Now comes retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, who has worked recently as the State Department’s envoy to the region with a mission to encourage talks between Palestinians and Israelis. Zinni, a Purple Heart recipient who served in Vietnam and helped command forces in the Gulf War and in Somalia, spoke last Thursday in Washington at the Middle East Institute’s annual conference and laid out his own reservations about a potential war with Iraq.

In a keynote address striking for its critical assessment of the Bush administration, Zinni stressed the need to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track, build a broad coalition against Iraq, create trust among allies in the region — and put Saddam Hussein’s threat in perspective.

He also took issue with hawks in and around the administration who downplay the importance of Arab sentiment in the region. “I’m not sure which planet they live on,” Zinni said, “because it isn’t the one that I travel.” And he challenged their suggestion that installing a new Iraqi government will not be especially difficult. “God help us,” he said, “if we think this transition will occur easily.”

Following his speech, in an exchange moderated by former U.S. ambassador to Israel Edward Walker, Zinni answered questions from the audience. In that session he was even more pointed as he discussed the possible consequences of an attack on Iraq and why war should always be used only as a last resort.

What level of troops do you think that we’re going to have to invest in order to carry out an operation in Iraq?

I’m a subscriber to Colin Powell’s doctrine: Use overwhelming force. As a military man, I bristle against ideas of small forces and of surrogate forces that we trust that can draw us into things. We then become responsible for their actions and for their welfare; that can suck us into cities and places where units are still fighting that wouldn’t normally fight us if we overwhelmed the situation.

We do not want to get involved in something that is done on the cheap or that is done in a way that maximizes destruction or leaves doubt in the minds that might fight us that they have any other option and don’t have a clear way … to remain intact and have a possible role in [building] a much more viable Iraq.

Do you think the war is unavoidable? Do you think that we are rushing into the war with Iraq without studying the consequences?

I’m not convinced we need to do this now. I am convinced that we need to deal with Saddam down the road, but I think that the time is difficult because of the conditions in the region and all the other events that are going on. I believe that he can be deterred and is containable at this moment. As a matter of fact, I think the containment can be ratcheted up in a way that is acceptable to everybody.

I do think eventually Saddam has to be dealt with. That could happen in many ways. It could happen that he just withers on the vine, he passes on to the afterlife, something happens within Iraq that changes things, he becomes less powerful, or the inspectors that go in actually accomplish something and eliminate potential weapons of mass destruction — but I doubt this — that might be there.

The question becomes how to sort out your priorities and deal with them in a smart way that you get things done that need to be done first before you move on to things that are second and third. If I were to give you my priority of things that can change for the better in this region, it is first and foremost the Middle East peace process and getting it back on track. Second, it is ensuring that Iran’s reformation or moderation continues on track and trying to help and support the people who are trying to make that change in the best way we can. That’s going to take a lot of intelligence and careful work.

The third is to make sure those countries to which we have now committed ourselves to change, like Afghanistan and those in Central Asia, we invest what we need to in the way of resources there to make that change happen. Fourth is to patch up these relationships that have become strained, and fifth is to reconnect to the people. We are talking past each other. The dialogue is heated. We have based this in things that are tough to compromise on, like religion and politics, and we need to reconnect in a different way. I would take those priorities before this one.

My personal view, and this is just personal, is that I think this isn’t No. 1. It’s maybe six or seven, and the affordability line may be drawn around five.

I want your opinion of what the Iraqi people want. Are they going to greet our troops as liberators?

I think that, again depending on how this goes, if it’s short with minimal destruction, there will be the initial euphoria of change. It’s always what comes next that is tough. I went in with the first troops that went into Somalia. We were greeted as heroes on the street. People loved to see us; when the food was handed out, the water was given, the medicines were applied, we were heroes. After we had been there about a month, I had someone come see me who said there was a group of prominent Somalis that wanted to talk to me. I met with them. The first question out of their mouths was that we’d been there a month, hadn’t started a jobs program, and when were we going to fix the economy? Well, I didn’t know it was my Marine unit’s responsibility to do that.

Expectations grow rapidly. The initial euphoria can wear off. People have the idea that Jeffersonian democracy, entrepreneurial economics and all these great things are going to come. If they are not delivered immediately, do not seem to be on the rise, and worse yet, if the situation begins to deteriorate — if there is tribal revenge, factional splitting, still violent elements in the country making statements that make it more difficult, institutions that are difficult to reestablish, infrastructure damage, I think that initial euphoria could wane away. It’s not whether you’re greeted in the streets as a hero; it’s whether you’re still greeted as a hero when you come back a year from now.

Do you believe that Iraq is the endgame or is this only the precursor to engagement in Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia as some journalists have projected? If there is this widening role for the United States in the region, do we have the necessary military forces and other resources to confront this kind of mega-involvement?

I have a couple of heroes. One is George C. Marshall, a great general that led us through a great war to victory. Look what that general did after the war. He didn’t look to fight more wars; he didn’t look to leave the situation in the condition in a place where those wars would re-breed themselves.

Look at Gen. MacArthur in Japan. He was a man who suffered through Bataan and Corregidor and lost his troops to a horrific enemy. He reached out to the Japanese people and used other means to re-create stability and prosperity. Look at Gens. Grant and Lee, where Grant wanted the mildest of surrenders where dignity was maintained and where friendship and connection could happen, where Robert E. Lee did not want to go into the hills and fight guerrilla wars. He knew it was a time to heal and to do it at the best level.

Like those generals who were far greater than I am, I don’t think that violence and war is the solution. There are times when you reluctantly, as a last resort, have to go to war. I will tell you that in my time, I never saw anything come out of fighting that was worth the fight. I’m sure my brother who served in Korea, my cousins who served in the Pacific and in Europe in World War II, and my father who fought for this country in World War I with the other 12 percent of Italian immigrants who served in the infantry may all have different views of their wars.

My wars that I saw were handled poorly. I carry around with me a quote from Robert McNamara’s book “In Retrospect.” Unfortunately, this was written 30 years after a war that put 58,000 names on that wall, caused 350,000 of us to suffer wounds that crushed many lives. He said: “One reason the Kennedy and Johnson administrations failed to take an orderly, rational approach to the basic question underlying Vietnam was the staggering variety and complexity of other issues we faced. Simply put, we faced a blizzard of problems. There were only 24 hours in a day, and we often did not have time to think straight.”

Well, Mr. McNamara, my 24 hours a day and my troops’ 24 hours a day were in a sweaty hot jungle bleeding for these mistakes. When he resigned in 1968, he didn’t want to do it in a way where he objected openly to the war. There were many more years of that war left, and many more casualties occurred. I wish he had stood up for that principle.

I would just say to you that if we look at this as a beginning of a chain of events, meaning that we intend to solve this through violent action, we’re on the wrong course. First of all, I don’t see that that’s necessary. Second of all, I think that war and violence are a very last resort, and we have to be careful how we apply it, especially now in our position in the world.

Talking about last resorts is a very difficult question and not one that we can answer here; it’s up to another country really. What do you think Israel should do if it is hit with nonconventional weapons?

I think every country has the right to defend itself, and every country has that reserved right to protect its people. I don’t think we could dictate to any nation what its reaction ought to be. That’s a political decision their leadership must make. The prime minister will have to make that decision as to what he feels is in the best interest of his own people and in his own interest. There is no doubt that this will be tested.

General, how do you think the war on Iraq would affect regional allies, particularly Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia?

I think Pakistan will be extremely worried about us getting distracted from the subcontinent, Central Asia and Afghanistan. There is the possibility that it will encourage or incite extremists within that region and within their own country to react. They’re going to look, I think nervously, to see whether we stay committed, that we’re able to handle two fronts or more.

For Jordan and Egypt, if the war is drawn out, the reactions on the street are going to be extremely dangerous for both regimes and may present significant problems in their abilities to support and deal with problems that may emerge from their own street. I think Saudi Arabia will support us. I think they are going to have a lot of difficulty with the decision to go in, unless a clear case is made. It will help in all these countries that there is a clear U.N. resolution that supports this; they can do it in the name of the U.N. I think in all cases the biggest problem is going to be internal. The images that come back and burn across the region are going to decide the greatest problems that each one of those is going to have to deal with.

Could you define success in the context of a military operation and what failure might be?

Well, success in a military operation isn’t only defined in military terms. We tried to do that in Vietnam by body counts and it didn’t work. Success in a military operation has to be measured in success in the political objectives that you’re out to achieve.

I think success will not be measured by what happens in the fight. I would hope in a military context that casualties are minimal all the way around, that destruction is minimized, and that the rapid conclusion of the fighting occurs in a way that we don’t create long-standing hatreds, frictions or security problems in the region. But the military success of this is just the beginning of the beginning. What is going to end up being a deciding factor as to whether this is a success will be what happens to Iraq in the aftermath, whether it stands up as a viable democratic multirepresentational nation with its territory intact, not threatening its neighbors and disavowing weapons of mass destruction. All of those component parts are going to be difficult to pull together. That will be the measure of success.

I don’t believe that we ever lost a battle in Vietnam. I don’t believe we ever lost a battle in Somalia. I don’t believe we ever really lost a battle once we committed ourselves to Korea, but we didn’t resolve the situations politically the way we wanted to in any of those instances. So military success, in and of itself, is never the complete answer. Success will have to be measured not in military terms but in political terms in what is left behind. That will be the mark of what we are — what we leave behind in this.

The book opens with this epigraph from Dante’s “Inferno”: “Through me is the way to the sorrowful city. Through me is the way to join the lost people.” And then, following a short, elegant introduction by Luc Sante, off we go, into the Inferno, accompanying Nachtwey on his nightmare mission. It’s heartbreakingly bad stuff and grotesquely exquisite, too. It’s the worst news there is and, needless to say, continues at this moment.

Nachtwey, born in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1948 (he grew up in Massachusetts), is one of the world’s most widely published and abundantly honored photographers. He has received the Robert Capa Gold Medal an unprecedented five times, he’s a contract photographer for Time, where much of his work is first published, and he’s a member of Magnum Photos. “Inferno” is his first book since 1989′s “Deeds of War,” which is now out of print.

On a recent afternoon, we talked for nearly an hour about “Inferno” and his experiences as a documenter and archivist of human catastrophe. Reticent about discussing his own life beyond the basic facts, he’s clearly one of those rare characters who focus singularly on their work with a missionary-like sense of purpose. “I don’t want people to be concerned about me,” he told me. “I want them to be concerned about the people in the pictures.”

First, let’s talk about the book itself, as an object. In your afterword, you say that most of the pictures were originally used in mass publications — newsmagazines, such as Time. Now they’ve been packaged in this very elegant, rarefied form — a large, expensive and lavishly printed coffee-table book. Is presenting these harrowing, photojournalistic images in this way at odds with your original intent of making them as broadly available as possible?

Not at all. The primary function of my photographs is to be in mass-circulation publications — during the time that the events are happening. I want them to become part of people’s daily dialogue and create public awareness, public opinion, that can help bring pressure for change. That’s the first and most important use of my work. A secondary use is to become an archive, entered into our collective memory, so that these events are never forgotten. That’s the purpose of “Inferno.”

It’s meant to immerse the viewer in a reality that’s relentless. We wanted to make the actual dimensions of the book quite large so that it has a physical weight and physical impact. It’s awkward. You can’t really put it anywhere. And you’ve got to reckon with it.

We had quite a discussion about the physical production of the book. We didn’t want to do a small book that was produced cheaply and you could forget it and toss it off. The quality of the printing is a product of the respect we wanted people to have for the subjects in the book.

In looking through these images — they’re really pictures of hell on Earth, many of the worst human catastrophes that have occurred over the last decade or so — I also found myself thinking of the person behind the camera: you. And it occurred to me that, while the photographs are in black and white, you’ve seen these scenes in color. I know it’s odd to ask, given that the people you photograph have been so terribly damaged, but what has it taken out of you?

You’re right, whatever I’ve had to bear is nothing in relation to what the people I photographed have had to bear. What’s happened to me is not important.

Why not?

Because I’m a messenger. I don’t want people to be concerned about me. I want them to be concerned about the people in the pictures. I try to use whatever I know about photography to be of service to the people I’m photographing. I’m trying not to create photographs that viewers will look at and think: “What a good photographer he is,” or “Look what an interesting composition he can make.” I want the first impact, and by far the most powerful impact, to be about an emotional, intellectual and moral reaction to what is happening to these people. I want my presence to be transparent.

How do you manage to keep going back into these horrific situations?

You have to have a sense of purpose.

What’s given you that sense of purpose?

It was, in fact, why I became a photographer in the first place — to do this kind of work, to be a war photographer, to deal with social issues and struggles. I felt it was the most worthwhile thing I could do. For me, it has become a tool of social awareness, not something for the sake of photography itself. And doing it has reconfirmed my initial inspiration.

Have you ever had any resistance from editors who say, “This photograph is too terrible to publish”?

None of the editors I’ve worked with have ever asked me to pull my punches. They’ve never asked me to give them anything other than my own interpretation of events. But it is an issue worth considering: What can people take? How much can they bear? And I think it’s important to give people credit for being able to cope with the truth, cope with reality, deal with it and have some kind of genuine, worthwhile response to it.

I believe it’s a disservice to a readership to condescend, be patronizing and feel that the whole world can’t really take knowing what’s going on. I think people can. I think they want to know. And to go into a situation that is deeply tragic, that’s incredibly painful, and publish an image that is generic and easy to look at sends the wrong signal. It becomes a mere illustration.

If there is something occurring that is so bad that it could be considered a crime against humanity, it has to be transmitted with anguish, with pain, and create an impact in people — upset them, shake them up, wake them out of their everyday routine. People should be aware that something highly unacceptable is taking place, and think about it and talk about it with each other.

You see yourself primarily as a photojournalist, rather than as an artist. You don’t necessarily want people to think, Oh that’s a beautiful composition, when they see your work.

That’s right.

Yet in going through the book, every now and then I’d be startled to find an image beautiful. And then I’d quickly realize I was looking at a nightmare. For example, there’s a photo you took in Rwanda. The first thing I noticed were the big heart-shaped, veined leaves. It’s a nature photo; it could be by Wynn Bullock or Edward Weston or Eliot Porter — that was my first impression. But then I saw a corpse lying face down in the grass under those beautiful big leaves.

I don’t think tragic situations are necessarily devoid of beauty. That’s one of the paradoxes of life, and one of the themes of art and literature. And it’s perhaps a way in which images become accessible to people. I try to record moments of beauty between people. I think that you’ll see, running throughout this book, images where people are reaching out to each other, where they’re caressing each other, or making contact in a tender way — expressing human beauty in the midst of suffering. This is what I think gives “Inferno” its underlying hope. I find it uplifting to see people transcending their own agony to reach out to others, and I see it continuously in these situations.

That reminds me of one picture, which I believe you took in Romania at an orphanage, of a young boy feeding a slightly older boy from a bowl.

Yes, I was in an orphanage in Romania in which the children were being kept in inhuman conditions. Many of them didn’t have clothes; many were confined to the same bed and surrounded by their own filth. There were very few of what I would call “keepers” — I wouldn’t even call them attendants, they were just keepers. Anyway, there were very, very few of them. So the children had to take care of each other. And this particular boy, the younger one, had a terrible physical handicap: His knees locked the reverse way and he had to move with just his arms; he couldn’t use his legs. But he had tremendous energy and charisma, and actually took care of a lot of the children who were in worse condition than he was. He’d feed them and look after them.

I understand you paid your own way to go and do the Romanian project.

That’s right.

How did you hear about it?

There were early press reports after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Some journalists had gotten in there and begun to report on an AIDS epidemic in orphanages in Romania, caused by injecting children with adult blood. It sounded horrific. And there was an opportunity, shortly after Ceausescu’s fall, to actually go into Romania. There was no government anymore, so therefore there was no accountability for the authorities; the secret police were in hiding. And there was what you might call a moment of openness when, as a journalist, you could go in and explore the legacy of this dictatorship. I was very curious about it — and especially curious about the AIDS epidemic.

I went there, began to travel around and found a kind of gulag of these horrible orphanages throughout the country. These weren’t orphanages for normal children, but for children who had some kind of perceived mental or physical handicap and who were kept in ghastly conditions. I was able to find these places and gain access to them quite easily — much more easily than I would have thought. I think I was discovering something that even most Romanians didn’t know existed.

Later in the book, there’s a picture taken in Somalia of one person using a pot of water to clean another very emaciated individual who’s lying on a tile floor. Tell me about that photograph.

That’s an image of washing the dead. Somalia is an Islamic country. And even in the face of the worst chaos, the total breakdown of society and tremendous hardship and suffering, the ritual of respect for the dead continued to be carried out. The famine victims would be brought to a collection point where a group of volunteers, local people, would wash the dead and then sew them into shrouds and take them to a mass grave.

Was there any resistance or reaction to your photographing this activity?

No. Virtually every picture in “Inferno” was made at close range. I like to work in the same intimate space that the subjects inhabit. I want to give viewers the sense that they’re sharing the same space with a photo’s subject. These pictures would have been impossible to make unless I was accepted by the people I was photographing.

How do you achieve that acceptance?

When I approach people, I do it with respect, with deference; I do it slowly and gently and I think about the way I move, the way I speak and the way I use the camera. I let them know that I respect them and what they’re going through. Also, almost everywhere I go, people understand that I’m going to show the outside world what’s happening to them and give them a voice that they wouldn’t otherwise have. They become a participant in the picture. I could not make these pictures without their acceptance and participation.

There’s a very striking picture you took in Bosnia of a massive column that has toppled, and in the foreground are two men in white working on a man whom I presume is dead. What was happening when you took that photograph?

The toppled column is actually a minaret of a mosque that had been broken by Serbian shelling; it was in a small village outside the town of Breko, which was one of the major points of conflict during the Bosnian war. The dead man is a young soldier from that village, who was brought to a makeshift morgue set up in front of the mosque where, again, because it is an Islamic society, the bodies of the dead are washed before burial.

I stayed in the village for a couple of weeks; I became part of the community to record what was happening to the people. And almost every day the dead would be brought to the mosque, and the townspeople would assemble there and try to identify them and discover their own sons and family members who had been killed in battle. Slowly the population of young men of the town was being wiped out.

Have you ever been injured in the course of your work?

I’ve been injured very slightly a few times. I was extremely lucky in every case. The injury itself could have been much more grave. A couple of times I could actually have been killed. I’ve been very lucky so far.

Have you ever been in a situation where you put down your camera and interceded in what was taking place in front of the lens?

That’s happened several times. But most often, when there’s a soldier wounded, they’re tended to by their own comrades or a combat medic, in which case my getting into it would be superfluous. My job is to record it and communicate it. And I stick to that except in those cases where I’m the only one who can make a difference — if there isn’t someone there to help or there aren’t enough people to carry the wounded to a safe place. Once in Haiti and once in South Africa, I rescued people from lynch mobs, from being beaten to death. I tried to do the same thing in Indonesia but wasn’t able to save him. When it’s clear to me that I’m the one person who can make a difference, I put down my camera.

Some of the most disturbing pictures in the book were taken in Rwanda, during the massacres in 1994. One image looks like it was taken at the church where villagers decided to leave the remains of the massacre victims where they fell, as a memorial. This particular photograph is of a skeleton — or a near skeleton — lying on the ground outside the church, and the white statue of Christ is above the door.

Yes, that’s the church at Nyarabuye near the Tanzania border. At that time it wasn’t yet decided that it would become a monument. The war, in fact, wasn’t over yet. So things like monuments hadn’t been decided upon yet. Since then, I believe, it has become a monument.

What goes on inside of you when you’re dropped off somewhere like that Rwandan church, filled with corpses. You arrive at this place, this hellish scene, and you pull your camera out of your bag and you start photographing. How are you able to function in such circumstances? Most of us would just freeze up in shock or go to pieces.

My job is not to go someplace and fall apart. I would fall to pieces if I was an emergency room doctor, but thankfully there are people who are trained to handle that kind of trauma and handle it well. My training is to channel emotions — my feelings of anger, of anguish, of disbelief, grief and frustration — to overcome them and channel them into my work. If I let those emotions paralyze me, then I shouldn’t go there in the first place because I’d be useless. I go there with a purpose and I have to take those emotions and, with a sense of purpose and discipline, use that emotional content and put it into the pictures.

Some of the pictures look almost biblical, like classical religious art. For instance, there’s one taken in Zaire of what appears to be a mass burial. It’s a mound of bodies, partially covered in dirt, and it looks like Auguste Rodin’s “Gates of Hell” or part of the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

It was indeed a mass grave, in Zaire, where people were dying of cholera so fast they had to be bulldozed into the earth. To me it was the gates of hell. Only hell was where those people had just come from.

These were the gates out of hell, rather than into it?

Yes. It’s interesting to me that so many photographs, not only my own but also those of my colleagues, resemble classical or biblical motifs — a mother grieving for a dead child resembles a Piet`; a mass grave resembles Rodin’s “Gates of Hell”; carrying a wounded man resembles the Deposition from the Cross. It’s absurd to think that we go around trying to imitate paintings of the past — that’s preposterous. What’s closer to the truth is that those painters and sculptors from the Renaissance and classical periods were creating their art from life itself. The way a mother grieves for her child is universal. Those studies from life were then put into a biblical or classical context. I believe that we are now witnessing the same thing that the artists of the past witnessed. These are universal symbols of life itself. And I think that by painting them as classical or biblical scenes, they sanctified life itself and what happens to ordinary people on this Earth.

I want to go back to what we were discussing earlier, the idea that things can be both horrible and beautiful, and that beauty is often found in these horrible situations. Given that, what is your take on artists who work that area of intersection but not in a journalistic way. I’m thinking of people, for example, like photographer Joel-Peter Witkin and late British painter Francis Bacon. What is your impression of their work?

I find Joel-Peter Witkin extremely disturbing. But he is not going to those places; he is creating situations in a studio. So it’s different. I had a very hard time accepting his work for quite a while. I don’t think I really understood what he was doing; I was so horrified by the fact that he was actually manipulating cadavers and body parts. I couldn’t quite get over that.

But I now understand that in a way he’s trying to tell us that the gods who we want to believe are so benign might not be. Maybe the gods themselves are depraved; the forces that rule the universe are not benign in the way we like to comfort ourselves by thinking that they are. Perhaps, in fact, they’re depraved and cruel and twisted and tortured themselves. It’s not necessarily my belief, but I think it’s a valid subject for an artist to explore. Given the results of some of the scenes I’ve witnessed, it certainly leaves it open to debate. But Witkin’s not really dealing in other people’s tragedies.

In “Inferno,” there’s a sequence of four photos taken in Chechnya, the first of which is a man’s bloody hand on a plastic shopping bag. Then below it is a picture of two men in fur hats. One is slipping a carton of L&M cigarettes into his coat.

There are several spreads throughout “Inferno” where I tell a story within a story.

Some of them are almost cinematic, like stills from a movie.

Yes, within the larger framework of a situation, I’ll focus on what’s happening to one individual and follow it for several frames. It is a kind of cinematic experience, where you’re seeing this story unfold in a few frames. In that particular sequence, the dead man was returning from some kind of expedition to acquire supplies, and while he was out in the open he was blown away by a Russian mortar shell. He was discovered by a woman who had been his neighbor. As you can see in the second frame, she is upset and being consoled by a group of men who had come along. And then one of the men scavenges the dead man’s carton of cigarettes. And in the final frame, the dead man’s left in the middle of the pathway; his hat’s gone, his bag is gone and he’s been left and forgotten.

And you just happened to be there?

Yes. It was as if they didn’t even see me. Although I was standing right next to them, they just ignored me.

In the Zaire pictures taken during the cholera epidemic, there are several images of big tractors scooping up bodies for mass burial, with masked relief workers standing nearby. You’ve now seen so many of these situations with the United Nations or Red Cross, or whoever it is, coming in and trying to manage or clean up after these catastrophes. What is the mental and emotional condition of these people, the relief workers?

The mass burials in Goma, Zaire, were being carried out by the French military. I suppose they were under orders and did what they were told to do by their commanders. Those images underline the biblical scale on which the deaths were taking place. As for the relief workers, I believe they are motivated by a sense of purpose. They understand they’ve got a job to do. They understand the value of that job. And they’re very focused on doing it.

One of the most surprisingly powerful pictures in the book — because it’s so apparently benign and banal — is of a man’s loafer, a shoe, sitting in weeds, filled with water.

That was in Kosovo. It is a very personal image, very instinctual and intuitive. It’s a relationship between myself and what I was experiencing. Somehow that man’s shoe, full of water — and you can see leaves reflected in the water — spoke to me as an emblem of the destruction of everyday life as we know it. It’s a perfectly good loafer. And it was once worn by a living man, and now there’s just a pool of water because the man’s been blown away. I thought it to be eerie and emblematic.

Then there’s a double-page spread in the section on Rwanda. It’s just a vast pile of machetes. Especially given what we know now, it’s a very chilling photograph.

The pile of machetes was such a spectacular thing to see — thousands of them. And they were the weapons with which the genocide in Rwanda was carried out. Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered at close range with these primitive weapons, by hand. It was a lot of work and it required a great deal of determination and organization. It is something beyond my understanding. I saw the evidence of it, I know it happened and yet, to this day, I don’t understand how it could have been done. And that picture of the machetes, I think, sends a chill through you because it does indicate how massive was the genocide and with what instruments it was performed.

Is there anything further you want to say about your work?

Yes, there is one thing that is important for people to understand — that’s perhaps a misconception about how the press works in these situations — and that is, especially in the case of famines, when we’re photographing victims of starvation, we’re not just walking away from them and leaving them there without food or help. We’re photographing the famine victims in feeding camps and feeding centers that have already been established by humanitarian organizations. They are already being helped as much as they can be helped at that time.

If there has ever been a time when I’ve discovered someone during a famine who was not at a feeding center, who couldn’t reach it or couldn’t find it, I would take them myself. And I think any journalist would.

This is a singular place where Kierkegaard collides with spirit-world djinns, where Jungian dreams and local folklore converge with the rattle of modern fax machines and the gunfire of clan violence. You will find here the shifting realities of the Horn of Africa, but not brought to you by National Geographic or CNN: Farah sets off on a warping exploration of Somalian life and consciousness that, as one critic has put it, “manages to be both pre-Islamic and post-modern.”

In his bold approach to questions of modern African identity and sexuality, Farah — who was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, which ranks just below the Nobel in literary prestige — is arguably the most important African novelist of the late 20th century. As Arcade reissues the first two volumes of his “Blood in Sun” trilogy this month (“Secrets,” the final volume, came out last year), it is worth adding that with the feverish and bodacious language of which he is a master, he is also the most astonishing, inventive, exuberant and mind-blowing.

After being exiled as a result of his first trilogy (aggressively titled “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship,” it was reissued by Graywolf Press in 1992), Farah said that his goal was “to keep my country alive by writing about it.” And though recent Somalian history is indeed etched into this second trilogy — “Maps” takes place during the 1977 Ogadan border war with Ethiopia, and “Secrets” unwinds on the eve of civil war in the early ’90s — it’s the personal crises of his characters that engulf the reader. A good deal of social and political baggage travels along with the personal dramas, of course. “Maps” dwells on the effects of Somalia’s historically carved-up borders; “Gifts” cleverly exposes the motives behind the “gift” of aid to the Third World.

But Farah’s obsessive search for identity — personal, familial, social, national — echoes through the series. “Maps,” the most innovative and challenging of the three books, follows Askar, an orphaned wonder-child who has visions of his own birth (and his mother’s death) and whose mouth bleeds as if menstruating. Askar grows up in the nurturing — and titillating — embrace of his Ethiopian guardian, Misra, until he sets off to study in Mogadishu, the capital, and is shaken by the war that took his father’s life. The boy’s growing self-awareness is informed in part by the maps he uses to trace the shape of his people’s land and his own allegiances.

“Gifts,” the most linear of the books, concerns a single mother’s battle for independence and self-fulfillment. The story revolves around the discovery of an abandoned baby and the riddle of its parents. “Secrets,” the trilogy’s final volume, extends the themes of mysterious paternity and consuming social ties. In this novel, Kalaman, a 33-year-old Mogadishu computer programmer, struggles against the pull of ethnic loyalty. (“I was no member of a clan, I was a professional,” he insists.) Kalaman’s search into his family’s hidden history is complicated by the return of his childhood playmate, Sholoongo, who long ago cast a spell on him by serving him her menstrual blood in a thimble. (As I said, it gets weird.) Yet the more Kalaman digs into the secrets of his origins, the more the looming national crisis consumes his own: “I saw death being forecast, death being anticipated, I saw death stalking the entire country, pursuing it with the determination of an elephant gone amok.”

As a rule, the most fascinating and complex of Farah’s characters are women. There is Misra in “Maps,” the Ethiopian outsider (and possible betrayer of the Somalian cause) who raises Askar. There is Duniya in “Gifts,” the single working mother, widowed and divorced, experiencing love for the first time. And of course there is Sholoongo in “Secrets,” the sexual sorceress just returned from America (where she presided over the All-America Shape-shifters’ Union).

While subverting traditional gender roles, Farah also exposes the strong undercurrents of sexuality in Islamic society. Askar’s cosmopolitan Mogadishu uncle, Hilaal, ends a soaring riff on life, the cosmos, and Freud with the blunt nugget of insight “Truth is body”; more to the point, he adds, “Sooner or later, sex.” And the sex Farah reveals is unashamedly polymorphic. In the closing scene of “Secrets,” Sholoongo “takes” — in multiple creative ways — Kalaman’s grandfather, Nonno, and quite literally screws him to death. The scene is disorienting, tragic, maddening: vintage Farah.

While African writing as a whole has been suffering an extended drought (with the exception of Nigeria’s Ben Okri and a fistful of South African authors), Farah has been breaking remarkable new ground. What he calls the “pastures of the imagination” comprise, for him, a redrawn map of Africa, of the Somalian psyche, of individual abandonment and belonging. And yet they also include modern Somalia, “a nation with a split personality,” at war with itself, exploding with ancient hatreds and modern feuds. Nuruddin Farah is something of a literary shape shifter himself. Following the trail of these three books into the pastures and the forests of his strange imagination will surely put you under his spell.

But the blood in these filmed battles is spilled for a larger cause, by men
of every station. In real time, long after the last Good War, the dying
hasn’t stopped; now, though, it’s done by blue-collar volunteers in morally
muddy police actions. Never has the murk been more obscure than it was in
Somalia on Oct. 3, 1993, when, in the American military’s nastiest
firefight since Vietnam, 19 soldiers died in the name of little more than
one another. An incident that began with two downed helicopters ended with
American casualties being dragged through the streets and American policymakers scrambling for the exit.

“Black Hawk Down” re-creates, with exacting detail, the gory confusion of
that day, when questions of heroism were far from cinematic. Mark
Bowden’s work ethic inspired him to track down 50 veterans of the conflict
and bring back Mogadishu whole. He conveys the sound and the feel of
killing — of what it’s like to watch your bullets splash through a
stranger and of the claustrophobic panic you feel when the strangers you
are shooting at begin to close in. He established such trust with his
subjects that they told him about everything from the banal (“It felt like
a movie”) to the brutal (trying to plug a spurting artery with an index
finger) to the embarrassing (masturbation in combat). We’re reminded that
these are young men with excess animal energy that surfaces in both
violence and sex, that the flip side of valor is an evil carnal thrill.
“That was the secret core of all the hoo-ah … esprit,” Bowden writes.
“Permission … to break the biggest social taboo of all. You killed
people.”

Mogadishu has already inspired several books and documentaries, with
another set for CNN in April. Spy planes and surveillance cameras made it
one of history’s best-documented battles. Bowden’s rendering, however, is
the most accurate and extensive, because in addition to first-person
accounts he wrangled access to confidential Army action logs. He also moves
beyond Soldier of Fortune-style bravado, interviewing dozens of enemy
combatants so that we can learn why a thousand angry Somalis threw
themselves into the high-tech maw of the Army Rangers, sacrificing their
lives just to teach the U.S. government a lesson. Sometimes the book bogs
down in this conscientious detail — Bowden wants us to know where every
man was at every minute. So much data and so many different dramas and
casts are braided into this one engagement that the account becomes
confusing; more maps and recaps might’ve helped keep it straight.

This is the sort of crowded time line that Web sites were invented for. In
fact, the Rangers have used Bowden’s original Philadelphia Inquirer
articles as the core of their own Mogadishu cyber-memorial, linking the
text to maps and bios in a shorter, tighter version of events. But if
Bowden had also opted for simplicity, imposing a dramatic arc on confusion
and paring away supporting characters, he’d have left some men’s last hours
unremembered. In other words, if he’d made his peerless record of this
forgotten war more like a Web site, he’d have been making it more like a
war movie. And that will happen soon enough anyway, because Jerry
Bruckheimer has already bought the rights to the book.

The organizers of Africa Fete hope the tour is a breakthrough for Mursal
and its other headliners (Wemba, Salif Keita and Cheikh Lt), all of whom are
stars in world-music circles yet still lack the crossover cachet in the United
States. To expand the audience for African pop music, Island Records is willing to lose money sponsoring Africa Fete ’98, just as it did from 1993 to 1995, when it lost more than $1 million
staging the tour in the United States. This time, though, the John F. Kennedy Center is
involved, as is American Express, which has chipped in $2 million to help the Kennedy Center fund Africa Fete for the next four years. The money has produced the biggest musical bargain in America: At half the stops on Africa Fete ’98, the concert is free, just as it was on opening
night in Los Angeles, when 7,000 people crowded into California Plaza. Three
days later, on June 21 in Saratoga, the audience numbered only 1,000, but
tickets for that stop were as high as $30, and there was little publicity for
it — an oddity of this year’s tour, which is relying on word of mouth and
media exposure to draw in fans. College and public radio stations have
embraced Africa Fete; commercial radio and television have virtually ignored
the tour.

“[Commercial] radio and television are not receptive to it because they
[the Africa Fete artists] don’t sing in English,” says Karen Yee, vice
president of artist development at Island Records.

There is also little commercial incentive. Despite their fame and
success in Africa and Europe, none of this year’s Africa Fete artists has
had a bestselling album in the United States. Keita doesn’t even have a
recording contract anymore. (Island Records didn’t renew his contract after it
ran out recently.) “None of the artists on this tour have sold more than 35,000
copies [of an individual album] in the United States,” says Yee. “With
this tour, we want to prove we can bring in an audience.”

One way to attract more people in the United States is for the artists to
incorporate more English in their songs (as Wemba did on “Emotion,” his 1995
Real World album) — or to incorporate a more American sound. Whether he’s
conscious of this or not, Keita is performing with a new band that features
American guitarists — guitarists who give his music a heavy, rock-oriented
feel.

Fortunately for Keita, the combination works. On his new song “Abede,”
Keita’s soaring voice carries an emotional weight that — enlivened by guitar
and the kora of Toumani Diabete — comes through even if the audience can’t
understand French or Bamana. At the end of the concert in Saratoga, Keita had
many in the crowd dancing onstage with him. So many people hopped onstage to dance that Keita, Diabete and other members of the Wanda Band were completely obscured by the flailing arms and legs. Somewhere in there was Keita, singing without
interruption, even when his fans tried to take his hand and dance with him.
He closed the concert with a two-song encore, four hours after Mursal
opened it with songs from her new solo album, “The Journey.”

Mursal is the most intriguing artist of Africa Fete ’98, because her
story and her voice are so compelling, and because she is new to international
touring. In 1991, she fled the war in Somalia, leaving Mogadishu on foot with
her five children and crisscrossing the horn of Africa for seven months. Eventually, Mursal and her family received asylum from the Danish embassy in Djibouti. In Denmark, Mursal
was “discovered” in a camp for Somali refugees when Danish musician-producer
Soren Jensen happened to be there and heard her sing. Jensen recognized
Mursal’s music from a visit he took to Somalia in 1986. “The Journey,” which
Jensen produced for Real World, is a studio mix of songs that are deeply
personal for Mursal. On “Somalia Udida Ceb,” Mursal laments the state of her
homeland.

“The first good thing I hear about my country, the first suggestion that
it is changing, and I will go back — and quickly,” Mursal says. “It might
take five years or even 10 years, but one day things will change.”

Mursal’s enthusiasm is infectious. Her voice is stunning. The influence
of Arabic and her Muslim faith are clearly audible in her music. Mursal gives
Africa Fete ’98 a nice balance and is a visible reminder that African pop
music is not limited to West Africa — the long-standing source of most of the
continent’s pop music that is played on U.S. radio stations.

“One of the things I suggested to Karen Yee was that, for our purposes,
it was really important that all the performers don’t come out of West
Africa,” says Alicia Adams, director of special programming for the Kennedy
Center. “We wanted to focus on Africa on a continentwide basis.”

Africa Fete was started in 1978 by Mamadou Konte, an expatriate
Senegalese worker living in Paris who wanted to create more awareness of
African music and culture and, at the same time, raise money for
charitable causes. The event has taken place every year in Paris since then.
Five years ago in the United States, Island Records picked up Africa Fete, then dropped it when the financial losses were too great.

Seeing Mursal, Keita, Lt and Wemba on the same bill is an unforgettable
experience. The only disappointment is the synthesized music that Mursal
incorporates into her songs. She performs with a Danish group of four that
uses prerecorded tracks from “The Journey.” Listening to prerecorded music
while Mursal sings so intensely is off-putting. But Mursal was still impressive, and the
performances by Wemba, Lt and Keita were riveting. Each of these artists is a headliner; together, they form an African Dream Team, reminding American audiences of the tremendous potential for African pop music. The day may come when these musicians are afforded the same respect in the marketplace that they demand onstage.