Clinton Tone-Deaf During Africa Trip
Hillary Clinton tried to emphasize the importance of
Africa during her recent trip, but only managed to emphasize how marginal the
continent remains to U.S. foreign policy.
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Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton’s 11-day trip to Africa, which came less than a month after President
Barack Obama’s visit to Egypt and Ghana in July, was an attempt to emphasize
Africa’s importance to the United States. Clinton was supposed to reassure
African leaders that the Obama administration intends to engage with the
continent, despite wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and perennial problems in Israel
and the Korean peninsula.
The
trip, however, merely reinforced Africa’s marginal position in U.S. foreign
policy. Clinton did not announce any new initiatives or policy directions.
Instead, she said the United States would continue to support Bush
administration initiatives on “faith-based” HIV prevention and Millennium
Development grants. She also pledged to extend military aid to Somalia and $17
million for victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC).
Clinton’s rhetoric during the trip signaled a
continuation of the Bush administration’s dualism in its policies toward Africa.
This dualism consists of moral condemnation of corruption and human rights
abuses while facilitating economic and security ties with mineral-rich and
security partners. Oil producers such as Equatorial Guinea, for instance, are
exempt from U.S. sanctions. Ethiopia, one of the largest recipients of U.S. aid,
also escapes sanctions for its egregious human rights record. This dualist
rhetoric reinforced the image of the United States as oblivious to the rapidly
changing geopolitics of the region.
During the trip, Secretary of State Clinton appeared as
petulant and imperious. Her self-proclaimed “tough love” speeches sounded
patronizing. She threatened Eritrea with unspecified action for supporting
militants in Somalia. In the DRC, she lost her
temper at skeptical questions from students. In response to a question about the
motives for her trip, she replied that the United States was not obliged to aid
victims of violence.
She also took umbrage at another student’s query about
her husband’s views on China’s investments in Africa. In Angola, too, she struck
an incongruous figure lecturing on good governance, despite the history of U.S.
efforts to subvert the democratic process by financing a terrorist militia
(UNITA) to destabilize the government.
Neocolonial Scold
Reading from an outdated script, Clinton insisted on
giving unsolicited advice on the connection between democracy and economic
growth. She called for an end to corruption and impunity in Kenya, urged South
Africa to lead the campaign for political reforms in neighboring Zimbabwe,
deplored sexual violence in the DRC, and called for accountability, the rule of
law, and an end to corruption in Angola. In Nigeria, she blamed the “failure of
leadership,” incompetence, and corruption for widespread poverty in the oil-rich
country.
The media in Africa immediately labeled her speeches
“lectures.” One day before Clinton arrived in Nairobi, her first stop on the
seven-nation tour, Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga
told the United States: “We don’t need lectures on how to govern
ourselves. Lecturing us on issues that deal with governance and transparency is
in bad taste.” The next day, Clinton went ahead and criticized Kenya’s
leaders, calling on them to hold those responsible for the postelection violence
accountable. In Nigeria, the ruling party and the Senate President strongly condemned Mrs. Clinton’s remarks.
In South Africa, the Southern Times argued in an editorial titled “Do we need these
lectures from the West?” that her preaching cast her in the role of a
“neo-colonial scold.” An editorial in the East
African, “Poor Hillary, just good enough for Africa,” pointed out that
Clinton has been relegated to the “sort-out-the-Africans role,” while her
husband and other White House envoys get the critical foreign policy
assignments.
Geopolitical Shift
This outdated dualism policy is a liability in the
changed circumstances engendered by Africa’s growing economic ties with emerging
economies such as India, Brazil, and China. According to a recent United Nations
report, there is growing optimism
that Africa will weather the current economic crisis by increasing trade with
emerging economies instead of its traditional trading partners in Europe and the
United States. The report indicates that China has increased its trade with
Africa tenfold in the last decade. It has overtaken the United States to become
Africa’s second largest trading partner after the European Union. Its trade with
Africa south of the Sahara stands at $107 billion for 2008, compared to $104
billion for the United States. China provides African countries with billions of
dollars in loans for infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, railway
lines, and ports in exchange for access to oil, copper, cobalt and other
minerals. It is also interested in markets for its consumer goods.
Russia’s
president Dimitri Medvedev visited Egypt, Namibia, Angola, and Nigeria in June.
The Russians, like the Chinese, were interested in trade. The presidents of
Brazil and India also visited Africa this year seeking to strengthen their
relations with the continent’s big oil and mineral producers.
Scramble for Africa’s Resources
In this context of a new scramble for Africa’s resources,
one would have expected a more aggressive response from the United States. On
the political front, the United States and EU no longer have the leverage to
bully African countries into accepting harmful conditions on credit and trade.
They no longer have the upper hand as Africa strengthens its economic ties with
China, India, Malaysia, and Brazil. U.S. corporations will have to work harder
to maintain their position in Africa. This will be extremely difficult with the
current economic downturn meaning that the ties with China and other emerging
economies will continue to strengthen. The Chinese argue that they are seeking
relations based on equality and mutual respect. There are no lectures on human
rights or governance and no political conditions for loans. The UN warns,
however, that growing ties with emerging economies in Asia and South America
will not necessarily benefit ordinary Africans. Chinese investors have been
accused of dumping substandard consumer goods, promulgating corruption, hiring
only Chinese workers, and contributing to the decline in African industry.
The recent tour and statements indicate that the Obama
administration’s policies toward Africa continue to revolve around
anti-terrorism and access to natural resources. This is evident in the inclusion
of Kenya, Angola and Nigeria in the Secretary of State’s itinerary. In Kenya,
Clinton announced that the United States would double its military aid to
Somalia’s fragile government led by President Sharif Ahmed. The United States
has clearly thrown its lot in with the moderate Islamist government led by
Ahmed. The new government also has the support of the Intergovernmental
Authority on Development, a regional security association. This is another
desperate effort to prevent the chaos in Somalia from further destabilizing the
region. U.S. officials consider Somalia one of the “ungoverned” regions of the
world that could become a safe haven for terrorists. The U.S. military is
engaged in countering that threat through a variety of tactics that reportedly
include training Somali troops, and
providing logistics and equipment.
By continuing to subordinate Africa policy to the “war on
terror,” the Obama administration has missed an opportunity to evolve along with
the ongoing geopolitical and economic shifts on the continent. Obama missed the
opportunity to go beyond dualism to a more equal partnership with African
countries.
The United States must also recognize the diversity of
political systems on the African continent. Since the 1960s, the U.S. government
has tended to focus on countries that are either security threats or sources of
raw materials. This perspective is extremely narrow. The United States must
develop a nuanced foreign policy that recognizes that African countries are at
different stages in the democratization process. They have different resource
endowments and have complicated relations with other parts of the world.
Building a sustainable long-term relationship with African countries would
require a broader human security perspective that takes into account the basic
needs of the population in addition to personal security.
The United States can start by supporting the work of
multilateral institutions such as the African Union and the United Nations, and
initiatives such as the AU’s peer-review mechanism, which requires ongoing
evaluation of efforts to improve adherence to the rule of law, governance,
development, and human rights. In Somalia, it would make more sense to
strengthen the regional and AU initiatives rather than duplicating their
efforts. Strengthening the AU’s capacity to organize peacekeeping operations and
efforts to build regional economic blocks are worthwhile long-term projects. The
United States must also adopt fair trade policies by dropping protectionist
barriers and subsidies for its farmers – and thus open U.S. markets to African
products and prevent the crowding out of local products by cheap American
imports in Africa itself.
Without such serious policy changes, Africa and Africans
will continue to look skeptically at U.S. speeches, however high-minded they
might sound.
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http://www.aei.org/files/2003/07/17/20030718_lizza.pdf
Where Angels Fear To Tread by Ryan Lizza
''Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence,'' Mr. Clinton said.
A 2,500-member United Nations force sought authorization under the United Nations charter to stop the killing. The United Nations commander in Rwanda at the time, Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, said last month that if he had had the mandate, the massacres would have ceased.
SIERRA
LEONE,
THE LAST CLINTON
BETRAYAL.
Where Angels Fear To Tread by Ryan Lizza
Post date: 07.13.00 Issue date: 07.24.00
Even for the Clinton administration, it was an
extraordinary lie. "The United States did not pressure anybody to sign this
agreement," State Department spokesman Philip Reeker proclaimed at a press
briefing in early June. "We neither brokered the Lomé peace agreement nor leaned
on [Sierra Leonean] President Kabbah to open talks with the insurgents.... It
was not an agreement of ours." Observers were stunned. The dishonesty, said one
Capitol Hill Africa specialist, was "positively Orwellian."
Orwellian because the peace agreement signed in Lomé,
Togo--an agreement that forced the democratic president of Sierra Leone to hand
over much of his government and most of his country's wealth to one of the
greatest monsters of the late twentieth century--was conceived and implemented
by the United States. It was Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton's special envoy to
Africa, who in late 1998 pressed President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to "reach out" to
Foday Sankoh--a man who built his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) by
systematically kidnapping children and forcing them to murder their parents. In
May 1999, the United States, led by Jackson, brokered and signed a cease-fire
agreement between the government and the RUF. In June, U.S. officials drafted
entire sections of the accord that gave Sankoh Sierra Leone's vice presidency
and control over its diamond mines, the country's major source of wealth. U.S.
Ambassador to Sierra Leone Joseph Melrose even shuttled back and forth between
Lome and Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, to cajole the reluctant Kabbah. In
March 2000, after the accord was signed, American officials hosted repeated
meetings at the U.S. embassy to carry it out.
Barely any of this made the American press. And then this
May, when the RUF took hostage 500 of the U.N. peacekeepers meant to supervise
Lome's implementation--simultaneously detonating the agreement and catapulting
it onto the front page--the United States washed its hands of the whole thing.
Said Reeker on June 5, "We were not part of that agreement."
The Clinton administration's Africa policy will probably
go down as the strangest of the postcolonial age; it may also go down as the
most grotesque. In dealing with Africa, previous U.S. administrations were
largely unsentimental. Africa was too poor to affect the U.S. economy, too alien
to command a powerful domestic lobby, too weak to threaten American security. As
a result, past presidents spoke about Africa modestly and not very often.
Not Bill Clinton. He has proclaimed frequently and
passionately that Africa matters. He has insisted that black suffering has as
great a claim on the American conscience as white suffering. He has vowed that
the United States will no longer be indifferent. These words have borne no
relation whatsoever to the reality of his administration's policy. Indeed,
confronted with several stark moral challenges, the Clinton administration has
abandoned Africa every time: it fled from Somalia, it watched American stepchild
Liberia descend into chaos, it blocked intervention in Rwanda. But Clinton's
soaring rhetoric has posed a problem that his predecessors did not face--the
problem of rank hypocrisy. And so, time and again, the imperative guiding his
administration's Africa policy has been the imperative to appear to care.
Unwilling to commit American blood and treasure to save African lives, and
unwilling to admit that they refuse to do so, the Clintonites have developed a
policy of coercive dishonesty. In Rwanda, afraid that evidence of the unfolding
genocide would expose their inaction, they systematically suppressed it. And in
Sierra Leone, unwilling to take on a rebel group that was maiming and
slaughtering civilians by the thousands, the Clintonites insisted that all the
rebels truly wanted was peace and a seat at the negotiating table.
Abandoning Africans is nothing new. But the Clinton
administration has gone further. It has tried to deny them the reality of their
own experience, to bludgeon them into pretending that the horrors around them do
not truly exist--so that they won't embarrass the American officials who
proclaim so eloquently that their fates are inextricably linked to our own.
Sierra Leone, a former British colony whose capital was
founded in the late eighteenth century by freed slaves, was a pretty nasty place
even before the birth of the Revolutionary United Front. After an initial bout
with democracy upon gaining independence in 1961, it slid into dictatorship and
kleptocracy and stayed there through the 1970s and '80s--consistently near the
bottom in world rankings of infant mortality, per capita income, and life
expectancy.
So the outside world barely noticed when, in 1991, a
group of about 100 guerrillas launched a campaign to take over the country. But
the RUF--backed by Charles Taylor, a warlord in neighboring Liberia--quickly
established itself as a rather unusual rebel group. For one thing, it had no
discernible political philosophy or agenda. For another, it was almost
unimaginably brutal. Typically, RUF troops would enter a village and round up
its children. Girls as young as ten would be raped. Boys would be forced to
execute village elders and sometimes even their own parents, thus cutting
themselves off from their past lives and beginning their absorption into their
new rebel "family." Once children were conscripted, their loyalty was maintained
through drugs--they were injected with speed, which numbed their sensitivity to
violence and rendered them dependent on their adult suppliers--and violence.
When conscripts tried to escape, RUF leaders amputated their limbs. Refugees
even accused the RUF of cannibalism.
For several years after its initial invasion, the group
terrorized the Sierra Leonean countryside, periodically closing in on Freetown
and being pushed back by a succession of military dictators. And then, in 1996,
something remarkable happened--a burgeoning civil-society movement, backed by
the United States and led largely by women's groups, rose up against Sierra
Leone's military overlords and cleared the way for the country's first
presidential elections since 1967. The RUF did its best to keep people from the
polls--chopping off the hands of would-be voters--but almost two-thirds of the
electorate cast ballots nonetheless, electing as president Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, a
longtime U.N. official. After the election, hundreds of Sierra Leoneans danced
outside the U.S. embassy in Freetown in gratitude for America's support.
The euphoria did not last long. In May 1997, 14 months
after Kabbah's election, disgruntled government soldiers--known as "sobels"
because of their collaboration with the rebels--staged a coup, forcing Kabbah
into exile in Guinea. The coup leaders invited the RUF into their junta,
suspended Sierra Leone's constitution, emptied Freetown's prison of its worst
criminals, and literally held the city's residents hostage, placing artillery in
the hills around the capital and threatening to bombard the civilians below if
removed from power.
No one expected the United States to send troops to
restore democracy; this was, after all, Africa. But it didn't need to. Nigeria,
a country that long fancied itself the region's hegemon, already had its own
intervention force in Sierra Leone under the auspices of an organization called
ECOMOG, the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group.
While Nigeria, a country in perpetual economic crisis,
spent some $1 million per day battling the criminal regime in Freetown, several
mid-level State Department Africa hands began lobbying their superiors to
request funds from Congress to bolster ECOMOG's work. But the administration
refused, saying such a request was pointless because Congress would say no. And,
while the Clintonites were right that the Republican Congress wasn't usually
enamored of foreign aid, the struggle for Sierra Leone might have offered the
administration an opportunity to put its vaunted commitment to Africa into
action. Indeed, several sympathetic members of Congress--Republicans and
Democrats--even urged the State Department to challenge Congress to rise to the
occasion. But the challenge never came. "It was totally bizarre," says one
person with knowledge of the internal squabbling. "A decision was made that the
State Department was just not going to ask for it."
In fact, not only did the Bureau of African Affairs not
request additional money from Congress, it didn't even spend the money Congress
had already given it. For months, $3.9 million sat unspent in the bureau's
budget for voluntary peacekeeping operations. In February 1998, ECOMOG liberated
Freetown and restored Kabbah to power--proving that the RUF's child soldiers
were no match for a bona fide adult military. As the rebels streamed back into
the countryside, the Nigerians saw an opportunity to finish them off
for good. But ECOMOG lacked the resources to take the war
into the Sierra Leonean hinterland, and still no money came from the Clinton
administration. "The only way they [ECOMOG soldiers] could eat is because the
people of Sierra Leone gave them food and places to sleep," says one U.S.
official. By spring, the window of opportunity had closed. The RUF, freshly
resupplied by Liberia, was back on the offensive with a campaign of systematic
killing, mutilating, and raping called Operation No Living Thing. In late May,
long after it could have made a real difference, the administration finally
allocated the $3.9 million to ECOMOG.
Nigeria, visibly tiring of its proxy war, began to look
for a way out, and the United States faced an even starker version of the same
dilemma it had confronted all along. It could make a major financial and
political commitment, in conjunction with the Nigerians or others, to save a
fledgling democratic government too weak to save itself. Or it could abandon
that government, leaving Sierra Leone to Sankoh and his child butchers--because,
after all, Sierra Leone did not remotely affect America's vital national
interest. The Clintonites, typically, did neither. Against all the evidence that
Sierra Leone could be saved from the RUF only through war, the Clinton
administration set out to make peace. In early spring 1998, a group of U.S.
policymakers gathered on the sixth floor of the State Department to plot
strategy. One senior official summarized their goal: "We need to appear to be
doing something."
To make peace with Foday Sankoh and the RUF, the
Clintonites had to go through Sankoh's political godfather, Liberian dictator
Charles Taylor. Taylor and Sankoh attended the same school--a Libyan
secret-service camp known as al-Mathabh al-Thauriya al-Alamiya (World
Revolutionary Headquarters), a sort of university for revolutionary guerrillas
from all over Africa. When they met, Taylor had recently returned from the
United States, where he had escaped from a prison in Plymouth, Massachusetts,
while awaiting extradition back to Liberia on charges of embezzlement. Sankoh,
imprisoned in the '70s for his role in plotting a coup, had been working as an
itinerant photographer in the Sierra Leonean countryside. Each man dreamed of
overthrowing his native government, and they pledged to help each other do
so.
Taylor got his chance first, on Christmas Eve 1989, when
he launched a civil war that would become a model for Sankoh's a year and a half
later. One of Taylor's first military innovations was his creation of the Small
Boys Unit, a battalion of intensely loyal child soldiers who were fed crack
cocaine and referred to Taylor as "our father." Soon, refugees from the Liberian
countryside began recounting stories of horrific cruelty. Taylor's soldiers were
seeking out pregnant women and placing bets on the sex of their unborn children.
Then they would rip open the women's wombs and tear out the babies to see who
was right. Evidence of cannibalism also began to trickle out. One soldier told
Reuters, "We rip the hearts from their living bodies and put them on the fire,
then eat them." A Liberian human rights organization claimed cannibalism in
Taylor-controlled territory was so widespread that "there is fear of persecution
based on one's fitness for consumption." Taylor's own defense minister accused
him of taking part in the practice himself.
By 1991, Liberia looked a lot like Sierra Leone would
look seven years later. Troops from ECOMOG defended a weak government in the
capital, Monrovia, while Taylor controlled the other 90 percent of the country.
Taylor developed a vast warlord economy, selling off Liberia's minerals and raw
materials, trafficking in hashish, and reportedly reaping an annual income of
about $250 million. But he wanted to expand his lucrative empire even
further--to include the diamond mines just across the border in Sierra Leone.
What's more, he wanted revenge against Sierra Leone, which had served as a base
for the ECOMOG troops that were preventing his total victory in Liberia.
So he kept his deal with Sankoh. In March 1991, a number
of Taylor's fiercest fighters accompanied Sankoh and the fledgling RUF into
Sierra Leone, where they headed straight for the diamond mines. Taylor appointed
Sankoh "governor of Sierra Leone," and his soldiers jokingly referred to Sierra
Leone as their Kuwait. Sankoh frequently visited Taylor at his headquarters in
the Liberian town of Gbarnga.
And then in 1996, with Liberia in ashes and 13 failed
peace agreements--"[Taylor] reneged on all of them," says a former senior State
Department official--Taylor offered his Sierra Leonean protege the ultimate
lesson in the politics of terror: he took power. Taylor agreed to stand for
election. He had the largest army and the most money, and he made it clear that
if he did not win, he would resume the killing. A country exhausted by war
elected him president. During the run-up to the vote, Taylor's child soldiers
took to the streets, chanting what became his unofficial campaign slogan: "He
killed my pa. He killed my ma. I'll vote for him."
To bring "peace" to Sierra Leone, the Clinton
administration first had to show that Sankoh and Taylor were men with whom one
could legitimately do business. "Their whole policy was to `mainstream'
them--that was the word used by someone at State," explains an aide to the House
International Relations Committee. "`If you treat Sankoh like a statesman, he'll
be one.' ... [A State Department official] used the term to explain what they
had done with Taylor and what they were trying to do with Foday Sankoh." In
Jesse Jackson, appointed "Special Envoy for the President and Secretary of State
for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa" in October 1997, Washington had the
ideal man for the job.
Jackson first met the Liberian dictator on an official
trip to West Africa in February 1998. Taylor, worried that Jackson, like prior
American diplomats, would hector him about human rights, invited an old Liberian
friend of Jackson's named Romeo Horton to brief him on America's new envoy.
Horton says Jackson and Taylor's meeting went extremely well. "Instead of
meeting an adversary," says Horton, Taylor "met a friend." The following month,
when Clinton toured Africa, Jackson arranged a 30-minute phone call between the
two leaders from Air Force One. Upon returning home, Jackson organized a
conference on "reconciliation" for Liberians at his push headquarters in
Chicago.
According to Harry Greaves Jr., co-founder of a Liberian
opposition party, who attended the Chicago conference, "The message was,
`[Taylor's] been elected, and let's give him a chance.' It's all about p.r., and
Jackson is part of that campaign." As Leslie Cole, an old friend of Taylor's,
wrote to the new president soon after Jackson's conference, "Getting Jesse on
the bandwagon was a good and smart idea."
So it's not surprising that by the time Jackson began the
diplomatic push that would lead to Lomé, he and Taylor were giving the same
advice to the democratic government of Sierra Leone: Cut a deal with the RUF. In
November 1998, Jackson traveled to West Africa again, meeting with Taylor and
Kabbah in Guinea and then, in Freetown, with Kabbah alone. During his five-hour
stop in Sierra Leone, Jackson, who arrived just days after fresh reports that
the RUF was beheading children and disemboweling pregnant women, urged Kabbah to
make concessions to the rebels. "The government must reach out to these RUF in
the bush battlefield," Jackson told Sierra Leonean leaders. Much of Freetown
believed otherwise. "Think again, Jackson, the RUF is not a civilised body to be
trusted," implored one prominent newspaper. A local journalist asked Jackson why
he was telling Sierra Leoneans to negotiate with the RUF when the public was
against it. "I remember very clearly what he said," says Zainab Bangura, a
prominent member of Freetown's democracy movement. "`That is what leadership is
about: to mold public opinion, not to follow public opinion.'" Sierra Leone's
current ambassador to the United States, John Leigh, remembers Jackson's trip
well. "When he went to Sierra Leone in 1998," Leigh says, "what he was doing was
pushing Charles Taylor's position."
Seven weeks after Jackson departed, as Bangura put it
recently, "All hell broke loose." The "hell" was the January 1999 RUF assault on
Freetown, which, hard as it is to believe, set a new standard for rebel
atrocities. Capitalizing on ECOMOG's weariness, the RUF marched into the capital
surrounded by a human shield of civilians that prevented the Nigerians from
launching an effective counterattack. Divided into squads with names like "Burn
House Unit," "Cut Hands Commandos," and "Kill Man No Blood Unit" (the last group
specialized in beating people to death without spilling blood), the RUF burned
down houses with their occupants still inside, hacked off limbs, gouged out eyes
with knives, raped children, and gunned down scores of people in the streets. In
three weeks, the RUF killed some 6,000 people, mostly civilians. When the rebels
were finally forced from the city by an ECOMOG counterattack, they burned down
whole blocks as they left and abducted thousands of children, boys and girls who
would become either soldiers or sex slaves.
Incredibly, the Clintonites didn't abandon their efforts
to "mainstream" the RUF in the weeks following the attack; they intensified
them. In February, just weeks after the assault, the State Department hosted the
RUF's "legal representative," Omrie Golley, for talks in Washington. While
Golley was at the State Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for
African Affairs Howard Jeter organized a phone call between him and Kabbah,
establishing the first formal contact between the government and the rebels.
Golley remembers the experience fondly. In contrast to the British, who he says
treated his group with disdain, Golley gushes that he "was always very impressed
with the American approach to the whole conflict."
Golley also met with New Jersey Representative Donald
Payne, probably the most important member of Congress on Africa policy. Within
the Congressional Black Caucus, it is common knowledge that members take their
cues on Africa from Payne. And, given the overriding importance of domestic
politics--particularly domestic racial politics--on the Clinton administration's
Africa policy, Payne wields substantial influence.
Among Capitol Hill Africa specialists, Payne's sympathy
for Taylor and Sankoh is the stuff of legend. In February 1999, for instance,
after his meeting with Golley, Payne wrote to Kabbah imploring him to pursue
negotiations with Sankoh, who had been temporarily captured by the government
and was actually awaiting execution for treason, even while the RUF continued
the war. "[S]uccessful negotiations must be without precondition and include the
permanent release of Mr. Foday Sankoh," Payne wrote. "That letter is exactly
what Charles Taylor was saying at the same time in Liberia. He was saying Sankoh
should be freed," says Ambassador Leigh. "That letter that Payne wrote to
President Kabbah is exactly the type of agreement that the State Department
pressed Kabbah to accept." And, indeed, Sankoh was released as part of the
run-up to Lomé.
On the House Africa Subcommittee, where Payne is the
ranking Democrat, both Republican and Democratic staff members say he has bashed
ECOMOG and questioned whether Taylor was really aiding the RUF. In May of last
year, Payne fought to remove from a resolution language accusing Liberia and
other countries of supporting the rebels, even after the State Department
formally acknowledged that Taylor "continues to actively support the rebels in
Sierra Leone, including the provision of arms and ammunition." Says one
Democratic aide, "Whenever there is talk of sanctioning Taylor or of threatening
Liberia ... Mr. Payne is always the first one to jump to their defense." Former
Liberian Ambassador to the United States Rachel Diggs says Taylor "had free
access to Don Payne and Jesse Jackson ... whenever there was a problem, these
were the people whose ear Taylor had in the U.S. and who had his ear in
Liberia."
Indeed, Payne's relationship with Taylor goes back to the
early '80s, when Taylor was in jail in Massachusetts and Payne, then a member of
the Newark municipal council, spoke out against his extradition to Liberia.
Payne says he was simply helping Taylor at the behest of a friend and didn't
actually meet the Liberian until 1997, when he attended Taylor's presidential
inauguration in Monrovia. But since then the two men have clearly become
friends. One visitor to Payne's office tells of watching the congressman hang up
the phone with Taylor and remark that the Liberian president had just told him
he was tired of dealing with Jeter, the U.S. envoy for Liberia. (Taylor is known
to dislike Jeter, once referring to him as a "burnt-out" diplomat.) Taylor
suggested that Payne become the U.S. envoy instead. "What surprised me was that
Payne didn't say anything," says the visitor. "He seemed flattered." Payne says
he does not remember any such conversation. At one point, according to an
associate of Payne's, the New Jersey congressman jokingly complained that he was
getting so many calls from Taylor that he was tired of talking to him. Payne
insists he has talked on the phone to Taylor no more than half a dozen
times.
Within three months of Golley's February 1999 visit to
the State Department and the congressional offices of Donald Payne, the phone
call initiated by Howard Jeter had led to a government/RUF cease-fire. With
striking unanimity, Sierra Leonean intellectuals believe that Kabbah, a rather
weak president, agreed to the cease-fire under pressure from Jackson and against
the advice of some of his ministers and prominent members of civil society. Days
before the cease-fire, Jackson and Kabbah met up in Ghana, where both were
attending a conference. From Ghana, Jackson abruptly flew Kabbah to the talks in
Lomé, Togo, where the cease-fire agreement was signed. One Freetown newspaper
even reported that Kabbah was "kidnapped" by Jackson. "The story was," explains
Zainab Bangura, "that he was kidnapped, because [Kabbah] went [to the conference
in Ghana] with his finance minister and information minister"--at the time both
men were thought to be against signing the agreement--"and they all went to the
airport to go to fly to Lomé, and Jesse Jackson said there were no seats for
them. So they didn't go."
The cease-fire paved the way for the Lome peace talks
themselves. And, once again, the United States took the lead. U.S. Ambassador to
Sierra Leone Joseph Melrose was a constant presence at the negotiating table.
"They oversaw the whole peace talks," says Abu Brima, who attended as the leader
of a delegation representing Sierra Leonean civil society. "Melrose was very,
very active and literally kind of led it, I would say." Bangura adds: "Every
time the talks were about to fall apart, Melrose would fly over to Freetown to
pressure the president." According to Leigh, Melrose's "job was to soften the
Sierra Leonean delegation to accept the agreement." The Clinton administration
even sent a technical team, led by a usaid official named Sylvia Fletcher, that
actually drafted parts of the accord.
The final agreement at Lomé, signed on July 7, 1999,
awarded the RUF four ministerial posts, made Sankoh vice president, placed him
in charge of a new commission to oversee Sierra Leone's diamonds, and granted
the RUF blanket amnesty for all crimes. After the agreement was signed, Fletcher
and Melrose held meetings establishing the diamond commission--which included
Sankoh, members of Kabbah's government, and representatives from De Beers and
other diamond companies--at the U.S. embassy. As one U.S. government official
put it, "The message we sent with Lome is that you can terrorize your way to
power."
For close to a year, the Lomé agreement did what the
Clinton administration hoped it would do. With articles on pages A17 and A6,
respectively, The Washington Post and The New York Times announced the accord
and ushered Sierra Leone off their pages--another peace process successfully
brokered by an administration committed to the well-being of Africa. As
Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice bragged last
September, "the U.S. role in Sierra Leone ... has been instrumental. With
hands-on efforts by the president's special envoy Jesse Jackson, Ambassador Joe
Melrose, and many others, the United States brokered the cease-fire and helped
steer Sierra Leone's rebels, the Kabbah government, and regional leaders to the
negotiating table."
It probably wouldn't even have mattered that Sankoh
refused to disarm--of the estimated 10,000 children fighting for the RUF, only
about 1,700 were turned over to demobilization camps, as required--or that he
continued the illicit diamond-trading that Lomé was meant to stop. If Lomé had
simply unraveled quietly--even if Sankoh had followed his mentor in Liberia and
grabbed complete power himself--it is unlikely that Sierra Leone would have made
the American front pages. The Clinton administration would still have
accomplished much of what it set out to do at that meeting on the sixth floor of
the State Department in spring 1998.
But this May, in an ironic twist of fate, Sierra Leone
leapt from the shadows into the world spotlight. Lomé had achieved one of the
RUF's central goals--the exit of the stubborn Nigerians. The U.N. peacekeepers
who took their place--sent from countries like India, Jordan, Kenya, and
Ghana--were ill-equipped and bound by the timid U.N. rules of engagement. And,
as soon as they ventured into the RUF's diamond heartland, the rebels stole
their weapons and vehicles and held them hostage for several weeks. The
humiliating standoff brought Lome crashing down in full public view. And U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan's desperate appeals for Western countries to send
troops to reinforce his peacekeepers called global attention to the very point
the Clinton administration had worked so hard to conceal: its unwillingness to
sacrifice anything real on behalf of the people of Sierra Leone. Instead of
soldiers, the United States once again sent Jesse Jackson. But, by this time,
Jackson was so bitterly despised in Freetown that the Sierra Leonean government
told him it could not guarantee his safety. One group of prominent Sierra
Leonean democracy activists warned Jackson, "Our people will greet your presence
in the country with contempt, and we'll encourage them to mount massive
demonstrations in protest." During a conference call with Freetown leaders in
which he tried to explain himself, Jackson was openly attacked as a RUF
"collaborator." His trip to Sierra Leone was canceled.
Today, a year after Lomé, the U.N. hostages have finally
been freed. Foday Sankoh has even been captured and will likely be tried as a
war criminal. President Kabbah's government is defended by a shaky coalition of
citizen militias, government soldiers, former RUF collaborators, U.N. troops,
and, most importantly, military advisers from Great Britain--the only Western
power to heed Annan's call. Sankoh's apparent replacement has been given
sanctuary in Liberia by Taylor, who continues to arm the RUF. The rebels still
control much of the Sierra Leonean countryside, and there are widespread rumors
of an imminent RUF attack on Freetown. If the British leave, an attack is all
but certain.
At the National Summit on Africa in February, President
Clinton said, "We can no longer choose not to know. We can only choose not to
act, or to act. In this world, we can be indifferent, or we can make a
difference. America must choose, when it comes to Africa, to make a difference."
Sophisticated people understand what this kind of talk, coming from this
administration, means. And the people of Sierra Leone, who now count prostheses
as one of their country's chief imports, have become sophisticated. In fact,
in
recent months Sierra Leonean exiles in Washington have
increasingly allied themselves with Republicans like New Hampshire Senator Judd
Gregg. It's a remarkable turn of events, given that Gregg and his ilk are
isolationists--men who say forthrightly that America has no important interests
in Africa, can't successfully export its method of government there, and
shouldn't waste blood or money trying. After eight years of the Clinton
administration, it seems, the people of Sierra Leone no longer expect very much
from the United States. They're willing to settle for truth.
RYAN LIZZA is an associate editor at TNR.
CLINTON IN AFRICA: THE BLOOD BATH; Critics Say U.S. Ignored C.I.A. Warnings of Genocide in Rwanda
When President
Clinton confessed today that ''people like me'' failed to see the storm of mass
killings that swept Rwanda in 1994, he acknowledged a bitter truth for the first
time.
The Clinton Administration ignored powerful warnings of impending genocide,
including a Central Intelligence Agency study saying half a million people could
die if Rwanda exploded, former Administration officials and human rights experts
said today.''Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence,'' Mr. Clinton said.
But even when it was clear that hundreds of thousands of
Rwandan civilians were in mortal danger, the United States stopped the United
Nations from taking action that might have saved those lives, the critics of the
Administration's policy said.
''By definition, when a human catastrophe like that takes place, the whole
international community, including the United States as a leader in it, has
failed,'' Anthony Lake, the national security adviser to President Clinton at
the time, said today.A 2,500-member United Nations force sought authorization under the United Nations charter to stop the killing. The United Nations commander in Rwanda at the time, Canadian Maj. Gen. Romeo Dallaire, said last month that if he had had the mandate, the massacres would have ceased.
Giving General Dallaire the authority and the troops that he requested
''could have stopped the whole thing,'' said Morton H. Halperin, a National
Security Council staff member in 1994.
But the Clinton Administration opposed the move. The United Nations had to learn ''when to say no,'' President Clinton said at the time.
Alison DesForges, author of ''The Killing Campaign: The 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,'' a Human Rights Watch report to be published next month by Yale University Press, said ''the U.S. was the primary stumbling block'' to international action to stop the massacres.
Lionel Rosenblatt, president of Refugees International, said: ''The ball was not only dropped by the U.S., it was blocked by the U.S.''
Mr. Halperin, now senior vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund, a public policy foundation, recalled: ''Nobody was really focused on how serious the situation was until things were out of control. People were saying, 'We're not willing to make the kind of commitment that would really stop this.' People concluded, 'We can't do anything.' ''
But the Clinton Administration opposed the move. The United Nations had to learn ''when to say no,'' President Clinton said at the time.
Alison DesForges, author of ''The Killing Campaign: The 1994 Genocide in Rwanda,'' a Human Rights Watch report to be published next month by Yale University Press, said ''the U.S. was the primary stumbling block'' to international action to stop the massacres.
Lionel Rosenblatt, president of Refugees International, said: ''The ball was not only dropped by the U.S., it was blocked by the U.S.''
Mr. Halperin, now senior vice president of the Twentieth Century Fund, a public policy foundation, recalled: ''Nobody was really focused on how serious the situation was until things were out of control. People were saying, 'We're not willing to make the kind of commitment that would really stop this.' People concluded, 'We can't do anything.' ''
After the disastrous
1993 mission in Somalia, the United States was reluctant to become involved in
an African nation it did not know well, whose geopolitical importance was small,
and whose sufferings were at the time unobserved by television, Mr. Halperin
said.
''We didn't really know the nature of the conflict'' immediately before it
exploded into one of the great man-made disasters of the century, he said.
''There weren't any visuals and there wasn't a lot of information. The data
weren't on anybody's screen.''
But the data were
there, said Ms. DesForges. She said that Administration officials ignored clear
warnings before before the massacres began on April 6, 1994. Those massacres
were mostly committed by Hutu militia against minority Tutsi civilians and the
moderate Hutu opposition.
''They ignored a letter of warning from high military officers in the Rwandan
Army in December 1993 about plans for widespread violence,'' she said. ''They
ignored a very explicit telegram of Jan. 11, 1994, sent to the U.N. and the U.S.
Ambassador from an informant, detailing the preparations of the militias to kill
Tutsi. And they ignored a C.I.A. study at the end of January 1994 which
suggested that if combat were to begin in Rwanda, that it would include violence
against civilians -- with a worst-case scenario of the deaths of half a million
people.''
On May 3, 1994, while
the massacres were raging, President Clinton signed a major foreign policy
order, Presidential Decision Directive 25. It narrowly defined the national
interest in the fate of a small, faraway, unimportant place like Rwanda, whose
collapse would not directly affect the United States or breach international
security. The policy blocked the United States from acting to stop the
killing.
That month, Administration spokesmen were instructed not to use the word
''genocide'' in referring to Rwanda. The word made it harder for the United
States to explain doing nothing.
Mr. Clinton acknowledged for the first time today that
''we did not immediately call these crimes by their rightful name: genocide.''
He used the word 11 times.
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