Opinion

Welcoming but wary, Africa awaits President Clinton's visit

by Vince Farley

In This Story:

• John Kennedy's new frontier inspires Africa
• U.S. reaches out to Africa
• President Jimmy Carter comes calling
• The end of the Cold War - new opportunities
• Somalia turns sour
• Washington closes its eyes to genocide in Africa
• A plea to former President Carter
• President Clinton's trip

Every 10 years or so, the United States seems to show a genuine interest in Africa, only to disappoint, eventually, the hopes and aspirations engendered by that seeming concern.

While the citizens of the six African nations which U.S. President Bill Clinton will visit late this month will welcome him with jubilation, the entire continent will rejoice that this visit may indicate a renewed U.S. interest in Africa.

Since the wave of anti-colonialism swept most of the continent's nations to independence in the years around 1960, the United States has been viewed by Africans as a spiritual mentor and hope for the future. Periodic surges of U.S. interest and commitment, however, have been followed by disheartening spells of indifference, marginalization and benign neglect. Africans, and those Americans who care about Africa, will give Clinton the benefit of the doubt, but will be wary that their hopes might once again be dashed.

John Kennedy's new frontier inspires Africa

My first journey to Africa was in 1961, when I and nearly 300 other young Americans spent the summer with Operation Crossroads Africa, working with young African counterparts to build schools, youth centers and medical clinics. We left for Africa inspired by Crossroads founder James Robinson, a charismatic African-American minister who had a vision of creating a vast network of exchanges and inter-relationships between Americans, both black and white, and an Africa that was embarking on a new era of independence. John Kennedy's vision of a new frontier had struck a deep resonance in Africa, and many of the leaders of the new nations had been educated or trained in the United States, including the first presidents of Nigeria and Ghana, both graduates of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

My Crossroads group had the opportunity, and challenge, of working in the West African country of Guinea, which in 1958 had courageously thrown out the French colonial masters. It had not been an accident that one of the first African heads of state President Kennedy had received was Guinea's President Sekou Toure, who symbolized for many Africans the spirit of anti-colonialism. I saw pictures of Kennedy and Toure displayed even in the smallest villages. (Kennedy is still revered in Africa -- Clinton staff would do well to have many copies of the famous Rose Garden Kennedy-Clinton photo available.)

In the early 1960s, U.S. assistance was forthcoming, but Toure had also welcomed assistance, which was desperately needed, from the Soviet bloc, and the battle between the United States and the Soviet Union to align Cold War allies had already begun. A CBS documentary entitled "Crossroads Africa: Pilot Project for the Peace Corps" described the civic action work of the group, but also focused on this Cold War dimension. Most Guineans welcomed the visiting Americans, but were mistrustful of the ultimate intentions of the U.S. government. Many Guineans had trouble accepting that we students had raised $1,000 each from church and civic groups to fund our summer, and instead believed we must have been CIA agents. (When the Peace Corps volunteers began to arrive in Africa, they were greeted with the same suspicion.) Despite the skepticism, Africans were pleasantly surprised that Americans wanted to help, and we Crossroaders returned to the United States committed to expanding U.S. ties with, and support for, Africa.

U.S. reaches out to Africa

By the time I landed in Niamey, Niger, in June 1969 as a recently commissioned U.S. Foreign Service officer, the U.S.-Africa relationship had blossomed. The success of the civil rights movement was well known to all Africans, and Martin Luther King Jr. was an inspiration and model. There were U.S. embassies in nearly all independent African countries and U.S. assistance programs in most. U.S. government personnel eagerly sought assignments in Africa, which was still a new frontier of U.S. involvement and interest.

While some cynics may have seen the U.S. involvement in Africa as simply an effort to sign up Cold War allies, other observers believed that the United States was sincerely committed to helping the newly independent countries build sorely needed infrastructures to provide for the basic human needs of its citizens. The Peace Corps had within its first five years expanded to over 15,000 volunteers worldwide.

In Africa, the mutual experience of American volunteers and their hosts would unite the young, and not so young, of the United States and Africa by inseparable bonds that have continued through the decades since. Volunteers were in nearly every Nigerian village, no matter how isolated.

I vividly remember Niger's President Diori spending one entire Sunday morning at his farm discussing with my wife and me his hopes for a greater U.S. involvement in supporting Niger's urgently needed development programs and his concern that the United States appeared to view Africa mainly through a Cold War prism. His concern was well-founded, as U.S. assistance went increasingly to high-profile Cold War allies -- Zaire, Ethiopia and Liberia -- which were considered essential to U.S. strategic interests. Many Africans had difficulty understanding why the evident U.S. interest in development and in alleviating human suffering was overshadowed by the Cold War paradigm.

President Jimmy Carter comes calling

At the end of March 1978, Africans welcomed President Jimmy Carter to Lagos, the first official visit to sub-Saharan Africa by a sitting U.S. president (President Roosevelt had refueled in Monrovia, Liberia, in 1943 en route back from the Casablanca summit). President Carter's record of support for human rights and economic development and democratization was well known throughout the continent. In his remarks in Lagos, Carter reiterated the U.S. commitment to bringing about independence for Zimbabwe (then known as Rhodesia) and Namibia and the U.S. "determination to support the rights of the oppressed people of South Africa . . . and to do away with apartheid."

Carter was accompanied on this historic trip to Nigeria and Liberia by U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, whose appointment had been seen by Africans as evidence of the importance Carter placed on including African-Americans in the highest levels of his administration.

In Nouakchott, Mauritania, where I was serving at that time, President ould Daddah requested copies of each statement Carter made on the trip. Africans throughout the continent saw the visit as an important milestone in the developing relationship with the United States.

The end of the Cold War - new opportunities

In the late 1980s, as the Cold War was ending, a wave of reform began to sweep across Africa. The United States, as the Cold War victor and only remaining superpower, was at the forefront of supporting African efforts to nourish free-market economies, open up political systems to multi-party competitive elections, and strengthen democratic participatory institutions. At the same time, the U.S. leadership in bringing about independence for Namibia and pressuring the apartheid government of South Africa to open its political system to participation by all South Africans was seen as concrete evidence that the United States was assuming a leadership role in Africa. African states were nearly unanimous in supporting the U.S.-led Desert Shield/Desert Storm effort in the Persian Gulf, and the crash of a Senegal troop transport in Saudi Arabia resulted in the deaths of as many troops from Senegal as the United States lost in the conflict.

The renewed U.S. commitment to alleviating human suffering in Africa was dramatically demonstrated by the leading role it played in organizing a U.N. humanitarian relief effort in Somalia in late 1992, an operation which saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Africans believed the U.S. leadership in mobilizing this U.N. action, which involved troops from throughout the world (including over half a dozen African nations), augured well for the future.

Somalia turns sour

In 1993, U.S. policy in Somalia, which until that time had been concentrated on the relief effort, became focused on altering the political leadership structure in Somalia. In a U.S. operation to capture the Somali warlord Aideed, 18 U.S. soldiers died, resulting in the infamous TV coverage of a soldier's body being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The American public was outraged, the United States in short order pulled out, and the U.N. operation withered away. Africans were dismayed at the vehemence with which U.S. leaders, particularly in Congress, placed blame for the failure in Somalia on the U.N. leadership.

Washington closes its eyes to genocide in Africa

The debacle in Somalia traumatized U.S. decision-makers and directly led to the U.S. policy of refusing to support efforts to stop a horrific genocide in Rwanda in which between 500,000 and 1 million ethnic Tutsis, and moderate Hutus, were slaughtered between April and July 1994. There had been warnings of the possibility of an outbreak of massive killings, and, when atrocities began 24 hours after the Rwandan president's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, as it approached Kigali, Rwanda's capital, the United Nations had a presence of nearly 2,500 peacekeeping troops in Rwanda.

When the U.N. Security Council, led by the United States, quickly reduced the U.N. presence to 250, the leaders of the genocide saw the U.N. drawdown as a green light and redoubled their murderous efforts. (As reports of the terrifying scale of the carnage began to cross my desk at the State Department, I was stunned. Was this the way it had felt to be among the first officials who had received reports a half-century ago of the Holocaust in Europe?)

As African leaders saw the reduction of the U.N. presence in Rwanda, they proposed sending their own forces. At Nelson Mandela's May 10th inauguration as president of South Africa, the secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) pleaded for U.S. and world logistical support, which he said was needed to transport to Rwanda the 4,000 African troops who were ready to go. As of early June, U.S. government press spokesmen in Washington were still only willing to go as far as saying "acts of genocide may have occurred in Rwanda." By late July, U.S. logistical support for transporting and equipping African troops finally was in place, and African troops began arriving, but the killing was virtually over.

As the Rwandan rebel forces took control of the country and the genocide was drawing to a close in the summer of 1994, nearly 2 million Rwandans, including the perpetrators of the genocide, fled into Zaire, Tanzania, and Burundi, fearful of retribution. The world's conscience was finally pricked by the sight of dying refugees, and the United States took the lead in establishing camps for the fleeing refugees. The dramatic humanitarian response, which reflected the best of U.S. instincts to alleviate human suffering, was perplexing to African leaders, who had been shaken by the lack of U.S. interest in stopping the genocide. Over the next year, the international community expended hundreds of millions of dollars to support these refugees, but this humanitarian action had created a vexing new problem. The camps, which were located within eyesight of the Rwandan border, were controlled by perpetrators of the genocide intent upon launching attacks into Rwanda.

A plea to former President Carter

When I accompanied former President and Mrs. Carter on a series of trips to Africa in 1995 and 1996, I was struck by the grave concern expressed by all heads of state that the Great Lakes region was about to explode again, with the flash point being the Rwandan refugee camps. They were frustrated by the West's narrowly focused humanitarian response which ignored the dangers caused by the camps and offered scant relief to either the victims of the genocide who remained in Rwanda, or to the needs of the Zairian and Tanzanian hosts, who had been overwhelmed by the refugee incursions.

At the behest of the regional heads of state, Carter visited the region, and in late November 1995, he and Archbishop Desmond Tutu co-facilitated a historic summit in Cairo, where the heads of state pledged to move ahead jointly to defuse the crisis and called for international support. The Cairo summit succeeded in jump-starting a regional heads of state summit process and opened a window of opportunity to address the refugee camp crisis, as well as a broad range of pressing issues in the region.

Unfortunately, the United States and the Europeans failed to develop a coordinated strategy to close or move the camps, and violence erupted in eastern Zaire in October 1996. In relatively short order, the camps were destroyed with a significant loss of life. (Some U.S. officials estimated deaths in the low 10,000s, while some U.N. and European officials put the number at up to perhaps 250,000.)

President Clinton's trip

President Clinton will carry a clear message that the United States is committed to promoting sustainable economic growth and development in Africa. In recent years, most African states have implemented economic reform measures, and, with its abundant natural resources, large potential markets for goods and services, and a re-energized political and economic leadership, Africa is set to take off. The annual GDP growth in Africa in 1996 averaged almost 5 percent, and U.S.-Africa trade grew by 18 percent. U.S. exports to Africa exceed those to all the states of the former Soviet Union combined by more than 20 percent.

While the African leaders will welcome Clinton's focus on expanding trade, they well recognize that the continent is burdened with most of the world's poorest nations. Aid is desperately needed for better nutrition, clean water, disease eradication, improved health care and basic education. Meanwhile, U.S. assistance has dropped to a 10 year low. Aid from France, Japan, and Germany far exceeds that of the United States, and assistance from many other European countries (such as little Denmark) is approaching U.S. levels. Although Clinton will not be visiting the poorest of the African countries, the leaders of the more successful countries which he is visiting are well aware that problems caused by severe poverty elsewhere on the continent result in economic migration and refugees, which place a burden on all states.

Democratization is following many paths in Africa, as each country has a unique set of political circumstances. Since the late 1980s, most African nations have held competitive elections: Some 25 African states enjoy a democratic form of government, according to U.S. officials. In fact, nearly all of the 47 sub-Saharan African states have taken steps to open up their political systems. Among the countries Clinton is visiting, the challenges are quite different, ranging from Uganda, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed by the two previous regimes, to Senegal and Botswana, which have had competitive political systems since independence.

South Africa's carefully crafted constitutional process is a model of power sharing, which assures all segments of its society representation in the government. Such arrangements are particularly needed in Africa, where the national boundaries created by the dictates of colonial decisions made in Europe include a wide range of diverse populations with different ethnic, religious. language and cultural backgrounds.

Clinton will use his visit to bolster the efforts of Africans who are promoting political reform. the strengthening of democratic institutions and the protection of human rights. He will hear expressions of appreciation for U.S. support in establishing independent electoral commissions in 11 African countries, organizing and monitoring elections throughout the continent, and creating and expanding independent media in many countries. His assurances of continuing U.S. support for these democratization efforts will be welcome.

On the political front, Clinton will be pressed to articulate a vision of U.S. government policy toward Africa, which in recent years has been unfocused. The U.S. withdrawal from Somalia and the decision not to send troops into Liberia, even though a U.S. task force was deployed on a U.S. ship just miles offshore from Monrovia for months, have sent a clear message that Africans should not expect U.S. forces to be directly involved in helping to resolve future conflicts.

The United States has begun to assist African militaries to improve their capacities to respond to humanitarian crises and peace-keeping challenges, but will the United States provide the required logistical and financial muscle the African forces will need to respond to future crises?

The United States has encouraged Africans to propose African solutions to African problems, but the United States must recognize that the Africans may see issues differently. On Africa-wide issues, the Africans work through the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which includes in its membership the states of North Africa. The OAU position on the trial of the Libyans accused in the Pan Am 103 bombing, for example, closely parallels the Arab League position, which proposes having a trial before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, instead of in the United States or Scotland, as the United States insists.

While the United States calls for the peaceful resolution of crises in Africa, it has openly opposed the regime in Khartoum, Sudan. The U.S. government has widely publicized its provision of "defensive, non-lethal military equipment" to Sudan's southern neighbors, but this is purely a semantical distinction to many Africans.

The groundwork for Clinton's trip has already been accomplished by the recent highly successful visits of Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Mrs. Clinton was received last spring with acclamation at all her stops, and her public support of increased U.S. involvement in Africa since that trip has been welcomed. Albright stated during her trip to Africa last fall that she is ready to listen to African concerns and support African initiatives. In a speech in Addis Ababa on December 9, 1997, she politically cleared the air regarding the inaction in Rwanda by "acknowledging that we -- the international community -- should have been more active in the early stages of the atrocities in Rwanda in 1994, and called them what they were -- genocide."

Thus, the stage is set for a successful visit by the U.S. president. The Africans will be open to whatever Clinton has to say, but the visit takes place within a context. On the one hand is the enduring African vision of America as a democratic, humanitarian role model. On the other hand is Africa's experience of an America that disillusions and disappoints, is faint-hearted at crucial times and has a dismayingly short attention span.

About the author:
Vince Farley is a consultant on African affairs who lives in Atlanta. A retired Foreign Service officer, he served in Africa for many years and has made working visits to most African countries. He was the director of the State Department's Office of Research and Analysis for Africa for five years and from 1994 to 1997 was a diplomatic adviser to former President Jimmy Carter.

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