Powell’s Visit Signals a New African Focus

Citing an “emotional connection” to the continent of his forefathers, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell arrived here Wednesday to open a four-nation swing meant to underscore Africa’s importance to the Bush administration.

The trip comes on the heels of two White House initiatives. Two weeks ago, President Bush launched a global fund to fight HIV and AIDS and pledged $200 million as seed money. The president announced plans last week to host 35 African leaders in October to inaugurate the U.S.-African Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, which opens American markets to foster development among African countries undergoing difficult political and economic reforms.

As many as 500 U.S. soldiers are scheduled to arrive next month in this vast West African country, which is larger than California and Texas combined, to train Malian forces to handle humanitarian crises and disaster relief, two of the continent’s most persistent problems.

“We realize the importance of the continent, the opportunities of the continent and especially the problems that the continent is facing,” Powell told reporters in his entourage en route to Mali.

Powell’s tour, his longest yet, reflects his personal imprint on Bush administration foreign policy. The African trip comes before visits to traditionally high priority areas such as Europe, Russia, China, Japan and Latin America. Past administrations have usually fit in Africa only at the end of their terms, mainly to point out that the world’s most troubled continent had not been forgotten.

But Powell’s visit also underscores the different priorities within the Bush administration. In a weekend interview, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld indicated that he wants to cut back or even end U.S. involvement in training peacekeeping forces as part of the African Crisis Response Initiative. This effort, designed to help Africa deal with its own conflicts, was launched by the Clinton administration in 1996 as an alternative to sending U.S. or foreign troops.

Powell, who will tour the project today before leaving for South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, admitted the differences of opinion.

“Rumsfeld is always for opportunities to back off some of the overseas commitments we have--and that’s his job. But we have to balance it against our responsibilities,” he told reporters. “We have to balance it on the one hand with the United States wishing to do not quite as much overseas and asking others to do more.”

Powell has put Africa back on the U.S. agenda, reflected when he asked that his first briefing as secretary of State-designate be about the continent. En route to Mali, he conceded his personal interest in the continent, triggered when he and his wife Alma first visited Freetown, Sierra Leone, and toured the transfer prisons where slaves were held before being shipped to the United States.

“There is an emotional connection, and I always feel it when I am in Africa [knowing] that this is where my folks come from,” said Powell, the highest-ranking African American official in U.S. history, whose ancestors went first from Africa to Jamaica.

The feeling was mutual among Mali’s young people, hundreds of whom waited hours in the tropical heat to catch a glimpse of Powell at a malaria research facility. They cheered him wildly when he appeared.

“After all the hardships blacks have gone through here and in America, seeing Powell reach such a high position fills me with emotion and pride,” said 23-year-old Abdallah Hamadoun, a third-year medical student.

Powell heralded Mali, which means “hippopotamus” and was the center of three great West African kingdoms between the 10th and 16th centuries, as a model not only for Africa but also for the rest of the developing world. Although Mali is now one of the world’s 10 poorest countries, the secretary said his meeting with President Alpha Oumar Konare was “a conversation of hope.”

Mali is a relative success story, despite an ethnic conflict that raged sporadically between 1990 and 1995, because it made the transition to democracy in 1992. “If you can obtain conditions of peace, if you can get violence and conflict behind you, then you have circumstances on which you can build democracy [and] a free enterprise system,” Powell told a news conference.

Yet Mali--whose capital, Bamako, means “crocodile pond”--still faces numbing obstacles as it approaches presidential and parliamentary elections next year with 75 political parties vying for greater power. The vote would mark the country’s first transition from one democratically elected president to another.

After meeting with party leaders and answering their questions about the way U.S. elections are conducted, Powell pledged that Washington would provide technical, educational and some financial support for the balloting. Due to an array of problems, Mali’s 1997 legislative elections were annulled by the judiciary.

Complicating the democratization process are expectations of progress in a country whose per capita income is only $240 a year. Life expectancy is less than 48 years--one of the six lowest in the world and declining due to HIV and AIDS--while illiteracy is almost 70%.

Powell said he assured Konare of continuing U.S. support to ensure that democracy develops and that the nation’s younger generation is educated and brought into the information age “so that the people of Mali can join in the 21st century economic and technological revolution.”