[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 104 (Tuesday, August 2, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: August 2, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
THE WASHINGTON POST'S EXAMINATION OF SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA
Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, for several years, I have publicly
lamented about the lack of a strong constituency for Africa in the
United States.
Just 10 days ago in an interview with National Public Radio, I
suggested that if every Member of the House and Senate had received 100
letters from people back home saying we had to do something about
Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing then the response would
have been different.
Whether you ask me about what it was like to rally support for United
States aid to Somalia before the pictures of the hundreds of thousands
of starving men, women, and children reached the front pages of our
newspapers and our living rooms through television, or getting involved
in the conflicts in Liberia or Angola or the Sudan or many other
African states, it has nearly always been a struggle to captivate the
eye of America. The news media has not reported as much about the
tribulations that face African peoples as much as the conflict in
Bosnia or the Middle East.
I am pleased to rise today and commend the Washington Post for their
efforts to change this course. Their continuing series ``Continental
Drift,'' has been exceptional. The editors of the Washington Post have
noted that with the end of the cold war, sub-Saharan Africa ceased to
be the prize for which the East and West had vied over decades. In the
1990's, sub-Saharan Africa's 45 governments have been trying to make
their way in a changing world, grappling with new political and
economic systems that are often at odds with centuries-old traditions
and decades-old practices. This series, which has run occasionally over
the last few months, focuses on the continent of Africa, with its
successes and failures and their causes.
I understand that future stories will examine environmental
degradation, economics, health, religion, population growth, and
Africa's role in the world.
Mr. President, in case my colleagues have missed this substantial
effort, I ask unanimous consent that the series published to date be
printed in its entirety in the Congressional Record.
If all news organizations would make as strong a commitment we could
alleviate many future crises before they start.
The articles follow:
[From the Washington Post]
Mozambique at Peace As Angola Fights On; Ex-Portuguese Colonies Take
Different Roads
(By Paul Taylor)
Maputo, Mozambique.--For centuries, former Portuguese
colonies Mozambique and Angola have stood like bookends along
the southern base of Africa, sharing a hauntingly similar
history, especially over the course of the past generation.
But today, one is at war and the other is at peace.
The most compelling explanation is also the most ironic:
Mozambique is too poor to keep fighting.
``We don't have Angola's oil and diamonds, so there's no
way we can sustain a civil war here without outside help,''
said Carlos Cardoso, an independent publisher in the capital
of what is generally regarded as the world's poorest country.
There's another ``advantage'' that Mozambique enjoys: the
cautionary tale of Angola. Both countries won their
independence from Portugal in 1975, both immediately became
Marxist states, and both were plunged into civil wars
financed by outsiders. But Mozambicans did not sign a peace
accord until October 1992, nearly two years after Angolans
did--and just as Angola's fragile peace was falling apart. It
has left a deep impression.
``Angola is everyone's negative point of reference here,''
said Aldo Ajello, head of the U.N. Operation in Mozambique.
To avoid another peacekeeping fiasco, the United Nations
sent some 7,000 troops here, compared with the 400 it had
assigned to oversee military demobilization in Angola.
Everyone now agrees the 400 figure was a bad misjudgment--
one that made it too easy for Jonas Savimbi, leader of
Angola's UNITA rebels, to flout the demobilization deadlines
and keep his best men and materiel hidden away in the bush,
so they were ready to return to war when Angola's first
democratic election did not go his way.
Not everyone is convinced, however, that a larger
peacekeeping force in Angola could have changed the dynamics
that much. ``If you need 7,000 troops in Mozambique, you
probably needed 50,000 in Angola, and you still might not
have been able to control the situation,'' said Philip
Clarke, director of the U.N. World Food Program in
Mozambique, who held the same job in Angola. ``There's not
the same hatreds here as in Angola. There, you have a few
big tribes with a history of animosity. Here there are 19
different tribes, and they tend to blend into one
another.''
Even with the larger peacekeeping force here, many of the
demobilization deadlines have been missed, just as in Angola,
and the new joint army is likely to be just a skeleton force,
as it was in Angola.
But Ajello, while frustrated by the delays, doubts that
Mozambique's election, set for Oct. 27-28, will lead to a
resumption in hostilities, as it did in Angola. Even though
the formal demobilization process has gone slowly, the war-
weary soldiers of both sides have made it clear--with riots
and mutinies at their assembly areas--that they are fed up
with their generals and want to grab their demobilization pay
and go back to their villages.
``Whoever says, `We'll go back to war if we don't like the
result,' will get laughed at,'' said Cardoso, ``because
everyone knows nobody has an army.''
Then there's the personality factor, which also seems to be
running in Mozambique's favor. Savimbi's opposite number
here, rebel leader Afonso Dhlakama of the Mozambique National
Resistance, is 42--18 years younger than Savimbi--and seems
to understand that even if he loses the coming election, he
has a bright future as an opposition political leader.
In the 1980s, when Savimbi and Dhlakama were the two
highest-profile anti-communist guerrilla leaders in Africa,
Savimbi won the hearts of conservative groups in Europe and
the United States, who hailed him as a true democrat. But
Dhlakama was rebuffed because his faction was so closely
identified with the apartheid regime in South Africa and with
brutality against civilians.
Now Savimbi has lost his old friends in the West, while
Dhlakama is making new ones among diplomats who have taken
not of his generally good record so far in adhering to the
peace process.
Dhlakama's commitment to democracy will not really be
tested until the returns come in from the October election.
But if, like Savimbi, he loses and wants to fight back, it is
unlikely he will have any troops to go along with him.
____
With Mischievous Outsiders Gone, Angola Creates Its Own Suffering;
Devastating Civil War Follows Years as Colony and Cold War Pawn
(By Paul Taylor)
Dondo, Angola.--Antonio dos Anjos, a 15-month-old war
victim, has sunken eyes, twig-like limbs and a case of
cholera that will not kill me, thanks to the kindness of
strangers.
His doctor is a Nigerian, his nurse a Minnesotan. An
Australian is the supply officer at the therapeutic feeding
center at Antonio's displaced persons camp; a Norwegian is
the water engineer.
They are part of an international relief effort that has
kept Angola from becoming another of this decade's
humanitarian catastrophes, on the order of Somalia, Rwanda or
Bosnia.
Unfortunately, the kindness of strangers has not rescued
Angola from itself. A mineral-rich southwest African nation
of 11.2 million, Angola is home to one of Africa's most
intractable post-colonial civil wars, now approaching its
20th year and well past the half-million mark in deaths.
Nor have strangers always come in kindness. Over the span
of just two decades, this country has been a Portuguese
colony, a Soviet client state, a superpower battleground, a
failed object of New World Order democracy initiatives and a
starving recipient of First World food aid.
It hardly seems to matter anymore if the outsiders come for
mischievous purposes or noble ones. Either way, Angolans keep
suffering and dying. ``If you want to make a case that the
industrialized world still doesn't understand how to deal
with Africa, Angola is a pretty good example,'' a Western
diplomat said.
In a sense, Angola is the whole post-colonial African
tragedy writ small. While most of the rest of the planet
moves toward democracy and free markets, this nation is stuck
in its own hellish orbit, with a dysfunctional command
economy and a civil war fueled by the momentum of greed and
power.
It seems beside the point to argue who is most to blame.
There is more than enough to spread around--from the
Portuguese colonizers who never prepared Angola for
independence, to the superpowers who treated it like a
plaything, to the Angolan combatants themselves, who have
never found the courage or will to make peace.
The war could well get deadlier. Last month, just as U.N.-
sponsored peace talks showed glimmers of progress, fighting
intensified throughout the country. The formerly Marxist
government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has launched
a major offensive, bombing rebel-controlled areas in the
central highlands and the north. The rebel movement, the
National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known as
UNITA and led by Jonas Savimbi, is using artillery to pound
government-held cities, including one, Cuito, heavily
populated by its own supporters.
The flare-up forced curtailment of what for the previous
six months had been the U.N. World Food Program's largest
airlift. If the relief flights cannot resume soon, up to 2
million Angolans dependent on food aid face the prospect of a
war-induced famine. The state-run Angolan News Agency
reported last weekend that people in Cuito are eating mice
and plant roots to stay alive.
Because Angola's calamity has been spread over two decades,
it has rarely found its way onto the world's front pages or
television screens. But the cumulative death toll of more
than 500,000 here rivals that of any of today's higher-
profile tragedies.
It is a disaster for which the United States, Russia and
other outsiders clearly bear responsibility. While they come
now as relief workers and would-be peacemakers, in the 1970s
and 1980s they came with arms, armies and ambitions, making
Angola a pawn in the Cold War. The United States armed and
supported UNITA, which was also helped by an invasion force
from white-ruled South Africa. Moscow backed the Marxist
government and enlisted Cuban troops to prop it up.
Since the start of the post-Cold War 1990s, the United
States, Russia, Portugal and the United Nations have all
tried to coax the combatants here toward a political power-
sharing arrangement similar to the one that brought South
Africa through its transition from white-minority rule to
democracy. Yet they have discovered that formulas imposed by
outsiders are ineffective if the parties themselves do not
trust one another.
At various stages since 1975, the war here has been waged
under the banner of ideology, ethnicity or class animosity.
Nowadays, stripped of outside patrons, it seems mainly about
power, money and ego.
Since fighting resumed in late 1992, the war has taken an
estimated 200,000 lives, on top of 350,000 from 1975 to 1990.
Most of the casualties have been civilians. Angola has some
100,000 amputees, possibly the highest number per capita in
the world, and an estimated 10 million unexploded land mines.
Despite a nine-month round of U.N.-supervised peace talks
in neighboring Zambia that, on paper, has brought the parties
close to an agreement on a cease-fire, demobilization and
political power-sharing, diplomats here say the conflict's
dynamics still tilt toward war, not peace.
For one thing, the dos Santos government appears to have
the advantage militarily, and its generals seem determined to
cripple UNITA before agreeing to any cease-fire.
Also, the combatants already made peace once, under the
prodding of the United States, Portugal and the Soviet Union,
only to have the war resume when Savimbi claimed that the
U.N.-certified 1992 election he lost had been stolen. Peace
will likely prove more elusive the second time around.
But perhaps the most intractable problem is that while most
Angolans are impoverished, Angola holds enough mineral wealth
to fuel both parties' war machines indefinitely, and there is
a deadly equilibrium in the way the spoils are divided.
The government draws revenue from offshore oil wells that
produce 550,000 barrels a day, according to official Angolan
estimates. UNITA draws at least $100 million a year--perhaps
much more--from diamonds it extracts from mines in
northeastern Angola, according to a calculation by trade
specialists in South Africa. UNITA representatives smuggle
the diamonds to Zaire and sell them through middlemen to De
Beers, the South African diamond giant.
``This war is between Angola's two main tribes: oil and
diamonds,'' said one disillusioned relief worker.
This all raises a knotty question about humanitarian
assistance. By feeding Angola's poor victims, is the world
also indirectly fueling its wealthy warriors? According to
the United Nations, the government spends 2 percent of its
budget on education and 2 percent on health. Nearly all the
rest goes for bombs and land mines that create more business
for relief workers.
``In a sense, we are blackmailed,'' said Mike McDonagh,
head of Concern, an Ireland-based relief agency. ``If we
weren't here, there would be a massive famine. But by coming,
we may be making it easier for the war to go on.''
Manuela Aranda da Silva, the U.N. coordinator for
humanitarian aid in Angola, said, ``We have prevented a
catastrophe here.'' He noted that about a thousand Angolans a
day were dying of starvation and war-related diseases before
the U.N. relief effort geared up late last year, aided by
about 50 nongovernmental organizations.
In theory, by providing more than $150 million in food aid
this year, the United Nations has acquired a lever to nudge
the combatants toward peace. In practice, however, the
combatants more often use the aid as a club, refusing
military clearance for relief flights whenever they want to
punish or pressure the other side. ``Neither side seems to
give a damn about Angolans,'' said one relief worker. ``You
can get pretty cynical here pretty fast.''
This week, 11 of the humanitarian organizations working in
Angola appealed to dos Santos and Savimbi to stop the
killing, respect the neutrality of the relief effort and
``reflect on the appalling moral consequences of the current
course of events.''
But critics say U.N. hands are not entirely clean either.
In 1991-92, the United Nations tried to supervise the peace
process with 400 unarmed military advisers--``an inadequate
force,'' officials now acknowledge. Both sides failed to
demobilize their forces fully, and the United Nations lacked
the clout to respond. When Savimbi took issue with the
election results, the core of his army was ready to fight
again.
If there is a new peace agreement, the United Nations says,
it will take at least 5,000 troops to supervise it. But few
countries are likely to send troops until the two sides show
a commitment to demobilization. And neither side is prepared
to disarm until U.N. troops arrive to protect them against an
enemy they will never trust.
To break the logjam in peace talks, Alioune Blondin Beye,
the U.N. special representative to Angola, has recruited
South African President Nelson Mandela as a mediator. Mandela
held regional peace talks this month in Pretoria with the
presidents of Angola, Zaire and Mozambique and hopes to meet
soon with Savimbi, an old foe of Mandela's African National
Congress.
Savimbi, 60, a popular figure and gifted general, began in
the 1960s as an anti-colonial guerrilla leader influenced by
the teachings of Mao Zedong. When a larger rival anti-
colonial movement, the Popular Liberation Movement of Angola,
known as the MPLA, received support from the Soviet Union,
Savimbi cast himself as an anti-communist and sought funding
from the CIA, which considered Angola the front line of
Soviet expansionism in sub-Saharan Africa.
The MPLA became the government when Portugal pulled out in
1975. American aid to Savimbi stopped soon after but resumed
in the Reagan era, during which the United States channeled
an estimated $250 million in military aid to UNITA. Military
experts estimate the Soviets may have lavished 10 times as
much on their clients. The Soviet Union also encouraged Cuba
to dispatch troops to Angola to defend the MPLA, while South
Africa mounted an invasion to help UNITA uproot the communist
government.
Savimbi lost some of his democratic credentials when he was
accused by his own supporters of killing high-level
dissidents within UNITA. He lost even more when he refused to
accept the 1992 election results. His UNITA force is subject
to a U.N.-backed embargo that is to be tightened after Sunday
if he does not accept the peace proposal worked out in
Zambia. UNITA has refused to embrace the peace plan unless it
gives the rebels control of the provincial capital of Huambo,
a UNITA stronghold.
Savimbi now casts the conflict in ethnic and populist
terms. He says it pits his large but poor Ovimbundu tribe of
the central highlands against the Mbundu and other relative
economic elites who live along the coast. But it is unclear
how much ethnicity really matters in this fight. ``I talked
to the headmistress of a school in Cuito. She lost her
husband and six of her seven children when UNITA shelled the
city last year, and she lost her seventh child this year,''
McDonagh said. ``And the thing is, she is Ovimbundu and a
Savimbi supporter, as are most of the people in Cuito.''
The MPLA has killed its own too. Last month a government
MiG accidentally bombed a school in the government-controlled
town of Waku Kungo, killing 89 children. The aging MiGs fly
high to avoid UNITA antiaircraft fire, and their bombs are
notoriously scattered. Still, the government's air
superiority is one reason it has retaken two of five
provincial capitals that UNITA grabbed after the election.
In its current offensive, the government is pushing
northward to try to cut off UNITA's access to diamonds and to
resupply routes in Zaire.
Meanwhile, displaced persons' camps fill the countryside.
In Dondo, 150 miles southeast of Luanda, the World Food
Program feeds 83,000 people cut off from their villages and
crops by land mines and fighting.
Even with the aid, the camp's therapeutic feeding center
loses 15 children a month to malnutrition. A recent cholera
outbreak claimed 43 lives in Dondo.
``The thing that gets me is that when the children die, I
have yet to see a mother cry,'' said Karen Easterday, a nurse
with World Vision, a relief organization.
``They seem to have lost all hope, and I guess they are
afraid to get emotionally involved. I cry, and they wonder
why I am crying.''
____
Military Rulers Drained Nigeria, Enriched Selves
(By Steve Coll and Cindy Shiner)
Lagos, Nigeria.--During the Cold War, East and West met
furtively in the hangars of Makurdi Air Base in central
Nigeria, the most populous country in sub-Saharan Africa and
a substantial prize in superpower competition for global
influence.
Soviet military advisers hovered around two dozen MiG-21
fighter jets supplied by Moscow to Nigeria's long-serving
military government.
British advisers watched over 15 Jaguar fighter-bombers
sold to balance the Soviet supplies.
Americans ferried supplied for nine C-130 transport planes.
Czechs tended approximately two dozen L-39 jet trainers
they had sold.
Italians carried spare parts for eight G-222 aircraft.
``The view as far as the British government and the
Americans were concerned was, `Here we have a large
population which has got tremendous potential as a force for
stability in West Africa, which could act as a role model for
democracy and act as a leader with its oil, minerals and
agricultural potential,''' recalled retired British air force
wing commander Ken Petrie, who was stationed in Nigeria from
1987 to 1990.
But today Makurdi is a Cold War ghost town and a military
shambles, a symbol not only of how Nigeria has lost its
strategic interest for the outside world, but of how its
military government has failed to take care of the country
and even of its own rank and file.
Riddled with corruption, pinched for funds and absorbed by
domestic turmoil, the Nigerian military regime now led by
Gen. Sani Abacha has largely stopped paying for maintenance
of its Cold War-era equipment. The neglect is lethal: In
1992, almost an entire generation of senior Nigerian
commanders from the country's military academy--163 people,
most of them high-ranking officers--died when their
overloaded, poorly maintained C-130 crashed after taking off
from Lagos's Murtala Mohammed Airport.
During 24 years of on-again, off-again military rule in
Nigeria, ``ruling cliques have not seized power on behalf of
the military as an institution, but from their own selfish
point of view, from greed,'' said a retired, wealthy Nigerian
general, David M. Jemibewon. ``If anything, they in fact set
out to destroy the institution, because if the military is
well equipped, there might be a challenge'' to their power.
At a time when militaries are in retreat from politics in
many areas of the Third World--from South and Central America
to Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent--armies in
large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa continue to pose a danger
not just to democracy and civilian populations, but to
themselves.
Overall military spending in sub-Saharan Africa is
declining in the aftermath of the Cold War. Some armies
loaded up with weapons by outside powers during the Cold War
are gradually demobilizing [see accompanying story]. But
African armies' crippling impact on politics and development
shows little sign of easing, despite a surge of democratic
movements in the region.
If military control of government is defined as the absence
of credible civilian authority over the army, then about two
dozen of sub-Saharan Africa's 45 countries are in such a
state today. Some, such as Angola and Sudan, are wracked by
devastating wars that claim tens of thousands of lives
annually. Others, such as Nigeria and Zaire, are large
regional leaders retarded by political repression and
economic decline.
The reasons why sub-Saharan African militaries hold such
sway when armies elsewhere are moving back to the barracks
are many and complex, according to African generals,
government officials, defense specialists and democracy
activists.
Shrinking economies in the region intensify competition
among all interest groups, including militaries, for limited
national wealth. State-dominated economic policies encourage
African elites, including generals, to believe that the only
way to get rich quickly is to get into government. A broad
erosion in public institutions enables those with weapons to
seize power and enrich themselves.
In oil-endowed Nigeria, the generals have done this in
style. Both active and retired, they live in sprawling
villas, work in $500-a-night hotel suites, travel frequently
to Europe and talk openly with colleagues and diplomats about
the homes, apartments, estates and even golf courses they own
in Europe and the United States.
``As long as they are in government you have a brand new
set of officers coming up who want to taste the spoils of
office,'' said Eluem Emeka Izeze, editor of the African
Guardian newspaper. ``Their mission is self-preservation.''
instrument of ethnic struggle
Equipment rusts and strategic air bases like Makurdi fall
into disuse because after the Cold War, and in the absence of
credible regional threats, ``the military elite recognize
quite honestly that the military is irrelevant in any
security sense,'' said Olufemi Otubanjo, a political
scientist at Nigeria's University of Ibadan. ``It's only
relevant as an instrument of domestic pacification.''
But to pacify a typical sub-Saharan African country, an
army almost inevitably becomes entangled in the ethnic and
tribal conflicts bequeathed by colonial borders.
Thus, Otubanjo added, besides a vehicle for economic and
social mobility, ``the military in most of Africa tends to be
an instrument of ethnic struggle.''
In giant Nigeria, in tiny Togo, in Zaire, in Congo, in
Liberia, in Sierra Leone and most bloodily of late in Rwanda,
fractured armies and militias provide the knife's edge of
wider struggles to allocate ethnic and tribal power, as well
as material resources, in fragile nation-states.
Liberian rebel Charles Taylor's National Patriotic Front
set up its own government in its own capital, ruling over a
territory with its own currency. At least six factions vie
for control of the country's gold, diamonds, rubber and
valuable hardwoods.
This thirst for money, power and ethnic advantage has
reached such an exaggerated point in some countries, such as
Nigeria, that the military is divided internally among
competing, sometimes ethnically based cliques of officers
desperate for a piece of the action before they retire.
``In West Africa, it's not so much the military taking over
as an institution, but a group of individuals,'' said L.S.
Aminu, a defense specialist at the government-funded Nigerian
Institute of International Affairs. ``Yes, they come out of
the military, but they do not follow military doctrine.''
Repetition of this process has produced, among other
things, a breakdown in military discipline and a politically
volatile schism between greedy senior officers and ambitious
lower ranks suffering from neglect. Economic and political
strife has prompted three massive looting sprees by Zaire's
army in as many years, resulting in hundreds of deaths and
the evacuation of at least 15,000 foreigners. Soldiers have
now begun demanding their often-delayed monthly salaries in
dollars.
As a result of such breakdowns, military intervention in
sub-Saharan African politics has become not just horizontal--
with a unified army stepping sideways to seize power from
civilian politicians--but also vertical, with junior ranks
mutinying against senior commanders.
Sierra Leone's head of state, army Capt. Valentine
Strasser, who is only 28, seized power in 1992 with a group
of junior officers because, while fighting a guerrilla war,
the young officers became angered by the lack of medical
treatment, food and ammunition available at the front.
The broad complaint many Africans have about this
generation of military leaders, young and old, is that they
have lost touch with reality.
Nigeria is arguably the most important case in point. With
a quarter of Africa's population, a preponderance of the
continent's surplus oil and about 100,000 men under arms, the
country is both a bellwether of sub-Saharan Africa and a
weighty force in regional affairs.
``Having a military regime in Nigeria constitutes a lot of
danger for Africa itself,'' said human rights activist Femi
Falana, president of the country's National Association of
Democratic Lawyers.
A Nigerian general commands Gambia's small army. About
10,000 Nigerian peacekeepers are stationed in Liberia. Others
have served in Somalia and Lebanon. And Nigeria's military
has just announced a new program to train Sierra Leone's
young army.
A year ago, Nigeria appeared ready to provide a different
example. After a decade of stagnant and sometimes repressive
military rule, peaceful democratic elections seemed to have
brought a civilian businessman, Moshood Abiola, to power.
But the country's ruling military council, led then by Gen.
Ibrahim Babangida, annulled the results, charging vote fraud,
and reasserted military authority. The military has ruled
Nigeria for 24 of its 34 years of independence, assisted by
the repeated failures of civilian administrations and
civilian politicians.
One year after that aborted election, Nigeria seems
possessed by an almost surreal mood of self-disgusted
inertia.
It's not just opposition politicians who declare that the
military has lost touch with reality; retired generals,
senior government officials, even cabinet ministers say the
same.
One well-placed government official, after offering a
laundry list of corruption allegations and malfeasance by the
generals to whom he reports, said in a tone that blended
wonderment and disgust, ``If you are going to steal money,
you have to do it with a view that your children will be able
to steal money too.''
Foreign Minister Baba Gana Kingibe, speaking of the
generals, said: ``Their credibility has progressively eroded
. . . such that right now people are not exactly enamored of
the military and people are anxious to see the back of the
military. That is really the position we have reached.''
Since Abiola was arrested last month and charged with
treason, strikes and protests have spread from Lagos to
several other cities. On Monday, 20 people were killed in
Lagos during demonstrations demanding Abiola's release and
Abacha's resignation.
Yet few of these officials and few outside analysts believe
the Nigerian military is in any immediate danger of being
pushed from power.
One reason is its elite presidential guard. The guard is a
typical feature of undemocratic sub-Saharan African regimes--
a coup-deterring force recruited for its personal loyalty to
the commander in chief. A 1,500-man brigade of guards in
Nigeria's inland capital, Abuja, and a similar-sized elite
force in Lagos, the country's commercial capital, are
described by military sources as the linchpin of Abacha's
internal security apparatus.
As in other undemocratic African countries, Abacha's
presidential guard unit is drawn from his own ethnic group in
his home town.
* * * * *
____
Downsizing Armies Is Difficult, Costly; World Powers That Aided Cold
War Buildup Offer Little for Demobilization
(By Jennifer Parmelee)
Makalle, Ethiopia.--By age 26, Khadija Noor Hussein had
spent half a lifetime in the trenches of Ethiopia's long
civil war. Now she is making up for the youth she lost to the
gun.
In a crowded classroom of third-graders learning basic
English at the Emperor Johannes School in this northern
regional capital, Khadija listened attentively, quietly
nursing her 18-month-old baby--named Light of Peace in the
Tigrinya language--from a back-row bench. Beside her sat
other members of the Tigray People's Liberation Front, the
linchpin of a rebel movement that toppled the dictatorial
Marxist regime of Mengistu Haile Mariam in May 1991.
They too have traded AK-47s and rocket launchers for
schoolbooks in the first stage of a long process to
demobilize the rebel force that now doubles as Ethiopia's
national army.
``This is the best opportunity of my life,'' Khadija said
with an infectious smile. ``I want to continue all the way to
university.''
On a continent tormented by civil war, Khadija is one of
the luckier survivors. Millions of former soldiers and
guerrillas throughout Africa face cloudy futures as their
countries struggle to switch from decades of high military
spending and big armies--largely the fruit of Cold War
battles across the continent--to the new tests of peace and
reconstruction.
With no battles to fight, the mostly young ex-combatants
often find themselves idle, with limited employment prospects
in nations that rank among the world's poorest.
``All these young people who know how to use weapons and
little else. . . . They are like a time bomb,'' said Yusuf
Abdi Gabobe, formerly a unit commander in a rebel group that
defeated Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. ``They are the
biggest obstacle to successful reconstruction we have
today.''
In Ethiopia, Khadija, who was on the winning side of the
30-year civil war, has better chances to adapt to peace than
the estimated 500,000 men and boys who made up Mengistu's
fallen fighting force, once black Africa's largest and
best equipped.
While more than 200,000 ex-soldiers are being reintegrated
into their home communities, largely with a $5 million U.S.
aid grant, thousands more are shiftless, angry, without hope
in a country with a devastated economy. Many have turned to
banditry or begging at city street corners.
Ethiopia is only one of many African nations confronting
the bitter inheritance of war.
While 16 countries still face some form of civil conflict,
according to a recent U.N. tally, another nine now at peace
are trying to dismantle their war machines and reintegrate
the combatants--either into civil society or into slimmer
national armies. The nine are Mozambique, Ethiopia, Eritrea,
Chad, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Namibia and the self-
declared but unrecognized Republic of Somaliland in
northwestern Somalia.
Yet while Africa's wars have been generously funded in the
past, mostly by Cold War sponsors, efforts to defuse the
dangerous legacies of these wars have attracted far less
international support, aid experts say.
At the fortress-like U.N. headquarters in the Somali
capital, Mogadishu, Abdelgedir Sheikh, an economist who has
run the U.N. demobilization and disarmament office since it
opened last October, said he has no money to spend. Sheikh
had to beg and borrow to start up his first humble project
for demobilized militia gunmen--a poultry farm in Baidoa. He
secured a loan from the U.N. Department of Humanitarian
Affairs and rations from the U.N. World Food Program. ``I'm
just like a looter,'' he said with a short laugh.
In Angola, the process of demobilization never really got
going, with disastrous results.
From 1987 to 1991, as the U.S.-Soviet rivalry in Africa
flamed out, Angola was the leading importer of conventional
arms in sub-Saharan Africa, spending more than $3.6 billion
on weaponry, according to the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute. In 1991, the country ranked 14th in the
world in arms imports, even as the two rival superpowers--
Angola's top arms suppliers--were trying to coax the
government and rebels into a lasting peace.
Reversing the military buildup was not easy. Demobilization
and disarmament attracted few international funds--less than
$1,100 a soldier, according to a 1993 World Bank report. The
United Nations, without a legal mandate to do more than
verify, had only one observer in Angola per 333 soldiers.
Progress was slow and erratic. By the September 1992
election, 40,000 troops had yet to be demobilized, the
opposing forces were nearly intact, and the new, integrated
national army was still in skeletal form. When hostilities
broke out again after the rebels challenged their election
defeat, few were surprised.
In a similar case, Rwanda paid a high price for failing to
implement terms of peace accords negotiated last fall between
its government and the rebel Rwandan Patriotic Front. One of
the key provisions of that agreement was to integrate rebels,
largely from the Tutsi ethnic minority, into the Hutu-
dominated army.
But by the time President Juvenal Habyarimana was killed in
a plane crash April 6, igniting the cataclysm of violence,
little progress had been made: 600 Tutsi rebels were still
camped in the capital's parliament building. Soon, they were
on the streets, battling the soldiers with whom they had been
intended to integrate--a convenient excuse for the mostly
Hutu-inspired butchery.
The tragic lessons of Angola and Rwanda, however, appear
not to have been lost on the international community
operating in Mozambique since the October 1992 peace accords.
Demobilization has been assigned high priority--and money.
The head of U.N. peacekeeping, Aldo Ajello, vows that the
rebel and government armies will be merged in advance of any
elections, now scheduled for October. In addition, noting the
scarcity of job opportunities for the mostly unskilled
combatants--a third of them 18 or younger--the United Nations
will pay demobilized soldiers from both sides a monthly
salary for two years.
____
Surging Rwandan Rebels Vow to Share Power; Pledge Designed to Forestall
Further Tribal Bloodshed, Tutsi-Led Insurgents Declare
(By Jonathan C. Randal)
Kigali, Rwanda.--Rwanda's Tutsi-led rebel forces, now in
control of this battle-scarred capital and poised for total
victory after three months of civil war, have vowed to share
power with the Hutu tribal majority to spare this Central
African nation further carnage.
Rebel leaders who outlined the pledge say it is intended to
halt the cycle of Hutu-Tutsi violence that has convulsed the
country periodically in recent decades--culminating this
spring and summer in the slaughter of perhaps as many as a
half-million Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus at the hands of
Hutu government troops and government-backed Hutu gangs.
The tribal rampage--modern Africa's most horrific atrocity
and an act characterized by U.N. officials as genocide--was
touched off by the death of Rwanda's Hutu president in an
unexplained plane crash April 6 and reignited a dormant civil
war that negotiations between the Hutu regime and the rebel
Rwandan Patriotic Front had failed to resolve.
Rebel spokesmen have pointed out that they proposed Hutu-
Tutsi power sharing in a national unity government even
before the April massacres began but were rebuffed by a
government that claimed to speak for the 85 percent Hutu
majority in this country of 7.7 million. Indeed, throughout
weeks and months during which their families and neighbors
were being butchered by Hutus, rebel leaders seemed
determined to portray their movement as a responsible
alternative to a savage regime.
Nevertheless, with the rebels just beginning to solidify
their hold on the three-quarters of the country they now
occupy, it is difficult to assess how their vows of
evenhandedness will play out in dozens of towns and villages
where wholesale killing took place. Their promises of
conciliation have so far failed to sway the mass of Hutu
refugees who fled before the rebel assault, leaving the
countryside largely empty, crops withering in the fields and
an uncanny silence shrouding what once was one of Africa's
most densely populated nations.
Kigali's pre-war population of nearly 400,000 fell to about
35,000 as government troops retreated under rebel attack,
leaving a shall-pocked ruin of a city reeking of rotting
flesh. Many residents are now returning, but most seem to be
heeding government radio broadcasts warning that Hutus who
come back to the city will be killed by vengeful rebels.
Western sources said they are convinced that any rebel
atrocities have been relatively few compared to those of the
Hutu gangs, but they added that rebel leader Paul Kagame has
expressed fear that his men could be driven to excesses by
battle fatigue and the shock of learning that some relative
or friend had been killed by Hutus. The rebel leadership is
said to have meted out summary punishment among its forces in
several instances, including several rapes of Hutu women and
the assassination of Rwanda's archbishop.
In detailing their power-sharing proposal, rebel spokesmen
here noted that with perhaps as much as half the country's
Tutsi minority slain since April they now have little choice
but to seek Hutu cooperation in a new government if their
movement is to succeed where so many other successful African
guerrilla groups have failed. With all but a relative handful
of its moderate Hutu allies also slain by the old regime, the
rebels believe they must now deal with Hutu leaders who may
themselves have been involved in the killing.
Rebels say a national unity government would exclude only
two Hutu-led parties--the National Republican Movement of
Development and Democracy and the Coalition for the Defense
of the Republic--because they apparently were chiefly
responsible for organizing and inciting the anti-Tutsi
bloodbath. Rebel spokesman Wilson Rutayisure said he believes
that no more than ``300 to 400'' Hutu extremists should be
brought to trail for their roles in the slaughter. That
number, he said, includes ``some politicians, some members of
the middle class, some journalists, some army officers, some
members of the civil service--those who planned the
genocide.''
``If this small group can be punished,'' he said, ``it
would be a good example that you can no longer wipe out a
whole ethnic group and get away with it.''
The rebel pledges of forbearance seemed all the more
exceptional in light of the unquestioned military triumph of
Kagame, 38, who has led the rebel forces to the brink of
victory against seemingly insurmountable odds. With about
20,000 men, he has consistently outfought and outmaneuvered a
government force twice that size with tactics that have been
described as ``absolutely brilliant'' by a senior Western
military analyst here.
Perhaps as compensation for this, rebel leaders
acknowledged they want to amend some of their early power-
sharing proposals to guarantee them control of more that 40
percent of the amry--the figure set forth in negotiations
last August aimed at regulating relations between the Hutu
government and the Tutsi minority.
Almost to a man, rank-and-file guerrillas use the same
arguments as their leaders in favor of sharing power with the
defeated Hutus, yet close observers of the rebel movement are
convinced that alongside its purported vision of tribal peace
and multi-party democracy thrives a yearning for ethnic
hegemony.
Tutsis had ruled Rwanda as a tribal oligarchy for centuries
before being driven from power in 1960, and the two peoples
have battled sporadically since. Now the rebels make no
secret of their demands that 2 million Tutsis they say were
driven into exile during tribal turmoil over the last three
decades must be allowed to return.
____
Africa: Bloodied, Torn at Its Ethnic Seams
(By Jennifer Parmelee)
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.--Africa is living in a season of
extremes. Two temblors have shaken the continent: one, South
Africa, a triumph of the politics of reconciliation; the
other Rwanda, a war of the tribal passions that are Africa's
worst political enemy.
In South Africa, the government led by Nelson Mandela of
the African National Congress is for the most part
cooperating smoothly both with the white-led, formerly ruling
National Party and the Inkatha Freedom Party, dominated by
the Zulu tribe, nearly three months after the country's
historic multiracial elections. Before the elections, more
than 13,000 South Africans died in four years of political
violence, mostly between supporters of the ANC and Inkatha in
feuds motivated in part by ethnic rivalry.
But when Inkatha leader and Zulu chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi
bowed to the democratic process on the eve of the polling,
nudging along the country's biggest tribe and most formidable
political ethnic force, the incidence of violence plummeted.
Since April, the spirit of inter-tribal reconciliation
kindled by Mandela and former white president Frederik W. de
Klerk has guided the new government: de Klerk is a deputy
president, and Inkatha's stronghold in KwaZulu/Natal Province
has seen a continuing reduction of strife.
Rwanda, a tiny and densely populated central African
republic wounded by recurrent tribal pogroms, is still
wracked by violence three months after the alleged
assassination of its president triggered ethnic carnage on a
scale hitherto virtually unknown in Africa. An estimated
half-million Rwandans, mostly members of the minority Tutsi
tribe, have been slaughtered by militias of the majority and
ruling Hutus.
Between the polar extremes of South Africa and Rwanda lie a
multitude of African countries wrestling with multiethnic and
multi-religious heritages--perhaps the greatest threat to
their stability today. Sub-Sahara Africa is divided into 45
states--it is the most Balkanized land mass anywhere. Yet
those divisions pale next to the hundreds of unofficial
boundaries among tribes and clans, religions and languages.
There are about 50 major languages spoken in Africa, and as
many as 2,000 languages less widely spoken.
Clan politics is hardly unique to Africa in today's
fractious world. In some ways, according to Ali Mazrui,
professor of African studies at Cornell University, African
tribes have provided a strong and valuable network of
extended family, a system of collective welfare and a refuge
from states that often have been rapacious.
However, colonial borders that ignored African realities--
haphazardly slicing through tribal territories--combined with
the upheavals of post-independence politics, have made Africa
uniquely susceptible to tribalism's centrifugal pulls,
observers say. Most of the continent's civil wars--at least
20 in three decades--have had a significant ethnic component.
Such forces appeal even more in an era of tremendous
anxiety within Africa, already the world's poorest continent
and growing poorer. Most countries are faced with huge and
mounting debts, their economies and agricultures stagnant--or
shrinking. Meanwhile, their populations are skyrocketing,
foreign aid is declining and their governments are
overwhelmingly incompetent and corrupt. The absence of a
significant middle class, the ballast of civil society, also
contributes to instability.
Today more than ever, Africa is prey to what historian
Basil Davidson calls ``the curse of the nation state.''
African states remain artificial entities still struggling to
find legitimacy in the eyes of their citizenry.
Davidson, Mazrui and many other historians and political
scientists argue that much of Africa's tribal conflict can be
blamed on the inheritance of highly centralized states that,
in standard colonial ``divide and rule'' style, delegated
most power to a favored tribe or tribes. After independence,
this characteristic evolved into political systems in which
the winners--usually the dominant ethnic group--took all and
losers got precious little. Many of the dispossessed, from
Eritrea to Sierra Leone, took up arms.
This was true in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. The
minority Tutsis--a Nilotic, cattle-rearing tribe that held
sway for centuries as feudal overlords of the more numerous,
agrarian Hutus--were overwhelmingly favored by their German
and Belgian colonizers. Long-limbed and lighter-skinned, the
Tutsis won educational and economic privileges; the stockier,
darker Hutus were oppressed. This potent dynamic of
discrimination fueled three decades of massacres after
independence.
Rwanda was bathed in blood from birth, with 100,000 to
200,000 killed in a five-year period following independence,
as Hutus avenged their unhappy history. Hutus seized control
of government institutions, including the army, while Tutsis
fled into exile, ultimately coalescing into an armed
opposition group that invaded in 1990, igniting a three-year
civil war.
Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana's April 6 death in an
unexplained plane crash--militant Hutus said it was caused by
rockets--provided government troops and Hutu gangs with a
pretext for a systematic campaign of political killings that
swiftly turned into an all-out slaughter of Tutsi civilians,
and reignited the civil war after a year of truce.
In Burundi, the minority Tutsis managed to retain their
grip on power until multi-party elections last year brought a
Hutu to the presidency for the first time. His assassination
four months later, apparently by the Tutsi-run
security forces, ignited a four-week tribal bloodbath last
fall that claimed at least 100,000 lives.
His successor, Cyprien Ntaryamira, also a Hutu, was killed
in the plane crash with Habyarimana, but Burundi avoided
Rwanda's violent reaction. Diplomats, aid workers and U.N.
officials have suggested that the memory of Burundi's most
recent experience in ethnic bloodletting was fresh enough to
stay any impulse to commit tribal slaughter again any time
soon.
Many African countries have been similarly hamstrung by
their colonial legacies.
In Nigeria, home to at least 250 ethnic groups, British
colonialists catered to the large Fulani and Hausa tribes in
the Muslim north. Northern groups have maintained hegemony in
Nigerian politics ever since, a reality that sparked the
secessionist war of southern Biafra in 1967-70 and continues
today with the northern-dominated military's denial of power
to Moshood Abiola, a southerner who was the apparent victor
of civilian presidential elections last year that the
military government annulled before results were announced.
The Baganda in Uganda were granted similarly preferential
treatment.
In Sudan, British treated north and south as separate but
unequal entities, and the two halves have been at war for 28
of the 38 years since independence.
And in Liberia, U.S. governments bolstered the rule of
Americo-Liberians, descendants of freed American slaves, at
the expense of indigenous tribes. Conflict between those
groups persist to this day.
Unscrupulous African governments also have played one group
against another for their own ends.
In South Africa, the white-minority government fanned
hostilities among black opposition groups to forestall a
joint frontal assault on their white rulers. Pretoria divided
black South Africans into 10 tribally based homelands, a
classic divide-and-rule tactic in a country where blacks
outnumber white by a 5 to 1 ratio.
Over time, however, the strategy backfired. Not only did
the common experience of racial oppression unite blacks from
different tribes, but the fact that the engineers of the
apartheid system of racial separation had tried to manipulate
ethnicity so shamelessly wound up tainting the concept as a
force in black liberation politics. Buthelezi tried to play
the ethnic card earlier this year, but it took him only so
far.
In Kenya, human rights groups have accused President Daniel
arap Moi's government of inciting clashes between Moi's
minority Kalenjin ethnic group and the larger Kikuyu and Luo
tribes in the country's most fertile farm country. The
escalating violence, which has displaced thousands of people
and disrupted agriculture in a drought year, threatens to
boil over into civil war, according to the human rights
organization Africa Watch.
Ethnicity also has often exacerbated other divisions in
Africa, between landed and landless, farmers and herders,
haves and have-nots. Competition among regions or religions--
Muslim, Christian, animist--is another sectarian flashpoint.
Some of the continent's tensions, if they were between
blacks and whites, would be called racism. In Somalia and
Ethiopia, for example, the gracile, dominant people of mixed
Semitic and African heritage have often looked down on their
``purely African'' compatriots in southern regions, whom they
have used in the past as slave labor.
In spite of the profusion of actual and potential fault
lines across the continent, many states in Africa have
managed to forge a national identity, expressed in symbols
such as sports teams, popular music, national languages and
dress.
Virtually every African state that drew up post-
independence constitutions--Nigeria was an exception--avoided
federalism on grounds that it would encourage groups or
regions to go their own way. The Organization of African
Unity, in its 1963 charter, reflected this concern when it
enshrined the sanctity of colonial borders, and it regularly
denounces the bogeyman of secession.
Multi-party politics also was widely regarded as a recipe
for disintegration--and this view frequently became an excuse
for leaders to maintain an iron, one-party grip on their
people in the name of ``nation building.'' In a host of post-
independence countries--including Nigeria, Somalia, Uganda
and Sudan--the introduction of a multi-party system saw
dozens of small parties spring up overnight, mostly along
sectarian lines; all mentioned wound up under military rule,
often seen as an antidote to chaos.
The preponderance of states swung between anarchy and
tyranny: authoritarian in nature, they lacked the moral
authority to do anything but hold their disparate
constituencies in am embrace of force; they had yet to learn
the South African lesson that legitimacy--and thus
stability--is created when opponents are given a stake in the
system.
``Focusing on ethnic tensions misses the point,'' argued I.
William Zartman, director of African studies at the Johns
Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies
in Washington. ``It is the collapse of authority structures
that opens the ways for ethnic conflict, not the reverse,
because a strong state can handle ethnic strife and maintain
law and order.''
Such was the case in Somalia, where U.S.-supported dictator
Mohamed Siad Barre diverted the spoils of power to his own
small clan, thus destroying any advantage flowing from a
nation blessed with a single language, religion and people.
Upon his overthrow in 1991, Somalis angrily set upon any
outpost of the government that had failed to serve them--
schools, hospitals, even power lines.
Today, as the ethos of democracy is preached from one
corner of the continent to another, many leaders are looking
to new or re-tooled constitutions to unite their fractured
constituencies.
African leaders must work quickly, however, especially
given the economic free fall that heightens political
tensions. Secession is on the lips of many groups--from the
Barotse of Zambia to the Tuaregs in Mali, the southerners in
Sudan and Somali-speakers in Ethiopia's Ogaden region.
In Malawi, whose first-ever multi-party elections in May
dislodged Africa's longest-serving liberation leader, H.
Kamuzu Banda, political parties already reflect regional
antagonisms. In Zambia, democratically elected President
Frederick Chiluba, who disdained the tribal balancing act of
predecessor Kenneth Kaunda by installing a predominantly
Bemba-speaking government, faces rising dissent in the former
Kingdom of Barotseland.
In Ethiopia, which is attempting to negotiate the leap from
military dictatorship to democracy, most parties mirror
ethnic divisions.
South Africa, while on the multi-party trail, also favors
decentralization, although the relationship between the
central government and regional authorities remains to be
worked out. In what is generally perceived as an astute
political compromise, the charter gives largely ceremonial
powers to the Zulu King, while any party that wins at least 5
percent of the vote gets a cabinet seat.
``The South African model is one way of stabilizing ethnic
tensions because everyone will get part of the cake,'' said
Benyamin Neuberger, a political scientist at the Open
University of Tel Aviv.
Today, Ethiopia is trying an experiment in ethnically based
democracy that it acknowledges is a high-stakes enterprise.
Most parties are tribally based, and a new draft constitution
is intended to devolve power to nine regions drawn largely
along tribal lines. Its most controversial clause allows for
self-determination up to and including secession. Many
Ethiopians say such language will erode the bonds that the
country's various nationalities share and invite a Soviet-
style breakup into ethnic fiefdoms.
Ethiopian President Meles Zenawi says his government has no
choice but to recognize the diversity that was so long
suppressed. Some of the experts, but not all, agree.
Filip Reyntjens, an African law specialist at the
University of Antwerp, acknowledges ``a big risk'' in
codifying recognition of ethnic diversity and the ``right''
to secession. But he added: ``Africans have paid a higher
price for ignoring or suppressing ethnicity, rather than
accommodating it * * *. What's happening in Ethiopia
constitutes a dramatic departure from what's happened in
Africa over the past 30 years.''
Kifle Wadajo, a foreign minister in the government of Haile
Selassie who heads the constitutional commission, agrees.
``The dangers of ethnic disintegration have been used as an
argument to destroy democracy in Africa, again and again * *
*. It's been an uncomfortable topic, especially among the
elites, ``Kifle said. ``The challenge we have is to promote
the well-being and rights of groups, enriching all of us,
while at the same time promoting our common interest.''
Correspondent Paul Taylor in Johannesburg contributed to
this report.
* * * * *
Clan politics is hardly unique to Africa in today's
fractious world. In some ways according to Ali Mazrui,
professor of African studies at Cornell University, African
Tribes have provided a strong and valuable network of
extended family, a system of collective welfare and a refuge
from states that often have been rapacious.
However, colonial borders that ignored African realities--
haphazardly slicing through tribal territories--combined with
the upheavals of post-independence politics, have made Africa
uniquely susceptible to tribalism's centrifugal pulls,
observers say. Most of the continent's civil wars--at least
20 in three decades--have had a significant ethnic component.
Such forces appeal even more in an era of tremendous
anxiety within Africa, already the world's poorest continent
and growing poorer. Most countries are faced with huge and
mounting debts, their economies and agricultures stagnant--or
shrinking. Meanwhile, their populations are skyrocketing,
foreign aid is declining and their governments are
overwhelmingly incompetent and corrupt. The absence of a
significant middle class, the ballast of civil society, also
contributes to instability.
Today more than ever, Africa is prey to what historian
Basil Davidson calls ``the curse of the nation state.''
African states remain artificial entities still struggling to
find legitimacy in the eyes of their citizenry.
Davidson, Mazrui and many other historians and political
scientists argue that much of Africa's tribal conflict can be
blamed on the inheritance of highly centralized states that,
in standard colonial ``divide and rule'' style, delegated
most power to a favored tribe or tribes. After independence,
this characteristic evolved into political systems in which
the winners--usually the dominant ethnic group--took all and
losers got precious little. Many of the dispossessed, from
Eritrea to Sierra Leone, took up arms.
This was true in Rwanda and neighboring Burundi. The
minority Tutsis--a Nilotic, cattle-rearing tribe that held
sway for centuries as feudal overlords of the more numerous,
agrarian Hutus--were overwhelmingly favored by their German
and Belgian colonizers. Long-limbed and lighter-skinned, the
Tutsis won educational and economic privileges; the stockier,
darker Hutus were oppressed. This potent dynamic of
discrimination fueled three decades of massacres after
independence.
Rwanda was bathed in blood from birth, with 100,000 to
200,000 killed in a five-year period following independence,
as Hutus avenged their unhappy history. Hutus seized control
of government institutions, including the army, while Tutis
fled into exile, ultimately coalescing into an armed
opposition group that invaded in 1990, igniting a three-year
civil war.
Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana's April 6 death in an
unexplained plane crash--militant Hutus said it was caused by
rockets--provided government troops and Hutu gangs with a
pretext for a systematic campaign of political killings that
swiftly turned into an all-out slaughter of Tutsi civilians,
and reignited the civil war after a year of truce.
In Burundi, the minority Tutsis managed to retain their
grip on power until multi-party elections last year brought a
Hutu to the presidency for the first time.
* * * * *
____
An African Giant Falls Under Its Own Weight; Years of Greed Make Zaire
Chaotic State
(By Keith B. Richburg)
Kinshasa, Zaire.--The once elegant, European-style
boulevards of this capital are overrun with debris. Largely
abandoned government buildings are obscured behind elephant
grass and overgrown trees. In a perverse reversal of the
usual development maxim, an opulent colonial capital is being
overtaken by the bush. Kinshasa was carved out of the jungle.
Now the jungle is coming to claim the land back.
As sub-Saharan Africa struggles to find stability in the
1990s, Zaire offers a poignant--and ominous--lesson. Unlike
Somalia and Liberia, this big, rich country has not collapsed
into civil war. It has not, like tiny Rwanda, imploded after
a brutal campaign of tribal slaughter. But Zaire, the
region's second-largest country and one of its potentially
wealthiest, is equally desperate: It has crumbled from
official corruption and greed, incompetence, neglect and
decay.
The institutions that once defined the Zairian state have
all ceased to function. Civil servants and teachers are not
paid, roads and bridges are left in disrepair, public
hospitals are not supplied, the public telephone system has
disintegrated. Child malnutrition is on the rise, and the
country is ravaged by AIDS and a rebirth of sleeping sickness
that has caused entire villages simply to lie down and die.
``Precolonial'' is how one Western resident described
Zaire. ``It's like Europe in the Dark Ages,'' said another
Westerner, a diplomat with long experience here. ``Zaire just
proves that societies don't depend on the existence of a
state. Societies can function on their own.''
While the cause of Zaire's crisis may be distinct--and the
extent of its free fall extreme--this country in many ways
stands as a microcosm of what many Africans and others say is
a continent-wide phenomenon.
Since the United States and the Soviet Union ended a
rivalry that shaped the politics of sub-Saharan Africa
through much of the last 30 years, the region has struggled
to find a new basis for stability and development free of
foreign tutelage. Some progress has been made. But
government, economies and even whole countries artificially
forged by European colonizers in the 19th century,
and propped up since achieving independence a generation
ago by the patronage of outside powers, are beginning to
fragment.
Like most countries of the developing world, and in the
former communist bloc of Eastern Europe, African states have
tried to adopt the non-communist world's formula for success.
Most have pledged to open their economies and adopt free-
market policies, and many have begun talking about giving up
autocracy or one-party rule for democracy and pluralism. A
few--most famously South Africa--have succeeded.
Yet as much of the rest of the Third World appears poised
to enter a new era of rapid economic growth and stability,
Africa is still struggling to shake off the burdens of the
past, ranging from the borders drawn by the European powers
to the corruption and economic mismanagement engendered by
post-colonial dictators backed by Moscow, Washington, Paris
or Beijing.
In many places, the old order is crumbling but nothing is
taking its place. ``There's too much talk about development
and not enough about decay,'' said Peter Lyon at London's
Institute for Commonwealth Studies. Zaire, he said, ``may be
the classic case.''
OBSTACLES OLD AND NEW
For two years, Zaire for all practical purposes has had no
working government. Its longtime president, Mobutu Sese Seko,
has been abandoned by the United States, his backer during
the Cold War, and no longer can impose order on his sprawling
country. But his political opponents have been too weak to
remove him. There are two competing prime ministers, neither
of whose authority is accepted by the army or the
bureaucracy. Soldiers have destroyed much of the
infrastructure of the capital in riots over pay, and whole
regions populated by distinct ethnic groups have simply taken
over their own affairs.
For some Africans, the crisis reflects fundamental problems
of statehood that have lingered in African countries since
they gained independence in the 1960s. ``It raises profound
questions about the nature of these governments and the
nature of these states,'' said Rakiya Omaar, a Somali who is
co-director of African Rights, a London-based human rights
group. ``The problem in Africa has been these predatory,
strong central governments that never cared about their own
people.''
Similar political breakdowns are happening around the
region. Somalia has not had a government since its U.S.-
backed dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre, was chased out of power
in January 1991. Liberia is still in the throes of an on-
again, off-again civil war over who, and what, should replace
the late Samuel Doe's dictatorship. Angola and Sudan both
seem hopelessly locked in civil wars that have effectively
divided those countries along geographic lines.
And Rwanda, Zaire's neighbor, has been in a state of
anarchy and civil war since April 6, with no effective
government in place, since President Juvenal Habyarimana was
killed in an unexplained plane crash.
Other countries, from Sierra Leone to Uganda, from Ethiopia
to Mali, are waging small-scale wars against guerrillas,
ethnic separatists or armed bandits that have made large
chunks of territory impassable and lawless.
One key cause of this turmoil is Africa's loss of what was
arguably its most important resource; its relevance. During
the Cold War, the continent was a playground for the proxy
conflicts. The Americans, the Soviets, the Chinese, the
Israelis, the Arabs, white South Africans, white Rhodesians,
even the Taiwanese searched for allies and brought in aid,
arms and advice. Much of the attention lavished on Africa
proved destructive--fueling civil wars, as in Angola, or
backing dictators, as in Somalia, Liberia and Zaire.
But the outside attention also meant that highways were
built, hospitals were kept supplied and a generation of
Africa's elite were given access to education at home and
abroad. African autocrats were able to play East against
West, Arabs against Israelis, Chinese against Taiwanese in a
bid for foreign largesse. The game was always to find who
would give the most aid, and some despots played it deftly.
With the end of the East-West conflict, the dismantling of
South Africa's racist policies of apartheid and the move
toward peace in the Middle East, Africa has become more
marginalized than at any time since Europeans first set foot
here 500 years ago. Zaire tells the story: After years in
which the United States, France and Belgium lavished aid on
Mobutu, almost all foreign assistance has been cut since
1990, and most expatriate workers have departed. In June,
Zaire was expelled from the International Monetary Fund.
The lack of foreign interest and investment, combined with
the difficulty of implementing new economic and political
models, means that even outside war zones, Africans are
struggling to come to terms with longstanding social and
economic ailments:
According to the World Bank, the four poorest countries in
the world, in terms of gross national product, are in Africa;
seven of the world's 10 poorest countries are in Africa. From
1980 until 1991, African economies actually shrank an average
of 1.2 percent each year, meaning Africans have gotten poorer
over the last decade.
African countries have the world's highest illiteracy
rates, and they put the least public money per pupil into
their education systems.
Agricultural production has declined in most African
countries over the last two decades, leaving Africa less able
to feed itself and more dependent on foreign food aid. The
World Bank estimates it will take 40 years for some African
countries just to climb back to their pre-independence level.
Africa is ravaged by disease. AIDS has become the most
common cause of death for Africans, and in a dozen African
cities, 20 to 30 percent of the adult population is infected
with the virus that causes AIDS. More than 10 million of the
world's 15 million people infected with the AIDS virus are in
Africa.
Not all African countries are in a downward spiral. While
Angola is in the grip of full-scale civil war, Malawi
recently conducted a peaceful election that ousted an
entrenched autocrat. The death of the president of Rwanda
sparked an explosion of tribal massacres, but the death of
the president of Ivory Coast caused barely a political
ripple. There are many economic problem areas, but some
countries, like Ghana, are on the mend.
Still, it is the absence of outright conflict in most
African countries that makes their social and economic
decline so remarkable. In state after state, public
institutions have collapsed, health care has diminished,
infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and poverty has
deepened--not because of civil war, but simply because poorly
supported, inefficient and sometimes corrupt governments have
been unable to manage their countries' daunting problems.
In other words, the pattern in Zaire may not be the
exception but the rule. ``In Somalia and Liberia, it was
violent,'' said a European diplomat in Zaire. ``Here, it's a
slow implosion. But the result in the same. Here, it's just
crumbled.''
the road to anarchy
Although its descent into near-anarchy was touched off by
the end of the Cold War, Zaire's deterioration as a state
began shortly after the country gained independence from
Belgium in June 1960. An early secessionist movement in the
region of Katanga, which provoked U.N. troops to intervene,
underscored the fragility--and artificiality--of the new
nation of 200 separate tribes.
Still, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Zaire--then known
as the Congo--provided Western countries with 69 percent of
their industrial diamonds, 49 percent of their cobalt, and
other strategic minerals, making it ``a very important piece
of real estate,'' according to American University's Sanford
J. Ungar in his book, ``Africa.'' From that commanding
position as a wealthy and strategically important Western
supplier, the country entered a long era of Western-backed
autocratic rule--and slow decline. In 1965, army strongman
Joseph Desire Mobutu seized power, changing his name and that
of his country in an ``Africanization'' campaign.
Mobutu personifies the African Big Man, the old-style and
outdated autocrat who rules more like a traditional tribal
chieftain. Over almost three decades with Mobutu at the helm,
Zaire suffered from extraordinary mismanagement and
corruption. Hundreds of millions of dollars of export
earnings from state-run mining corporations literally
disappeared--presumably into the overseas bank accounts of
Mobutu and his family members, and also to support the lavish
but unaccounted-for spending projects of the office of the
presidency.
Mobutu's well-documented corruption and his heavy-
handedness with opponents brought frequent rebukes from
Washington and his European patrons. But from the first Congo
crisis of the Kennedy administration, which saw Africa
becoming a battleground between East and West, Mobutu proved
a valuable Cold War ally to the United States. And
Washington's financial and political support kept Mobutu in
power.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of
Cuban troops from neighboring Angola, however, the United
States no longer had a strategic interest in propping up
Zaire's dictator. And like Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda, Kenya's
Daniel arap Moi and Malawi's H. Kamuzu Banda, Mobutu was
forced to relent to mounting pressure for change.
Zaire for a time looked as if it might be on the path to
pluralism. In 1992, a national conference stripped Mobutu of
much of his power, appointed staunch Mobutu opponent Etienne
Tshisekedi as prime minister and even changed the country's
name back to Congo in a direct slap at Mobutu. The
conference--made up of politicians, civic leaders,
intellectuals and clerics--voted to make all of its
decisions binding and replaced the old Mobutu-dominated
parliament as the supreme lawmaking body.
What the conferees apparently never counted on was that
Mobutu would simply ignore their edicts and continue to
govern as he pleased, keeping personal control of the
nation's money supply through the central bank and using
freshly minted cash to keep his elite presidential guard paid
and loyal.
What has developed over the last two years has been a kind
of bizarre shadow play. Mobutu ``fired'' Tshisekedi as prime
minister, then concocted a new convention to choose a
replacement, Faustin Birindwa, a Mobutu ally. But Tshisekedi
refused to relinquish his title, giving the country two
claimants to the position, neither of whom has any resources
or real power. Government offices shut their doors, unable to
function without cash. Cabinet ministers stayed home. The
country ground slowly to a halt.
With the country sinking into ruin, weary national
conference delegates--their numbers now swollen with Mobutu
supporters--voted in June for yet another prime minister,
Kengo wa Dondo, who had more legitimate anti-Mobutu
credentials but still was rejected by some elements of the
opposition. Various Western embassies tried to persuade
Tshisekedi and his rivals to unify, but to no avail.
The latest convention has promised presidential elections
next year. Many Zairians and Western diplomats predict that,
with the opposition divided and squabbling, Mobutu will
likely win, whether he rigs the elections or not. And that,
they say, is a likely formula for continued national
stagnation and disintegration.
``Things are getting worse and worse,'' said Eugene Nzila,
a physician whose AIDS research project has crumbled to
virtually nothing because the country's continuing paralysis
forced foreign donors to withdraw funding. ``It's basically a
political situation,'' he said, reflecting the frustration of
many Zairians. ``There's nothing we can do but wait.''
surviving by skimming
If Zaire can be seen as a microcosm of Africa, then Ndili
International Airport might be seen as a microcosm of Zaire.
Upon arriving at the airport, a passenger is immediately
greeted by a dizzying array of soldiers and police, hustlers,
deal makers, facilitators, money changers, customs
inspectors, health inspectors, drivers, shoeshine boys,
baggage handlers and just plain hangers-on. Each claims to
have some official service to perform--checking your
vaccination card, searching your luggage--and each demands to
be paid ``service''--a price that can range anywhere from a
few pennies in local currency to $20.
Official services at the airport have broken down; no one
has gotten a paycheck in at least six months. But working at
the airport can still prove lucrative for the amount of money
that can be extorted or raked off from incoming passengers.
There is much jostling, shouting and occasional shoving
as everyone takes a turn to perform his task and demand
his fee.
To cut more easily through the crowd, there are
``facilitators.'' Most are uniformed soldiers--ostensibly,
assigned to airport security, in reality soldiers-for-hire.
One will attach himself to a passenger, according VIP status;
help push through to the front of lines; find the passenger a
taxi; even accompany the passenger for the 20-mile trip into
town ``for security.'' The price: $100 all -inclusive,
including cab fare.
``You can pay the colonel, you can pay the soldiers,'' said
a European diplomat. ``And it's a good thing. Those guys are
being fed. They sleep well, they eat well, their families are
fed.''
That kind of chaotic, anything-goes corruption is more
evident the farther one ventures from Kinshasa, as the
``privatization'' of government services and the irrelevance
of the central government become even more pronounced.
The small border outpost of Uvira, on Zaire's eastern
border with Burundi, is about as far from Kinshasa as
possible, in every way. The border post still has immigration
controls, customs controls, police controls and every other
conceivable type of government authority. But the
corruption--if it can still be called that in a place with no
official rules--has become a means of survival for public
servants with no other means of income except whatever can be
extorted from travelers.
Thus, there is the $20 fee for each person crossing the
border, plus an extra $20 for each car. There is a
Transportation Ministry desk that charges a $10 ``tax'' for
use of the road. The Health Ministry charges $20--or whatever
can be negotiated--as its price of entrance. And there are
the police manning roadblocks along the way out of town, also
demanding ``service'' to allow passage.
By becoming more or less financially self-sufficient, such
isolated east Zairian towns have maintained some semblance of
public order--while at the same time becoming less tied to
Kinshasa. In Goma, for example, local merchants have joined
together to make sure the military is kept paid, preventing
the kind of bloody soldier riots that wracked Kinshasa in
1991 and 1993.
``It's all localized,'' said a diplomat, using the analogy
of Europe's Dark Ages. ``Think of it as castles along the
Rhine in the year 900, where everyone exacted a tax or
toll.''
This kind of de facto decentralization--growing regional
autonomy and independence--is in evidence elsewhere, an
outgrowth not of any planned attempts to disperse power but
rather the natural evolution of weak central governments that
can no longer provide needed services to their outlying
areas.
In war-torn Angola. Somalia and Liberia, central
governments can no longer claim to control much beyond their
capitals. In large countries such as Nigeria and Ethiopia,
government edicts are becoming less relevant. Even relatively
stable Tanzania is now having to deal with growing calls for
independence from the island of Zanzibar, which is finding
union with the mainland irrelevant.
``These countries are artificial,'' said Michael Chege, a
Kenyan scholar at Harvard University. ``They have to be. What
else do you do, with all these tribes and linguistic groups
and so on? * * * We might have to consider adjusting
boundaries--or at least put it on the agenda.''
____
Looking Back to Colonial Past for Clues to Future
(By Keith B. Richburg)
Kinshasa, Zaire.--With Africa in crisis and facing the
collapse of some of its nation-states, some Africans are
tentatively raising an idea once considered so outrageous as
to be unspeakable here: They are debating the merits of
recolonization.
In April, renowned African scholar Ali Mazrui raised the
idea in an article in the Sunday Nation, a Kenyan newspaper.
``As the whole state machinery collapses in one African
country after another, is Africa in need of recolonization?''
Mazrui asked.
He was not talking about the European-style colonization of
the last century, but rather a new kind of international
trusteeship system, through which functioning African states
might be granted a mandate by the international community to
administer states that have fallen apart. ``For example,'' he
asked, ``might Ethiopia in the 21st century be called upon to
run Somalia on behalf of the U.N.?'' Or, he said, a stable,
black-ruled South Africa might be called upon to intervene to
stop the carnage in Angola.
``We may yet learn to distinguish benevolent intervention
and malignant invasion in the years ahead,'' Mazrui wrote.
``Self-colonization is better than colonization by
outsiders.''
Few take the idea seriously, other than as an academic
exercise. But there are examples of African countries
intervening in the affairs of others: Nigeria and other West
Africans provided peacekeeping troops in Liberia; Botswana,
Nigeria and other African countries operated with the United
Nations in Somalia; Senegal sent troops along with the French
intervention force in Rwanda.
But to many Africans, raising the question of
recolonization seems indicative of the continent's woes and
the near-complete absence of any good solutions. ``It is a
poignant, eloquent statement on the extent to which Africa
has self-destructed that elder statesmen [like Mazrui] are
even proposing that,'' said Rakiya Omaar of African Rights, a
human rights group.
``Colonialism killed millions of Africans and stifled
development of civil society,'' Omaar said. Talk of
recolonization, under any form, she said, ``reflects a sense
of frustration that you should be experiencing these same
problems at the hands of your own people.''
____________________