Militarization of US Africa Policy Continues Apace

Around election time, several knowledgeable Africanists wrote pieces lamenting Obama's disappointingly thin first-term record on Africa. (This article by the Center for Global Development's Todd Moss is an excellent representative of the genre. For more, follow the links here.)  Unlike a lot of observers, I myself wasn't terribly surprised that Obama hadn't done more for the continent. I never expected him to. If there's one thing he couldn't have afforded, politically, it was expending resources and political capital on what would have been billed, inevitably, as a Kenyan, Muslim, anti-colonial, America-neglecting agenda.

But it's not quite correct to say that Obama hasn't pursued any major new initiatives toward Africa. He has--just not on the trade, diplomatic, or humanitarian fronts. On the military front, Obama's  administration has gone gangbusters. Indeed, the faster the US declines as a major political and commercial player in Africa, the more intent it seems on turning the place into a garrison continent, secured and patrolled by elements of America's national security apparatus.

Three news stories in the past couple of days reinforce this impression. Yesterday's New York Times reported on AFRICOM commander General Carter Ham's recent assessment of al Qaeda-affiliated extremist groups in Mali, which it termed "detailed and sobering"--national security speak for "something we need to spend lots of money on." The Washington Post  featured a long article about how the Pentagon is establishing a new spy network  to rival the CIA in size and scope, focused inter alia on the Middle east and Africa.  And today's Defense News, which also summarizes Ham's assessment, informs us that AFRICOM has at last acquired its own  Commander's in-extremis force, more commonly known as a special operations company. (For earlier reporting on US militarization of the continent, see here and here and here and here and here and here.)

During the Cold War, US foreign policymakers seemed unable to distinguish between genuine ideological opponents and groups that were merely nationalist, anti-colonial, or pro-social justice. Everything was seen through the lens of a globalized, Manichean struggle: A sparrow couldn't fall in Managua but that it was the sinister work of the Soviets.  Today's policymakers seems equally unable to understand how America's increasingly numerous and widespread interventions abroad fuel rather than diminish antagonism toward the US. (In my more cynical moments, I wonder if that isn't the point: after all, the more we treat others as potential enemies, the more real enemies we'll make, and more real enemies we have, the more money flows into the military's budget.) But how wise can it be, really, for the US to be expending vast new sums militarizing Africa when China, our geo-political rival in the region, is doing stuff like this or this? Not to get Maureen Dowd cute here, but do we want to be trying--and failing--to transform the continent into a military satellite, or do we want to be building it new communications satellites?

Quote of the Day

Speaking of North Africa and the Sahel region, Ham said there is a “growing linkage, a growing network and collaboration and synchronization among the various violent extremist organizations... which I think poses the greatest threat to regional stability, more broadly across Africa, certainly into Europe, and to the United States."
     --General Carter Ham, Commander, US AFRICOM, at George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute on December 3, 2012.

Photogenic Goma

The war in eastern Congo may not be attracting the consideration it deserves from the media and the upper echelon of the international diplomatic community, but that doesn't mean no attention is being paid. In addition to the dozen or so journalists who are posting regularly from the Kivus, several photographers are documenting the conflicts there. Here are a few recently published photos that struck me.

1) This photo by Dominic Narh of Magnum of a young man mourning the death of his father seems to me to strike the right balance in depicting suffering without being overly intrusive. The man's face is largely hidden, protecting his dignity, even as his drawn-in body evokes the universal language of grief. Note the contrast between the bright red of his sweater and the dark shabby clothes of the people passing on the crumbling cement veranda behind him. The fact that some of the pedestrians are half-turned toward him, while others are simply walking past, provides a useful footnote to usual Auden/Breughel observation. But to me what gives this photo its precise measure of rightness is the caption, which provides the name and occasion for the man's grief, lifting it from the universal to the particular.

Mujinga Lokuli Grace (21) mourns after finding the body of his father who was a DRC
government military doctor who was killed the day before as rebels took the city of Goma.
 Dominic Narh. Magnum Photos. 11/18/12

2) The things they left behind. The Congolese army melted into the civilian population as Goma fell, abandoning their uniforms, weapons, and anything else that might give them away to the Rwandans. I'm wondering if these army boots ever had laces, or if the soldier who owned them took the laces for repurposing on civilian shoes. Yes, it's a little Van Gogh-y, but still.

Items left behind by soldiers who fled. Photos taken in the
neighborhoods of Volcans and Mabanga.
Alain Wandimoyi. France 24. 11/22/12

3) This photo by Phil Moore of AFP of Monusco blue helmets manning a protective barrier near Goma appears at first glance to show two soldiers doing their job under dangerous conditions. But something about their relaxed, almost casual demeanor provides a sardonic comment on Monusco's impotence in eastern Congo. By extension, it constitutes a sharp criticism of the international community's continuing indifference to the plight of eastern Congolese.

Uruguyan United Nations peacekeepers man a defensive position on the outskirts
of Goma, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Phil Moore. AFP/Getty. 11/20/12

Lifted from the Archives

March 9, 2009

Somewhere The Onion (a satirical news magazine) has a headline that says something like, "Area Asshole Gets his own Blog."

And sometimes, I feel like I'm that asshole. If only I weren't so pessimistic about the latest developments in the Great Lakes! If only I weren't so skeptical of the region's leaders, and believed they actually had their own people's best interests at heart! If only I felt that the new administration was really going to make a difference! If only it weren't staffed by so many former Clintonites! If only I didn't feel the Clintonites had made such a hash of it the first time around! If only I believed in the power of Hollywood stars to change the calculus of nation states! If only I believed that a few, inexpensive measures would make all the difference! 

Instead, I'm always carping about this or that, worrying about the-other-thing, questioning motives, remembering some awkward bit of history, and generally sulking around like the skunk at the picnic. 

So it's nice, every once in a while, to remember I'm not alone.* Howard French, former NYT bureau chief in Africa, chronicled the rise of Kabila and the disastrous Clinton policy of those years. He has an editorial in the Huffington Post about what Obama may mean for Africa, and like me, he retains a bad taste in his mouth from the last Democratic administration:

There is a powerful argument to be made that this disaster [the wars in the Congo], along with the Rwandan genocide that preceded it, is Bill Clinton's most important foreign policy legacy, and an Obama policy toward Africa run by many of the same people and carrying forward Clinton era thinking would be a sign of disdain for the continent and its problems.
The Congo's apocalyptic dissolution began in earnest when Washington gave Rwanda the green light to invade the country, setting off a free for all that sucked in many of the Congo's neighbors.

*And of course, I'm not. While the policy debate in Washington is being led by cheerleaders, the real scholars of the region--and you know who you are--are much less doe-eyed, much more weighed down by the deep intractability of the problems, and much less hopeful about Obama's capacity or political will to bring change to the region.

An Eccentric Little History of Congo

Adam Curtis of the BBC has a strange, entertaining little history of the Congo's early years of independence. He touches on Che Guevara, Mobutu, Mike Hoare, the Sapeurs, and Diane Fossey, and includes several short video clips that I've never seen before. Did you know that Louis Leackey, Fossey's mentor, had an affair with her and tried desperately to convince her to abandon the gorillas to be with him?

My Two Cents

Hope and Change

I'm voting tomorrow for the same guy I voted for four years ago, but with little of the hope and yes--joy--I felt back then. Obama has been a crushing disappointment to me. On Africa, my single issue topic, he has not simply been absent, as several commentators have argued. He has been worse. He has inaugurated a host of militaristic policies in Africa driven by our millenarian wars on drugs and terror. He has welcomed the same tyrannical and bloody kleptocrats to the White House as his predecessors. And while he talked a good game early on about the importance of building civil society and good institutions, he has done nothing to follow up on those words. Nothing.

On the wider stage, he has enshrined a state of more or less constant war against Eastasia--I mean the Muslim world--that normalizes atrocities against the darker-skinned abroad and a permanent abridgment of their our civil liberties at home. He has barely uttered the words "global warming," though he must know that posterity is likely to judge him more harshly for that than any number of sins of commission. On the domestic front he has rescued capitalism for the capitalists (Roosevelt famously rescued it from the capitalists), but done nothing to reverse--or even slow--the entrenchment of our emerging financier-based plutocracy. Dodd-Frank's only real effect will be to enrich a new generation of Wall Street lawyers. He has imprisoned and deported more undocumented people than all previous presidents combined. He has taken every opportunity to invigorate rather than temper the war on drugs. He has pursued quasi-market educational policies based on the lamentably well-philanthrophized notion that testing well is dispositive for learning. He has ignored labor.

His one significant accomplishment is health care: it is impossible to gainsay that, if only because nearly every president since WW II has tried and failed to institute some sort of universal coverage. That it was the worst of the options, that it does little to bend the cost curve, that it came at the cost of bribing off virtually every stakeholder except the sick and those who may someday become sick: Well, perhaps this was the price that needed paying. Or perhaps not: the other options were never tried. In any case, that one achievement isn't nearly enough to make up for him having squandered the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that his election represented. He came in facing the gravest set of problems any president has confronted since Roosevelt; in his biography and rhetoric Obama promised as soaring a set of responses. The achievements he has delivered have been at best Clintonian in their scale and imagination.

But the other guy's worse. And I live in Virginia, where votes count.

Quote of the Day

"The countries in the Great Lakes including Rwanda, Uganda, DRC, Kenya and others have shown a common interest in ending the crisis in the eastern parts of DRC...Although the situation involves complex issues like ethnic identity, transit and DRC's ability, it has been illustrated that no one is willing to support the negative forces operating in Congo and the country's sovereignty will be supported at all times."

                         --US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Wendy Sherman

Thierry Michel's Film about the Assassination of Floribert Chebeya

Youtube has the entire film, which is well worth watching.

Allegations Of Rwandan Complicity Go Back a decade

The Rwandan government is vociferously denying that it has anything to do with the M23 rebellion. These are lies, it says, being spread by a group of experts wedded to a poisonous anti-Rwandan agenda. In recent months, however, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Crisis Group have all advanced similar claims. Rwanda, they say, is heavily involved in funding, arming, and directing the rebels. Prior UN reports, composed of different groups of experts, have also reached similar conclusions. In fact, Rwanda's history of plundering Congo's resources and committing atrocities on its soil are among the most well-documented human rights violations of our time.

Here are selections from a few of those reports:

 12 April 2001

http://www.un.org/News/dh/latest/drcongo.htm

Illegal exploitation of the mineral and forest resources of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is taking place at an alarming rate. Two phases can be distinguished: mass-scale looting and the systematic and systemic exploitation of natural resources.

Mass-scale looting. During this first phase, stockpiles of minerals, coffee, wood, livestock and money that were available in territories conquered by the armies of Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda were taken, and either transferred to those countries or exported to international markets by their forces and nationals.

Systematic and systemic exploitation. Planning and organization were required for this phase. The systematic exploitation flourished because of the pre-existing structures developed during the conquest of power of the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire. These pre-existing structures were improved over time and new networks for channelling extracted resources were put in place. However, the systemic exploitation used the existing systems of control established by Rwanda and Uganda. In both cases, exploitation was often carried out in violation of the sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the national legislation and sometimes international law, and it led to illicit activities. Key individual actors including top army commanders and businessmen on the one hand, and government structures on the other, have been the engines of this systematic and systemic exploitation.

The consequence of illegal exploitation has been twofold: (a) massive availability of financial resources for the Rwandan Patriotic Army, and the individual enrichment of top Ugandan military commanders and civilians; 

Wall Street Journal Confirms ad hominen Nature of Akin Gump Attack on Hege

The Wall Street Journal reports that the law firm Akin Gump, hired by the Rwandan government to review the UN Government of Experts report on the rebellions in eastern Congo, did not limit its attack to the substance of the allegations, but instead went after the personal credibility of its chair, Steve Hege:

In its review to be delivered to the U.N. sanctions committee Friday, Akin Gump, the law firm hired by the Rwandan government, takes direct aim at the authors of the U.N. independent report, primarily its coordinator Steve Hege, calling him biased against Rwanda and therefore "unfit to continue in his current position."
It also says the group didn't provide Rwandan officials with sufficient opportunity to address the findings before they were submitted to the U.N., in several updates in recent months as well as the final report to be delivered Friday, nor did it include what the government did submit.
Mr. Hege declined to comment, citing U.N. policy. An earlier addendum from the Group of Experts said, "The Group has made extensive efforts to engage with the Rwandan government regarding its findings, with some limited success." It added that during an official visit in mid-May by the group to Kigali, the Rwandan capital, the government "didn't receive them in any substantive meetings to discuss these issues."

Let me reiterate that I am astonished that a major law firm would stoop to this level. Law firms of Akin Gump's caliber are allergic to publicity and assiduous about protecting their reputation. Nobody wants to be known at their law school reunion as the guy who trashed the personal reputation of a human rights investigator on behalf of a regime guilty of mass murder.