NATO’s Role Reaffirms Doubts Among Africans

NATO’s decision to use military force in Kosovo has reinforced the view among many Africans that the world community is less inclined to intervene to halt conflicts here than it is in many other regions.

Coming as East Africa marks the fifth anniversary of a three-month ethnic rampage in Rwanda that killed an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the intervention in Yugoslavia has sparked a debate among scholars, human rights activists and political observers about when and for whom world powers are willing to take action.

While the general sentiment across Africa supports punishing Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for his treatment of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians, it also condemns NATO’s bombing campaign for causing suffering for ordinary people.

And the outpouring of sympathy and international aid for the ethnic Albanian refugees has privately piqued many Africans who feel that--given the number of dead and displaced so far--if Kosovo were in Africa, the response would have been far different.

“We continue seeing double standards applied, and that is not good for the global village as a whole,” said Ngande Mwanajiti, executive director of the International Inter-African Network for Human Rights, or AFRONET, which is based in the Zambian capital Lusaka. “The question to be asked is [whether] Africa is considered part of the international community.”

Judging by the reluctance of most Western countries to get involved in the continent’s numerous conflicts, many Africans have concluded the answer is “no.”

Civil war in Sudan--geographically Africa’s largest country--has dragged on for 15 years, pitting rebels from the predominantly black African, animist and Christian south against the government forces of the Muslim and ethnic Arab north. At least 1.5 million people have starved to death because of war and crop failures. Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. Negotiations have made little progress.

In Angola, government and rebel troops have have been fighting for more than 20 years. About 10% of the country’s 12 million people have been forced from their homes, and more than 500,000 killed. A U.N. peace deal has fallen apart in recent months.

Rebels in Sierra Leone have been battling the government since 1991. Conservative estimates put the death toll there at about 20,000.

A conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has sucked in at least seven other African nations.

There have been many reports that the United States, Belgium, France and the U.N. Security Council received dozens of warnings about plans for the slaughter in Rwanda, but--despite having a U.N. contingent in place--failed to act.

Following decades of colonial domination by Europeans and the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, Western ambivalence toward Africa is nothing new.

Even when Western countries have intervened, things often have ended badly. The ill-fated U.S. action in Somalia in 1993, the slaying of Belgian U.N. troops in Rwanda in April 1994 as the genocide began, and the 1997 loss of French troops in the Central African Republic all but sounded the death knell for Western military intervention in Africa.

Some Africans acknowledge that a lack of credible political leadership in many of the continent’s countries make it difficult for Western intervention to solve the problems that lie behind Africa’s humanitarian disasters.

And while the United States and its allies argue that they have a strategic interest in preventing war from spreading from Kosovo across Europe, few people argue that those same countries have a strategic interest in Africa.

In recent years, calls have increased for African solutions to African problems. Western nations have been encouraging regional bodies like the Organization for African Unity to resolve conflicts.

The U.S. has also been promoting the concept of Africans assisting Africans by helping to train troops for an African Crisis Response Force. West Africa, at least, already has a contingent of peacekeepers under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States. The Nigerian-led force, known as the Economic Monitoring Group, or ECOMOG, helped resolve an eight-year conflict in Liberia, which ended in 1997, and is struggling to bring peace to Sierra Leone.

While praising ECOMOG, analysts acknowledge that there are problems associated with using African troops to settle disputes in neighboring countries.

Ethnic ties, the risk of being co-opted or manipulated because soldiers are poorly paid and a lack of a respect from civilians often erode their impartiality. Add to this the lack of funds, weaponry and equipment essential for peacekeeping, and the ability to be an effective mediator is lost, said Benedict Sannoh, executive director of the Center for Law and Human Rights in Monrovia, Liberia.

Leaving Africans to solve their own problems simply allows Westerners to evade their own responsibility, Africans argue. The United States, Asian and European countries profit by selling weapons that fan Africa’s conflicts, they say.

“Disorder is good for certain types of business,” said Mwanajiti of AFRONET.

Abdul Oroh, executive director of the Lagos, Nigeria-based Civil Liberties Organization, said the United States and Europe have a particular responsibility to help end conflicts in Africa because many of them are a consequence of colonial-era border tampering and Cold War politics.

He argued that the issue really is race.

“There is racism behind it all,” said Oroh. “They cannot deny that they are involved in Bosnia and Kosovo because they are white people.”

African analysts say the world needs to somehow apply regional solutions with international muscle to their continent’s conflicts.

Sannoh said that when a government loses the ability to protect its own people, the world community should get involved.

“We need a professionally trained force with adequate [Western] backing and financial support,” he said. “If regional forces have [this], it gives them international credibility.”

Meanwhile, as Africa watches the war in Kosovo unfold, many who are too familiar with the scourge of conflict support the Western intervention but prefer diplomacy.

“Let Mr. Milosevic say that for the sake of the women and children of Kosovo, he will seek a peaceful end to this crisis,” said a recent editorial in Kenya’s Daily Nation. “On the other hand, NATO also needs to swallow its pride and rest its hi-tech jets.”