A Complicated, Low-Priority Nuisance

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Title: [SW Column] (Africa News/Visafric) A Complicated, Low-Priority Nuisance - Eritrea-Ethiopia war.
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Date :[Thursday, April 27, 2000 8:48 PM EST ]

A Complicated, Low-Priority Nuisance

Story Filed: Thursday, April 27, 2000 8:48 PM EST

Asmara (Visafric, April 27, 2000) - At the conclusion of an April 23, 2000 New York Times article about hunger in the Horn of Africa, we hear a "Western researcher" say: "There is no pretense [among donor nations] of, 'We're negotiating over your peace and we're going to call in these debts ' Part of it is, that is too complicated. Part of it is that it isn't a priority. It's kind of a nuisance conflict."

Repugnant as these remarks may seem, let's take them at face value. A friend of mine, a film maker, suggests we look at both the text and the sub-text. He writes: "The Eritrean perspective is neither acknowledged nor dismissed. The sub-text is that Ethiopia is "America's friend" whom we "understand" (i.e. accept), while Eritrea is "non-existent" (not an enemy, but a neutered mute factor)."

While thousands of tons of wheat and tanks flow into Ethiopia, with the blessings of the United States (if not Britain and Germany) we are forced to ask -- who benefits from this moral travesty? How, in a supposedly sane world, is this insanity dignified as a "humane" policy by the most powerful nation in the world?

The answer to this dilemma may not be clear to "Western researchers", but it is self-evident to anyone who has paid attention to the conflict for the past 24 months. The answers are embedded in the complaints themselves:

"That [exchange of peace for food aid] is too complicated .."

If ever there was a simple and historically-valid formula it is this one -- wars are a major cause of hunger. In this conflict, we clearly see the mechanism at work in several ways: (a) people are displaced from their subsistence farms, becoming instantly dependent on their cash-strapped governments; (b) ruling elites are distracted from the task of building infrastructure and food-growing capacity, by the "urgent" needs of defense; and (c) maintenance of huge standing armies requires diversion of food resources, as well as spending of scarce foreign currency on the purchase of weapons.

To say that the equation is "too complicated" is an explicit and wholesale acceptance of the Ethiopian government's contention that assistance and peace cannot be linked. It is a hearty pat on the back for the extortionist policies of a "friendly" government. There is no mystery or complication here at all. This is the continuation of U.S. policy that stretches back toward Ethiopia, Guatemala and Iran of the 1950s, toward Chile, Panama, Argentina, Nicaragua, Congo, and a dozen other CIA "client-states" (including Siad Barre's Somalia) in more recent decades. U.S. policy-makers are accustomed to turning a blind eye to the excesses of their allies. In order to justify such blindness, they work hard at reversing public perceptions of common-sense reality. Thus, Ethiopian perversions that are simple and obvious to people on the ground in Addis Ababa can be dismissed as "too complicated" for the uninformed electorate back home, who can scarcely find Ethiopia (let alone Eritrea) on a map.

"Part of it is that it isn't a priority ."

Again, this is a cynic's view of "real-politik" which typically produces a knowing shrug, in place of moral outrage. We are left to guess which priority the researcher has minimized (a) the negotiation of a peace settlement (preventing loss of tens of thousands more lives) or (b) the shipment of substantially more food aid to Ethiopia (preventing the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives). In either case, we are expected to believe that Western governments (really, only North America, since Europe and Australia object to Ethiopia's policy) can easily tolerate genocide on the African continent. Why is genocide (by neglect or by aggression) unacceptable in the Balkans, but a "low priority" in Africa? Could it be for the same reason that genocide is never mentioned, until very recently, in connection with Canadian and American policies toward this continent's indigenous natives? Some truths are too painful to stare in the face. Our Disney-scripted concept of ourselves as generous, kind-hearted people is totally at odds with our actual behavior but it's OK, because it "isn't a priority".

The painful truth is that by every measure, the United States is the world's stingiest nation in addressing the needs of poor countries. A new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the Clinton administration's request for development aid is at its lowest level since World War II and the U.S. commitment is expected to shrink further in coming years. While 1.2 billion of the world's people live on less than $1 per day, 5% of the global population who call themselves Americans enjoy 27% of the world's economic output. Public concern about the World Trade Organization (WTO) and World Bank targets the wrong culprit -- it is the U.S. government, with its paltry contribution of 0.11% of its economic output to overseas development, which literally forces poor countries to the brink of starvation. Out of 20 donor nations who support overseas development, the U.S. ranks dead last, averaging $29 per capita, versus $70 average for the group of donors as a whole. Japan, with an economy half the size of the U.S., contributes more absolute dollars. Four European nations contribute seven times as much as the U.S. on a per-capita basis.

"It's kind of a nuisance conflict .."

The infuriating illogic of blaming the conflict on both Ethiopia and Eritrea has haunted this conflict from the very beginning. Why do Americans find it so difficult to believe that someone started this war, and someone (let's not be coy everyone knows Ethiopia is the culprit) has frustrated every attempt to end the war. When both sides are culpable, then "no one" is to blame, and it's only a nuisance. Except for the fact that 70,000 soldiers have died, it's hardly a war at all.

As the May, 2000 issue of Harper's Magazine points out (see "Licensed to Kill", by Ken Silverstein) this war is a textbook example of demand rising to meet a predicament of over-supply. The commodity in question, of course, is weapons, which have been "liberated" by the end of Cold War tensions, and whose sales now constitute the major methodology for leveraging geopolitical muscle. Intelligence agents in every country are funneling arms into Africa, not so much to de-stabilize weak nations (who "nobody gives a shit about anymore", according to a CIA analyst quoted in the Washington Post in 1998) but to play the purveyors of surplus weapons (China, Bulgaria, Russia, Israel, Romania, Azerbaijan, and, yes, the United States) off against each other. Arms dealers have never demonstrated very much delicacy about whom they accept money from, or deliver arms to. The Kremlin is so broke that is willing to sell virtually anything, and the U.S. is willing and able to buy Soviet-era weapons, and pass them on (often through forged end-user certificates) to corrupt dictators. Bribes and corporate deals for laundering money further enrich the traders, who kick back some of their profits to government suppliers. "Nuisance wars" serve a vital purpose, just as illicit drugs feed the greed of those who deal in a different, deadly commodity.

My film-making friend is right. Look at the sub-text, along with the text. The reasons for consigning Eritrea to a marginal role, for treating it as "non- existent" are as numerous as the reasons for obscuring and dismissing Ethiopia's callous disregard for human life. The people who benefit from this war and its continuation through "humanitarian" charades are much closer to Washington, D.C. than to Addis Ababa. They don't want the world to see what they are doing, or not doing. Understandably. Would you?

The writer, Dr. John Rude is an educational consultant and served in the Peace Corps in Eritrea, 1962-64.

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