Читать книгу Paying Calls in Shangri-La - Judith M. Heimann - Страница 11

Chapter 1

Political Apprenticeship in Africa

DIPLOMATS ASSIGNED TO A NEW post often have strong preconceptions about it and clear expectations of what it will be like. I had very strong views and expectations about Kinshasa, and virtually all of them proved to be wrong.

After six years in Belgium, the first place where I was not only my diplomat husband’s wife but a diplomat in my own right, in 1978 we received orders for home leave and transfer. Our new post was Kinshasa, capital of Zaire (the name President-for-life Mobutu had given to the ex-Belgian Congo, now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Just then, news was breaking of the taking as hostages of some three thousand foreigners, mostly Europeans, in Kolwezi. This was a place in the Congo’s southeast, and further news told of the murder there of more than two hundred of those hostages by an armed rebel Congolese group with the aid of some Cuban and East German military officers. We spent a lot of our home leave in the summer of 1978 explaining to family and friends that Kolwezi was a thousand miles away from Kinshasa.

Yet even before the Kolwezi incident, the ex-Belgian Congo was known to be unsafe, uncomfortable, and expensive, and home to terrifying diseases like Ebola and a fatal wasting disease that was later identified as AIDS. (We were grateful that our kids were safely home in college and boarding school, respectively.)

My Kinshasa job would not be available for months after we got there. I had pleaded for a house with a swimming pool, which I had been told was typical housing in Kinshasa for someone of John’s rank. I argued that I was being forced to be on leave without pay; at least I could work on my tan. But word came back that we would have an apartment—without swimming pool—right in the middle of town.

Having arrived in Kinshasa—which looked to be as dispiriting a place to live in as I had been warned—I asked the embassy personnel officer, “Couldn’t I go somewhere else in Africa on temporary duty for some of the time until my job here comes free in late November?” Well, yes, I could.

The Department promptly offered me a job in Nairobi, Kenya, as acting chief of the consular section. It was enormous fun while it lasted, but within a few months I was back in Kinshasa, ready to report for work as “protocol officer” in the political section. I was not really looking forward to it.

I had by then become comfortable doing consular work, first in Brussels and then in Nairobi, and felt competent at it. But now, I realized, as a new, untrained political officer, I was back in kindergarten again. This is not an unusual experience for junior and mid-level career diplomats, I would learn. In the late 1950s, when John started his diplomatic career, Foreign Service officers usually received language and area training for their new assignments, sometimes including a year of graduate school at a top university. The officer was then expected to hone that expertise during the bulk of what remained of his or her career. But by the time I joined, fifteen years later, in the Kissinger era, that policy had changed somewhat.

The new rules were that officers should expect at least once every eight or so years to be uprooted from a place where they had expertise and made to serve somewhere else. The theory was that this would keep us from becoming too emotionally committed to a favorite area or country and would also give diplomats serving in hardship posts a fairer share of life in the fleshpots of Europe.

I felt ready to kick and scream like a spoiled child at what I saw as a squandering of our hard-won knowledge and contacts. If they had wanted us to leave Europe after six straight years, fair enough. But why (I wondered aloud) couldn’t the State Department have sent us back to Southeast Asia? John had been a diplomat there while I had been his wife and diplomatic hostess during six fascinating years. We both spoke Indonesian and Malay and were more than willing to learn Thai or even Burmese.

Still, I had to concede in fairness to the State Department, we had always said our highest priority as a “tandem” couple was to be assigned together. And State had managed—just—to find jobs for both of us in Kinshasa. Although Kinshasa was then often referred to as the second worst “hell hole” in Africa (after Lagos, Nigeria), John would have a good job there. He would be counselor for economic affairs, at a time when Zaire’s economy was a basket case being kept on life support by the IMF and the Paris Club. John’s new job, one of the top three or four in a big embassy, was sure to get him noticed by the powers-that-be in Washington. My job, however, was an entry-level job, two grades below my then low rank; it was not even in my career specialty, consular work.

My new job’s title was Protocol Officer and, recalling that protocol had been only a small part of John’s political officer duties years ago in Jakarta, I asked my new boss, Political Counselor Bob Remole, what my job would entail. “Not much,” he said frankly. “Basically, the protocol job here amounts to carrying the ambassador’s briefcase at meetings, if he lets you go along, and meeting his flights—usually in the middle of the night, given the international plane schedules. You then get to carry his suitcase to and from the airplane.”

I felt my worst fears for this assignment had been confirmed. Trying not to sound too negative, I asked if there was anything else I could do. He paused and then said, “John tells me you can write. The person you are replacing, a very nice young man, cannot. Maybe you could already help by turning his newest effort at drafting a cable into something we can send to Washington.” John had always claimed to me that my writing would be an asset in diplomacy. Well, now I would see if it was.

I said I would try, but wished I hadn’t when I looked at the draft. There was no way I could edit this in a quick and discreet way so as not to embarrass the drafter—who was a nice young man of considerable cultivation, despite his awkwardness with a pen. It was clear that he had spent many hours on this long, convoluted message, with lots of repeated bits. It was as if (which seemed likely) he had tried putting sentences and the odd paragraph first in one place and then in another, and forgot to remove them from their earlier position. In the privacy of the file room, taking scissors, I cut the cable into several segments and removed the redundant text. After putting the stray sentences into what looked to be the right paragraphs, and the paragraphs into an order that seemed to make sense, I retyped them in that order. I edited, as I went, conserving as much of his wording as I could. Seeing the horrified look on his face when he picked up the new draft, I hastened to say: “You remember those hilarious advertisements for cheap records of the classics? The ones that promised you all nine Beethoven symphonies on two LPs with ‘all the unnecessary repetitions left out’? Well, that is all I did here. This is still your text, your cable.”

At this point fate intervened in the form of a wonderfully helpful colleague, Harlan “Robby” Robinson. Robby was the number two of the section, a civil servant who was on loan from the Africa Office of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Unlike most of the rest of us, including me, Robby spoke flawless French. He also knew a lot about Africa, including the Congo, from previous study. Also, he had already been in this job for two years and had extended for a third year. He came over and said, “Judy, if you have nothing better to do, I suggest you accompany a friend of mine, David Gould, who has just turned up. He’s a famous academic on the Congo; he’s the man who first used the term kleptocracy to describe the Mobutu regime. He is going out to the University of Kinshasa where he has lots of interesting Congolese friends on the faculty you could meet.”

I wondered if our boss would let me be away from the office on my second day at work in his section, but Remole said, “Oh yes, that’s a good idea of Robby’s! I should have thought of it myself. Go ahead!” (Given the much stronger centripetal forces in embassies nowadays, I doubt that any boss now would have let me out of the embassy in the company of somebody not on his staff on my second day in the office.)

As it happened, nothing could have been a better introduction for me to some of the smartest and kindest Congolese in Kinshasa than being passed on to them by Professor Gould. Gould was a man they all admired (and whom they would mourn when, some years later, he was killed in the Lockerbie air crash tragedy). After a day in the professor’s company, during which his Congolese academic friends and their wives included me in their (literally) warm embrace—because it looked odd to be hugging him and not me—I invited these academics to a buffet supper at our apartment. I already knew that the Zairian government (their employer) tried to discourage contacts with American diplomats. For this reason, some of my embassy colleagues tried to prepare me for a disappointing turnout at my party, but almost all the professors and wives I invited came.

I began to realize how fortunate it was that our apartment was situated on the eleventh floor of one of Kinshasa’s few attractive modern buildings. Our guests enjoyed the spectacular view from our terrace of the widest part of the Congo River, just where the rapids start to push the river 850 feet downward and nearly a hundred miles westward to the Atlantic Ocean. I came to realize only later, when my work portfolio changed, that one of the biggest pluses of where John and I lived was that it was in a big apartment building occupied by many Congolese and other VIPs. From outside, Mobutu’s intelligence services could not guess whose apartment a visitor was coming to.

I was finding to my surprise and delight that being a woman was not a handicap to being a diplomat in the Congo. One of my new Congolese friends pointed out that people could recognize me because I was wearing a skirt, whereas many Congolese had difficulty distinguishing one white face from another. Indeed, the only problems I had as a woman diplomat in the Congo came from within my own embassy. A few weeks into my new job in Kinshasa, I was still waiting to be called to meet the ambassador’s plane and carry his bags when I found to my chagrin that he was calling on my more senior colleagues in the political section to do what was clearly my job as protocol officer. I finally got up the nerve to go see the ambassador and ask him straight out why he wasn’t letting me do my protocol job.

The ambassador was a career officer but a rather conventional kind of man and had evidently not been raised by a mother like mine. He grudgingly confessed that he felt uncomfortable about having the wife of his economic counselor getting up in the middle of the night to meet his plane and carry his suitcases. Knowing that John did not share his views, I had my answer ready: “How do you think it makes me feel—or, for that matter, the poor guy who has to get up in the night to do my job—that you are not letting me do what I am assigned to do?”

Taken aback, he said, “I never thought of that.”

“Well, sir,” I said, “I am asking you to think of it from now on.”

Fortunately, I got on well with my boss, Bob Remole, who came from the mountains of the Far West and was more devoted to Save the Planet, World Wildlife Fund, and Amnesty International issues than to the conduct of traditional foreign policy. Dismayed at how little room there was in the State Department’s realpolitik foreign policy for someone with his priorities, he was planning to retire at the end of this tour.

Remole was upset that our government was, for Cold War reasons, on such supportive terms with President Mobutu, a half-educated, charismatic African dictator. Mobutu’s chief virtue for us was that he was not a communist and he allowed us to use staging places in his country to support rebels in neighboring communist-led Angola. (I did not then know—though I suspected—the big role of the CIA in putting him in power and keeping him there.)

Mobutu was notorious for his own corrupt acts and for encouraging corruption by his government. The rot ran from the top ministers on down to the cop on the beat, the soldier on patrol, even the prison guard. In recent years Mobutu had presented himself as a nearly God-like figure in his television broadcasts and had bestowed on himself ever more high-flown titles, one of his more modest being that of Zaire’s Guide Eclairé (enlightened guide).

My boss passed on to me the useful fact that Dean Hinton, our current ambassador’s predecessor, had been declared persona non grata (PNG) and expelled by Mobutu, allegedly for having shown disdain for the Enlightened Guide of Zaire by arriving one weekend afternoon at the official presidential residence in his tennis shorts to deliver an urgent message to Mobutu from Washington. According to Remole, our current ambassador lived in terror of being PNG’d himself. The barely hidden, though unspoken, moral of this story went: It would be best to avoid doing things that would anger Mobutu, because the ambassador would probably not back you up.

I occasionally had more substantive work to do than meeting my ambassador’s plane. In November 1978, soon after I came officially onto Kinshasa’s payroll, I was assigned to make my first demarche. As I explained in a letter to my mother: “This is where I go to the Foreign Ministry and say (in French) that ‘my government has instructed me to say. . . .’ And then I listen with yogic concentration while the man in charge of—in this case—United Nations affairs replies. I then make notes the moment I escape from his office and send a cable to Washington telling his part of it.”

I enjoyed doing it. I went over without phoning ahead because, as often happened, neither our phones nor theirs were working. When I finally took the elevator to an upper floor where he had his office, he was out, and I waited fully an hour for him to return. He turned out to be an extremely pleasant Congolese in his midthirties who spoke good French and was able to cope on the spot with the subject, saying nicely quotable things in reply to my demarche. I left his room, but by then the elevator had conked out and I had to descend the six flights to the accompaniment of cries of “Bon courage, Madame” at each landing, down to my waiting embassy driver and Land Rover.

Back at the office, I wrote up my message. Remole made a few sensible changes to my draft, and I got it typed on cable stationery by our secretary. Remole told me to take it along to the deputy chief of mission (DCM) and duck, because the DCM was a nitpicker. The DCM read it immediately, found the one typographical error, fixed it, signed off and said, “Congratulations on your first message from Kinshasa.”

Remole was a thoroughly decent guy, but was so offended by our policy toward Mobutu that he could not keep his views to himself when speaking to his boss, DCM Alan Davis. Davis (also an honorable man) had come to dread being lectured by his subordinate. When Remole found that I got on well with Davis, he took to using me as his messenger to the front office, where the DCM sat.

It got a bit awkward for me one day when my boss wrote a cable in which he used a bit of ironic humor. I read it before bringing it up to Davis to sign off on. I said to Remole that I thought ironic humor was always tricky when written down; it could so easily be misunderstood in Washington. Remole was rather proud of his clever remark and told me to take the cable along to the DCM. I did, but Davis sent it back to be retyped with a red line through the humorous bit. Remole showed me the mutilated cable and, with his hand shaking, said something to the effect of, “Nobody seems to want to know my views, but can’t I even make a little joke once in a while?”

I felt sorry for both him and the DCM, and a little anxious not to be caught in the middle of a battle between them. And then I remembered a quotation I had read from the great eighteenth-century wit, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once recalled that an old tutor had said: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” I typed it out and put it on my boss’s desk after he had left for the day.

The next morning Remole was in his cubicle when I came in, and I found my note back on my desk. He had scratched out “strike it out” and replaced it with, “cut it in half.” I laughed out loud, because, as anyone who reads my written work knows, I am addicted to overlong sentences. When Remole came back to his cubicle after lunch, the paper was back in front of him with my one-word comment: “Touché.” I heard him guffaw.

I hoped to have more demarches to make, but few came my way, and I began to wonder again what my job would amount to. The ambassador was still not using me to meet his plane or carry his bag. Fortunately, about then I acquired a new item in my portfolio that would gradually take up much of my time and even more of my interest. Robby, who was trying to pass on some of his work as he prepared to leave that summer, got the idea of passing on his entire contact list of interesting Congolese dissidents to me.

That is why, in January 1979, I found myself one afternoon taking a car ride alone with a total stranger, a tough-looking young Congolese, to an unknown destination. That car ride brought me to what turned out to be one of the most useful learning experiences of my diplomatic career.

The Shah of Iran had just fallen, and the State Department stood accused of not having prepared for his fall by troubling to get to know the people who might take over after him. So the word had gone out to the political sections of overseas posts such as the US Embassy in Kinshasa, where we were for Cold War reasons on close terms with President-for-life Mobutu, that someone should cultivate the dissidents, the people who, without promoting violence, opposed the country’s dictator. In my embassy, thanks to Robby’s introductions, I was that someone.

What made me the ideal choice was that I was the officer least likely to worry President Mobutu’s secret intelligence chief; I was the junior-most officer in the political section and a woman. Also, although I had been a diplomat’s wife more than twenty years by then, I had been a diplomat myself less than seven years. I was officially in the consular career track, not political. Everyone knew that the only reason I had a job in Kinshasa’s political section was because the embassy wanted John as its economic counselor and his price for going there had been a job for me.

A barrier to my getting to know the political dissidents was that members of the country’s parliament were not permitted to go to a foreign diplomat’s house without the prior permission of the head of Mobutu’s secret intelligence service. This was a limitation that no diplomat from a free country can accept, but it was imperative that, if we met with these politicians, we did so in a way that would not put them in danger.

Moreover, it soon became obvious to me that the people of the Congo were unaccustomed to dealing with a Western woman who was not a missionary, a nun, or the wife of a bwana (the Swahili term for a white man, usually a colonial boss). Of the politicians I needed to get to know, few of them had wives with even a high school education, and still fewer of these men had any experience dealing with a woman diplomat.

I had discreetly invited some dissident members of parliament—chosen by Robby because of the high regard their colleagues had for them—to dinner at John’s and my apartment. The dinner party took place, and several of the dissidents came (leaving their wives at home), but the leading politician among them simply did not appear. We all felt his absence. I thought he might be understandably cautious about breaking the rule on going to a diplomat’s home without informing the secret police, but still I was disappointed. He was the one the others most respected; I doubted the others would come again to see me, given the risk, if he did not show that he was willing to do so.

It was now the afternoon of the next day and, at the embassy, our secretary said I had a visitor. I went downstairs to the lobby and was handed an unsigned handwritten note delivered by a tough-looking young Congolese. I guessed that the note was probably from my missing guest; it said I should go with the messenger in his car.

The thought crossed my mind that this might be a risky thing to do. The Congo was a dangerous place then; the Kolwezi massacre in which hundreds of Europeans had been murdered had happened the year before. But then I thought: If the note really came from my missing guest, it would be worth my taking a chance to talk to the country’s leading nonviolent dissident politician.

The messenger drove to an unfamiliar part of the city, where my being white made me stand out. There were few traffic lights, and Congolese men, women, and children were dodging traffic every few yards to try to cross the wide road. The road had potholes everywhere. Of the cars parked alongside, most lacked hubcaps and windshield wipers and some were without tires. Although in Kinshasa it rained most days, there seemed to be dust everywhere. Overhead above the road were cement and metal pedestrian walkways that were missing stairs up to them or were broken off halfway across their arc. They looked to have been abandoned in mid-construction years earlier.

The driver parked the car on the sidewalk, and we entered a dusty, dimly lighted café. The furniture looked shabby and dirty. The only contrast to this dismal scene came from a radio, which was blasting forth the vibrant Congolese popular music of the day. A pair of big, well-built young men, who were seated at a table, I presumed to be bodyguards. Behind them in a corner was seated the “no-show” of my dinner party. The driver made a gesture to point him out to me and went outside to wait to drive me back.

The man stood up—he was a very big, tall man—and indicated that I sit on the wooden chair across from him. We both sat down. There was no offer to buy me a drink and the conversation (in French) was brief.

He: “You invited me to dinner at your place last night.”

I: “Yes, I did.”

He: “I didn’t come.”

I: “I noticed.”

He: “I didn’t know what rules you play by.”

It was then that I realized that he had no precedents, no rules, for his dealings with me—a woman and a diplomat—and that he had sent the ball into my court. Suddenly aware that a lot could hinge on how I handled this moment, I sent the ball back to him by saying: “What rules do you play by?”

He: “I don’t want anybody else who is there to be uncomfortable about my being there. And I don’t want to be surprised about anybody else who is there. Also, I don’t ever want to be quoted to another African.”

By then I had lived in both Asia and Europe, and so I blessed the fact that, apparently, in Africa people would say what they meant a lot sooner than would any Asian or most Europeans I had met. “Those are my rules, too,” I said, realizing how sensible they were. “I never quote anybody in the host country to some other person of the host country.” “And,” I added, “just to make sure that you are happy with the guest list, from now on I will show it to you first, before I invite anyone else. You can then cross out—or add to—the names on the list.”

He stood up to indicate that our meeting was over—and, for the first time, he smiled. It was not just his giant size that was impressive. He had the presence of a leader. From then on, we trusted each other, and through him I was able to learn a lot about what was going on in the dissident camp and report it by confidential cable to the State Department. Anxious to protect my dissident sources, I got permission to use pseudonyms in cables and in vouchers seeking reimbursement for dinners I hosted for them. Only my bosses in Kinshasa knew the real names.

Since I was the “dissidents” officer, the ambassador eventually asked my views, among others, on whether to stick with Mobutu or to encourage the dissidents to take over. I pleaded for the dissidents to be given a chance on the grounds that if we waited until, inevitably, Mobutu lost power, the dissidents—who included virtually the only people in the country who had had access to a decent education and who for the most part had a commitment to democratic principles—would probably be too old to take power. And the Congo would then go the way of too many former colonies around the world, with their educated potential leaders killed or jailed, and ending up headed by near-illiterate charismatic but bloodthirsty bullies.

To my sorrow, the decision was made to stick with Mobutu, which even I had to concede was a reasonable decision, given that there were large stretches of the country where the dissidents commanded little or no support.

Yet, though I had to come to terms personally with the tragedy that I could see lying ahead for a country I had come to care about, thanks to my giant friend and the dissidents I met through him, my whole career path had changed. I was no longer regarded at the embassy as a “token” female. I ended my tour there promoted to the next higher grade and was invited to move to the political career track, which was better suited to my penchant for reporting and making contact with politicians than would have been remaining a consular officer.

The rules my friend taught me turned out to be sound rules for maintaining a dialogue with important contacts, regardless of country. But more important was the way in this brief exchange we had established that our relationship would be led by him. I was not the bwana’s wife or a nun or a teacher to whom he would have been expected to humble himself in the old colonial days. This was his place, not mine, and, by sending the ball back into his court, I had acknowledged that he had the right to make the rules. New as I was, I realized that this man, by reaching out to me and talking straight, was trusting me literally with his life. Together with me, he was inventing a way to deal with a kind of diplomat new to him—a female. I am forever in his debt.

. . .

John was greatly tickled at the thought of my being allowed—even encouraged—to cultivate the most interesting people in the country and to be the chief link between the legal opposition and the US government. It was a far cry from the banal world of protocol duties to which I had been originally assigned. John found being present at those dinners—at which Robby was usually also present until he and his family left later that year—made up for his having to spend time dealing with Mobutu’s very corrupt and often boring commercial cronies. My dissident contacts liked John a lot. They trusted him to give them a good sense of what support they could expect from Uncle Sam.

Robby, who still had too much to do, also offered me the human rights dossier. Being the human rights officer at our embassy to Zaire meant following what was happening for good or ill as regards human rights in the host country and then writing a report. The report would be published, after editing back in Washington, as a chapter in the State Department’s annual assessment of human rights in all the countries we recognize.

It was in that connection that I got involved in the effort to get a pardon for prisoners. I was working with a Congolese man Robby admired and had nominated for an International Visitor’s grant to the United States. After coming back, the man—who was now my friend, too—had been appointed to a position high up in the Ministry of Justice. One of his first acts in the new job was to visit as many as he could of the country’s prisons; he was appalled by what he found there.

Together, he and I drafted a pardon for some of these prisoners, over a series of breakfast meetings at my apartment. (We had noticed that Mobutu’s secret police were not early risers.) My new friend’s idea was that the pardon should apply to those who had been in jail for two or more years without being charged, or who had less than two years to serve to complete their sentence. After consulting with me, and my checking with my bosses, my friend told his minister that these prisoners were by and large not troublemakers but that, unless released soon, most of them were likely to die of starvation, leading to headlines abroad that could keep Mobutu from getting in to see President Carter at the White House.

Mobutu signed the pardon in May or June of 1980, and somewhere close to 40,000 people were set free. I felt absurdly proud when our new career ambassador, Robert Oakley, asked my friend whether the pardon was due to the just concluded visit of Pope John Paul II. My friend smiled and pointed at me, saying, “Voici le Pape.” It wasn’t me, of course. It had only happened because the US government was then believed by Mobutu and his advisers to care about human rights. I think of this pardon when politically fashionable people of various nations pooh-pooh the effectiveness of human rights policies like Carter’s. But looking back now, I realize that the benefits of this human rights coup cut two ways. Yes, it saved tens of thousands of lives, but it also made it easier for the United States to defend its continued support of a dictator who had allowed prisoners to starve to death in jail.