Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times

Citation
As the East Africa correspondent for The New York Times, Jeffrey Gettleman has tracked the spread of Islamic radicalism, interviewed pirate bosses in Somalia (one of whom laughed that their lunch together was like "the cat eating with the mice") and described how mass rape of women and men has become a weapon of war in eastern Congo. He's been shot at by insurgents and dealt with the constant risk that his reporting will put him in harm's way. "The Gettleman method," Jack Shafer wrote in Slate, "is to play it straight and direct, easy on the cynicism, and without a hint of any world weariness."

Excerpt
GOMA, Congo - It was around 11 p.m. when armed men burst into Kazungu Ziwa's hut, put a machete to his throat and yanked down his pants. Mr. Ziwa is a tiny man, about four feet, six inches tall. He tried to fight back, but said he was quickly beaten down.

"Then they raped me," he said. "It was horrible, physically. I was dizzy. My thoughts just left me."

For years, the thickly forested hills and clear, deep lakes of eastern Congo have been a reservoir of atrocities. Now, it seems, there is another growing problem: men raping men.

According to Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, United Nations officials and several Congolese aid organizations, the number of men who have been raped has risen sharply in recent months, a consequence of joint Congo-Rwanda military operations against rebels that have uncapped an appalling level of violence against civilians.

Aid workers struggle to explain the sudden spike in male rape cases. The best answer, they say, is that the sexual violence against men is yet another way for armed groups to humiliate and demoralize Congolese communities into submission.

The United Nations already considers eastern Congo the rape capital of the world, and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is expected to hear from survivors on her visit to the country next week. Hundreds of thousands of women have been sexually assaulted by the various warring militias haunting these hills, and right now this area is going through one of its bloodiest periods in years.

The joint military operations that began in January between Rwanda and Congo, David and Goliath neighbors who were recently bitter enemies, were supposed to end the murderous rebel problem along the border and usher in a new epoch of cooperation and peace. Hopes soared after the quick capture of a renegade general who had routed government troops and threatened to march across the country.

But aid organizations say that the military maneuvers have provoked horrific revenge attacks, with more than 500,000 people driven from their homes, dozens of villages burned and hundreds of villagers massacred, including toddlers thrown into open fires.

And it is not just the rebels being blamed. According to human rights groups, soldiers from the Congolese Army are executing civilians, raping women and conscripting villagers to lug their food, ammunition and gear into the jungle. It is often a death march through one of Africa's lushest, most stunning tropical landscapes, which has also been the scene of a devastatingly complicated war for more than a decade.

"From a humanitarian and human rights perspective, the joint operations are disastrous," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.


Biography
Jeffrey Gettleman was named chief of the Nairobi bureau of The New York Times in August 2006 after serving as a foreign correspondent there since July of the same year. Previously Mr. Gettleman was a reporter for the paper's metro desk since 2004. He joined The New York Times as a domestic correspondent in the Atlanta bureau in August 2002. He was part of the paper's Iraq team, covering the war from the invasion in 2003 and returning to Iraq for a total of five tours.

Before joining the Times, Mr. Gettleman was Atlanta bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times since 2000, where he was also a war correspondent in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Before that he had been a general assignment reporter for that paper since 1999. From 1997 until 1998 he was a city hall and police reporter for the St. Petersburg Times. In 1994 Mr. Gettleman was a communications officer for Save the Children organization in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Mr. Gettleman has been the recipient of numerous awards, including an Overseas Press Club award in 2002 for reporting from Afghanistan. In 2001 he received the Los Angeles Times Editorial Award for Breaking News. He received first place for spot news from the Tampa Bay Society of Professional Journalists in 1997 and 1998. In 1997 the Florida Press Club awarded him first place for general reporting, and he was named Photographer of the Year (1994) by the Cornell Daily Sun.

Mr. Gettleman received a B.A. in philosophy from Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.) in May 1994. He was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University, where he received a Master of Philosophy in June 1996. While at Oxford he was the first American editor of Cherwell, the university's student newspaper.

Mr. Gettleman was born on July 22, 1971. He is fluent in Swahili and conversant in Indonesian.