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Dec.
25 issue — “Africa
matters,” American U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke
declared a year ago. “Its problems must be addressed or
they will get worse.”
AS PRESIDENT OF the Security Council last
January, he backed up those words by staging an
unprecedented “month of Africa” devoted to the troubled
continent’s most pressing crises. Vice President Al Gore
declared that the African AIDS epidemic constituted a threat
to U.S. security. Former South African president Nelson
Mandela set an October deadline for peace in Burundi.
Leaders of 10 central African countries, including the
erratic Laurent Kabila, promised peace in Congo.
It sounds hollow
now. Africa’s problems only deepened this year. The AIDS
pandemic raged unchecked. Burundi’s oppressive minority
resisted Mandela’s browbeating. Congo’s war wore on. The
world’s biggest U.N. mission, in Sierra Leone, broke down.
The leaders of South Africa and Nigeria, who had appeared
best equipped to help steer the continent toward recovery,
both stumbled at home. Zimbabwe and Cote d’Ivoire, once
among the continent’s most stable countries, veered toward
anarchy. And clearly solving these problems mainly will be
left to Africans. Finally, the U.S. election raised a
question about the future: for Washington, will Africa still
matter?
Whatever Bush
wants, he must beware. Africa blotted Clinton’s
presidency. Devastated by the mob killings of U.S.
servicemen in Somalia in 1993, Clinton’s team blocked any
U.N. response to the Rwandan genocide. Sympathy for the
genocide victims led him too close to the victors in Rwanda
and their chief backer, Uganda. He bought into the concept
that they and others might constitute the nucleus of an
“African Renaissance” built on solid economic growth
rates.
Clinton’s 1998
tour of the continent was a high-water mark for this overly
optimistic vision. A new generation of African leaders was
poised to uplift their region, he declared. No other
American president had ever made such an extensive tour of
Africa. The euphoria was short-lived. Congo’s neighbors
invaded, U.S. allies Eritrea and Ethiopia went to war and
Islamic fundamentalists bombed U.S. embassies in Nairobi and
Dar es Salaam. Still, Clinton followed up with a second
African mission to newly democratic Nigeria, last fall. If
nothing else, he raised Africa’s profile. During
Clinton’s second term nearly every cabinet secretary
visited the continent.
Africans liked
the attention, but wanted much more from Washington. They
complained of racism when the West drove Milosevic out of
Kosovo but wouldn’t intervene in Sierra Leone. Last
January’s “month of Africa” at the United Nations
blunted such criticism. Washington came up with an
additional $100 million to fight AIDS internationally,
bringing U.S. spending to $340 million. That’s nowhere
near what the United Nations says is needed for prevention
and treatment in Africa, where 25 million people are
infected—$3 billion a year. Washington paid $435 million
toward debt relief. But congressional Republicans tried to
block all spending for U.N. peacekeeping operations in
Africa.
Africa can expect
even less from the next administration. In the second
presidential debate, George W. Bush said that Africa does
not “fit into” U.S. strategic interests. And although
Bush’s prospective top foreign-policy aides are
African-American, neither has so far shown any sentimental
attachment to Africa. Colin Powell, the designated secretary
of State, is a career military man steeped in the doctrine
that U.S. troops shouldn’t serve under foreign command.
Condoleezza Rice, the front runner to be national-security
adviser, was a Soviet expert in Ronald Reagan’s White
House.
To the Bush White
House, Africa will first mean oil. The United States already
imports nearly as much oil from Africa as from the Middle
East and the share will grow with the recent discovery of
huge reserves in the Gulf of Guinea, chiefly off Angola.
Insiders know the territory; Vice President-elect Dick
Cheney until recently led Halliburton Co., the oil-services
giant, a major player on the Africa scene. And Rice is on
the board of Chevron. Oil politics could reinforce U.S.
reliance on Nigeria to tame regional conflicts. The first
test of the strategy will come early next year when
U.S.-trained Nigerian troops arrive in Sierra Leone.
New efforts by African leaders to address their own
predicament may matter the most. Eritrea and Ethiopia this
month agreed to end a war that killed tens of thousands.
Heads of state finally are jointly confronting the AIDS
emergency. A continent-wide summit conference in Nigeria on
the crisis early next year will be a first. The most
powerful leaders are pressing for a comprehensive approach
to Africa’s most crushing problems. Nigeria, South Africa
and Algeria are on the verge of presenting an Africa-wide
economic program, the “Millennium Africa Recovery Plan,”
or MAP, to Western leaders. That may not be the first thing
to land on George W. Bush’s desk. But much as the new U.S.
administration may want to put its energies elsewhere,
Africa inevitably will again command the world’s attention
before long. Mass starvation in Somalia prodded the elder
George Bush to act in 1993. His son will be no less
vulnerable to the troubled continent’s way of forcing
itself onto the agenda.
© 2000 Newsweek,
Inc.
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THE
INDIAN OCEAN NEWSLETTER #930 - 16/12/00
AFRICA/UNITED
STATES :
George W.
Bush’s African team
Now that George W. Bush is assured of being the
next president of the United States, the
candidates for the job of under secretary of state
for African affairs or other jobs linked to Africa
begin to see the light of day. Leonard H. Robinson
Jr. is openly chasing a job in the Bush
administration all the more so that the National
Summit on Africa of which he is the president has
closed its offices and put its computers up for
sale at $100 the item (ION n°920). The best
placed to look after the African affairs of the
future administration Bush is without doubt,
Jendayi Frazer, who was with Walter Kantsteiner
the African advisor to the presidential campaign
of the Republican party’s candidate (ION n°910).
Professor at the John F. Kennedy school of
Government of Harvard university, Frazer has
another strong point: she wrote her thesis under
the direction of Condoleeza Rice former National
Security Advisor to ex-president George Bush and
foreign policy advisor to his probable future
president of a son. But George W. Bush has perhaps
other ideas in mind. In any case his advisors
recently asked David Miller for his Curriculum
Vitae, the boss of the lobbying firm Africa Global
Partners, to study his eventual appointment to a
post in the new American administration. Miller
was executive manager of the Corporate Council on
Africa (CCA, grouping companies working with
Africa) from 1993 to 1999 before setting up his
lobbying firm which has a contract with Equatorial
Guinea and Mozambique (ION n°920).
Copyright
2000 Indigo Publications . Reproduction
and dissemination prohibited (photocopy, mailing
lists, intranet, web, etc.) without written
permission of the editor.
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