ME AGAINST MY BROTHER: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda.

• Author: Hammer, Joshua
• Position: Review

ME AGAINST MY BROTHER: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda by Scott Peterson Routledge, $26

THERE WAS PROBABLY NO more harrowing assignment for a foreign correspondent in recent years than sub-Saharan Africa during the early 1990s. The abrupt end of the Cold War, mounting pressures for democratization, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism all unleashed destabilizing forces that resulted in an era of unprecedented carnage. Yet unlike the recent wars in Kosovo and the Persian Gulf, access to the battlegrounds was largely unhampered. For anyone with the stamina and the courage to get around, that posting was a reporter's dream--and nightmare.

Scott Peterson is just such a journalist. As the Nairobi-based correspondent for Britain's Daily Telegraph and a photographer for the Gamma Liaison agency, he covered the fall of the dictator Mohamed Siad Barre and Somalia's subsequent disintegration into anarchy and famine. He witnessed the intervention to feed the starving and the disastrous pursuit of the warlord Mohamed Farah Aidid. In between, he somehow found the time to make frequent forays to Sudan, where a little-noticed conflict between the Islamic government and Christian and animist southern tribes has resulted in two million deaths in two decades. Along the way, he was attacked by machete-wielding mob in Mogadishu, shot at by the rebel army in Kigali, shelled by Sudanese forces and nearly done in by a bout of cerebral malaria contracted in the Rwandan bush.

Now Peterson has produced an extraordinary book about his years on the front lines. Me Against My Brother: At War in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda is Peterson's very personal account of that catastrophic era on the African continent. Vividly written and deeply researched, filled with compassion and moral indignation, the book takes its place alongside Keith Richburg's Out of America, Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families and Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down as one of the indispensable works about that time.

Peterson's account of the Somali debacle is probably the most detailed study of the country's disintegration at the hands of its feuding warlords and of the well-meaning but hapless United Nations peacekeeping operation that followed. He begins his tale with the final days of Siad Barre, whose bloody dictatorship set the stage for the country's collapse into rival clan-based fiefdoms. Mogadishu, the capital, became the lawless domain of...