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RECENT NEWS COVERAGE: January 23, 2000 San Jose Mercury News Africa battered by U.S. `help’ AS SECRETARY OF STATE Madeleine Albright prepares to convene a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Monday on the topic of the civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), the time is ripe for an assessment of the Clinton administration’s policy toward Africa. By declaring January the “Month of Africa” at the Security Council, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Richard Holbrooke has tried to highlight pressing African problems — from the AIDS epidemic to the spread of vicious civil wars — that often are ignored in favor of more “urgent” global priorities. It will take more than a month, however, for the Clinton administration to undo the damage wrought by decades of misguided U.S. policies that have helped sustain several generations of African dictators and demagogues. During the Cold War, the United States poured more than $1.5 billion in arms and military training into Africa under the guise of “fighting communism” and “promoting stability.” But the biggest U.S. arms recipients of that era — Liberia, Somalia, Sudan and Zaire — have been far from stable. In fact, these former U.S. arms clients ranked among the continent’s most severely troubled nations in the 1990s, ravaged by devastating civil wars that killed hundreds of thousands and wrecked already fragile economies. The government of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire received more than $400 million in U.S. weapons and training during his 32-year reign. It was one of the most brutal and corrupt dictatorships ever. Not only did Mobutu vigorously repress dissent, but he systematically looted his country by siphoning off billions of dollars in government funds to his own overseas bank accounts. Mobutu’s predatory behavior — supported and financed by the United States — set the stage for the nation’s current civil war. Although Mobutu is dead and gone, one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite “freedom fighters,” Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, is alive and fighting, thanks in part to more than $250 million in covert U.S. military aid over the past three decades. Although the Angolan government claims to have Savimbi on the run, he has rallied his forces from difficult situations before. The Angolan civil war has dragged on since the mid-1970s, when then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger first approved covert U.S. arms shipments to Savimbi’s forces. No doubt Clinton administration officials will argue that the U.S. Cold War record in Africa is “old history,” and that what they are seeking is a “new partnership” that will promote democracy and free markets to the benefit of the citizens of the United States and Africa. That was the message of President Clinton’s spring 1998 tour of Africa, the most extensive trip to the region ever undertaken by an American president. And Albright has spoken movingly of the need to stem the flow of arms to African conflicts, bemoaning the fact that “in many places where it is impossible to find a wholesome meal or a warm bed, it is easy to find a gun or a grenade.” Unfortunately, the Clinton administration’s new rhetoric on Africa has not been matched with new action. The Clinton policy can best be described as “Cold War lite,” in which the provision of arms and training still takes precedence over development aid and conflict prevention. In the 1990s, the United States exported $227 million in arms to Africa; 34 of the 53 nations on the continent have been trained by U.S. special forces under the Pentagon’s Joint Combined Exchange Training program. These U.S.-supplied combat capabilities have been fueling internal and regional conflicts throughout Africa. More than half of the U.S. weaponry shipped to Africa during the 1990s has gone to one party or another in the Congo’s civil war. The war has drawn the involvement of so many governments and rebel groupings that it has been described as “Africa’s first world war.” Eight of the nine nations involved in the Congo war have received U.S. weaponry. In fact, as the current Congo civil war began in 1998, the U.S. government was supplying military equipment to four of the governments involved in the hostilities — Angola, Chad, Namibia and Zimbabwe. Those deliveries have since stopped, but the United States still provides combat training to some of those nations — including Zimbabwe and Namibia, which are fighting in support of the government of Congo President Laurent Kabila, and Rwanda and Uganda, which are helping the rebels trying to oust Kabila. In the Horn of Africa, also, where Ethiopia and Eritrea are fighting a border war, U.S. special forces have also trained soldiers on both sides. In fact, U.S. military involvement has been expanded to include new training programs such as the African Crisis Response Initiative and the African Center for Strategic Studies. At the same time, Congress has cut U.S. development aid to sub-Saharan Africa from $800 million to just $700 million per year — about one-third the cost of a stealth bomber. During the Clinton era, the United States has solidified its position as the world’s leading arms merchant, yet we rank dead last among industrialized nations in the provision of economic assistance to poor countries: America devotes less than one-tenth of 1 percent of our gross national product to development aid worldwide. How can Clinton, or Albright, or any other U.S. official be a credible peacemaker in Africa (or anywhere) while the United States remains, in the words of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., “the world’s greatest purveyor of violence” through its role as the world’s No. 1 weapons-trafficking nation? Given the weight of recent history, the best way to produce something positive from the “Month of Africa” at the Security Council would be for the Clinton administration to put its money where its mouth is by supporting constructive steps toward promoting peace on the continent. For starters, Clinton should immediately cancel the hundreds of millions of dollars in debt racked up by the governments in Zaire, Somalia, Liberia and Sudan during the 1970s and 1980s for the purchase of U.S. weaponry. This should be followed by an unqualified endorsement of the Jubilee 2000 campaign’s call for the cancellation of all Third World debt. Many economists support this coalition of major religious organizations and non-governmental organizations, which has called for cancellation of the developing nations’ outstanding debt so they may enter the millennium with a “clean slate.” Then, the Clinton administration should set ambitious goals for an increase in development aid to the region, bringing the current sum of $700 million per year up to $2 billion by 2003. On the security front, the first priority should be to do no further harm:
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