Sean’s Blog

Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda by Scott Peterson

Some books have a profound impact on the way you look at the world. Me Against My Brother was one of them for me. I read this book about 5 years ago and just finished rereading it. Although the conflicts described have changed and have almost moved out of the realm of current events, the lessons that we can take from this book have not.

Today we see a Rwanda struggling to over come the horror of a very personal genocide. Sudan and Somalia are still at war, although the locations and combatants have changed. Me against My Brother gives us some perspective on these current conflicts and our responses to them.

The first third of the book is devoted to the US-led peace keeping mission in Somalia that most of us are familiar with from the book or movie Black Hawk Down. Peterson explains the situation that led up to the deployment of the US lead forces and the missed opportunities and hubris that caused and escalation in the violence as well as the ultimate withdrawal of those forces. Almost 20 years later, Somalia is still engaged in civil war, and another humanitarian crisis looms.

The middle third deals with the amorphous civil war in Southern Sudan. The shifting battle lines, alliances and goals displayed this as an unwinnable war, with neither side strong enough to defeat the other. And so it escalated. Both sides using child solders, religious shock troops and committing atrocities on the civilian population. Due to UN rules, even international aid meant to feed the starving had become a weapon. The ongoing tragedy in Darfur is where this has lead.

The last and most difficult part of the book dealt with the genocide in Rwanda. Over the course of 100 days the Interahamwe (ethnic Hutu militias)killed between 500000 and 1 million ethnic Tutsi Rwandans and Hutu moderates. While the world ignored and try to find reasons to look the other way (led by the US’s fear of another Somalia) these people died not in impersonal gas chambers (as horrible as that was) but by the clubs and machetes of their neighbors. That the west did everything it could to ignore any legal or moral obligation it had to stop the genocide was shocking and sickening.

Peterson has written a hard book to read. The despair and frustration that the reader feels are almost overwhelming at points. But the message is too important to ignore. When we in the west are not ignoring Africa’s conflict we are actively worsening it. Aid has become a weapon that allows armies to fight on and warlords to starve out their opponents. And man’s inhumanity towards other men, whether it is active in the case of the combatants or passive in the case of developed world, is a horrible thing to confront.