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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Focus Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Hope in hell
By Gamal Nkrumah
It's easy to roll one's eyes at the news that African peacemakers have resolved an African conflict. International media coverage of accords in war-torn African regions like Sierra Leone and the Horn of Africa heavily implies the indispensability of Western intervention, but little emphasis is placed on the need for feasible solutions over Western-dressed compromises.
In Algiers on Sunday, Salim Ahmed Salim, secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and Algerian President Abdel-Aziz Bouteflika, the current OAU chairman, presided over the formal signing ceremony of a peace accord designed to formally end the fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The accord calls for an immediate cease-fire and the deployment of UN troops along a buffer zone, while impartial cartographers and legal experts demarcate the disputed border. Sensitive issues like war reparations and direct talks between the two Horn of Africa nations were shelved for the time being.
The OAU-brokered peace accord was a triumph for African diplomacy and demonstrates the pivotal importance of mobilising regional and continental African organisations in the resolution of African disputes. African solutions to African problems might seem like a daunting challenge, but one not without opportunity. The Algiers accord was signed under the watchful eye of US President Bill Clinton's special envoy, Anthony Lake. Yes, Washington did much behind the scenes to lubricate the wheels, but in the end, the chief role of the US seems to be buttering up the warring parties with sorely needed development and reconstruction funds.
In the aftermath of World War II, America's Marshall Plan literally lifted war-torn Europe from the dregs of devastation. American financial assistance also triggered the miraculous Asian economic recovery. Why can't the US do the same for Africa? The Ethiopia-Eritrea war claimed the lives of 100,000 people and the two countries have spent an estimated $300 million each on arms -- a sum they can ill-afford, being among the world's poorest nations. At times Africa's policy-makers appear complacent about the horror landscapes surrounding them -- the displaced, the hungry, the wounded, the dying -- but the West seems to be waiting for African leaders to fall into their supposedly accommodating arms.
The West must articulate its moral codes more clearly instead of reiterating unrealisable and uninspiring sermons about democratisation. The real problem isn't Washington's pontifications, or even its arm-twisting tactics -- it goes much deeper. Western policy-makers believe that the unquestionable natural order of things is that Washington and its Western European allies are destined to win everything. So when it all goes wrong, as in Sierra Leone, it can't be because Western powers failed to be objective, but because someone else has prevented the West's natural superiority from shining through.
Consider the case of British intervention in Sierra Leone. London is posing as an all-conquering dragon of a neo-colonial power. When British forces delivered armed opposition leader Foday Sankoh into the custody of the Sierra Leonean government, they were enraged to find that Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front (RUF) forces were continuing in their military advance on the Sierra Leonean capital Freetown. With Sankoh securely in the hands of his enemies, Britain was forced to find a new bad guy in order to explain their failure to resolve the problem. It didn't need to look far before setting its sights on Liberian President Charles Taylor. British intelligence claims that Taylor maintains close links with RUF field commanders, and thus British venom is being unabashedly vented on Taylor.
At the moment, Britain is hell-bent on teaching Taylor what's what. Ominously, the British press is now pointing accusing fingers at Taylor for RUF's seeming invincibility. On the pretext that Liberia is the main conduit for smuggling illicit Sierra Leonean diamonds, Britain persuaded its European Union partners to block $53 million in EU aid to Liberia on the grounds that Taylor has been trading guns for diamonds with the RUF.
"I don't know what aid they are cutting off," Liberia's Ambassador to Egypt Tiahkwee Johnson told Al-Ahram Weekly. "Liberia receives no aid from the EU. European aid to Liberia was suspended during the Liberian civil war."
On the shift in blame from Sankoh to Taylor, Johnson seems astounded. "Liberia was instrumental in freeing the 500 UN peace-keepers who were taken hostage by RUF. It was President Taylor's friendship with Foday Sankoh that saved the day. Why do European nations overlook and downplay the positive role played by Liberia during the UN hostage crisis? Is this how they reward us?" he asked.
Johnson was also adamant about lifting the UN embargo on Liberia. "Where are the guns we are giving the RUF if we currently have an arms embargo imposed upon us?" Johnson inquired. Back home in the Liberian capital Monrovia, President Taylor was humming the same tune, assailing his Western critics for trumping up dubious charges. "You hear them talking about gun-running and diamond smuggling. It's movies," Taylor said on Liberian television recently. Britain, he chided, is the only gun-running country in this tale.
"Security is the task of the peace-keepers, not the British," Taylor explained. "[Liberia] is opposed to the British arming of the Sierra Leone government army." The Liberian president wants West African peace-keeping troops (ECOMOG) back in Sierra Leone and there are promising signs that Washington is now seriously looking into the possibility of funding a new Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) peace-keeping force. A very sensible idea; an African solution to an African problem.
(photo: AP)
RUF currently controls most of the diamond-producing areas in northern and eastern Sierra Leone. Under the now-defunct Lomé peace accord that ostensibly ended Sierra Leone's civil war, RUF fighters were given immunity in exchange for disarming and disbanding their troops. By the end of April, some 4,000 weapons had already been handed over by the RUF to UN peace-keepers. Now they are being asked to hand over the remainder. But, as Taylor points out, what guarantees do RUF fighters have that they are not going to be stabbed in the back? "A man fighting in the bush wants to know that the man he is handing his gun to is not going to receive it and shoot him in the back," stressed Taylor.
Taylor's view may seem outlandish given the widescale violence wreaked by RUF forces, but there remains in it a seed of truth. Contrary to all the media hype, the departure this week of the British Royal Marines from Sierra Leone was glaringly incomplete and adds up to little more than a tactical retreat.
The British, clearly no even-handed and neutral force, are now upgrading the poorly-trained Sierra Leonean army and the 300 elite and highly-specialised British troops left behind are propping-up the lightly-armed UN peace-keepers. But RUF forces are relatively well-armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, surface-to-surface missiles and anti-tank weapons and thus still pose a real threat to British interests. Tim Spicer, director of British-based mercenary outfit Sandline International, recently told The Guardian newspaper that Sandline's mercenaries can easily put RUF "right back into its box." There is obviously something in that: in the past, Sierra Leonean President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah has had to use Sandline's mercenaries, as well as mercenaries from the South African-based organisation Executive Outcomes, to keep RUF at bay.
Britain is fixated on a quick-fix solution and despite repeated failures, this mentality remains the core of Western diplomacy in Africa. In a magisterially brusque tone, British columnist Martin Woollacott openly advocates the overthrow of Taylor. "Britain is now involved far more than it was before in the complex and dangerous regional politics of West Africa, and in a problem that almost certainly cannot be solved until Charles Taylor, ruler of neighbouring Liberia, is overthrown," Woollacott wrote recently in The Guardian Weekly. Hamstrung by his own history, Woollacott pointedly refers to Taylor as a "ruler" and conveniently forgets to mention that Taylor is a democratically-elected president. Woollacott, of course, is simply parroting publicly what British politicians are saying in private.
So now the British want to overthrow a democratically-elected African president for making political alliances with a neighbouring country based on his country's business interests. The West does often appear comically churlish.
The BBC claims that diamond exports from Liberia rose sharply last year, a fact taken by Britain as a sure sign of the diamonds-for-guns trade between Liberia and the RUF. Liberia's annual capacity for diamond mining is estimated at between 100,000-150,000 carats, but imports of Liberian diamonds to Belgium shot up to six billion carats in 1999. Jumping on the British bandwagon, the Ottawa-based Partnership Africa charged that Liberia has emerged as a "major centre for massive diamond-related criminal activity with connections to guns, drugs and money laundering throughout Africa."
But the West's grudge with Taylor goes further back. When Taylor launched his armed struggle against the military dictatorship of Samuel Doe in 1989, Washington backed Doe, a bitter seven-year civil war ensued. The former rebel leader was vindicated, however, when the National Patriotic Front swept the UN-monitored polls in July 1997 and Taylor was elected president. Perhaps Sankoh could do the same in Sierra Leone?
The Liberian economy is still reeling from the impact of war, which claimed the lives of over 200,000 Liberians. The Taylor government inherited a $2.65 billion debt to international financial institutions and Western creditors, but Western aid has not been forthcoming. Taylor is still viewed with suspicion, despite his overwhelming victory in elections endorsed by the West as free and fair. Commitments and pledges to Liberia's National Reconstruction Programme have not been honoured. The Liberian cash-strapped post-conflict economy cannot cope with the reconstruction of a country economically, physically and socially devastated by civil war.
Taylor-bashing does not help. Taylor has warned that remnants of the former Liberian army are fighting alongside the Sierra Leonean government's army and are regrouping to launch an invasion of Liberia. What Liberia sorely needs is a Marshall Plan. For their part, the Liberians are doing their bit. Direct foreign investment has been increasing at a healthy 11 per cent since 1995 and is estimated to have reached the 15 per cent mark last year. This small West African country of three million people -- the first in Africa to become a sovereign republic, in 1847 -- needs all the international support it can get, but with no strings attached.
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