WUOrevolt
26th November 2005, 17:18
Taken from the June 8th ish issue of RollingStone magazine.
Peter Bouckaert has been traveling for days through the world's highest mountain range, skirting landslides and hugging cliffs on switchbacks shrouded in mist. Scattered among the rickshaws and ox carts and peasants herding sheep lies the wreckage of Nepal's civil war: bombed-out bridges, the charred carcasses of trucks. Maoist rebels dominate the countryside, torturing "revisionists" who disagree with their ideology and forcing entire villages to watch as they conduct "demonstration killings," breaking every bone in their victims' bodies before finishing them off. In the past decade, the fighting in Nepal has claimed more than 11,000 lives, most of them civilians caught between the Maoists and the army.
Now, as Bouckaert's Land Cruiser speeds across the plain north of the Indian border, the road gives way to other dangers. Up ahead, at a sandbagged barracks surrounded by coils of razor wire, two soldiers brandishing .303 Royal Enfields step onto the highway. It's one of dozens of army checkpoints set up to deter the rebels. Hoping to snag Maoist insurgents, the military has cast a wide net throughout the country. As a result, Nepal now leads the world in "disappearances." More than 1,200 civilians have been abducted by the army, never to be heard from again.
Bouckaert, armed with only a notebook and a camera, has come to Nepal to find out what happened to them. As the senior emergency researcher for Human Rights Watch, he is the James Bond of human-rights investigators. He jets to the world's hellholes when they're at their worst, racing to document human-rights abuses before the blood is dry. Then he shows up on CNN or at the U.S. State Department to report on what he witnessed and demand immediate action. His maverick style has helped shake up the human-rights movement, replacing dispassionate reports with urgent, headline-grabbing activism. He is legendary for his boundless energy and the sizzling speed of his investigations. He works fast, completing four to six missions a year, and he keeps the pressure on until the abuses stop and the tyrants are locked up. "I began to think he was more than one person," says one war correspondent. At Human Rights Watch's headquarters in New York, he's known as "the fireman," since he's routinely rushing to places everyone else is fleeing. The Washington Post recently named him "one of the most skillful human-rights investigators of his time."
As the Land Cruiser grinds to a stop at the checkpoint, one of the soldiers approaches and pulls on the door handle. A wiry man no older than twenty, he grips his rifle and glowers at Bouckaert with glassy, sleepless eyes, his sun-charred face glistening with sweat. Unfazed, Bouckaert leans across to greet him. "Hello, how are you doing today?" he asks, flashing a smile as if the two are old frat pals. He removes his silver sunglasses and looks up at the man with his warm blue eyes, extending his hand for a friendly shake. The soldier, who speaks no English, seems dumbfounded.
Bouckaert certainly doesn't look like a threat: An impish, slightly doughy man of thirty-four, he carries himself like a slacker, shuffling when he walks, his shirt untucked, notebook dangling from his hand. But for the past seven years, Bouckaert has probed the darkest battlefields of human depravity. He traveled to war-ravaged regions of the Congo when rebels had turned to cannibalism. He survived Chechnya when aid workers were being hunted for ransom. He visited Sierra Leone when rebels left the limbs of villagers littering the jungle. In Indonesia, he helped rescue a human-rights worker whose colleagues were killed by government assassins. During Saddam Hussein's rule he penetrated the treacherous mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan to document murder and torture by the Ansar al-Islam militants, and during the current war in Iraq he was among the first to investigate the killing of civilians by American forces.
Sometimes his work has helped change history. Evidence that Bouckaert collected was used in The Hague to charge Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic with war crimes. After he penned what the Christian Science Monitor called a "chilling litany of rape and murder" perpetrated by warlords in Afghanistan, one of the accused, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, had the entire report read to his lieutenants, warning them that Bouckaert was "a very dangerous man" who could put them in prison. On the day that Bouckaert exposed the heinous sins of Azerbaijan's chief torturer, the man died of a massive heart attack. In Russia, he once persuaded commanders to uncouple a locomotive from a freight train full of refugees about to be sent back to face violence in Chechnya. "They were pissed," Bouckaert recalls. "But they did it."
Nepal is his latest destination. The Maoists now hold more than two-thirds of the country, and diplomats say there's a real possibility that they could conquer the rest. In February, Nepal's king plunged the country deeper into turmoil, banishing parliament and launching a campaign of arbitrary arrests and repression. "We're not talking about people being slapped around a little," Bouckaert says. "We're talking about police and soldiers committing acts of cold-blooded murder."
Facing the armed soldier at the checkpoint, Bouckaert inquires about the man's family. He knows that the Maoists routinely murder soldiers' relatives, and his friendly concern implies that he's siding with the army. But Bouckaert doesn't support either the Maoists or the government -- he's here to stand up for civilians targeted by both sides. Warmed by his calm, affable manner, the soldier is soon answering every question put to him. Bouckaert quickly takes advantage of the rapport.
"So," he asks, "what do you do with the Maoists when you catch them?" < p> "We shoot them," says the soldier.
Bouckaert thanks him and drives away. The soldier has just confessed to a human-rights abuse. "I love it when they make it easy for us," Bouckaert says with a smile.
The next day, Bouckaert travels deeper into Maoist territory. He is heading for Rajapur, a remote area where dozens of people have reportedly disappeared. The paved highway has given way to rutted, packed dirt. It seems eerily abandoned. Pradeep, a local activist who is serving as Bouckaert's interpreter, says there's no cause for alarm. "The road is 100 percent safe," he says in the rich, roller-coaster accent of South Asia. "But," he adds, "there are land mines."
Bouckaert, slouching in the back seat, bursts into laughter. "I love it," he says. "This is the kind of local security advice you constantly get. So how does the driver know which side to drive on?"
"He doesn't know," Pradeep responds. "He has to be very careful. If he sees a sign of recent digging, he avoids it." It's a tough task, given the state of the road. The driver, after ten days behind the wheel, has eyes resembling burnt coals.
Bouckaert, to the tune of "The Wheels on the Bus," breaks into song: "The mines on the road go boom, boom, boom...."
Bouckaert doesn't seem like the kind of guy who makes a habit of courting danger. Instead of extra changes of clothes, his duffel bag is stuffed with books, from a Eudora Welty novel to a history of CIA involvement in Afghanistan. He wakes at dawn to read and can whip through a 300-page book in less than five hours. Despite his detailed knowledge of world affairs, he never comes across as pretentious or pedantic. His lofty arguments are frequently punctuated with the word dude, as in, "The Nepali human-rights activists have oversized cojones, dude. I'd be hiding in my grandmother's basement by now, and they're out protesting on the streets."
Bouckaert possesses the easy charm and relentless intensity of a grizzled war correspondent, and friends call him an adrenaline junkie, a description he doesn't deny. "I'm not going to lie to you," he says. "I like the constant changing action of a war zone. War is tragic, but it's also a very bizarre form of human theater. You feel especially lucky to be alive when you're working in a war zone." Given his assignments, Bouckaert is lucky to be alive: He's been shot at, survived two high-speed car crashes and was once locked inside a political party's headquarters at 2 a.m. while troops outside threatened to attack.
The half-day journey to Rajapur is like a trip back in time. It begins in the Land Cruiser, switches to an old wooden ferry, then a rickety bus, and ends with Bouckaert pedaling through rice fields in the fierce midday heat on a borrowed bicycle. He's an odd sight: Even the water buffaloes wallowing in an irrigation ditch look startled as he wobbles past. Suddenly, his bike mires in the muck, and he tumbles into the paddy. Muddied and on the verge of sunstroke, he recalls a story he once read describing how, thanks to modern science, turkeys now have such enormous breasts that they can no longer mate naturally and have to be coaxed into ejaculation by farm workers. "At least I'm not masturbating turkeys," he mutters to himself.
When he reaches his destination, the villagers immediately gather to greet him. Children stare at the tall white man, who photographs them and shows them their images. Soon there's a bedlam of tiny fingers reaching for the camera. The peasants here are Tharu, an ethnic minority considered even lower than those known as "untouchables." For generations, they have been enslaved, through crippling debt to landlords. The Maoists, who have killed or chased away the oppressors, consider the Tharu prime recruiting fodder. The Royal Nepalese Army, in turn, targets them as enemy collaborators. Among the thirty-five families in this hamlet, eight people have vanished.
"The insane thing about Nepal is that the government is committing these abuses with such impunity," says Bouckaert. "On the scale of depravity, Chechnya is definitely at the bottom, but Nepal is pretty close. It's definitely on my list of the worst countries in the world."
In the village, men fetch simple rope beds from their mud-walled, thatch-roofed homes and position them in the shade. Bouckaert hunches forward on one of the beds, his journal resting on his knees, and begins to question witnesses in a soft, somber tone. "Can you tell me what happened the night your sons disappeared?" he asks a villager named Cheddu Tharu, whose two boys have vanished. His words are translated into Nepali and then into Tharu. A woman squatting nearby wails loudly.
"We were sleeping," says Cheddu, a gaunt, middle-aged man with leathery skin. "Three or four men entered our home, but there were about fifty outside. They pretended they were Maoists, saying, 'Let's go blow up a bridge.' When they told my sons to get dressed, we realized they were from the army. They threatened to kill us if we didn't stay quiet. They smashed their rifles against my boys. Out here in the yard, they blindfolded the boys, bound their hands and led them away."
Bouckaert has already heard versions of this tale scores of times in other villages, but a look of anguish crosses his face. "Tell him we're very sorry for what happened to his sons, and we'll present his case to the government and do everything we can to get answers," he says. He snaps a photo of the man, then calls the next witness.
Everywhere he goes there's a crowd, and usually a sideshow: In one village a boy torments a monkey on a leash; in another a madman wearing a soiled loincloth looks on, a bulbous growth like a Christmas ornament protruding from his nose. For two days, in interview after interview, Bouckaert pieces together the details of what happened around Rajapur. Angered by Maoist attacks on government buildings, the army hauled away nearly a hundred villagers. The lucky ones were beaten, interrogated and released. The soldiers dragged others into the rice fields and gunned them down within earshot of their cowering families. Women in bright sarongs clutch identity cards of husbands and sons who have vanished. They beg Bouckaert for information about their missing loved ones.
"The abuses on one side are fueling the abuses on the other -- that's what happened in the Balkans," Bouckaert says later, anguish seeping through the fatigue. "These people have been missing for a long time, and we don't know if they're dead or alive. But even if they're dead, we want answers. If the security forces take someone into custody and then kill them, that's a war crime, and the perpetrators need to be held accountable."
Bouckaert applies the same standard to the Maoists. That evening, as the sun dips in the sky, he rushes to visit one last village before heading back to the ferry. But as we turn into a wooded area, a man stands in the road, blocking our way. It's the local Maoist commander. Like the soldier at the checkpoint, he is barely out of his teens. His comrades, he tells us, are currently preparing for a final assault to take the entire nation. Picking up on the boast, Bouckaert casually exploits the man's pride to reap more intelligence. "Will you be using child soldiers in that effort?" he asks.
"The children don't actually take part in combat until they're about seventeen, since they're not strong enough to handle a gun," the commander replies. "But we're involving everyone in the effort. We're training children as young as five years old to set off remote-control mines in case of a government offensive."
Bouckaert grew up on a hilltop farm in Belgium. "It was an idyllic place," he recalls. "We had ponies, mules, chickens and an incredible orchard." He and his younger brother Thomas, who was then his only sibling, perpetrated more than the usual boyhood mischief, once almost burning the house down after stealing eggs from the coop and cooking them over a brush fire. "I spent every day of my life with Thomas," Bouckaert says. "He was my best friend."
Then, when Peter was eight, Thomas was killed in a car accident. "I was confused, rudderless," Bouckaert says. "I started acting out a lot." Things only got worse when he was fifteen and his father's company transferred him to Berkeley, California, where Peter had a hard time fitting in. "Being cool was everything," he recalls. "I was a hick -- I definitely wasn't cool." It didn't help that his English was densely accented. Even today, after years of appearing on television to denounce dictators and tyrants, his pronunciation sometimes wavers. "He still hasn't mastered the 'th' sound," says Fred Abrahams, a fellow researcher at Human Rights Watch. "When we want to make fun of him we just call him a 'mudderfucker.' "
At school, Bouckaert felt like an outcast. He hung out with the black kids and listened to rappers like N.W.A and Public Enemy. "I found it easier to get accepted into that culture than into Marin County's golf-club culture," he says. "Rap music, radical politics, chicks -- what more could a teenager wish for?" The class clown, Peter also drank and took lots of drugs. "I would ingest pretty much anything you put in front of me," he says. He was kicked out of several schools before he met Ted Walch, a drama teacher and recovering cocaine addict. "In spite of all his teen angst," Walch says, "you knew there was something in this kid that was deeply good." Teacher and student bonded over their love of Scarface, and Walch helped him stay off drugs. "He made me realize that being sober didn't mean being a boring sod," Bouckaert recalls.
At the University of California, Bouckaert majored in black studies and became one of the most prominent activists on the Santa Barbara campus. Off campus, he befriended men who had been in the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army. He was sober and focused in his studies, but the wound of his brother's death was still fresh: At graduation, Bouckaert received an academic award, and in his acceptance speech he paid tribute to Thomas.
Determined to arm himself for a career in activism, Bouckaert went straight to Stanford law school. But once again he was the oddball. Everyone he met wanted to make a fortune in securities law; Bouckaert didn't even know what that was. After he graduated, he won a fellowship at Human Rights Watch. Within a year he found himself in Kosovo, his first war zone. The human-rights community, accustomed to taking its time to build detailed cases, had never seen anyone like him. "Peter was bold and pushy," says Abrahams. "He didn't accept the human-rights movement as an upper-row balcony voice but rather demanded that we step down onto center stage." One night, at a bar in Pristina, Abrahams learned of a massacre in a nearby village. Rights workers would normally have handled the incident by including it in a report with other meticulously documented evidence, to be released months in the future. Instead, Bouckaert went for maximum and immediate impact: He recruited a New York Times correspondent to accompany him and Abrahams to the scene. The resulting front-page story, with a gory photograph, played a major role in persuading President Clinton to send in the warplanes.
Bouckaert's aggressiveness catapulted him to the upper echelons of human-rights work. "Our researchers come face to face with incredible situations, in which many people are being slaughtered," says Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch. "The very urgent question is 'What can we do to stop it?' Peter's answer is: Get the information out there, feed the media beast, make headlines now. He has incredible go-get-'em instincts." But Bouckaert's style also draws resentment from those accustomed to remaining behind the scenes. "The rights abuses are supposed to be the story," one researcher says, "not us."
Bouckaert shrugs off such criticism. He knows his high-profile approach enables him to reach a wider audience -- and for him, it's the results that matter. "I'm not a navel gazer," he says.
Bouckaert also knows that before he can get the message out, he has to get the facts. In one district capital in Nepal, where soldiers with machine guns crouch behind sandbags at every traffic circle, he interviews one of the few "disappeared" who have been released. The man, a prominent lawyer who angered the army by defending alleged Maoists in court, was incarcerated at Chisapani barracks, a notorious army post where many of the disappeared are taken. Bouckaert tracks him down at his two-story cement home near the center of town.
"You're one of the few people who knows what goes on inside the Chisapani barracks," Bouckaert says, sitting in the lawyer's office. "Can you tell us about your arrest?"
"It was night, and I was here writing in my study when someone called my name from outside," the lawyer says. "I opened the door, and immediately the soldiers grabbed me. They were all wearing masks, and they beat me severely in the face and kicked me with their boots. When I tried to protect myself, they tied my hands."
Slowly, over the next two hours, the man relates the details of his torture. When he arrived at Chisapani, he was vomiting blood. The next day, soldiers took him behind the barracks and beat him with truncheons. "I really didn't think I would survive," he tells Bouckaert. "Once, they put me out in a bunker with a dead body. They made me sleep like that all night."
The man was interrogated for three months. A senior officer would stomp on his fingers and kick him in the mouth, saying, "This is the mouth that defends the Maoists." The officer would kill prisoners in broad daylight, in front of other detainees, then put their bodies in a truck and drive them out to the jungle.
When the lawyer has finished, Bouckaert pauses. "There are about 300 people missing from the districts near that barracks," he says. "Where do you think they are?"
"They are not still alive," the man says. "I think the officer killed most of them."
"Where is he now?" Bouckaert asks.
"At another barracks. He was promoted."
For Bouckaert, this is what it is like month after month. On every mission, he interviews victims of unspeakable cruelty, who trust him enough to speak about them. The images continue to haunt him for years. There's the man in the West Bank who unfolds a handkerchief containing his dying son's bloody toes and begs Bouckaert to get an ambulance through the Israeli tank lines. The man in Chechnya, about Bouckaert's age, who lost both legs. The fourteen-year-old boys in Sierra Leone forced to amputate the arms of villagers, and the nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped and raped by rebels. "A fuckin' nine-year-old who'd been raped!" Bouckaert erupts. "And her sister had been killed right in front of her!"
To prevent himself from sinking into despair, Bouckaert indulges himself in some sort of local diversion wherever he goes. A fanatical foodie who munches chili peppers like candy, he's eaten palm maggots and flying ants in Uganda ("You just pluck them out of the air, pop them in your mouth and wash them down with beer") and grilled sheep testicles in Pakistan ("You never look at a set of balls the same way again"). But often, the pain of the victims Bouckaert meets reminds him of the death of his own brother; he still cries when he talks about Thomas. "It is a very big hole in my life not to have him there," he says. "He's still very much a part of me, every day. Through him, it's important to give my life meaning. But Thomas died in an accident. A lot of the people I talk to, their relatives died because a soldier shot them, on purpose. I have a hard time understanding how people can do those kinds of things."
Bouckaert often recalls one of his first missions, to investigate the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, which has kidnapped thousands of children to use as conscripts and sex slaves. "Every night they go to sleep removed from their families, absolutely terrorized," he says. "I think about them many evenings. I'm going to bed in my comfortable house and these kids are still living in these horrible circumstances. That's devastating for me."
After fifteen days on the road gathering evidence, Bouckaert returns to Katmandu. The Maoists have recently blockaded the city for two weeks, threatening to cut off the hands of anyone who drives in or out. But Bouckaert's mind is elsewhere. He's here for the most contentious part of the mission: confronting those in power. The Bush administration has responded to the Maoist uprising by supplying the Nepalese army with thousands of M-16s, and Bouckaert visits U.S diplomats to inform them that the weapons are being used to kill civilians. He also pays a call on Gen. Pyar Jung Thapa, the Nepalese army's chief of staff.
As Bouckaert climbs the stairs to Thapa's office, military police salute him, crisply snapping their heels. Ushered inside, Bouckaert shakes hands with the general, a slick, almost cartoon-perfect commander, with a trim mustache and a paunch under his immaculate uniform. Bouckaert seats himself on a plush couch behind a low coffee table, on which sits a bowl of pink rosebuds supported by two miniature brass cannons. The general grins at his guest, exuding the bulletproof composure of the invincible.
Bouckaert eases into the meeting by accusing Thapa of murder and abduction. "We've documented eighteen cases in the last year where the army has executed civilians, and 250 cases where soldiers arrested people who have since disappeared," he says. "We believe this is happening in many cases around the country, and we're very concerned, because this is a serious war crime." He reminds Thapa that he is personally culpable for the atrocities. "We know you want to avoid the experience of Peru, in which many army officers have been prosecuted for such crimes," Bouckaert says calmly.
The general shifts in his plum-colored armchair. Clearly, he says, these allegations are simple misunderstandings. Bouckaert cuts the general off. No misunderstanding, he insists -- the evidence he has gathered makes clear that the crimes are systematic. Every time the general tries to dismiss the charges, Bouckaert firmly returns to the facts -- including the soldier at the checkpoint who confessed to shooting Maoist suspects.
By the end of the meeting, the general is laughing nervously. His deputy is furious. Bouckaert, however, seems to be enjoying himself; as he talks, it's easy to see the mischievous wit that got him booted from high school. Now, instead of unnerving his teachers, he brandishes the Geneva Conventions to torment despots and warlords.
"That's my favorite part of the job," Bouckaert says later. "You have to challenge these untouchable symbols of authority. People are shit scared of the generals. They're not used to people standing up to them this way."
The next day, Bouckaert hosts a packed press conference for eighty reporters. He blasts the Bush administration for ignoring the abuses in Nepal and talks up an initiative in Congress to cut off U.S. aid to Thapa's troops unless their human-rights record improves. And he has some fun at Thapa's expense. "I think the general was more nervous than I was when I talked to him," he tells reporters. The story lands in the New York Times, the Washington Post and dozens of other papers around the world.
That night, as he waits for a satellite phone call from Afghanistan at his hotel, Bouckaert reflects on the value of his work. A few weeks after the start of the Iraq War, he visited Saddam's mass graves and stood stunned as families spent hours under the blazing desert sun sifting through the dirt, hunting for a scrap of buried clothing or an ID card that might distinguish their murdered relatives. He watched a woman in a black chador pleading with a decayed skull. "Where is my son?" she wailed, over and over. "Please tell me, where is my son?"
Bouckaert shakes his head at the memory. "It hit me just how horrible this massacre had been -- that people had literally been processed, like cows at a factory, to their death," he says. "Think of the kind of organization this took. Day after day, busloads of people arrived there and had a bullet through their head. It happened to 300,000 people all over Iraq."
But Bouckaert was also horrified to see a bulldozer digging up the mass graves and the remains being dumped into clear plastic bags -- destroying crucial evidence against Saddam and his henchmen. "There wasn't a single forensic scientist in Iraq when these mass graves were uncovered," he says. "That's just a shocking failure by the Bush administration -- a failure that's directly related to the kind of situation that U.S. forces face in Iraq today. What made me immensely angry was to see this historic opportunity slipping away through sheer American incompetence. It's Iraqis who are paying the price."
For Bouckaert, the mass graves in Iraq, like the disappearances in Nepal, sum up how the world still seems unable to confront the crimes of tyrants. Killings go unchecked for years -- and then, when the evidence is finally unearthed, it's squandered. "Time and again," Bouckaert says, "small human-rights problems grow into major conflicts, and no one even pays attention until a lot of people are getting killed. Look at Congo. Three million people have died, and who sat around the table negotiating Congo's future? The guys with blood on their hands. We live in a world where if you commit one murder, you end up in jail -- but if you commit 1,000 murders, you have a pretty good chance of getting away with it."
Powered by vBulletin® Version 4.2.5 Copyright © 2020 vBulletin Solutions Inc. All rights reserved.