[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.''

                          ____________________