Will US ‘do the right thing’ in Africa?

Former US diplomats and other analysts fear that Bush’s indecision would send the wrong message to Africa and the world. ‘‘Are you going to care about people when they’re sitting on top of oil like in Iraq? When they’re from Europe like in the Balkans, but not when they’re Black Africans?’’ asks John Prendergast, a former adviser on African affairs to the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. ‘‘If you’re going to travel to Africa and say Africa matters, it’s almost impossible not to go.’’

Prendergast and others say sending US peacekeepers to Liberia is an obvious decision. Unlike Iraq, where American soldiers come under almost daily attacks from people who view them as an occupying force, the government of Liberian President Charles Taylor and rebels opposed to him say they would welcome US peacekeepers on their soil in the hope that would end the violence.

In a diary he is keeping for BBC Online, Tom Quinn, an aid worker with Doctors Without Borders in the Liberian capital, Monrovia, describes conditions facing thousands of Liberians displaced by recent fighting. ‘‘There are so many spent bullet cartridges on the road that you have the sensation of driving over marbles, and in the northern suburbs, the streets are absolutely empty save for wired-looking kids with guns, and rotting bodies,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s eerie. Back in the (displaced) camps, we’re greeted with the same singing and dancing as always but the people are losing hope. They live in constant fear and at the mercy of armed gangs that sweep through their shelters, stealing what little they have and raping their women.’’

Helping innocent victims would boost the United States’ battered image in Africa and the world, analysts add. ‘‘It’s an opportunity to do the right thing at a moderate cost,’’ says Chester Crocker, the Reagan administration assistant secretary of state for African affairs and now a professor at Georgetown University. ‘‘We’ve ignored Liberia for 13 years,’’ notes Dennis Jett, who was the acting US ambassador to Liberia in 1990 when Taylor and other rebel groups overthrew the US-backed government of strongman Samuel Doe. ‘‘If we agree that failed states breed terrorism, insecurity and disease, it’s in our interest to go in there, help get Taylor out, and establish order.’’

Apart from the nation’s founding, the United States has enjoyed a fruitful history in Liberia. Firestone, the tire and rubber company, maintained a large operation there. In the late 1980s, the United States gave Liberia $500 million in aid and made it a key Cold War base when it feared that communism was gaining a foothold in Africa. That support plummeted with the end of the Cold War. Since then, Africa’s importance to the United States has diminished considerably.

Crocker and Jett, dean of the International Center at the University of Florida, agree that the Black Hawk Down episode during the Somalia mission continues to determine US policy towards humanitarian missions in Africa. ‘‘We scared ourselves out of our shadows,’’ says Crocker of the Somalia experience.

The Somalia mission so traumatised US that in 1994, Clinton issued a foreign policy order, setting stiff guidelines for intervening in conflicts. The UN sought approval to use its 2,500-strong peacekeeping force to halt the massacres but Clinton blocked that, saying the United Nations had to learn ‘‘when to say no’’.

In her Pulitzer-winning book A Problem From Hell, Samantha Power, now a Harvard lecturer, described how Clinton’s officials fretted they could not afford another Somalia. The same officials worried that a failed intervention in Rwanda could threaten his re-election. Clinton travelled to Rwanda in 1998 and apologised for doing nothing to stop what he described as ‘‘unimaginable terror’’.

Since the Somalia debacle, the US has tried to limit its peacekeeping in African conflicts to supporting the African Crisis Response Initiative, a US programme that trains African soldiers to act as observers in traditional UN peacekeeping missions. But Prendergast, who now heads the African programme at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank, says such efforts are not meaningful because ‘‘just focusing on traditional peacekeeping is not relevant to most of the kinds of missions which need to occur in Africa’’.

In the Congo, for example, where militias allied to various governments have massacred civilians, systematically raped women and enslaved child soldiers, force by international peacekeepers is warranted to enforce ceasefires, disarm militias and protect safe havens for civilians, Prendergast said.

Jett, author of Why Peacekeeping Fails, says the United States has a chance to do in Liberia what the British did in neighbouring Sierra Leone: disarm militia groups, organise elections, and engage in rebuilding of a war-torn country. Jett and others agree that any mission to Liberia will be complex because the country’s ongoing civil war has consumed the West African region, including Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast. (LAT-WP)