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Barefoot Sick Hungry and Afraid

by Open-Publishing - Tuesday 29 July 2003

Barefoot, Sick, Hungry and Afraid
- The Real U.S. Policy In Africa -

Cover Story

http://www.blackcommentator.com/50/50_cover_africa.html

"Our policy with respect to the continent of Africa at best has
been a policy that is inconsistent and incoherent," said NAACP
Executive Director Kweisi Mfume, in Miami Beach last weekend for the
organization’s annual convention. "We’ve looked away in many instances
because Africa was not politically correct or politically cute."

Mr. Mfume is wrong. United States policy towards sub-Saharan
Africa has been consistent since August of 1960, when President
Eisenhower ordered his national security team to arrange the
assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Congo had been
nominally independent from Belgium for only two months, yet
Eisenhower, far from looking away from Africa during his last months
in office, was already embarked on a relentless policy of continental
destabilization, one that has been fundamentally adhered to by every
U.S. President that followed.

U.S. policy in Africa is anything but "incoherent." Rather, too
many of us have "looked away" from the clear pattern of U.S. behavior
and intent - a ferocious, bipartisan determination to arrest African
development at every opportunity and by all possible means - including
the death of millions. War on African civil society

Belgians murdered Prime Minister Lumumba on January 17, 1961, no
doubt with the collaboration of Eisenhower’s men. Lumumba presented a
danger to European and American domination of post-colonial Africa
precisely because he was not a tribal figure, but a thoroughly
Congolese politician, a man who sought to harness power through
popular structures. As such, Lumumba personified the threat of an
awakened African civil society - the prerequisite for true
independence and social development.

A popular and long held belief among Africans and African
Americans is that the prospect of continental (or even global) African
"unity" is what terrifies Washington, London and Paris. We wish that
were true. However, the neocolonial powers know they have nothing to
worry about on that score, having begun the era of "independence" with
a clear understanding among themselves that conditions for meaningful
unity would not be allowed to develop. African civil society itself
would be stunted, hounded, impoverished - rendered so fundamentally
insecure that, even should "leaders" of African countries band
together under banners of "unity," few could speak with the voice of
the people. Only leaders of intact civil societies can unite with one
another to any meaningful effect - all else is bombast, and frightens
no one.

Tribalism is, indeed, a problem in Africa. For Americans and
Europeans, it is an obsession - the game they have played since the
Portuguese planted their first outposts at the mouths of African
rivers in the 1400s. However, there are limits to the effectiveness of
tribal manipulation. Many "tribes" are very large - nations, actually.
Setting one tribal group against the other, while suppressing the
social development of each, is a tricky business. The colonizer must
not to allow the "favored" group to accrue, through privilege,
sufficient social space to aspire to nationhood. In that event, the
formerly favored group must be crushed by the colonizer’s own military
force - a brutish and costly business.

These are generalities, and Africa is a big place. Numerous
colonial powers at different times employed the full mix of coercion,
manipulation, favoritism, and raw (including genocidal) force.

After World War Two, and for a host of reasons, the colonial
arrangement had become untenable. Europeans would continue to engage
in tribal manipulation in the new political environment, while the
U.S. preferred bullets and bribes as it assumed overlord status among
the imperialists. However, it was clear to the old masters - and
especially to Washington - that the formal structures of independence
would inevitably lead to the growth of dynamic civil societies that
could impede the operations of multinational extraction corporations
and agribusiness. Civil societies can become quite raucous and
demanding, even in countries in which there are tribal divisions.
Therefore, the process of African civil development had to be
interrupted, not only in those new states that were economically
valuable to Europe and the U.S., but in all of Africa, so that no
healthy civil model might emerge. If this could be achieved, there
would be no need to fear the actions of assembled heads of African
states - an irrelevant gaggle of uniforms and suits, standing in for
nations, but representing no coherent social force. Assignment: crush
the people

To thwart the growth of civil society in newly independent Africa,
the imperialists turned to the Strong Men. It is probably more
accurate to say that the imperialists invented the African Strong Man.
Although both the neocolonial masters and the Strong Men themselves
make a great fuss about indigenousness - albeit for somewhat different
reasons - these characters arise from the twisted structures of
colonialism. Their function is to smother civil society, to render the
people helpless.

Joseph Desire Mobutu is the model of the African Strong Man. He
was an American invention whose career is the purest expression of
U.S. policy in Africa. With all due respect to the NAACP’s Kweisi
Mfume, there was nothing "inconsistent and incoherent" about Mobutu’s
nearly four decades of service to the United States. From the day in
August, 1960 when Eisenhower ordered the death of Lumumba (Mobutu,
Lumumba’s treasonous chief of the army, deposed his Prime Minister the
next month and collaborated directly in the murder) to his death from
cancer in 1997, U.S. African policy was inextricably bound to the
billionaire thief. It can be reasonably said that Mobutuism is U.S.
African policy.

Mobutu and nine U.S. Presidents (Eisenhower through Clinton)
utterly and mercilessly poisoned Africa, sending crippling convulsions
through the continent, from which Africa may never recover. With
borders on Angola, Zambia, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, Sudan,
the Central African Republic, and Congo (Brazzaville), and a land mass
as large as the U.S. east of the Mississippi, Mobutu’s Zaire was an
incubator of never ending war, subversion, disease, corruption and,
ultimately, social disruption so horrific as to challenge the Arab and
European slave trade in destructive intensity.

Mobutu’s reign began in the heyday of European soldiers of
fortune, allies of his like "Mad Mike" Hoare. By the time of his
death, more than 100 mercenary outfits operated in sub-Saharan Africa,
safeguarding multinational corporations from the chaos that Mobutu and
his American handlers labored so mightily to foment. So integral have
mercenaries become to Africa, a number of Black governments depend on
them for their own security, forsaking any real claim to national
sovereignty. This, too, is the legacy of U.S. African policy.
(American mercenary corporations garner an ever-increasing share of
the business.)

Millions died in Zaire-Congo and neighboring states as a direct or
indirect result of policies hatched in Washington and executed by
Mobutu - and this, before the genocidal explosion in Rwanda in 1994,
leading to an "African World War" fought on Congolese soil that has so
far claimed at least 3 million more lives, belated victims of the
policies dutifully carried out by America’s African Strong Man. Bush
cultivates more Mobutus

For 43 years U.S. governments have empowered Strong Men to do
their bidding in Africa. The geography and riches of Congo-Zaire
allowed Mobutu to wreak continent-wide havoc on Washington’s behalf,
while growing fabulously rich. However, many lesser clients have been
nurtured by successive U.S. governments, their names and crimes too
numerous for this essay. They and Mobutu’s outrages are the logical
product of the neocolonialist program. The actors come and go, but the
underlying design remains the same: to prevent the emergence of strong
civil societies in Black Africa.

The Strong Man’s job is to create weak civil societies. Weak and
demoralized societies, supporting fragile states hitched to the
fortunes of the Strong Man and his circle of pecking persons, pose
little threat to foreign capital.

The African Strong Man model suits the purposes of European
imperialists and the United States, perfectly. Their overarching
concern- especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union - is for
the multinational mineral and petroleum-extracting corporations - what
Europeans and Americans are actually referring to when they speak of
their "national interests" on the continent. Representing himself and
a small base of supporters/dependents, the Strong Man can be counted
on to bully civil society into steadily narrowing spaces, snuffing out
all independent social formations, while at the same time stripping
the society of the means to protect itself outside of his own,
capricious machinery. The nation itself atrophies, or is stillborn, as
in Congo. Where nations have not had the chance to take full root or
have been deliberately stunted, the Strong Man wraps the thin reeds of
sovereignty around himself, denying the people their means of
connectedness to one another, except through him. The state is a
private apparatus and - from the standpoint of civil society - there
appears to be no nation, at all. The people act, accordingly - that
is, they do not act as citizens of a nation.

Thus, the Strong Man’s most valuable service to the foreign master
is to retard and negate nationhood through constant assaults on civil
society.

What is commonly described as American "neglect" of Africa is
nothing of the kind. Over the course of the decades since the end of
formal colonialism, the governments of the corporate headquarters
countries have arrived at a consensus that a chaotic Africa, barely
governed at all, in which civil societies are perpetually insecure,
incapable of defending themselves much less the nation, is the least
troublesome environment for Western purposes. The extraction
corporations in Africa feel most secure when the people of Africa are
insecure.

In Congo and Liberia-Sierra Leone, this unspoken but operative
policy has plunged whole populations into Hell on Earth. African
Americans typically criticize the U.S. for failing to treat Black
lives as valuable - in other words, Washington is accused of
neglecting the carnage in Central and West Africa because of racism.
The reality is far worse than that. American policy is designed to
place Africans at the extremes of insecurity, in order to foreclose
the possibility of civil societies taking root. This policy has always
resulted in mass death. Moreover, the U.S. did not simply sit idly by
while genocide swept Rwanda and "World War" wracked Congo. Instead,
the American government initially thwarted a world response to the
Rwandan holocaust, and has prolonged the carnage in Congo through its
two client states, Uganda and Rwanda, which have methodically looted
the wealth of the northeastern Congo while claiming - falsely,
according to a report to the UN Security Council - to be protecting
their own borders. Uganda’s list of "proxy" Congolese ethnic armies
reaches into every corner of Ituri province, where "combatants...have
slaughtered some five thousand civilians in the last year because of
their ethnic affiliation," according to a Human Rights Watch report.
"But the combatants are armed and often directed by the governments of
the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], Rwanda and Uganda." ("Ituri:
Bloodiest Corner of the Congo," July 8.)

Zimbabwean officers have also plundered the country, but have been
involved in far less killing in their role as protectors of the
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government. Angola and Namibia also
went to the Kinshasa regime’s aid. The United Nations and African
countries labored for five years to untangle the mix of belligerents -
with only the most pro forma cooperation of the United States.
Prolonging "Africa’s World War"

Had the U.S. wanted to end or at least scale down "Africa’s World
War," there is no doubt that Washington could have reined in Rwanda
and Uganda, who received a steady stream of American military and
economic assistance during the conflict. The Congolese (DRC)
government, on the other hand, has suffered under severe sanctions
from both the U.S. and the European Union.

It would have cost Washington far less than a billion dollars in
bribes to quarantine "Africa’s World War" - slush money for a
super-power, and a fraction of the bribes Washington was willing to
pay for favorable votes on Iraq at the UN. Instead, the U.S. provided
aid to key combatants. That’s not a lack of policy, nor is it
indifference. In the larger scheme of things, Washington believed that
prolonging a war that weakened and debased Africa was in its "national
interest."

Uganda and Rwanda have reciprocated, shamelessly. "Recently Uganda
publicly backed the U.S.-led attack on Iraq, defying the African
position to endorse a UN-sanctioned war," reads the current message of
the official State House website of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s
government, in Kampala.

Rwanda’s Ambassador to the U.S., Zac Nsenga, was even more
obsequious when presenting his credentials at the U.S. State
Department, May 8:

"The Rwandan Government reaffirms its commitment to join forces
with the United States and the free world to combat acts of terrorism
wherever it rears its ugly head. The events of the 1994 Genocide and
September 11th has taught us that we have to stand together as Nations
to defeat these evil acts against humanity. For this very reason
President Kagame stood firmly in support of the U.S. led attack on
Iraq, not only to root out a terrorist dictator but also to free the
people of Iraq."

Three million dead in Congo mean nothing when compared to two
eager clients in the heart of Africa, who are more than willing to
both defy "the African position" on Iraq and help keep Central Africa
chaotic - Mobutu’s old job.

As for Charles Taylor, the Liberian Strong Man responsible for the
death, dismemberment and displacement of hundreds of thousands in his
own country and neighboring Sierra Leone - at the time of this
writing, Bush was still playing games over whether Taylor should leave
for Nigerian exile before or after an African peace keeping force
arrives to secure the capital, Monrovia.

Concerned American progressives debate what their positions should
be if Bush sends significant U.S. forces to help pacify the country.
He will not. If history is any judge, U.S. involvement on the ground
in Liberia will be token, if any, and brief - just enough to show the
flag. Had Washington desired stability for Liberia and its neighbors
Sierra Leone, Guinea and the Ivory Coast, it would have eliminated
Taylor years ago. He was allowed to live because he served U.S.
policy, whether he knew that or not. Eternal warfare is the most
effective way to smother civil society.

Americans may also one day learn this horrible lesson.