Erase the Dirty ‘R’ Word From U.S. Foreign Policy : Aid: America is miserly in promoting democracy, peace and even life in Africa. We must make black lives worth as much as white European lives.

The dirty and unspoken secret of American foreign policy is the “R” word. It is not uttered in polite society, but nothing else can explain our government’s often cruel and contradictory policies. Racism disregards black lives, and black lives are being lost daily in southern Africa because of callous policy decisions made by the Bush Administration.

The United States and South Africa have contributed weapons, money and other resources to Renamo, the right-wing rebels in Mozambique, and to UNITA, a rebel organization in Angola. Both are terrorist groups that have caused not only widespread death and misery in those countries but also an extraordinary $40 billion in property damage over the past 10 years, according to a recent United Nations report. The price of American and South African foreign policy is the blood and the lives of black Africans.

While we seem to have money for war, we give no money for peace. For the coming year, eight African nations--Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Malawi, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe -- are expected to get a pitiful total of about $50 million in American foreign-development aid. These countries, which are part of the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference, contain 76 million people, most of them poor, many of them starving or losing their lives to disease, many more of them dying in U.S.- and South African-supported violence.

All over southern Africa, hundreds of thousands of children die every year from malaria, yellow fever, influenza, tuberculosis and other preventable diseases. In Tanzania alone, 250,000 children die every year of sicknesses that in the Western world have been effectively abolished. Hunger and starvation are rampant in these countries. The health-care systems are overburdened to the point of collapse.

Not all of the causes of misery in southern Africa are found in nature. The apartheid government in South Africa has engaged over the past several years in a systematic campaign of terrorist aggression, destabilization and sabotage against neighboring countries. In the past decade, this strategy for regional military dominance has caused the deaths of 1.5 million people in southern Africa, more than half of them children under 5 years old.

A senior State Department official told a United Nations Conference on Mozambique in early 1988 that the Renamo campaign was “a systematic and brutal war of terror against innocent civilians through forced labor, starvation, physical abuse and wanton killing.”

According to UNICEF, 494,000 children under age 5 in Mozambique died from war-related causes between 1980 and 1988, and 331,000 Angolan children under 5 lost their lives to UNITA’s war.

According to testimony during a congressional hearing last year, the United States sends the bandits of UNITA an estimated $80 million a year in covert aid to wage their unpopular and futile war of death and destruction.

Thus, we Americans spend more of our money causing bloodshed in Angola than we do on promoting development in the states of the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference, nations that are all struggling to create democracy and diversify their economies. If we can support important processes of liberalization and economic reconstruction in Europe, why not in Africa? What is the difference?

Opponents of aid to Africa assert that Africa has less “strategic” importance to us than Europe. Then, it must be asked, why have we spent hundreds of millions of dollars supporting South Africa’s dubious foreign policy by encouraging destruction and terror in the region? What justifies our participation in these guerrilla wars?

The aftermath of the invasion of Panama and the end of the Cold War in Europe show us how quickly America can mobilize to give foreign aid to a people in need. It only took Congress days after the shake-up in Eastern Europe to authorize more than $900 million in development aid for Poland and Hungary over the next three years.

The swift passage of aid to these countries was morally right. We have an obligation to help the people of Panama recover from the damage caused by our invasion and the Noriega dictatorship. Similarly, the whole world is cheering for democracy and freedom in Europe.

But if we can help white people in Europe to improve their quality of life and their political system, we can do the same for black people in Africa. If we can contemplate a second Marshall Plan for the relatively wealthy nations of Europe, we can develop a first Marshall Plan for the impoverished nations of Africa.

The fact is, now that we have helped to create so much misery and chaos in southern Africa, we have an obligation to help the people of the region find their way to economic development, freedom from starvation and political democracy.

At this brilliant juncture in the history of humanity, the people of America must reevaluate and re-create our foreign policy. It is time to bring the “R” word out into the open and then banish it once and for all from the conduct of our foreign policy. Let us not bring our worst baggage from the most horrible days of the 20th Century into the hopeful new day of the 21st.