Review of War Junkie

War Junkie by Jon Steele, Bantam Press UK

The book is a partial autobiography. The writer is 'n cameraman who works for the British TV channel ITN, mainly in Moscow. He recounts his recollections of what happened when he was in, amongst other places, Abkhazia, Sokhumi, Russia (during Yeltsin's attack against the Russian parliament and democracy), Sarajevo (Bosnia), Kigali (Rwanda) and Goma (DRC).

He is clearly very sensitive toward the nature of Yeltsin's behaviour wrt democracy, and one wishes to believe that he is critical generally. Yet this wish is repeatedly disappointed, especially by his description of and behaviour in Goma and Kigali. He clearly feels much more comfortable with Canadians than Russians, and a well-spoken and neat general won his respect by dint of the persona he (the general) projected. I thus next discuss his behaviour and interpretation of events in Kigali (capital of Rwanda).

Steele observed several corpses that were hacked to death; the corpses appeared to be almost exclusively Tutsi. As the corpses were hacked to death, he concludes, quite reasonably, that machetes/pangas were used in the murders. At one point, they (he and the soldiers with whom he travels - an early example of `embedded journalism') come upon a group of civilian Hutus. The Canadian general (Romeo Dallaire) insists that his soldiers search the civilians, and they find some small arms and machetes. From this, Steele concludes that these civilians participated in the large-scale murder that had been happening for a while by that time, otherwise known as the 'Rwandan genocide'. I have one hell of a problem with this conclusion. Could they not be e.g. small farmers, who use the arms to ward off cattle thieves, and use the machetes to geld and slaughter cattle? After all, it would be difficult to hack large groups of people to death without soldiers standing guard with automatic arms to prevent resistance. At another point, he sees a group of murdered Hutu civilians who were fleeing a refugee camp, that also housed cannons which Hutu soldiers were using to attack parts of Kigali. Steele uncritically accepts the suggestion of a Canadian soldier that the civilians were murdered by the soldiers among them, yet the same Canadian soldier indicates that the victims had been dead by that point for at least eight hours, based on the caking of their blood, but protecting civilians against infantry is not a simple proposal when your main arms are artillery - why is it not plausible to him that the camp may have been overrun by Tutsi soldiers, with the Hutu soldiers fleeing, and the Tutsi soldiers leaving the artillery (or taking it - he gives no indication either way), and killing the civilians? Further, I feel strongly that Dallaire should be convicted of the murder of those groups of civilians whom he disarmed.

Then I also ask myself (and Steele gives no indication that such a thing ever happened) how many Tutsi civilians were searched by Dallaire. Yet strong evidence has emerged that Dallaire assisted Kagame (Kagami in the book) in the assassination of two prominent Hutu leaders, thus leading to the slaughter, and that the majority of the dead in the slaughter were Hutu, with a great portion killed by the royalist Tutsis of Kagame. Kagame also invaded Congo-Kinshasa on behalf of the west, instigating a civil war that has claimed five million victims, so that the west could have cheap access to Tantalum (for high quality capacitors, at that point for one of the gaming consoles, Playstation II if memory serves). Steele is very impressed by Dallaire's 'fatherly' approach to him, and clearly warms to soldiers who are kind toward the press. I wonder how he would have covered the Russian press had they sold him on the story (since used as a theme in several Hollywood movies and at least one US computer game) that the Russian leadership was trying to instigate a genocide in Russia/the former USSR.

Steele is also a cocaine addict, and neglected his wife and child. He comes across as largely morally and intellectually underdeveloped. Groups who must regularly deal with the press may find this book useful.