Bernard-Henri Lévy

For once, he is alone. Often, when he arrives at a «hot spot» of the globe, he’s capable of annoying the journalists who are there. He is suspected of being there especially in the interest of self-promotion, or to philosophize while others are content to relate the facts. It happened, as expected, at Algiers, and again in Sarajevo, during the first days of the siege. He’s come to expect it but still has never gotten used to it.

South Sudan, Burundi, Colombia, Sri-Lanka, Angola. At least there, no one will look for an altercation with him. The press doesn’t go to these places. Too far. Western public obviously indifferent. Five major stories that appeared in Le Monde, between May 30th and June 4th, 2001, the whole entitled Les Damnés de la guerre [The Damned of War]. Five ill-defined conflicts of which most people are unaware, ignorant of even the fact that they’ve been going on for sometimes a decade or two, the killing continuing unwitnessed, without images. Many journalists would be hard put to locate them on a map without giving it some thought, and even harder put to say precisely what camps are fighting there. Or for what cause.

What is his ambition? To take a step off the well-trodden path. To displace, at least for himself, the logic of contemporary geostrategy, to distance himself from the new battle grounds, the better to observe them from afar. At the end of the 90s, like everyone else, he is dragged into tortured, often truncated debates on “the end of History” and the advent of the times of the “war of civilisations». Islam vs the West, the return of the wars of religion, the pious against non-believers, new communism, the uprising, in turn, of the poverty-stricken of the planet vs the powerful. He is surrounded by the search for a meaning of this unleashing of fire and death—the next meaning, if you will, of conflicts that will rush in to fill the vacuum left by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

«The decline of Marxism,” he writes in the introduction to the first piece, “and all the great narratives that conspired with it to give meaning to what had no meaning, that is to say the infinite pain of mankind, has smashed this catechism to bits. And it is like a great tide going out, leaving behind it men and women who continue to flounder, sometimes with even more ferocity, but in the wake of whose confrontations we can read no trace of the promise, the coherence, or the epiphanies of long ago.»

Bernard-Henri Lévy wants to go where war has become devoid of the least meaning. Where it counts for absolutely nothing in the general disorder of the world. Forgotten wars, of no great stakes for the planet or even, basically, for their protagonists. Wars with no other justification but habit, or the lack of lucidity to put an end to them. They began. And so they continue.

Each one of these accounts is a dumbfounding story. “Report on the banality of the worst». Scrawny armies, skeleton logistics, archaic or moronic warlords. He goes to meet the guerrillas still living in the times of Che’s sparse mountain maquis in Bolivia; «resistances» that have become mechanical, somnambulist, with the passage of time; ghost towns—but declared «liberated». He seeks out, especially the masses of civilian victims whose only baggage consists of the memory of their dead and the broken, choked stories of the survivors.

Gilles Hertzog, his usual companion covering stories, with whom he returned to Afghanistan a few months ago to see Massoud again, travels with him to South Sudan. But Bernard-Henri Lévy goes to Colombia, Sri Lanka, Burundi and Angola alone. Notebooks, pens, testing the wind, counting on his luck to advance without incident. He passes any way he can, with NGOs or UN observers, when there are any, charters planes or hitches a ride on the trail with some unlikely convoy.

In Bujumbura, the pacified (in principle) capital of Burundi, he passes among the houses of the Hutu neighbourhood of Kamangue, demolished by heavy artillery. “…Strange atmosphere,» he writes, «a mixture of fear, suspicion, abandoned hope and fatigue. A long line of men and women, walking aimlessly, their eyes empty” Around him, the Tutsi paratroopers patrol. Rumour has it that rebel elements entered the city the night before, assassinating two women in front of a church. Bernard-Henri Lévy finds himself there at the precise moment of repression. An eye for an eye. The paratroopers surround the shelters, the makeshift cover, and expel the occupants. The weakest are startled awake by demonstrations of force, universal to army rabble, with blows in the ribs from gun butts or barrels.

Bernard-Henri Lévy is bothersome. Not because he is white, or a potential witness of exactions, but simply because the paratroopers must go round the obstacle of his figure. Scarcely a trivial scene. And so it is with all the civilians—the elderly, the mutilated, the women who seem to «carry their babies like little cadavers,» the writer notes, who are shoved, jolted, chased ahead like herds of goats, because they block the free access to the next confrontations between the two camps. They slow down the offensive and mess up the tactic of the day. Cause unending diplomatic contention if the UN and the NGOs get too openly upset by what is happening to them.

At Mubone, a camp of the «regrouped» that has become a city while waiting in vain for peace, all bets are off. The civilians are sure to lose. Before them the rebels, who hold the hills; behind them, the government army. Or the contrary, depending on the day. Whatever direction they take, and whether they are themselves Hutus or Tutsis, the probability that they will be manhandled, subject to racket, or drafted is strong. In normal times, when the silence is not broken by the sound of weapons, when a little of the daily routine wears itself out trying to return, and the bistros open, where people can finally discuss football, the oppressor’s identity varies rapidly. At nightfall, Mubone changes masters. The Hutu forces of the area come to help themselves—to food or to girls—and leave before the entire herd—which would punish the liberties taken in the night, as is the rule—wakes up.

«Black holes,» notes Bernard-Henri Lévy. “Grey zones”. Human driftwood on the ground—arms, legs, heads—that get in the way of drunken, drugged, or famished armies, often hastily composed of children who have gone crazy and who are competing, here in this no man’s land, for the Top 10 of the most bloodthirstry of humanity. Once past the checkpoints, expected, escorted, the writer comes upon often very urbane warlords, waited on hand and foot, who offer him tea, or barbecued lamb, dressing up their butcheries with rational discourse.

John Garang, leader of the interminable resistance to the Khartoum regime, in the steppes of South Sudan and the mountains of Nuba country, who cites the Bible and the works of De Gaulle and dreams of a reunified Sudan. As in the case of other commanders in chief he has approached during his series of interviews, Bernard-Henri Lévy is struck by the sudden need for “an audience” evident in the appeals of the Number 1 of the SPLA. By the “far off pipedream » that haunts him and that, in the depths of his clandestine retreat, prevents him from comprehending how some elements of his combat are outdated. Even in the far away South, where the petroleum installations flourish, in the hands of foreign companies. The Islamic regime of Khartoum is less concerned with defending the population in this area from the threat of John Garang than it is with protecting the black gold. “South Sudan is no longer anything but a gigantic underground its dead share with its oil,” writes the philosopher.

After the series of articles was published, Bernard-Henri Lévy presented the collected texts in a book, to which he added a sort of a stroll through the philosophic and the memorial. Réflexions sur la guerre, le Mal, et la fin de l’Histoire [Reflections on War, Evil, and the End of History]. Auschwitz, Guernica, Sarajevo. Conflicts and genocides, of others or of yesterday, but to whose ghosts he readily appeals. “Appels de notes», as he calls these short, numbered texts that come from passages in his reporting. Hegel, Nietzsche, Bataille, Sartre, readings, references to his former masters or to the contradictors of his times. A backword look as well, often perplexed and regretful, at the memory of his past commitments. In so doing, he attempts in a certain manner to bring back to the center, to save again, the ants of Burundi or Sri Lanka, the «destitute, the deprived, these men too many», by associating them there, in these pages, with the great or greater catastrophes of the times.

These investigations and these notes are not related to Iraq or Afghanistan, where the seekers of meaning rush. But nonetheless, Les Damnés de la guerre did not die on September 11th in the crumbling of the Twin Towers of New York. However, Al Qaeda’s attack was launched a few days before Bernard-Henri Lévy’s book came out, and he had the time to make some connections. Massoud also lies in this cemetery for the needy, the former gang leader who nearly succeeded, the enlightened leader of a war that was perhaps more just than the others, Massoud, who had just been assassinated by a phoney journalist, and whose word-portrait, drawn by Bernard-Henri Lévy for Le Monde, was added, at the end of the book, an expression of solidarity, an additional scar.

He also tells why he has become involved in all this. It’s true, why leave familiar western luxury for the austerity of a special correspondent and, morally, why accept such hardship? What, besides “virtuous reasons» compelled him? Essentially, «a love for different identities», Bernard-Henri Lévy replied. The freedom to be many things, “all and nothing, multiple and nobody”. Fool everyone, and, to begin with, his detractors who have taken pleasure in assigning him the role of the wealthy and sophisticated heir since the 70s. One sees him at the Ritz, or on the red carpet at the Cannes Festival where he should be, they think, and where he should stay. Yes, but the following day at dawn and, if need be, in the same tux, he takes off for a remote land where his wealth, his influence, his social status, even his international status, cannot protect him in the least. Giddiness and rest in the brutal tumbles of a personal story. Struggle, in Paris, to distinguish himself and then, suddenly, in South Sudan, to be nothing special, next to those who are nothing at all.

Philippe Boggio

Former reporter at Le Monde, Philippe Boggio is the author of many books including biographies of Coluche (Flammarion, 1991 and 2006), Bernard-Henri Levy (La Table Ronde, 2005) and Johnny Halliday (Flammarion, 2009).

Translation by Janet Lizop

Photo 1 : 2001-Gogrial, South Sudan. With a unit of fighters of the SPLA of John Garang. (c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 2 : 2001-South Sudan, with Commander Paul Malong, head of the northern sector, in the ghost town of Gogrial. “(c) Alexis Duclos.
Photo 3 : 2001 – Boma, in the heart of Southern Sudan, with John Garang, leader (Christian) of the People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). (c) Alexis Duclos.