Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda. By Scott Peterson. Routledge. 400pp, £14.99 in UK
Across the Red River: Rwanda, Burundi and the Heart of Darkness. By Christian Jennings. Victor Gollancz. 349pp, £16.99 in UK
So commonplace has it become to describe Africa as a repository for human misery and the evils of war that one is prone to forget that its anarchy and agony could well become the norm for the world in this century. Ethnic conflicts and wars inspired by religion and factional violence may be all too common throughout the continent, but they are by no means confined to its borders. The end of the Cold War has unleashed waves of instability that have produced great cruelty and the widespread availability of guns and other weaponry. As in Sierra Leone at the moment, a weak United Nations is facilitating the spread of chaos.
It is instructive, therefore, to examine three of Africa's main disasters in the 1990s - Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda. The first was the implosion of a state, an endless clan conflict marked by a disastrous international involvement. Sudan is a continuing civil war fought along religious and tribal lines. Finally, Rwanda's genocide was the culmination of a murderous ethnic conflict in an outwardly religious and bureaucratic state, marked by a disastrous international non-involvement.
Scott Peterson's book views these conflicts through the lens of a war journalist and photographer, topped up with extensive research long after his tours of duty were over. As Africa correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, he was a witness to most of the degradations visited upon the continent in this time, and has come to know the "dark side" of humanity very well.
In essence this book is about war crimes and how people come to commit them. At the outset, it vows to eschew the "cowboy tales of the front line" that is the normal output of gung-ho war journalists, but in fact Peterson can't resist delivering his share of bullet-ducking, blood-spattered, "I was there" prose from places like Mogadishu - "the city of the insane" - or Rwanda.
The largest and best section of the book deals with the disintegration of Somalia, and the catastrophic involvement of UN and US troops there. When Somalia was hit by a famine in the early 1990s, the humanitarians rushed to the rescue. But the cause of the famine, civil war between the Somali clans, had not been dealt with. The result was that relief agencies ended up paying armed gangs to act as " security" for their food convoys.
Then the UN came in to ensure the food got where it was needed. But before long, the UN soldiers became the targets and the US had hijacked control of the UN effort. In a battle of wits that developed between a witless superpower with no feeling for the terrain and local warlords with a bloody lineage, there could only be one winner. But it took the killing and mutilation of 25 Pakistani UN troops, and the murder of several journalist friends of Peterson, before the US pulled out humiliatingly in 1994.
Peterson recounts every twist of this sad tale, and its conclusion: "Nothing, nothing had changed. It seemed that Somalia's particular relationship with all four of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse would continue, and Somalia would remain an isolated organism worth examining only for what it tells us about the Dark Side". The thin but rich strand of Irish involvement in Africa is recorded in the book, especially when Peterson records the tragic death of two Irish aid workers, Valerie Place and Sean Devereaux, in the conflict in Somalia.
Like Somalia, Sudan's travails continue to this day, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. Peterson reports from both sides of the conflict, the Islamist north and the area controlled by the Sudan People's Liberation Army in the south, and takes an admirably sceptical view of both sets of combatants.
Rwanda's genocide has already produced a number of books of note, and Peterson's eyewitness reports and analysis add little to our existing store of knowledge. Indeed, one of the curiosities of this book is why it is appearing in the year 2000, when the conflicts under examination largely peaked in the first half of the 1990s. Extensive subsequent research, however, makes it a worthwhile introduction to conflict in modern Africa.
War reporting has never been more dangerous - witness the killings in recent weeks of two more journalists in Sierra Leone - and the popularity of the genre with publishers is growing apace. Christian Jennings is another veteran of central Africa in the 1990s and, like Peterson and many other war-junkies, he has also been drawn to the conflict in the Balkans. Indeed, when I met him through a friend in Kosovo last year, Jennings was kind enough to loan me the use of a satellite phone, without which I would not have been able to file my story from blacked-out Pristina.
His account of four years in Rwanda and Burundi belongs very much to the "white man in Africa" narrative that seems to dominate this genre. The ex-pat barbecues, the hotel swimming pools and the cosy briefings from British army officers in the UN are all in the foreground of this story. Jennings even treats us to excerpts from his romantic pursuit of "aid-babes", including a sex scene that starts Frederick Forsyth style - tellingly, The Dogs of War is a favourite book - and ends more like Walter Mitty, when his would-be catch turns out to be gay.
IN the background, frequently presented in caricature, is the plight of Africans, caught up in the genocidal conflicts in Rwanda and Burundi. Jennings freely admits his ignorance of both countries upon arriving there - no crime, that - and his impatience when asked by his bosses for background articles on, for example, the economy of Burundi. As befits one who did a stint in the French Foreign Legion, his obsession is with the conflict, less so with the reasons for it.
The book's main value is to shine a light on the "slow-trickle genocide" in Burundi, possibly the scariest place on earth and certainly one of the most neglected. Here, the brutality of Hutu rebels is matched by a ruthless and sinister Tutsi regime that brooks at nothing to maintain its control of the majority Hutu population. Jennings isn't the first journalist to be scared out of Burundi, but his relief on leaving is one I can well understand.
By the end of the book, Jennings has also been expelled from Rwanda, having incurred the displeasure of the strongman of that regime, General Paul Kagame, during a press conference. Not a bad way for any journalist to go, but it's a pity his memoir isn't fleshed out with subsequent research which might help explain just why he saw as many as 2,500 dead bodies in four years.
At the end, we are left with little more than the hoary cliche contained in the title - about Africa being the "heart of darkness" - and the solution suggested by one of Jennings's colleagues, which he quotes sympathetically: "Build a very high wall around both countries, and fill them with concrete".
Paul Cullen is development correspondent of The Irish Times. His book, Refugees and Asylum-seekers in Ireland, was published last month
