A rchive Date
[ 09-07-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_london.html
U.S. taking new role in Africa
SALIM MANSUR, For the London Free Press
2003-07-09
American President George W. Bush's five-country tour of Africa is full of surprises. This is so because history is not a linear progression and is full of irony.
During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush was dismissive of Africa and America's involvement in that continent's accumulating woes.
But then came 9/11 and Bush, uninterested in the world beyond American shores, quickly learned how to be a foreign policy president.
In this space immediately following 9/11, I wrote: "We live in a global village, ever more deeply woven into an emerging global civilization where our ignorance about the other, irrespective of how near or distant, can be fatal." Africa's misfortunes have been in part an assumption that the ills of Africans could remain confined to their continent.
During the Cold War years, Africa became an arena of East-West rivalry. There was little interest then to address the deep ethno-tribal divisions that lay below the political boundaries drawn by European powers in their rush to divide the spoils of Africa for themselves.
And when white-minority regimes clung to power in the ebb tide of colonialism, there was a mistaken view that once these remnants of a wicked past got interred, Africans would work out their problems.
They did not.
Africa's problem was too much history, too many divisions, too many expectations and too little responsible leadership to navigate the turbulent currents of a continent awash with poverty, diseases and an explosion of ethno-tribal conflicts that followed once, paradoxically, the brutally stabilizing effect of Cold War rivalry ended.
America's relationship with Africa is invariably conditioned by the guilt of the past. At some point both continents and peoples must put the history of slavery behind them, and meet each other with the respect of mutual interests.
But just when America was preparing itself to engage with Africa, the 1993 Somali episode made Washington turn its back on the continent.
The Somalia mission ended when American forces, as part of a UN effort to end clan warfare, were attacked and 18 marines killed. Osama bin Laden boastfully took credit for his organization's role in those killings. The unintended consequence of the Somalia experience was America's refusal to risk involvement as Africa's troubles mounted.
Africa is roughly divided between Arab and Muslim in the north, and black, Christian and local folk traditions in the sub-Saharan south. In countries such as Sudan and Nigeria, these divisions collide.
The ethno-tribal divisions, magnified by corrupt leaders, have created killing fields in Rwanda, Congo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. These raging conflicts have impeded the greater urgency of meeting the basic needs of Africans.
Africa's famines, presently devastating six countries in the south - Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland - and recurrent in Ethiopia, have less to do with nature than political corruption and mismanagement. The same sad cause and effect of politics and greed have worsened the HIV/AIDS crisis in countries such as South Africa.
The August 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania by terrorists linked to bin Laden's network came as a warning to Americans that Africa could only be ignored at a frightening cost.
Then 9/11 confirmed, if such confirmation was sadly necessary, that for the U.S. to successfully fight international terrorism, Americans must become engaged with the world, providing direction and leadership in battling poverty and disease, as well as in matters of security.
At the G8 summits after 9/11 - first in June 2002 at Kananaskis, Alta., and recently at Evian, France - leaders of the world's richest economies turned their attention to Africa, and pledged participation in an African-designed plan called NEPAD (New Partnership in Africa's Development).
Bush's African tour has a noble precedent, for it was Republican president Abraham Lincoln who was responsible for emancipating African slaves in America.
A new Afro-American relationship is straining to be born, and it will be a fitting irony that Bush becomes its midwife.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Wednesdays Copyright © The London Free Press 2001,2002,2003
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