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July
4, 2003
Racism, Exploitation
and Neglect
Bush and Africa
By MARTHA HONEY
[Editors' Note: This essay is an excerpt from the excellent
new book PowerTrip:
U.S. Unilateralism and Global Strategy After September 11,
part of the Open Media series published by Seven
Stories Press. The book is edited by John Feffer and
includes essays by writers and scholars from Foreign
Policy in Focus, including William Hartung, Mel Goodman
and Ahmed Rashid.]
It was a powerfully symbolic gift, coming as it
did from one of the world's poorer countries to the world's richest.
In June 2002, a Maasai village in Kenya presented its most precious
resource, fifteen head of cattle, to the United States as an
expression of solidarity for the tragedy of September 11. "To
the people of America, we give these cows to help you,"
read banners at the ceremonial handover of the cattle from Maasai
elders to the U.S. ambassador.183 The gift was all the more poignant
since the U.S. government still has not compensated the families
of the Kenyan victims of terrorism who died in al-Qaeda's1998
bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.
This was the latest of a long string
of gestures of sympathy from different parts of Africa. Immediately
after September 11, the Organization of African Union (OAU, since
renamed African Union) expressed its "full solidarity"
and "deepest condolence," and African leaders, even
those usually at odds with the United States, offered their support.
Libya's Muammar Qaddafi sent condolences for the "horrific"
attacks and offered to donate his blood to the U.S. victims.
Sudan, which once housed Osama bin Laden, offered cooperation
in tracking al-Qaeda terrorists. Ethiopia, Djibouti, Nigeria,
and Kenya, among others, shut down or froze suspected terrorist
financial networks operating in their countries, while once-leftist
Eritrea offered the United States use of its territory and port
as a military base to fight terrorism. Nigeria, home of Africa's
largest Muslim population, drafted antiterrorist legislation,
while South Africa offered its support for U.S.-led diplomatic
efforts to fight terrorism. And during an African summit in Dakar
in October 2001, Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade proposed
an African Pact Against Terrorism and created a regional counterterrorism
intelligence center, with U.S. assistance.
At the same time, several African governments opportunistically
hitched their own counterinsurgency campaigns to Washington's
global war on terrorism. In Africa's longest-running civil war,
the Sudanese government labeled Christian and animist separatists
as terrorists; Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki, a liberator
turned increasingly  dictatorial, used the postSeptember
11 period to crack down on dissent; and Zimbabwean leader Robert
Mugabe termed his largely nonviolent political opponents "terrorists."
Close U.S. allies Daniel arap Moi in Kenya (voted out of office
in December 2002) and Olusegun Obasanjo in Nigeria tried to bolster
their own hold on power by forging closer ties with the U.S.
military.
But in this mix of genuine sympathy and political opportunism,
many Africans were wary, as well, of being too closely associated
with Washington's war on terrorism. African states feared repercussions
both from and on their own Muslim populations. Roughly 40 percent
of Africans are Muslims with large concentrations in North Africa,
the East African coast, and West African countries such as Nigeria
and Senegal. In the days after September 11, there were scattered
street celebrations in Muslim strongholds in northern Nigeria
and Somalia, and subsequent anti-American protests in Sudan,
South Africa, and Kenya. African leaders also feared that the
United States would pursue its war on terrorism throughout the
continent. By January 2002, as U.S. military attacks in Afghanistan
wound down, the United States turned its sights on a handful
of countries suspected of harboring al-Qaeda terrorists, including
Libya, Egypt, Sudan, and Somalia. "These governments are
afraid they might be the next U.S. target, and are therefore
clearly keen to show they are cooperating in the war against
terrorism," commented a diplomat stationed in Nairobi.
Somalia, with its lack of a stable central government, was most
clearly in Washington's crosshairs. Its transitional government
hastily declared bin Laden persona non grata and arrested eight
Iraqis and a Palestinian as terrorist suspects. The detentions
were largely symbolic; as one U.S. government adviser noted,
those detained were probably "a few poor Iraqi migrants
looking for cooking jobs in Mogadishu." Indeed, the United
States, while continuing to deny Somalia diplomatic recognition,
took extremely crippling measures against this impoverished country
with only rudimentary state functions. Contending that it may
have ties to al-Qaeda, the United States branded as "terrorist"
the indigenous group al-Itihad al-Islami (AIAI), which is fighting
for an Islamic state. Most damaging, the United States closed
down al-Barakat, Somalia's biggest employer and largest remittance
bank-cum-telephone service, thereby cutting off both communications
and $500 million a year sent home by Somali expatriates. The
United States also severed Somalia's Internet links, monitored
international air flights, and sent naval forces to barricade
the coast. As in Afghanistan, the United States sought the use
of local and regional surrogate forces. For instance, the Somali
Restoration and Reconciliation Council (SRRC), an Ethiopian-backed
group, helped the United States identify possible terrorist bases.
The leader of SRRC is the son of Mohammed Aidid, the Somali clan
leader that U.S. Special Forces were pursuing so unsuccessfully
in the early 1990s. September 11 has created many strange bedfellows,
but this Somalia campaign netted no significant al-Qaeda operatives.
TERRORISM IN AFRICA
Africa, of course, has not been untouched
by terrorism, some homegrown, some linked to international networks.
As early as 1990, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak began warning
that international terrorism represented a bigger danger than
war. In 1995, Islamic fundamentalists targeted Mubarak in an
assassination attempt that may have been orchestrated by al-Qaeda.
In the wake of September 11, Egyptian police rounded up twenty-two
professionals who belonged to the banned Muslim Brotherhood,
while Tunisia and other countries have sought to crack down on
their own brands of politicized Islam. Algeria, for instance,
has been fighting a decade-long war against Muslim fundamentalists.
"Each North African country has its own bin Laden,"
editorialized the French-language Arab weekly Jeune Afrique
in the wake of September 11. At a 1992 meeting in Algiers, the
OAU passed a resolution at its meeting calling for enhanced cooperation
in fighting terrorism, and in 1999, again in Algiers, the organization
adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Combating of Terrorism.
Over the last decade, Sudan has been a major U.S. concern, labeled
a "rogue state," denied diplomatic recognition, and
placed off-limits to U.S. investors. From 1991 to 1996, bin Laden
was based in the Sudan, and the al-Qaeda leader claimed his operatives
were involved in the 1993 killing of American marines in Mogadishu,
Somalia. The United States also viewed Sudan as an operational
base for al-Qaeda's August 7, 1998, simultaneous bombings of
the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 and injured
thousands, mainly Africans. In retaliation, the Clinton administration
launched a cruise missile attack, destroying what it claimed
was an al-Qaeda chemical weapons facility, but which subsequent
investigations found was a pharmaceutical factory. Yet during
the 1990s, there were diplomatic crosscurrents, as Sudanese officials
met secretly with the FBI and CIA in an effort to combat terrorism,
even offering, according to some reports, to help apprehend bin
Laden. After September 11, the Khartoum government immediately
announced it would cooperate in the search for Islamic terrorists
and revealed publicly that U.S. intelligence agents were already
operating in Sudan.
In the United States, however, these steps toward engagement
with Sudan's National Islamic Front government are opposed by
an unlikely coalition of religious right organizations and African-American
churches, human rights groups, and labor unions. They are backing
Christian guerrilla groups in southern Sudan who, for nearly
half a century, have been waging a civil war demanding self-determination.
Complicating the political landscape, U.S. corporations, circumscribed
by the embargo, have watched with frustration as Chinese and
Canadian petroleum companies invested in Sudan's largely unexplored
but potentially large oil reserves. Once again, powerful but
strange bedfellows have pushed Sudan onto the Bush administration's
Africa agenda.
Libya, the North African country Washington has long considered
at the top of its terrorism list, did not make it into President
Bush's "axis of evil." Following the terrorist attacks,
Qaddafi quickly declared that "the United States has the
right to vengeance" and then revealed that Libya had been
providing intelligence about al-Qaeda to the United States. Yet
relations between the two countries remain far from normalized.
In 2003, the Bush administration extended for another year the
strict trade, investment, and travel sanctions imposed on Libya
in 1986 (in retaliation for the suspected Libyan bombing of a
Berlin discotheque) and rejected Libya's draft statement apologizing
for the 1989 terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie,
Scotland. Washington's rejection of this statement, which had
been accepted by both Britain and the victims' families, delayed
both Libya's removal from the State Department's list of countries
that sponsor terrorism and Libya's payment of compensation to
the families, reported to total $2.7 billion. After Iraq, one
political analyst told the New York Times, "Libya
is either No. 2 or No. 3 on the list of nations the hard-liners
want to go after."
The State Department's 2001 report on terrorism accurately stated
that "most terrorist attacks in Africa stem from internal
civil unrest and spillover from regional wars" in, for instance,
the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
However, the report noted that both al-Qaeda and the Lebanese
Hizballah "have a presence in Africa and continue to exploit
Africa's permissive operating environment-porous borders, conflict,
lax financial systems, and the wide availability of weapons-to
expand and strengthen their networks." The State Department
put several African insurgencies on its list of terrorist groups,
including the Sudanese-backed Lord's Resistance Army in northern
Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone.
As U.S. preparations for war against Iraq mounted, the Horn of
Africa became an increasingly important outpost in the war on
terrorism. A Navy command ship was stationed off the Horn's coast
on an "open-ended mission" to "track, frustrate
and eliminate" al-Qaeda terrorists. By early 2003, some
eight hundred U.S. special operations forces and CIA paramilitaries
and fifteen hundred marines were operating from an abandoned
French Foreign Legion post in tiny Djibouti, just across the
Gulf of Aden from Yemen, Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland
and the suspected hideaway of al-Qaeda operatives. This first
U.S. base in Africa in the postCold War era is also useful
for observing suspected terrorists in neighboring Somalia.
Eastern Africa has also continued to
be the site of al-Qaeda attacks. In November 2002, al-Qaeda claimed
responsibility for a suicide car bombing at an Israeli-owned
beach hotel in Mombasa (killing ten Kenyans, three Israelis,
and the three bombers) and for the failed attempt to shoot down
an Israeli charter jet with shoulder-launched missiles. Coming
just weeks after the deadly bombing of a tourist nightclub in
Bali, the Mombasa incident was part of what an al-Qaeda spokesman
vowed would be a widening war against the "Christian-Jewish
alliance" of the United States and Israel and its other
allies. Indeed, within a few weeks, the United States and other
countries issued tourism travel warnings of a terrorist plot
against the Muslim resort island Zanzibar.
OIL AND SECURITY
One year after the September 11 attacks,
the lead story in the New York Times proclaimed that "Africa,
the neglected stepchild of American diplomacy, is rising in strategic
importance to Washington policy makers, and one word sums up
the reason: oil." In early 2002, the newly created African
Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG), composed of congressional
members, administration officials, industry executives, consultants,
and investors, drew up a blueprint for U.S. energy and mineral
resource interests in Africa. As House Subcommittee on Africa
chair Ed Royce (R-CA) explained, "African oil should be
treated as a priority for U.S. national security post 9-11, and
I think that post 9-11 it's occurred to all of us that our traditional
sources of oil are not as secure as we once thought they were."
U.S. imports of crude oil from West Africa-Nigeria, Angola, Equatorial
Guinea, Gabon-equal 15 percent of total imports and are set to
rise to 25 percent by 2015, according to the National Intelligence
Council. In his 2001 National Energy Policy Report, U.S. Vice
President Dick Cheney projected that the area would be "one
of the fastest-growing sources of oil and gas for the American
market." Expansion plans include reopening the U.S. consulate
in Equatorial Guinea, where off-shore reserves have been recently
discovered, a new embassy in oil-rich Angola, construction of
a pipeline linking southern Chad to Atlantic ports, increased
military exchanges with West African countries, and a possible
new U.S. naval base on Sao Tome and Principe, a tiny, two-island
nation strategically located in the Atlantic oil-bearing basin
of the Gulf of Guinea.
With civil war and unrest in Colombia and Venezuela, upheavals
in the Middle East and war looming with Iraq, Africa was playing
"an increasingly important role in our energy security,"
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham told the House International
Relations Committee in June 2002. Shortly afterward, Secretary
of State Powell was dispatched to visit Gabon, Sao Tome, and
Angola, oil-rich countries that rarely, if ever, have been visited
by a high-level U.S. official. Powell avoided Nigeria, the most
important African oil supplier to the United States, where popular
resistance continues to grow against oil companies in the Niger
Delta region. Quietly, however, the Bush administration has increased
its military ties to Nigeria, while pressuring it to pull out
of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
the quota and price-setting cartel. As one oil industry official
explained, "There is a long-term strategy from the U.S.
government to weaken OPEC's hold on the market and one way to
do that is to peel off certain countries." By summer 2002,
Bush's Africa policy was characterized as "build the military
and extract the oil."
While most current military training programs predate September
11, the United States has sought to strengthen relations with
African police, military, and security forces in a bid to identify
Islamic radicals and secure access to oil resources. At present,
nearly every sub-Saharan country receives International Military
Education and Training (IMET) funding. U.S. Special Forces, through
the African Crisis Response Initiative started in 1997, have
trained eight thousand troops from Senegal, Ghana, Mali, and
other countries. Both South Africa and Kenya received lists of
suspects from the United States and agreed to cooperate.
In Kenya, a key U.S. ally from the Cold
War era and central to any U.S. antiterrrorist operations against
Somalia, three thousand U.S. Marines participated with Kenyan
troops in large-scale military exercises in February 2002. In
the run-up to the December 2002 presidential elections, many
Kenyans feared the expanded focus on security and counterterrorism
would push democratization to the back burner. Indeed, during
President Moi's final state visit to Washington in early December
2002, President Bush made no public appeal for peaceful and fair
elections. Despite Washington's official silence, Kenya's December
elections took place without violence or corruption, and the
next day Moi turned over power to opposition candidate Mwai Kibaki.
While Kenya's political transition was smooth, U.S. policy makers
worried that domestic conflict and social collapse in a number
of African countries would provide opportunities for Islamic
fundamentalists to recruit or to exploit criminal financial networks.
As Africa Subcommittee Chair Ed Royce argued, "The general
weakness of African governments as well as the civil strife,
which exists in several countries, makes parts of the continent
hospitable grounds for terrorist operations." The U.S. focus
on security has brought African states with Muslim populations
under close scrutiny, while military training is being expanded,
new intelligence relationships are being forged, and alleged
African links to global criminal networks are being probed. After
September 11, reports began to surface of possible al-Qaeda connections
to criminal gangs in Mozambique, diamond smugglers in Sierra
Leone, and black-market purchases of raw uranium and money laundering
with tanzanite gems in Tanzania. South Africa closed a number
of bank accounts because of possible terrorist connections and,
along with several other states, rushed through legislation on
money laundering and monitoring telecommunications.
But this threat has not prompted the
U.S. military to intervene directly in Africa. Post-Vietnam and
post-Mogadishu (where eighteen marines were killed during a UN
mission in 1993), Bush continues to oppose sending U.S. forces
into Africa's several civil wars. Instead, the United States
is promoting regional peacekeeping forces led by South Africa
and Nigeria, a view reflected as well in the peace and security
initiative of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD).
DIFFERING U.S. AND
AFRICAN AGENDAS
A growing discomfort with U.S. unilateralism
has increased anti-American sentiment across the continent and
prompted calls for UN rather than U.S. leadership in the war
on terrorism. Within just two weeks of the September 2001 attacks,
Egyptian President Mubarak warned that Washington's "cure
should not be more bitter than the illness." Terrorism is
far from the most critical problem confronting the continent.
Poverty, AIDS, protracted violent conflicts between countries,
debt burdens, and the breakdown of states have all ranked higher
on the agendas of African leaders and regional organizations.
As Salih Booker, director of the U.S.-based policy organization
Africa Action, wrote, "Whether measured by numbers killed
or nations wounded, by economies upended or families crushed,
the AIDS pandemic is a deadlier global threat than that posed
by terrorist groups. The war on AIDS is more important than the
war on terrorism." Yet, after September 11, the U.S. government
began to look at Africa almost exclusively through the lenses
of terrorism and oil.
When the Bush administration took office, it signaled that Africa
would remain a low priority, economically and strategically.
During the Cold War, the U.S. foreign aid and alliances in Africa
were largely aimed at checking Soviet and Chinese influence.
In the 1990s, the Clinton administration proclaimed that free
market prescriptions-trade, not aid; export-led growth; and structural
adjustment policies-would define its relations with Africa. But
less U.S. foreign direct investment goes to Africa than any other
world region-less than one percent of the total in 2001 -and
over half of that goes to the oil industry. And Clinton's much-touted
trade access bill, the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA),
helped increase African exports (mainly textiles) to the United
States for a handful of countries, including Mauritius, Lesotho,
Mozambique, and Kenya.
The Bush administration continues to press African economies
to privatize, open up to foreign capital, develop "good
governance" practices, and uphold agreements to end conflicts
in the Congo and elsewhere. At the same time, the administration
has modestly increased development assistance, while favoring
neoliberal protégés such as Mozambique, South Africa,
and Nigeria. U.S. contributions still lag far behind Europe,
and by mid-2002, the $700 million that the United States had
committed for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative
had yet to be disbursed. Most of the Bush administration's $2.2
billion in total aid to Africa for 2003 was not appropriated
by Congress.230 Meanwhile, the United States provided only a
modest contribution of $200 million to the UN Global AIDS Fund,
which estimates its needs at $7 to $10 billion.
By the time Americans commemorated the first anniversary of the
terrorist attacks, African support and goodwill, as symbolized
in the gift of cattle, had largely vanished. The Bush administration's
unilateralist policies combined with its aggressive and narrow
obsession with security and oil in Africa have increasingly alienated
many Africans. In September 2002, Africa's most respected statesman,
Nelson Mandela, charged in uncharacteristically bitter language
that "the attitude of the United States is a threat to world
peace." Mandela, who had supported the U.S. war in Afghanistan,
lashed out at Bush officials for pursuing war in Iraq. He went
a step further, charging that in the eyes of many, U.S. actions-from
not paying compensation to Africans killed or injured in the
two embassy bombings, to snubbing the world summits on racism
and sustainable development (both held in South Africa), to showing
contempt for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan-contain "that
element": racism. This racism, which also underlies U.S.
designs on African oil, the prioritizing of counterterrorism
over tackling poverty and AIDS, and the militarizing of the continent,
has distorted Washington's perception of what truly matters to
Africa and Africans.
Martha Honey
is Executive Director of the enter on Ecotourism and Sustainable
Development, a Joint Program of Stanford University and the Institute for Policy Studies.
She can be reached at: Martha@ips-dc.org
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