World’s Hot Spots to Test Clinton in New Year

With civil wars in Africa threatening to spread to neighboring countries, and a Balkan conflict ready to erupt again, President Clinton’s impeachment-clouded administration faces a growing list of war-or-peace decisions in the new year--even if it is able to keep Iraq in a strategic box.

In addition to active or potential wars in Congo, Sudan, Angola and Kosovo, Clinton must cope with continuing economic dislocation in Asia and Russia, a dangerous deterioration in the Middle East peace process and endemic instability in North Korea.

None of these challenges is new, but all threaten to explode early next year--just as Clinton’s Senate trial on impeachment charges is expected to get underway. Any one of them could provide a stern test of Clinton’s nerve, as well as his vaunted ability to concentrate on the issue at hand regardless of distractions.

Administration officials have made clear that Clinton is reluctant to use the U.S. military in these conflicts, with the exception of Iraq.

However, events may force his hand.

In the post-Cold War world, the United States has become--often against its will--the guarantor of global stability in a way that has radically rewritten the rules of what constitutes a threat to the U.S. national interest.

“We may not have a vital interest in Rwanda, but we had a vital interest in acting in Rwanda to preserve the rule of law,” said Jane Holl, a former Pentagon and National Security Council official. She referred to the 1994 ethnic slaughter in that tiny African nation, which eventually helped spark civil war in the neighboring--and far more strategically important--country then known as Zaire and now called Congo.

Even by traditional standards, the war in Congo is a threat to Washington’s global interests. A mineral-rich country whose territory is almost one-fourth the size of the United States, Congo dominates the map of Central Africa, bordering nine nations. Once one of Washington’s staunchest Cold War allies, the country now is an unstable stew of often antagonistic ethnic groups. Its president, Laurent Kabila, was installed in May 1997 with the help of the armies of neighboring countries. The pivotal role was played by the Tutsi-led Rwandan government that seized power after Hutu militias killed an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu civilians in 1994, which the U.S. and other governments have labeled genocide.

Now, Kabila totters on the brink of being overthrown by rebels backed by his old allies in Rwanda and Uganda. Troops from Zimbabwe, Angola and other African states have been fighting on the government’s side.

“This is a civil war over a power vacuum,” said I. William Zartman, director of African studies at the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University in Washington. “Congo is definitely a collapsed state.”

He said the international community needs to begin by persuading foreign armies to withdraw from Congo, although that would not be nearly enough to end the crisis. The United States, he said, should “get its allies together and articulate what the world will accept.”

U.S. Unlikely to Intervene Militarily

If diplomacy fails, Zartman said, it is unlikely that the United States will send its own forces to Congo. However, he called on Congress to pay Washington’s overdue bill for United Nations peacekeeping to allow countries that are willing to commit troops to stabilize the situation. In 1994, the United States vetoed a U.N. peacekeeping force for Rwanda even though no Americans would have taken part.

“The time to have dealt with the problem of Central Africa would have been at the time of the Rwanda genocide,” said Andrew Natsios, a senior fellow of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a U.S. government-sponsored think tank in Washington. “The genocide could have been stopped. But it wasn’t, because of a lack of political will.”

The ethnic war in Kosovo--a rebellious province of Serbia, which is the dominant republic of Yugoslavia--threatens to resume at any time. Washington’s solution of choice for that conflict is to give ethnic Albanians, who make up about 90% of Kosovo’s population, a broad level of autonomy. Yet that position has not been accepted by the ethnic Albanian rebels and the Yugoslav government.

If the U.S. autonomy plan fails to fly, the administration will be left with a choice of either backing the Kosovo Liberation Army rebels or looking the other way during a bloody war that could rival the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina in intensity and perhaps spill over into Albania, Macedonia and even Greece, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“The administration will have to decide if it is prepared to support Kosovo’s independence and if it will support the rebels either directly or by bombing Serbia,” said Richard Haass, a former National Security Council expert. “That’s going to happen sometime this spring.”

Mideast Peace Process Could Break Down

Also looming in the spring is a possibly irreparable breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, which could mean the end of one of the administration’s proudest achievements in foreign policy and risk widespread violence. Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat has threatened to issue a unilateral declaration of independence May 4, the day Israel and the Palestinians were supposed to have completed negotiations on a permanent peace. With Israel facing elections in the spring, there is little chance that negotiators will meet the deadline.

U.S. experts say Arafat holds the key. If he agrees to give the Israelis more time, the peace process could continue, albeit at a snail’s pace. If Arafat forces the issue, it will result in a crisis that will strain Washington’s ties with Israel, shatter its fledgling relationship with the Palestinians and undercut U.S. efforts to enlist Arab governments in a coalition to contain Iraq.

Administration officials have made it clear that the United States and its British allies are prepared to take repeated military action against Iraq if President Saddam Hussein tries to revive his weapons of mass destruction programs. Yet officials concede that the Iraq policy will be far harder to sustain diplomatically without at least tacit support from the Arab world, Russia, France and other nations.

If Iraq is the most likely focus of U.S. military activity in the new year, the most dangerous potential conflict could also be the oldest one still on Washington’s agenda: the confrontation left over from the 1950-53 Korean War. North Korea, saddled with famine and a collapsed economy, still maintains one of the world’s largest standing armies. Experts in Washington fear that the regime in Pyongyang may choose to use its army offensively as a diversion from an economic crisis or political instability. If it did that, U.S. troops, stationed just a few miles away across the demilitarized zone, would come under immediate fire.

“You can never predict with any certainty about North Korea, just considering how opaque decision-making is there,” said Haass, now director of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “But at any point, the North could stir the pot either by doing something offensively or by denying us the access we need to convince ourselves that they are not doing anything in the nuclear area.”

In addition to potential flare-ups of violence, the administration must find a way in the new year to cope with economic troubles in Asia and the former Soviet Union.

“The most serious foreign policy challenge facing the United States over the next few years is likely to be the deterioration inside Russia,” Haass said. Given its powerful nuclear arsenal left over from the Cold War, he said, any sort of instability in Russia is very dangerous.

Nevertheless, shooting wars in Africa may constitute the administration’s toughest test.

The main difference between the Congo war and other conflicts on the continent is that the Congo crisis is of fairly recent origin. Wars have been raging for decades in Sudan and Angola, although Angola agreed to a peace settlement in 1994. That agreement has recently broken down completely with renewed fighting between the government and the UNITA rebels, a Cold War client of the United States. Despite its former support for UNITA, the U.S. government now hopes to dampen the conflict before other countries are drawn in.

War in Sudan Has Claimed Many Victims

The war in Sudan, which has caused about 2 million civilian casualties over almost two decades, pits the government, dominated by the country’s Arab and Muslim north, against a southern-based rebel movement made up mostly of blacks who are Christians or followers of indigenous religions. The United States has condemned government atrocities but seems reluctant to get involved despite pressure from U.S. Christian and human rights groups that describe the conflict as a religious war between Islam and Christianity.

In addition to the spreading civil wars, there is conflict in Africa between Ethiopia and Eritrea, which refuses to withdraw from Ethiopian territory.