"Emma's War" by Deborah Scroggins

When a beautiful, idealistic Western aid worker fell in love with a Sudanese warlord, a terrible tragedy of hunger and violence was set in motion.

By Michelle Goldberg

Dec 11, 2002 | "Emma's War" is a tale of high romance and tragedy that offers an epic view of the kind of international issues currently crowding the newspapers. There may be more encyclopedic books on the ugly machinations of oil politics, the destruction well-meaning Westerners can wreak when they interfere in conflicts they cannot grasp, the way failing states incubate terrorism, and the clash between atavistic tribal politics and democratic ideals. But none can match the page-turning melodrama of Deborah Scroggins' dazzling biography of Emma McCune, a gorgeous English aid worker who became the second wife of a Sudanese warlord and helped tear southern Sudan apart even as she risked her life to save it.

Though her story is a kind of modern "Heart of Darkness," Emma, who died at 29 in a car accident, is a character too grandiose for most novelists to pull off -- a beautiful, brave, foolish woman who throws herself into a vicious war, crossing the line separating charitable Westerners from the objects of their charity. She's a person at once boundlessly generous and dangerously self-absorbed.

Scroggins describes Emma in London after her marriage: "She made a dramatic entrance at one party wearing a dress by the designer Ghost that must have cost several hundred pounds. 'Who is that stunning woman in black?' the guests were asking. She relished answering that she was the wife of an African guerrilla chief." Emma was entrenched in the agony of Sudan as no other Westerner was, but almost until the end of her life, one senses it remained a romantic adventure to her. She shows both intense caring and adrenaline-junkie callousness, a duality that seems to affect many Western forays into war zones.

The book comes at a time when many of the issues it raises are being fiercely debated. Our administration seems full of sunny certainty that it will bring democracy to Iraq, a country riven by sectarian hatreds. That view is abetted by exiles who tell our leaders precisely what they want to hear. Thus, Emma's husband, Riek Machar, serves as a cautionary example.

As Scroggins writes, local people called Riek "the Bill Clinton of Sudan." He's charismatic, Western-educated and conversant in the rhetoric of human rights and democracy. Initially, he fights the Muslim fundamentalist government in the North, which is supported by Osama bin Laden and his ilk, and which is determined -- with the help of foreign energy companies -- to exploit the oil reserves in the South. Yet, while Emma is determined to see Riek as a Western-style hero, he eventually starts a vicious tribal war within the South, manipulating starving refugees to garner international aid that benefits his struggle.

Meanwhile, the moral complexities of the aid industry itself have been thrown into high relief by David Rieff's recent "A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis." In that book, Rieff shows how relief workers can augment crises -- for example, by working in refugee camps that double as sanctuaries for militias. Writing about aid workers, Rieff asked, "Are they serving as logicians or medics for some warlord's war effort (as they probably are in the Sudan)? Are they creating a culture of dependency among their beneficiaries? And are they being used politically by virtue of the way government donors and U.N. agencies give them funds and direct them toward certain places while making it difficult for them to go to others?"

"Emma's War" doesn't offer a single answer to such questions, but it illuminates them and renders them immediate, showing the way war can twist an outsider's blazing idealism into something sinister.

Emma begins as an intrepid, passionate girl in love with Africa. She moves there in 1989, when she's 25. The most daring in a circle of young expats who pride themselves on their fearlessness, she lands a job with Street Kids International, a charity devoted to starting schools in war- and famine-ravaged Southern Sudan. It's important work. The Christian and pagan Sudanese are desperate for education, realizing it's one of the main advantages the Arabized North has over them. Thus, many parents were sending their children to Ethiopian refugee camps, hoping they'd go to school while being trained as rebel soldiers. For Emma, local schools were a way to keep children out of war.

When she realizes that her Land Cruiser can't reach many of the villages she wants to help, she sets off through the bush on foot. "Emma's willingness to get out and walk from village to village won her respect from the southern Sudanese," Scroggins writes. "They called Emma 'the Tall Woman from Small Britain.' She was such a novelty that they drew pictures of her in her miniskirt on the walls of their wattle-and-daub tukuls."

It's through her work with Street Kids International that Emma meets rebel commander Riek Machar. The southern rebel army SPLA had blocked her efforts to expand her schools into Riek's district because, she believed, they'd interfere with the rebels' campaign to recruit child soldiers. With characteristic audacity, she decides to confront Riek herself, traveling to a relief conference he was attending in Nairobi, Kenya.

Next Page: "Then the killing really started"

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