Once Again, We Ignore Africa’s Pain

On Thursday, the White House announced the creation of a new State Department-CIA joint venture called the Genocide Early Warning Center. “Human rights,” Hillary Rodham Clinton said at the ceremony, “is not a marginal issue.”

Forgotten amid the bureaucratic pageantry is the fact that real-life wars of genocidal proportions are raging in east, west and central Africa. The largest of these is centered on Congo (formerly Zaire) and involves at least nine countries with a combined population of more than 150 million. This conflagration has all the ingredients that have attracted intense official and media attention elsewhere: cross-border invasion, ethnic slaughter, competition for resources, massive population displacement, humanitarian disaster, the specter of renewed genocide.

And yet no one cares. In contrast to Kosovo, the massacres that took place in Congo in August and Sierra Leone in November went unremarked, as if having occurred on another planet. During his March African safari, President Clinton apologized for America’s past neglect of Africa and promised not to remain idle in future African crises. His administration, however, has stood on the sidelines. Apart from hand-wringing appeals for restraint and low-profile tours of the region by midranking State Department officials, silence has been the order of the day. No Security Council ultimatums, no shuttle diplomacy, no menace-filled deadlines.

The Europeans also have looked away. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, for example, normally gung-ho for military muscle to enforce the Labor Party’s “ethical foreign policy,” has gone quiet, as have his European colleagues.

Media disinterest has compounded--or caused--the official silence. With the honorable exception of a few print journalists, the U.S. media have taken a bye.

That the great powers have their foreign policy priorities and the media conglomerates have their bottom lines is hardly surprising. In terms of the hardheaded realities that command attention, sub-Saharan Africa always will be at the back of the queue. Not much oil, not many vital raw materials, not astride strategic sea lanes of communication, no weapons of mass destruction, not much buying power, ramshackle infrastructure.

Against this harsh background, with the bitter memory of Mogadishu still fresh and with a full plate of ongoing military commitments elsewhere, it is unlikely that U.S. intervention will go beyond lip service. In practical effect, the U.S. has chosen the coldhearted rationale for inaction put forward in 1991 by then Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger: “Until the Bosnians, Serbs and Croatians decide to stop killing each other, there is nothing the outside world can do about it.”

Over Bosnia, this approach was not acceptable to the Clinton administration. From its earliest days, it asserted an American duty to act on universalist grounds. Experience has not dulled this instinct. In the current issue of Foreign Affairs, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright asserts America’s right as the nation of “Iwo Jima and Omaha Beach” to “sound the trumpet” and to summon the “collective will of the world’s leading nations” to enforce “global standards.” These are inspiring statements of American resolve. But they ring hollow if applied only when European lives are at risk or in oil-rich regions of the world.

Visiting Rwanda in March, Clinton said, “Never again must we be shy in the face of the evidence.” The evidence from Congo is that a war approaching the magnitude of World War I is in progress, with all the attendant slaughter and human misery. The rebels are pressing forward and the government has declined peace initiatives. The administration, however, is relaxed, as are the usually noisy human rights groups. The time may come for retrospective indignation and guilty recrimination, but for now there is an elite and popular consensus that the best policy is to carry on doing nothing.

Africans are used to the West’s cynicism. They have an amazing capacity to endure suffering. Somehow, they will pull through this crisis. But those in the West who campaign so loudly for military action elsewhere in the name of a shared humanity should ask themselves why humanity always stops at Africa’s shores.