily armed rebel vehicles occupying the main road to Abéché, we could not travel overland. “If we need to evacuate, we will have to do it in small planes, and they can carry only eight people,” he said.
“Where do we evacuate to?” I asked. “Abéché?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Maybe it will be Abéché that has to evacuate, not us,” I said.
He laughed. “Maybe.”
That evening, a column of Chadian Army vehicles moved out of Abéché toward the rebel army. Gervais Koutangni believed that there was little likelihood of a battle. He thought that the rebels would fade away into the countryside. Spero thought differently. He didn’t say much, but his smile, when I greeted him, was tight and quick.
“If there is a battle, the problem for us will come afterward, in the chaos that will follow with retreat,” he said.
The battle at Abou Goulem began on Monday morning at nine o’clock. The first salvo of big guns, six miles away, sounded like thunder in the distance. Outside the field-office gates, on the dusty street, the villagers who lived nearby stood motionless, gazing in the direction of Abou Goulem.
In his office, Koutangni was communicating with Abéché. He looked worried. “It’s a dangerous situation,” he said. “The fighting could arrive here.”
The battle continued for three hours, until noon, and, finally, there was silence.
I left the field office and walked a hundred yards up the road, to a small compound occupied by Doctors Without Borders. An Italian nurse and a Swedish doctor were preparing bandages, medicines, and cots for the wounded. They had heard that there were more than two hundred dead and wounded in the Chadian Army alone, and that the hospital in Abéché was overwhelmed with injured soldiers lying on cots in the corridors.
On the radio that evening, the rebels declared a decisive victory in the battle of Abou Goulem. That announcement was immediately followed by a government declaration that the Chadian Army had crushed the rebels.
Koutangni cancelled all trips to the refugee camps. It was too dangerous to travel. The gendarmes had, in any event, vanished, and there was no escort against the coupeurs de route. We were in lockdown until further notice.
The road to Abéché was strewn with the burned-out hulks of military vehicles. The Chadian Army had removed its own dead and wounded but had left the rebel dead to bake in the sun. Koutangni told me that the villagers of Abou Goulem had all fled into the bush when the rebels arrived. Now they were burying the dead rebels.
The days of lockdown passed one after another, and the rumors of war continued.
One afternoon, Aiméry Mbounkap appeared in Spero’s office with the news that the Chadian Army had moved into position just behind the field office, beyond a small rise, and that it was preparing to attack a rebel contingent. “We are directly in the line of fire,” he said.
“Where does this news come from?” I asked. “From good authority?”
“Yes. One of our drivers has an uncle in the Chadian Army, a colonel, who told him this.”
Everybody had news, but all news was suspect. The rebel forces seemed half phantom; they were reported everywhere, lurking in the hills, columns coming from the west and the north. Mbounkap, who wanted to return to his wife and children, was furious that we had not yet been evacuated.
Not far to the north, another battle broke out. I stood in the courtyard of the field office and watched the flash of cannon, like dry lightning, in the distance. According to the U.N.H.C.R. office in Abéché, two rebel groups, normally antipathetic to each other, had joined forces.
A poisonous torpor of boredom and anxiety descended over everyone. I saw Spero in his office, slouched down so far that only his round head was visible above the plane of the desk, like a dark pumpkin on a table. He smiled at me weakly, a jack-o’-lantern with white teeth.
Across the street, in the World Food Program compound, I found Béré sitting alone, watching television. I got a beer and sat down with him. He had a pot of food in front of him, a stew of some kind, cooked yesterday or the day before. It smelled older. He offered me some. I declined. We lapsed into silence and watched an American sitcom in French.
After a while, Béré turned to me. “I am not happy today,” he said sadly. “I miss my family. He looked down at his hands in his lap. “You get very lonely here.”
He had sixteen months remaining in Chad before he could apply for another assignment. “The money is good, but the job is hard,” he told me. And so he stayed on, hoping that his next post would be in Europe, perhaps in Rome, the location of the headquarters of the World Food Program.
After nine days of lockdown, movement to and from the refugee camps began again. The first week of every month was the period of food distribution in the camps, and that occupied Béré’s attention. With the road to Abéché now clear, Koutangni departed to meet with Catherine Huck. Several days later, I set off for Abéché, too.
I rode with a U.N.H.C.R. driver in a Land Cruiser, behind an escort of Chadian gendarmes. We passed the village of Abou Goulem, the road scorched and blackened but cleared of debris. In the distance, across a barren plain, I saw the burned shells of several military vehicles. Most of the battle had taken place out there, the driver told me. Rebel corpses still lay in the sun.
I left Chad in mid-December of 2007. Around this time, armed bandits climbed over the wall of the U.N.H.C.R. field office in Guéréda, north of farchana, and stole two Land Cruisers. Within three days, bandits had made off with five vehicles belonging to relief agencies. The U.N. staff in Guéréda was evacuated to Abéché. Six weeks after my departure, on January 31st, three hundred heavily armed rebel vehicles, moving swiftly across the country from the Sudanese border, arrived on the outskirts of N’Djamena. The rebel army, by then an alliance of three groups, encircled the Presidential Palace and demanded negotiations with President Idriss Déby. The battle began the next day. The U.N. evacuated all but a few of its personnel, as did other aid organizations. The U.S. Ambassador took refuge* on a French military plane. Thirty thousand residents of the city fled across the Chari River to Cameroon. The U.N.H.C.R. dispatched an Emergency Response Team to Cameroon to assist the Chadian refugees.
After two days of fighting, the rebels failed to take the city and withdrew. The corpses of soldiers and civilians littered the streets, along with the wreckage of military vehicles. According to the Red Cross, there were more than a thousand wounded, most of them civilians. Looters pillaged shops and ransacked the offices of the U.N. and other aid organizations.
A week later, the janjaweed militia attacked and burned a dozen villages in West Darfur. Twelve thousand new refugees crossed the border into Chad.
In May, a Frenchman named Pascal Marlinge was travelling in a convoy of three vehicles on the Farchana road. He was forty-nine years old, the director of Save the Children U.K. in Chad. His convoy was stopped by three armed men. One of them shot him in the head, killing him. No one else was injured.
The rainy season began in June. For four months, the roads in eastern Chad were impassable. The armies retreated to their camps and prepared for the coming of the next season of war. The various rebel factions, each with its own loyalties, have no aim other than to seize power, and oil revenue, for themselves. Should one faction succeed in overthrowing President Déby, the others will fight for control, and the country will plunge into a brutal, uncontained civil war. ♦
*Correction, January 22, 2009: The U.S. Ambassador took refuge on a French military base. He did not quit the country on a French military plane, as previously stated.
Lives of the Saints
International hardship duty in Chad.
by Jonathan Harr January 5, 2009
1. THE WAR SEASON
Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.
This is what Aiméry Mbounkap tells me on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2007. Mbounkap works as a site planner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He is a robustly built man of about thirty, an architect by training and saturnine by disposition. We are sitting in the common room of a U.N.H.C.R. field office situated on the eastern frontier of the African nation of Chad, thirty-five miles from the Darfur border. Along that border, the U.N.H.C.R. oversees the operation of twelve refugee camps with a population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Sudanese who have fled to Chad to escape death, mayhem, and ethnic cleansing.
The rainy season in Chad ended more than a month ago. Now that the rutted, undulating roads are again passable, it is the season of war. Aiméry Mbounkap’s preoccupation with bad moments that arrive unexpectedly is the result of reports, as yet unconfirmed, about a column of Chadian rebels gathering to the south of here. The rumors have come from the nearby village market and they are perfectly plausible, given that war has broken out in Chad with near-seasonal predictability every year at this time in recent years.
This field office is one of six U.N.H.C.R. outposts ranged along the eastern frontier of Chad. The compound consists of two sandy, sun-scorched acres, several low, whitewashed buildings, and a cluster of thatch-roofed huts where seven international staff members live and work. The national staff—some thirty Chadian employees—report here to work every day but live outside the compound. The field office meets the U.N.H.C.R.’s minimum security standards for eastern Chad, which call for a wall two metres high strung with razor wire, a metal gate, and a contingent of security guards, called CopGuards. The guards are dressed in black uniforms, which is meant to give them a menacing paramilitary aspect, but they are unarmed (by U.N. regulation), barely trained, and mostly teen-agers. Their job, for which they are paid around two dollars a day, consists in opening and closing the gate and keeping watch at night.
The Chadian rebel groups, of which there are at least half a dozen, formed largely along ethnic and familial lines, are not known to single out aid organizations for attack, but they are loosely organized, indifferently disciplined, and well armed. Some rebels, and also some Chadian Army recruits, have been known to freelance as hooligans and coupeurs de route—highway bandits—when they are not soldiering. The week before I arrived, in the middle of a sprawling refugee camp three miles from this field office, a U.N.H.C.R. worker named Ali Abderaman watched two young men in white robes walk past the Toyota Land Cruiser in which he and a driver were sitting. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. Abderaman saw the men pause, exchange a few words, and come back. To talk, he thought, but they drew out AK-47s concealed in their robes and pointed the muzzles at his head.
A photograph of that Land Cruiser, with its blue U.N.H.C.R. logo, is tacked like a forlorn memento on a bulletin board in the field office. Ali Abderaman, frightened but uninjured, last saw it heading overland, across the desert scree, in the direction of the border. Since October of 2005, more than eighty-two vehicles—from Oxfam, CARE, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, and various entities of the United Nations, such as the World Food Program and UNICEF—have been stolen or hijacked on the eastern frontier, usually in daylight on the open road, or in refugee camps, and occasionally at night, when armed men assaulted a compound.
The field offices of relief organizations present alluring targets for men with guns. Parked in the courtyard here are five Land Cruisers and one large truck, all kept in a state of good repair by a team of mechanics. The communications room is full of satellite and VHF radio equipment, items of particular value in a region where there are no telephone lines, cell-phone service, or other means of communication. The office of Gervais Koutangni, the chef de bureau of this field office at the time of my visit, contains a safe full of cash, sometimes as much as thirty thousand dollars, to pay sundry expenses.
The United Nations classifies eastern Chad as a level-E duty station, the most extreme of its five hardship categories. In the normal rotation, these employees must remain here for at least two years before they can apply for another duty station. They receive hardship pay and, for every six weeks in country, one week of leave, which they are required to take for their psychological well-being.
In the common room, Aiméry Mbounkap continues his lamentations. He returned only yesterday from his week of leave, at home in Cameroon with his wife and children. Now he glumly faces the prospect of another six weeks here. He tells me that several months ago a group of Sudanese rebels were encamped in the hills nearby, perhaps so that the soldiers could visit their families in the refugee camp. Mbounkap frequently heard the crackling of small-arms fire.
The governments of Chad and Sudan have repeatedly denounced each other for supporting rebel groups—accusations that are manifestly true, as the President of Chad, Idriss Déby, well knows. Years ago, Déby himself built and commanded a rebel army from a base in Darfur. On November 10, 1990—the war season—Déby swept across the border to depose the existing regime. Ever since, one Chadian warlord or another has tried to do the same to him.
I leave Aiméry Mbounkap and cross the dusty courtyard. It is autumn here, a hundred degrees under the noon sun, but the air is bone-dry and tolerable in the shade. A CopGuard lets me out the compound door into a terra-cotta landscape, a hard-baked alkaline terrain of rust-colored rock and thorny scrub, broken now and then by stretches of shifting sand. Two hundred yards down the road, a Chadian family lives in a small cluster of tukuls, mud-brick dwellings with conical thatched roofs. It is a suburb of the village proper, which is half a mile distant, beyond a grove of mango trees.
Three other relief organizations also have small outposts here, near the U.N.H.C.R. field office. I cross the street and enter the World Food Program compound, where I am billeted in a tukul of my own. Francis Béré, the chef de bureau and the only other person who lives in this compound, convenes his Chadian workers here every morning, and in the evening he fixes himself dinner on a small stove and eats alone.
“There is trouble,” he announces grimly. “The rebels have come into Hadjer Hadid.”
Hadjer Hadid is a small village sixteen miles to the south, where there are two large refugee camps with nearly fifty thousand inhabitants. I ask Béré what happened when the rebels came into the village.
“It’s market day in Hadjer Hadid, and the rebels came in and fired their weapons,” he says. “Not at anyone, just in the air. People ran away, and the rebels looted the market.”
He is interrupted by a call on his radio. He answers and listens without saying anything. It’s a report from one of his Chadian workers in Hadjer Hadid.
“The gendarmes at the camps ran off,” Béré tells me. Small contingents of armed Chadian gendarmes, paid by the U.N.H.C.R., are assigned to maintain order at each refugee camp. “One of the gendarmes was caught by the rebels,” Béré adds. “I think he is dead now.”
Are the gendarmes fighting the rebels?
Béré laughs softly. “No, they just take off their uniforms and disappear. They are hiding from the rebels.”
Béré is forty-one, from Burkina Faso, where he has a wife and three children, the youngest a year-old boy. He is afflicted with loneliness. When he goes home on leave, his young son does not recognize him. His last duty station, in Pakistan, was also non-family.
Gervais Koutangni, the U.N.H.C.R. chef de bureau, lumbers toward us. He is a big man, slow-moving. Retirement is still some years off but visible on his horizon. He sits heavily in a chair across from Béré. “The rebels have a hundred vehicles occupying Hadjer Hadid,” he says. “We don’t know what will happen, what they will do. If they will do anything.”
Béré thinks it unlikely that the rebels will stop here. At least, he says, they did not last year, when he watched a heavily armed column speed by on the main road, not a hundred yards from the compound. They were headed seventy miles west of here to do battle with government forces in Abéché, one of the largest cities in Chad, and also the administrative center for the relief organizations with field offices on the frontier. When the rebels finally withdrew, two days later, the streets of Abéché were littered with the smoking hulks of military vehicles and dozens of dead. The U.N., which had evacuated some of its personnel, lost a million dollars’ worth of blankets, tents, medical supplies, and communications equipment. Thieves ransacked the World Food Program warehouses and made off with five hundred tons of provisions meant for the refugee camps.
“Headquarters told me to prepare an evacuation plan,” Koutangni says. “We have five vehicles, four drivers, eighteen people to take out. What do you have?” he asks Béré.
“Two vehicles and the truck,” Béré says. “Two drivers.” He falls into silent calculation. “Twelve people to take out.”
“You are part of the evacuation plan,” Béré tells me. “According to headquarters, you will go with the World Food Program.”
II. FIRST RESPONDERS
T he great diaspora from Darfur began in the spring of 2003, when the government of Sudan, led by a regime of Arab supremacists, embarked on a campaign to crush an uprising by the black African farmers of Darfur. The government’s strategy was to obliterate the villages in which the rebellion had arisen. The favored tactic was to drop rudimentary bombs—fifty-five-gallon drums packed with explosives and scrap metal—from old Antonov cargo planes, followed by an assault on the villagers by mounted Arab militias known as the janjaweed, the “demons on horseback.” The janjaweed killed those who had not fled into the bush, poisoned wells with their corpses, raped girls and women, set buildings ablaze, destroyed stocks of food and seed, trampled fields, and hacked down fruit trees.
Tens of thousands of villagers, most of them women and children, set off across the bleak Sahel landscape in search of refuge. Many dispersed throughout Darfur, and others headed toward the border with Chad. They arrived in Chad with few possessions, and camped on the outskirts of villages and towns. For the most part, the Chadian villagers greeted them with compassion, offering water and food. The refugees hoped to return soon to their homeland, but, as the months wore on, more refugees arrived, bearing horrific accounts of janjaweed atrocities in one village after another.
The carnage in Darfur continued for many months before it became known to the outside world. At its headquarters in Geneva, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees did not begin tracking the movements of the refugees until the late summer of 2003. That fall, it sent a team to investigate.
The first team was followed by a second, an Emergency Response Team led by Yvan Sturm, a forty-five-year-old Swiss national and a veteran of many dangerous and chaotic refugee situations. He had a lean, muscular build, short-cropped hair the color of metal filings, and a passport that bore entry and exit stamps from the following killing grounds: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Somalia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Burundi, Rwanda, and Zaire. In his spare time, he climbed mountains.
“I decided to go with a small team, just six other people,” Sturm told me. “I wanted to take a look at the situation, and I wanted to be able to move fast.” In Geneva, he chose the specialists he would need, going through a roster of forty U.N.H.C.R. volunteers who had recently completed a rigorous training program in the forests of southern Germany. For ten days, these men and women had lived in tents and faced simulated confrontations with armed groups, courtesy of the German Ministry of the Interior and the federal police. They were trained in dealing with angry crowds and hostile checkpoints, hostage situations, travel in rough terrain, setting up communications networks, and, of course, planning and building refugee camps. For the Chad operation, Sturm had in mind several people of varied expertise who had reportedly worked well together during the exercise. He needed someone skilled in security, someone in telecom, another in logistics, one in administration, and an expert in the legal rights of refugees.
Before Sturm’s departure from Geneva, a Beechcraft King Air, a twin-engine turboprop that the U.N.H.C.R. had stationed in the Congo, was requisitioned. He instructed the crew to fly the plane to N’Djamena and await his arrival. He arranged to have shipped to Chad several Thuraya satellite phones, VHF radios, laptop computers, and a fax machine. Those supplies came from a vast emergency stockpile in Copenhagen. The warehouse also contained twenty fully equipped Toyota Land Cruisers and large quantities of supplies for refugees—two hundred and fifty thousand blankets, tens of thousands of rolls of plastic sheeting, canvas tents, and kitchen sets with aluminum pots, bowls, cups, and plates—items that Sturm could begin distributing once he understood the dimensions of the crisis on the Chadian frontier.
Sturm flew from Geneva to Paris, where Air France still maintained the only commercial flight from Europe to Chad, a legacy of its French colonial past. At Charles de Gaulle airport he met the other members of his team, who had flown in from disparate parts of the world. They left Paris at six o’clock that evening, arrived in N’Djamena at midnight, and disembarked into the African heat and clouds of mosquitoes. Sturm saw the Beechcraft from Kinshasa parked on the tarmac.
Sturm’s team faced enormous logistical problems. Chad occupied an area three times the size of Germany and had less than seven hundred miles of paved roads, with two traffic lights in N’Djamena, neither of them functioning. The country was landlocked, the nearest port six hundred miles away, in Cameroon. The capital was a vast slum of seven hundred thousand people, the sky at dusk a purpuric haze from the smoke of wood cooking fires, the exhaust of ancient colonial-era vehicles, and windblown sand. In gullies alongside unpaved city streets, goats rummaged in trash and human excrement. The rest of the country had no electrical grid, no water or sewage system. Chad ranked fifth from the bottom in a U.N. index of human development. Three-quarters of the population of nine million were illiterate. Nearly one out of two people did not live to age forty.
The country was plagued by lawlessness, ethnic strife, widespread corruption, and political instability. In the years since Idriss Déby had seized power, he had engineered fraudulent elections, enriched himself, and dispensed favors to his inner circle.
The extraction of oil in southern Chad held the promise of alleviating the country’s extreme poverty. To bring the oil to market, Déby entered into an agreement, in 2000, with the World Bank and several oil companies to finance a pipeline to the Atlantic terminals in Cameroon. In exchange, Déby agreed to use most of the oil revenues to build schools, hospitals, and roads. The oil brought more than a billion dollars a year to Déby’s regime. He spent much of it on the military, fending off rebel armies. The rest was lost to corruption, shoddy, half-built projects, and numbered bank accounts outside Chad. In September of 2008, the World Bank withdrew from the project.
The events in Darfur have a direct bearing on the political instability in Chad. The Sudanese government supports the Chadian rebels with bases in Darfur and with money. The possibility of a successful coup d’état by one or another of the rebel groups raises the spectre of a regime even worse than Déby’s. As a Western diplomat in Chad told me, “This government is one-man deep. If he goes, the country falls into absolute chaos.”
From N’Djamena, Sturm and his team flew four hundred miles across Chad to Abéché, a hundred miles from the Darfur border. The French military maintains an outpost there and had just finished paving a runway to accommodate a pair of Mirage jets. Sturm’s team moved into a house and an adjoining building, which they used as a temporary headquarters. He hired a Land Cruiser and, early one morning, departed on a four-hour journey overland to the frontier with Sudan.
In mid-afternoon, he arrived in Adré, a town of ten thousand inhabitants directly across the border with Darfur. Travelling along the border, he saw hundreds of people encamped in makeshift shelters of reeds and straw, with rags and tattered blankets suspended overhead on sticks. Under the midday sun, the temperature could soar to a hundred and ten degrees. Dry winds and sand storms parched the terrain and sucked moisture from anything animate. Women and children dug deep into the sand of the dry riverbeds to find water and foraged miles into the countryside collecting wood to sell at the markets. As Sturm and his team continued along the border, the hundreds became thousands. About seventy-five per cent were women and children, hollow-eyed and lank-skinned from hunger and despair and fatigue. Interviews conducted later by Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders told of families being burned alive in their homes, and of men who had been forced to watch, in the moments before their own deaths, as their wives and daughters were raped. Some refugees had been there for months, and more came every day. Every so often, they saw in the distance a column of black smoke rising from another burning village. In the month before Sturm’s arrival, thirty thousand new refugees had crossed into Chad. The total number gathered along the four-hundred-mile border with Darfur, by rough estimates, came to seventy-seven thousand.
Sturm had a pragmatic cast of mind. The scene evoked in him a sense of urgency, but it neither shocked him nor caused him great distress. “I had been involved in other situations that were just as bad, even worse,” Sturm told me. Years earlier, in Goma, eastern Zaire, he’d been part of a team trying to cope with a million refugees and an outbreak of cholera that, at its peak, had killed seven thousand people a week.
“What preoccupied me most was water,” Sturm said. “It’s like gold in that region. The wind and sand will dry you up within two hours. Second, I had to get them away from the border to safety. The janjaweed were making raids across the border, stealing cattle and killing people.”
Sturm spent that night in Adré, where Doctors Without Borders had opened a small clinic. The immediate task was to get food, water, and temporary shelter to the refugees, and then begin the process of registering them, finding out precisely how many there were and where they had come from. To accomplish that, Sturm had to set up several field offices at intervals along the border and bring in people and equipment to run those offices. He and his team had to identify potential sites for refugee camps, which required negotiations with the Chadian government and the tribal chiefs among the refugees. Technical experts—hydrologists and engineers—had to be brought in to determine whether those sites had sufficient water to support thousands of refugees. The land had to be cleared, tents set up, water pipes laid, latrines dug. The U.N.H.C.R. attempted to place the refugee camps at least fifty kilometres from zones of conflict. To transport the refugees to the camps, Sturm had to assemble an armada of vehicles and get them across Chad, over hundreds of miles of rocky roads, to the Darfur border.
By the following week, support staff had begun to arrive in Abéché and on the frontier. Supplies were en route from the warehouse in Copenhagen and from other stockpiles in Gibraltar and Kenya. With money and technical assistance from the U.N.H.C.R., a Chadian government commission registered and interviewed refugees along the border. Teams of technicians came from Norway and Germany to search for water, drill wells, and plan campsites. The Italians sent a medical unit to work alongside the Chadian Red Cross and the Dutch and Belgian divisions of Doctors Without Borders. The Germans took charge of managing a fleet of Land Cruisers and heavy trucks brought in by the U.N.H.C.R., Sweden, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.
The operation that began with Sturm and his crew of six grew, within a span of weeks, to dozens, and within a few months to hundreds. Many were Chadian national staff members, their salaries paid by the U.N.H.C.R. Sturm spent half of his time in the office in Abéché coördinating the various parties, going to the camps whenever he could. In less than two weeks, thousands of refugees had received blankets, kitchen sets, jerry cans for water, and plastic tarpaulins. Sturm heard that in the village markets the tarpaulins handed out by the U.N.H.C.R. were showing up for sale at the equivalent of twenty-five dollars apiece. Some of the recipients—mostly women and children—may have sold the tarps, but Sturm also got reports that men from outside the camps were taking these and other items by force. He called a halt to the distributions and accelerated efforts to get the camps in working order.
The first refugee camp, known as Farchana, for the village nearby, officially opened on Saturday afternoon, January 17, 2004. The German and the Norwegian engineers had prepared the site, bulldozed a road, and overseen the assembly of tents into discrete blocks separated by lanes and footpaths. The first arrivals—a hundred and forty-eight women, children, and the elderly—came aboard a convoy of four trucks and one bus from the village of Ouendalou, south of Adré. The camp was intended to accommodate eight thousand refugees. In time, that figure grew to more than twenty thousand.
III. THE THREE “M”S
Shortly after I arrived in Chad, I met a young woman who worked for a large, well-known humanitarian organization. She and another woman, a colleague, were sitting in rattan chairs on the veranda of the Hotel Meridien in N’Djamena, a building that dated to French colonial days—the sort of place where ceiling fans twirl slowly overhead and gardeners are always tending the lawn and the bougainvillea. The young woman—I will call her Carole—had been in Chad for two months, on her second foreign assignment for the humanitarian organization. In many ways, she fit the profile of young, well-educated aid workers: in search of adventure in an exotic locale, and inspired by a vague desire to do good. Some end up devoting their lives to the work. Many more come and go within six months or a year.
Carole was stationed far to the east, in Abéché, a town once known among aid workers as a place of drunken weekend revelries and romantic flings. But, with rebel armies now roaming the eastern landscape, the government had declared a state of emergency in Abéché and imposed a six-thirty curfew, strictly enforced by checkpoints and pickups full of soldiers with AK-47s and RPGs.
Carole was twenty-nine, with shoulder-length blond hair. She had the dull, glazed eyes of someone who has witnessed an accident that she cannot get out of her mind. She listened to my questions and replied coherently, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She fell silent when the conversation did not directly involve her.
She lived in a compound in Abéché that was maintained by her aid organization and, like the U.N.H.C.R. field offices, was walled, razor-wired, and CopGuarded. “It’s me and three guys,” she told me. “At breakfast, we talk about the day ahead. At 7 A.M., we’re driven out to the office, a concrete building with three air-conditioned rooms. We’re at our desks by seven-fifteen. At six o’clock, we’re driven back to the guesthouse for dinner, and we continue working after dinner. I go to sleep at eight-thirty or nine. Day after day after day like this—it’s like being in a prison. I’m starting to lose my mind. I’m no good to anyone if I’m feeling that way.”
Carole had come to N’Djamena to stay with a friend for a few days and regain her equilibrium. The friend cast an occasional concerned glance at her. She was only a few years older than Carole, but she had many more years of experience in Africa.
As near as I could figure, Carole’s friend was utterly fearless. One night, she took me to a tiny restaurant run by two Chadian women. She drove through the dark, chaotic streets of N’Djamena in her agency’s jeep, past sheds and mud-brick buildings where groups gathered around small cooking fires, past an endless procession of people along the road, all coming into view and going out again as the headlights swept by. The restaurant was in a dim, stony courtyard lit by kerosene lanterns, and consisted of a few plastic tables and chairs. She knew the women who ran the place and greeted them warmly. She ignored the cold stares from a table of men drinking beer in the shadows.
Over a meal of fried plantains and bony fish from the Chari River, she told me that, among the variety of aid workers, two broad categories stood out: the runners and the seekers. The runners were fleeing their past lives; the seekers were looking for adventure or enlightenment. She was a runner, she said, but offered no details.
She went on to say that she had reached a point in her life where she must make a choice. She was thirty-three, young enough to return to her country and try to establish a life with marriage, children, and a home. Or she could continue on as she was, with reassignments every few years and little chance for marriage and children. “Look around,” she said, “and you’ll see that this business is full of women thirty-five to forty-five who are strong, competent, good at what they do, and single.” She had never had a long-term relationship. She must make a choice, she said. It seemed to me that she already had.
Another aid worker in N’Djamena, in her early thirties, told me that there was a more cynical categorization—the three “M”s, she called it: missionaries, misfits, and mercenaries. Missionaries and misfits I understood, but not mercenaries. “This can be a well-paying business, depending on the organization you work for,” she explained. “If you work for the U.N.—and just about everybody wants to work for the U.N.—your salary is not taxed, you get hardship pay, time off, and a lot of your expenses are covered. Especially if you come from Africa, or any developing country, it’s very difficult to find a job that pays as well.”
Serge Malé, who is French and a medical doctor by training, runs the U.N.H.C.R.’s operations out of a dilapidated colonial-era villa near the center of N’Djamena. Sixteen months in country when I met him, he found that every day brought to his door a fresh crisis of one sort or another—“le problème du jour,” he called it. He appeared to relish the problems. “My philosophy,” he told me, “is don’t take yourself seriously, but do what you do seriously.”
I was one of Malé’s smaller problems of the day. He was trying to arrange a ride for me on a U.N.H.C.R. plane to Abéché. His real aim, however, was to impress upon me his view of the refugees. “People tend to treat them as a group, one more camp of twenty thousand refugees,” he said. “But they have names, hopes, lives, loves. You have to see them as individuals.”
When I reached Abéché, I saw that the U.N.H.C.R. compound there had grown from the building occupied four years earlier by Yvan Sturm and his team to encompass four contiguous properties and a dozen buildings, all surrounded by an eight-foot wall crowned with helices of concertina wire. Seventy-six people, not counting the drivers and the CopGuards, work there full time, in air-conditioned offices—most of them cramped, with two or three desks jammed together. There is an environmental officer, a water-and-sanitation officer, a food-and-nutrition officer, a fleet manager, and a public-information officer, who has an assistant. There are officers for finance, administration, registration, community services, supply, telecom, and gender protection, along with assorted deputies, clerks, and assistants.
The chef de bureau was Catherine Huck, who had been ten months in country. The six U.N.H.C.R. field offices strung along the eastern frontier report to her, and she reports to the U.N.H.C.R. country headquarters, in N’Djamena. Huck is French and in her mid-forties, and has blond hair cropped at ear length and wears tortoiseshell spectacles. She has spent much of her adult life working for the U.N. Her tour of duty in Chad, like that of most international employees, is two years, although some stay longer. “Two years is O.K.,” she told me. “Not one more day.”
The U.N.H.C.R. staff in Abéché oversees the work of most other aid organizations. Even the largest and best known receive money from the U.N.H.C.R. to carry out operations in Chad. (Two exceptions, Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, prefer to work on their own.) The aid organizations must file regular reports with the U.N.H.C.R., explaining how and to what effect the money has been spent. People here evaluate those reports and file their own reports and financial assessments, which go to headquarters in N’Djamena, where reports on the reports are written and dispatched to headquarters in Geneva.
As a consequence, most people in this compound spend most of their time in front of their computers or in meetings. Because of the dusk-to-dawn curfew, there is, in any event, little else to do apart from work. Even in broad daylight, almost no one sets foot outside.
Angele Djohossou, from Benin, was the senior protection officer for the refugees, a position of rank in the U.N.H.C.R. hierarchy, even if the organization likes to consider itself non-hierarchical. Her job, which requires a law degree, is to insure the refugees’ physical safety and their legal rights under the 1969 Organization of African Unity Refugee Convention. Of late, her main preoccupation has been domestic violence and rape, a daily occurrence outside the refugee camps when women collect wood for cooking and to sell.
Angele came to Chad directly from a tour of duty in Afghanistan. She was first assigned to run the U.N.H.C.R. field office in Bahai, in northern Chad, on the edge of the Sahara. Of all the difficult places in Chad, Bahai is the most difficult, desolate and windblown, with fierce sand storms that last for days, and unrestrained banditry. The living conditions for aid workers are primitive, with little privacy, no fresh fruits or vegetables, and temperatures ranging from freezing at night to a hundred and twenty degrees during the day. The field office was neither air-conditioned nor heated.
On transferring to Abéché, after fourteen months in Bahai, Angele sought space to live. She rented a large house near the U.N.H.C.R. compound. She lived there for seven months, until an evening in July, when six men with Kalashnikovs broke through the front gate and overpowered the two CopGuards on duty. The house came with a gardener, whom Angele called Baba. “He was old—no one knew how old,” Angele recalled. “He looked about ninety. He didn’t do very much, but he was kind.”
The bandits shot and killed the gardener. Angele happened to be in Togo, on her week of leave, and learned of the robbery and murder in an e-mail from Abéché. On her return, she never again set foot in the house. She moved into the main compound, where Catherine Huck and a few other senior staff members lived.
Among the eight or nine white Land Cruisers parked in the courtyard of the Abéché compound, I noticed one with a faded blue insignia, hands reaching around a stylized globe, and, under that, the faint words “Aide Publique au Développement.” Those words had been scrubbed into near-invisibility, and the vehicle now bore a fresh U.N.H.C.R. insignia.
I asked the fleet manager, Anastase Makembera, about the old insignia. “It belonged to the Japanese,” he told me. “They left it behind.”
Why did they leave? I asked.
He shrugged. “They thought it was too dangerous to stay.”
The Japanese had encountered several dangerous situations. A few years earlier, a Japanese aid group had been engaged in planting trees in the Farchana refugee camp, the first camp to open. According to one account, they enlisted the help of the refugees, some of whom apparently construed tree planting as a sign that the authorities intended to keep them permanently in the camps—no longer refugees but internees. Within the confines of the camp, this inference was quickly adopted as gospel. On July 13, 2004, an angry crowd gathered around the mystified Japanese aid workers and their saplings. Things got out of hand, and the Japanese fled, bruised and bloody, two injured seriously enough to be hospitalized.
Riots erupted throughout the farchana camp. Three days later, the contagion spread to another camp, twenty-five kilometres south. In that camp, the cause was different—rumors that several aid workers were spies for the Sudanese government—but the effect was the same, and relief organizations were forced to withdraw their workers from both camps. Order was finally restored when Chadian armored vehicles entered the farchana camp in search of the instigators. They left carrying the bodies of two refugees, one of them a woman. The circumstances of their deaths have never been explained.
The task of assisting some thirty-three million refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people in more than a hundred and ten countries around the world costs the U.N.H.C.R. about $1.2 billion a year. The bulk of that sum comes from voluntary contributions made by wealthy nations. The top ten donors account for eighty-five per cent of the agency’s budget. The United States is the largest contributor, followed by the European Commission, Japan, Sweden, and the Netherlands.
Managing this money, accounting to donors for its expenditure, and overseeing the agency’s far-flung operations requires a bureaucracy. Like most bureaucracies, the one created by the U.N.H.C.R. has evolved into a cumbersome apparatus. The agency’s job is to take care of refugees, a task that is full of uncertainty and peril. But it also has to raise money for its operations, supervise its staff, and report to its donors. In the perverse way of bureaucracies, these secondary tasks, less fraught with uncertainty and peril than refugee situations and thus seemingly more manageable, have assumed an importance equal to, and in some instances greater than, the job at hand. That, at least, is the conclusion of a lengthy analysis commissioned by the U.N.H.C.R. and published in 2005. According to the analysis, called “The State of U.N.H.C.R.’s Organization Culture,” the agency “has a tendency to behave as though its primary purpose is, for example, to create reports, arrange staff movements and keep itself funded,” rather than “protecting and assisting refugees.”
IV. THE CAMP
The U.N.H.C.R.’s “Handbook for Emergencies” lays out general rules for how refugee camps should be set up—one tent per family of four to six people, set on a plot of land the approximate footprint of a small suburban ranch house, enough space for both the tent and a small garden. The family plots are grouped into “communities” of sixteen families, separated by footpaths or narrow lanes, and these, in turn, are grouped into “blocks” and, finally, into “sectors.” Each sector, block, and community is identified by a number or a letter. In theory, every person in every refugee camp has a precise address.
I went to the Bredjing refugee camp, near the village of Hadjer Hadid, in the company of Comlan Spero, from Benin, who had been eighteen months in country. We travelled from the U.N.H.C.R. field office in Farchana in a convoy of four other Land Cruisers, a fifty-minute journey on a washboard road of rock and sand, ruts, furrows, and yawning potholes, a goat path of a road known for armed robberies and carjackings. In accordance with U.N. regulation, the convoy had an armed escort of Chadian gendarmes, their vehicle, fuel, salaries, and VHF radios paid for by the U.N.H.C.R.
At the entry of the Bredjing camp the gendarme emerged from a makeshift guardhouse, lifted the gate pole across the road, and waved the convoy past, into a vast panorama of tents and mud-brick habitations, rising and falling away into the distance with the undulations of the landscape. At last count, the Bredjing camp had 30,390 inhabitants, the most populous refugee camp in Chad, and twice the size the U.N.H.C.R. had originally intended. It dwarfed every Chadian town and village within eighty miles.
We drove down a broad road to the center of the camp. Smaller roads and footpaths branched off the main road and disappeared into the dense maze of dwellings. The tents, with their faded blue U.N.H.C.R. insignias, had become tawny-colored and mottled from being scoured by sand storms and baking in the sun. They were intended to last a year, perhaps two with care, but most of them had given shelter for three years and the fabric had started to split and tear apart. The refugees had defined their plots of land by erecting reed fences around the perimeters. Some fences were elaborate, the reeds tightly woven into a houndstooth pattern. Others were simpler, unwoven, the reeds merely piled between vertical sticks planted in the ground. A few were in disarray, on the verge of collapse, as if the inhabitants had taken ill or succumbed to despair.
The U.N.H.C.R. office stood in a barren clearing near the center of the camp. It was a small rectangular brick building with peeling white stucco and a corrugated metal roof. Its two rooms contained several straight-backed chairs, a narrow wooden bench, and a table with a delaminating plywood top. The walls were streaked with tobacco-colored stains from the rains. The grit of sand was underfoot and on every surface.
Spero convened a brief meeting with his Chadian workers. He oversaw the community-service programs in Bredjing and in two other refugee camps, an assignment that covered everything from the schooling of children to the care of the elderly and the infirm.
As the others set off on their rounds, I accompanied Spero to the nearby office of the Chadian government’s refugee agency, which exercised extensive bureaucratic jurisdiction over the lives of the refugees. Camp registration, food-ration cards, travel permits, births, deaths, marriages, and separations all fell under its purview.
Outside the agency’s office, in the scant shade of two gnarled acacia trees, a hundred or more women, many tending babies, sat on mats or on the bare ground. They wore robes of vibrant hues—emerald greens, crimson reds, lemon yellows. A long line of women, with a scattering of old men and teen-age boys, formed at the front door. Inside, the order of the line broke down and petitioners crammed in, bodies tight against one another, heads craned over shoulders. They were awaiting an audience with the Chadian officials.
Seeing Spero, one of the Chadians rose from his desk with a big smile. He was a short, lean, muscular man in his forties who was dressed in a dark-green suit and street shoes polished to a high gloss. On his wrist was a large gold watch. His name was Vito Ngomnalta. His understudy, a man fifteen years his junior, wore a T-shirt and sat at the second desk, a cigarette in his mouth, squinting as he riffled through a stack of several hundred blue ration cards.
Ngomnalta freed a chair next to the desk and invited me to sit down. Hundreds of pages of printed forms, some with passport-size photographs appended, lay stacked on the desk.
There were numerous births every month. Every birth had to be registered on the ration cards. Women in polygamous marriages were entitled to ask for a separation, a bureaucratic formality, so that they could have ration cards for their own children. Travel outside the camp required a permit. And then, at the end of the month, there was a registration check of everyone in the camp.
For every petitioner, Ngomnalta and his understudy searched through the stacks of paper or the piles of tattered blue ration cards. The women crowded into the room, babies at their breasts. Most were solemn. Others were dull and listless. Some were fierce-eyed, angry, and impatient, and made no effort to disguise their mood. It was like a D.M.V. in a land where people had no motor vehicles.
Every so often, in the interest of crowd control, Ngomnalta would rise from his desk, stomp around, and wave his arms. He appeared to have mastered the demeanor of a low-level bureaucrat. He was by turns haughty, authoritative, harsh, and dismissive.
A teen-age boy, perhaps eighteen, wearing dusty jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, sat before Ngomnalta and proffered a tattered page. A travel permit, necessary for exiting and entering the camp, it was folded in half and then in quarters. The boy opened it delicately, like the wings of a butterfly. Examined by many hands at many checkpoints, it had split along the four creases.
Ngomnalta took it from the boy, gave it a glance, and spoke to him sharply. The document had expired twelve days ago.
The boy replied, a worried look in his eyes: yes, he knew that it had expired, and would like to have another.
Ngomnalta shook his head dismissively. From what I gathered, it was the boy’s duty to make this application for renewal before the expiration of the permit. Whatever the problem, Ngomnalta slapped the document face down atop a thick stack of papers. Case closed.
The boy began to appeal, but Ngomnalta motioned him to be on his way and summoned the next person in line.
Throughout his audience, the boy had maintained a deferential bearing. But as he rose from the chair his eyes smoldered with anger. He glared openly at Ngomnalta, but Ngomnalta either did not notice or was immune to this sort of venom.
One day, in another refugee camp called Treguine, I sat outside with Spero in the shade of a thorn tree. Nearby was a crude brick schoolhouse from which came the sound of children’s voices during their lessons.
Spero was explaining how the refugees managed to create an economy in the camps. Every camp has a market, with stalls in which goods of every sort—food, tools, cloth—are bought, sold, and traded. To make money, the refugees grow vegetables in their gardens, or collect wood, an everyday necessity for cooking that now required ever longer foraging trips into the countryside. Some hire themselves out to work in the Chadians’ fields, and some work for the World Food Program unloading fifty-kilo sacks of grain. Others are more entrepreneurial. In many refugee camps, barbers have set up shops, cafés offer tea and fruit juices, and millers have machines to mill the wheat and other grains distributed by the World Food Program. In nearly every camp, there is at least one entertainment center, with a television hooked up to a satellite dish and powered by a small generator. On any given night, fifty or sixty people pay to watch the news and a movie in Arabic.
Spero had never seen an entertainment center in action. All U.N. personnel, and those of every other relief organization, must leave the refugee camps by four-thirty every afternoon. At night, the camps belong to the refugees.
Late one afternoon, I found myself in an empty U.N.H.C.R. office in one of the camps. Outside, the sky was a dome of blue and the sun beat down like a hammer. Everything crackled with dryness. The oils of my hands had evaporated, my fingers and palms were fissured and scaled with dead skin. To avoid the sun, I stood inside the doorway and watched people pass by in the shimmering heat.
An old woman appeared at the end of the porch and eyed me. Her robes of yellow and green were frayed and soiled. She had a stick for walking, gnarled and crooked, stripped of its bark. She said something to me—in Arabic, I presumed—and mounted with difficulty the single concrete step to the porch. I nodded to her and smiled, and she stumped toward me. In front of me, leaning on her stick, she asked me a question.
I shrugged and said, “I’m sorry, I do not speak Arabic.”
She nodded sagely and began a long dissertation. Her face was deeply lined, her eyes rheumy, the sclera yellow. Her shawl had slipped back on her head, and I saw that her gray hair was arranged in neat rows of small tight braids. She extended a hand, the palm cupped.
Just then, a young man in long white robes and a white immah, a loose turban, saw us and came over to the porch. I nodded to him and asked if he could tell me what the woman was saying. I asked in French, having become habituated to speaking with Chadians, who are Francophone.
“I speak a little English,” he said to me.
He told me that his name was Muhammad Yusef. Then he addressed himself to the woman. He spoke in a gentle voice, barely above a whisper.
The old woman was sagging against the doorframe. I said to the young man, “Let’s go inside so she can sit.”
The woman dropped heavily onto a bench and leaned forward on her stick. Muhammad Yusef sat in front of her, erect, on a straight-backed chair. His white robes were freshly ironed and impeccable. He was uncommonly handsome, his features clean and sharply etched. He listened to the old woman with respect and dignity.
“She is alone,” he told me. “Her family have all died in the war. She has no one here to help her.”
The woman lifted her hand and made another comment.
“Also, she would like a new tent.”
There was nothing I could do for this woman, apart from giving her some money. In substance and in many details, her story was the story of almost everyone in this camp.
From my pocket I withdrew a handful of Chadian coins and placed them in the woman’s hand. She put her hand to her chest and thanked me, levered herself up, and went out the door into the sunbaked terrain.
I sat inside the darkened room with Muhammad Yusef. I asked him how he had learned English. He attended an English class in the camp, he said, taught once a week by an elderly Darfurian man. The class was not sponsored by a humanitarian organization, and the teacher did not work for free. Each student had to pay him half a day’s wages per class.
“Where do you get the money?” I asked.
He told me that he works whenever he can, usually in the fields. The harvest season had just ended. A day’s labor yielded him about six hundred C.F.A.s, or about $1.30.
At the door of the room, another woman appeared, this one middle-aged and stout, wearing robes of red and yellow. She spoke to Muhammad Yusef, who again listened calmly and without interruption.
“She is also poor,” he told me. “She has seven children. She does not have a husband. He died. She does not work, because she cannot leave the children alone.”
“Where is she from?” I asked.
The woman spoke at length. “She is from a village near Misterei,” Muhammad Yusef said. “When the janjaweed killed her husband, she came here. She has been here three years.”
These were the salient facts, the bare particulars of her situation, shorn of details. The woman looked to be in her mid-forties. She held within her the memories of childhood and family, marriage and birth, violent death and flight. And, now, a life uprooted within a refugee camp. Tonight, she will cook for her children. Tomorrow, she or one of her daughters will stand in line to fetch water at the spigot closest to her block, and venture out of the camp in search of firewood. Even if we spoke the same language, I would never comprehend the demons she wrestled with as she tried to sleep at night.
I had no more coins. I pulled out a bill, a thousand C.F.A.s—a little more than a day’s wages in the fields—and pressed it into her hand.
In her place was another woman. Behind her was yet another, and then a third. They had formed a line. I had become an unofficial bureau of appeal, a non-governmental organization of one. If I remained, the line would grow to twenty, thirty women, waiting in turn for an audience.
I stood and walked toward the next woman waiting at the door. She addressed Muhammad Yusef sharply, clearly protesting that she had not yet been heard. Her mouth was set and her eyes blazed with indignation. Muhammad Yusef tilted his head slightly, smiled, and replied to her in a soft voice. Despite his tone, I suspect that he was chastising her for her demeanor.
“No, I want to hear her,” I told him.
The woman composed herself and began to speak. “Her son is ill,” Muhammad Yusef said. “She takes him out every day to get air. The janjaweed shot him, and he has a bullet near his heart and cannot get up.”
“How old is her son?”
Muhammad Yusef listened to the woman, nodding.
“Her son is twenty-two years old. The doctor told her that she must take him to Abéché, to the hospital, but she has not been able to.”
I pulled some bills out of my pocket and handed her a C.F.A. note. I gave the next two women a bill apiece, and, stepping outside, saw an endless vista of tents.
V. THE BATTLE OVER THE HILL
The rebel army of a hundred vehicles that had entered the village of Hadjer Hadid on Saturday afternoon and disrupted the market had identified itself as the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development. Its leader, Mahamat Nouri, had once been President Déby’s defense minister. His army was the largest and best equipped of the rebel groups.
At dawn the next morning, I was awakened by the shriek of two fighter planes, the French Mirages, passing low overhead. I went out to the courtyard and saw that Francis Béré was already in his office.
“The rebel column is on the move,” he told me. It had left Hadjer Hadid and was on the main road to Abéché, having bivouacked at a tiny village called Abou Goulem, just six miles away.
The Mirages screamed above us again, banking off to the south. Béré and I stood outside watching them. “The French are doing reconnaissance for the Chadian government,” he said. “Every move the rebels make is known to the Army.”
The problem that preoccupied Béré now was evacuation. With a hundred heavily armed rebel vehicles occupying the main road to Abéché, we could not travel overland. “If we need to evacuate, we will have to do it in small planes, and they can carry only eight people,” he said.
“Where do we evacuate to?” I asked. “Abéché?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Maybe it will be Abéché that has to evacuate, not us,” I said.
He laughed. “Maybe.”
That evening, a column of Chadian Army vehicles moved out of Abéché toward the rebel army. Gervais Koutangni believed that there was little likelihood of a battle. He thought that the rebels would fade away into the countryside. Spero thought differently. He didn’t say much, but his smile, when I greeted him, was tight and quick.
“If there is a battle, the problem for us will come afterward, in the chaos that will follow with retreat,” he said.
The battle at Abou Goulem began on Monday morning at nine o’clock. The first salvo of big guns, six miles away, sounded like thunder in the distance. Outside the field-office gates, on the dusty street, the villagers who lived nearby stood motionless, gazing in the direction of Abou Goulem.
In his office, Koutangni was communicating with Abéché. He looked worried. “It’s a dangerous situation,” he said. “The fighting could arrive here.”
The battle continued for three hours, until noon, and, finally, there was silence.
I left the field office and walked a hundred yards up the road, to a small compound occupied by Doctors Without Borders. An Italian nurse and a Swedish doctor were preparing bandages, medicines, and cots for the wounded. They had heard that there were more than two hundred dead and wounded in the Chadian Army alone, and that the hospital in Abéché was overwhelmed with injured soldiers lying on cots in the corridors.
On the radio that evening, the rebels declared a decisive victory in the battle of Abou Goulem. That announcement was immediately followed by a government declaration that the Chadian Army had crushed the rebels.
Koutangni cancelled all trips to the refugee camps. It was too dangerous to travel. The gendarmes had, in any event, vanished, and there was no escort against the coupeurs de route. We were in lockdown until further notice.
The road to Abéché was strewn with the burned-out hulks of military vehicles. The Chadian Army had removed its own dead and wounded but had left the rebel dead to bake in the sun. Koutangni told me that the villagers of Abou Goulem had all fled into the bush when the rebels arrived. Now they were burying the dead rebels.
The days of lockdown passed one after another, and the rumors of war continued.
One afternoon, Aiméry Mbounkap appeared in Spero’s office with the news that the Chadian Army had moved into position just behind the field office, beyond a small rise, and that it was preparing to attack a rebel contingent. “We are directly in the line of fire,” he said.
“Where does this news come from?” I asked. “From good authority?”
“Yes. One of our drivers has an uncle in the Chadian Army, a colonel, who told him this.”
Everybody had news, but all news was suspect. The rebel forces seemed half phantom; they were reported everywhere, lurking in the hills, columns coming from the west and the north. Mbounkap, who wanted to return to his wife and children, was furious that we had not yet been evacuated.
Not far to the north, another battle broke out. I stood in the courtyard of the field office and watched the flash of cannon, like dry lightning, in the distance. According to the U.N.H.C.R. office in Abéché, two rebel groups, normally antipathetic to each other, had joined forces.
A poisonous torpor of boredom and anxiety descended over everyone. I saw Spero in his office, slouched down so far that only his round head was visible above the plane of the desk, like a dark pumpkin on a table. He smiled at me weakly, a jack-o’-lantern with white teeth.
Across the street, in the World Food Program compound, I found Béré sitting alone, watching television. I got a beer and sat down with him. He had a pot of food in front of him, a stew of some kind, cooked yesterday or the day before. It smelled older. He offered me some. I declined. We lapsed into silence and watched an American sitcom in French.
After a while, Béré turned to me. “I am not happy today,” he said sadly. “I miss my family. He looked down at his hands in his lap. “You get very lonely here.”
He had sixteen months remaining in Chad before he could apply for another assignment. “The money is good, but the job is hard,” he told me. And so he stayed on, hoping that his next post would be in Europe, perhaps in Rome, the location of the headquarters of the World Food Program.
After nine days of lockdown, movement to and from the refugee camps began again. The first week of every month was the period of food distribution in the camps, and that occupied Béré’s attention. With the road to Abéché now clear, Koutangni departed to meet with Catherine Huck. Several days later, I set off for Abéché, too.
I rode with a U.N.H.C.R. driver in a Land Cruiser, behind an escort of Chadian gendarmes. We passed the village of Abou Goulem, the road scorched and blackened but cleared of debris. In the distance, across a barren plain, I saw the burned shells of several military vehicles. Most of the battle had taken place out there, the driver told me. Rebel corpses still lay in the sun.
I left Chad in mid-December of 2007. Around this time, armed bandits climbed over the wall of the U.N.H.C.R. field office in Guéréda, north of farchana, and stole two Land Cruisers. Within three days, bandits had made off with five vehicles belonging to relief agencies. The U.N. staff in Guéréda was evacuated to Abéché. Six weeks after my departure, on January 31st, three hundred heavily armed rebel vehicles, moving swiftly across the country from the Sudanese border, arrived on the outskirts of N’Djamena. The rebel army, by then an alliance of three groups, encircled the Presidential Palace and demanded negotiations with President Idriss Déby. The battle began the next day. The U.N. evacuated all but a few of its personnel, as did other aid organizations. The U.S. Ambassador took refuge* on a French military plane. Thirty thousand residents of the city fled across the Chari River to Cameroon. The U.N.H.C.R. dispatched an Emergency Response Team to Cameroon to assist the Chadian refugees.
After two days of fighting, the rebels failed to take the city and withdrew. The corpses of soldiers and civilians littered the streets, along with the wreckage of military vehicles. According to the Red Cross, there were more than a thousand wounded, most of them civilians. Looters pillaged shops and ransacked the offices of the U.N. and other aid organizations.
A week later, the janjaweed militia attacked and burned a dozen villages in West Darfur. Twelve thousand new refugees crossed the border into Chad.
In May, a Frenchman named Pascal Marlinge was travelling in a convoy of three vehicles on the Farchana road. He was forty-nine years old, the director of Save the Children U.K. in Chad. His convoy was stopped by three armed men. One of them shot him in the head, killing him. No one else was injured.
The rainy season began in June. For four months, the roads in eastern Chad were impassable. The armies retreated to their camps and prepared for the coming of the next season of war. The various rebel factions, each with its own loyalties, have no aim other than to seize power, and oil revenue, for themselves. Should one faction succeed in overthrowing President Déby, the others will fight for control, and the country will plunge into a brutal, uncontained civil war. ♦
*Correction, January 22, 2009: The U.S. Ambassador took refuge on a French military base. He did not quit the country on a French military plane, as previously stated.
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