Borderlines. Michela Wrong

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СКАЧАТЬ on a new constitution. Colleagues marvelled at his appetite for airlines blacklisted by US embassies, brothels masquerading as hotels, and his willingness to pop a Lariam with his morning coffee at a stage when they had grown dependent on the five-star hotel, the chauffeured pick-up, the left aircraft swivel into business class.

      I sipped my beer, silently noting the absence of any reference to ‘my wife’, ‘my partner’ or ‘the kids’. No alimony, no pets. Gardening got a brief mention, but how far could that take a man? Was the law Winston’s only passion?

      The roundabout route had brought him to the Horn of Africa. Winston had led a team that had virtually written the constitution of still-unrecognised Somaliland. He had found himself drafting legislation on ancestral grazing rights for a young mayor in the Ethiopian highlands – the man had raved about his work at a regional conference. A job in South Sudan had followed, and finally the authorities in Lira had reached out.

      ‘It was a bizarre experience. I boarded a bus in Juba, heading east. I thought this was going to be my only chance to see Lira – you know people rave about the 1930s architecture? – so I’d arranged a stopover. I couldn’t remember telling anyone my plans. As I got off the bus two men in their fifties, both with that weathered, tough look about them you get here, stepped forward and said, quietly and politely, “Mr Peabody? Could we have a word?” They must have monitored me all the way from Sudan. This is one of only about three governments in Africa, I reckon, capable of running such an effective intelligence network. It comes of spending decades under enemy occupation, I suppose. You learn the tricks of the trade.’

      They had virtually frogmarched him to a nearby café and explained that someone important wanted to see him. Then they had driven him to the old Italian governor’s palace on the hill, through a single checkpoint – ‘He doesn’t do security, says if any member of the public wants to assassinate him he’ll have outlived his usefulness anyway’ – and ushered him straight into the president’s office, where he had been relentlessly wooed. For what could have been better calculated to win round a left-leaning maverick without a cause, a New World, African-American intellectual snob, than a brutally honest exposition of an African administration’s lack of preparedness to meet the most testing legal challenge of its short existence, delivered in a gruff monotone by the Man Himself during a protocol-free tête-à-tête?

      ‘For the first hour I wasn’t offered so much as a glass of tea, which is incredibly rude in this culture,’ he recalled, with a fond smile. ‘The zero-charisma charm offensive, I like to call it, a Lira speciality.’ And it had worked like a dream, I thought, noticing how uncharacteristically flustered Winston looked, like a lover voicing a girlfriend’s name at the family table.

      ‘He was just, well, extremely impressive.’ Winston threw me a surreptitious glance. ‘You’ll meet him one of these days and see for yourself. I suppose it’s partly that he appears to lack … wiles. What you see is what you get – that’s half of the problem when he’s operating in the international arena. No bowing and scraping from his staff, none of that “Your Excellency” nonsense. He was dressed very simply, an outfit I’ve now seen a hundred times. He was totally open, made no attempt to cover anything up. The machinery of government barely existed, he told me. They’d done their best in the bush during the war of independence, running clandestine schools, but literacy rates among the former fighters now in charge of the various departments were embarrassing. He had ministers, he said, who could barely read the newspapers, let alone master Microsoft Word. Wonderful military strategists, but they’d started out as goatherds. Even before the clash in Sanasa and the new war, most of the real work of government was being done by a few harried secretaries left over from the old regime whom no one really trusted. Shortages of printers, photocopiers, cartridges, even pens. The educated elite were taking their time returning from exile, and when they arrived they wanted to set up import-export outfits, not work in government. This was a state that could barely issue a driver’s licence so contesting a border dispute in The Hague was simply beyond its capacities.’

      ‘And you agreed to do it for them?’

      He pursed his lips. ‘That’s not how I would phrase it. I see myself in a mentoring role. A facilitator, if you like. These guys may not have taken classes in international tort, but there’s no shortage of brains. Part of your job here will be to pass on what you have learned, thanks to your privileged Western education, to the local staff. It’s like water on a sponge – every drop gets soaked up. I won’t tolerate any apartheid in the office. I can’t stand that Western staff-versus-local-hire rivalry that so often develops. We all need one another’s skills. They may not know the law but we don’t know the local culture and don’t speak the language. The ultimate aim of the Western staff – you, me, Sharmila and the interns – should be to put ourselves out of a job.’

      ‘You’d better talk me through the case.’

      ‘We’re going to need to raise our blood sugar for that.’ Winston made a vague gesture, and two slabs of vanilla ice-cream were placed before us. Vanilla ice-cream, I was to discover, was the only dessert that ever passed his lips. He would become agitated if any attempt was made – an oozing gash of raspberry ripple, a dollop of puréed fruit – to ‘jazz it up’. ‘It’s perfect,’ he claimed. ‘Never tamper with perfection.’ Carving cat-tongues from his magnolia ingot with a teaspoon, he laid it all out.

       5

      Most of us have watched so many police thrillers and legal dramas, we have a pretty accurate grasp of what form a criminal court case takes. International arbitration is different. It usually happens in private. It can take any form the parties decide. In this case, the two presidents had agreed to a two-stage process. First, the course of the contested border would be established by an independent Border Commission made up of lawyers and academics with pedigrees in international dispute settlement. Each government’s legal team would plead its case before those veterans, who were both judge and jury. Once the border had been decided, the issue of who bore responsibility for starting such a wasteful scrap – jus ad bellum, as it was technically known – would be decided by a panel of inquiry to be set up in Addis Ababa by the African Union, which was keen to demonstrate its readiness to police the continent.

      I was arriving late to the party. Both sides had already filed Memorials, opening salvoes in a contest that would climax with a ruling dubbed ‘final and binding’. It was the experience of drafting the ‘granddaddy of Memorials’, as Winston referred to it, that had finally persuaded him he needed help. The Memorials summarised each side’s arguments and were bursting with pertinent facts, set in historical context and backed up by legal argument and precedent. Winston had clearly found the task near overwhelming.

      ‘It’s a damn good piece of work, if I say so myself,’ he said, scooping up his ice-cream with surprising speed. ‘But, then, their side’s isn’t too bad either, as you’ll see. I’d recommend that’s all you do for the first few days here, just sit down and read the two Memorials. You’re going to end up knowing them as well as a pulpit-thumping preacher knows his Bible. We have six weeks to prepare our counter-Memorials, demonstrating what fools and liars they’ve been. Then both sides swap those and prepare for the final showdown, the hearing.’

      ‘What are we arguing?’

      ‘We’re going for a multi-strand approach. Hopefully each strand of the argument complements the others to form a nice thick rope of validation. First,’ he said, ticking one stubby finger, ‘we’ll use nineteenth-century colonial treaties and the beautiful, beautiful maps that go with them.’ Briefly he looked quite dreamy. Then his expression changed. ‘Did you know that a map, without a treaty attached, carries almost no legal weight?’

      ‘No, I didn’t.’

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