United States: The New Scramble for Africa
Pierre Abramovici
Precious Resources in Need of Protection
The United States is turning its diplomatic and military attention to Africa, not just to the continent's oil and natural gas supplies although these represent an important future contribution to US energy supplies but to its metal and industrial diamond resources. It is quietly establishing military training and equipment links with a number of countries to secure future supply lines.
The United States, under the pretext of the war on terrorism, has boosted its presence in Africa. Washington has realised that it is dependent on strategic raw materials and is increasing political and military accords with the majority of African countries in an effort to secure its supply lines. The US army, oil companies and US security companies are winning. Despite this active encroachment on its former preserve, France seems to be adopting a passive stance.
On 23–24 March 2004 the chiefs of staff of Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Senegal and Tunisia took part, for the first time, in a little publicised meeting at the headquarters of the US army's European command US-EUCOM in Stuttgart. The meeting was described as unprecedented and its proceedings have remained secret: it dealt with military cooperation in the war on terrorism and focused on the Sahel, a buffer zone between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, between the oil fields of the north and those of the Gulf of Guinea.
The US political and military interest in Africa has increased significantly in recent years. That is clear from Secretary of State Colin Powell's visit to Gabon and Angola in September 2002, he spent just one hour in each and from President George Bush's tour of Senegal, Nigeria, Botswana, Uganda and South Africa in July 2003, as well as the tour of Ghana, Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Namibia, Gabon, Sao Tomé, Niger and Tunisia by the deputy commander of USEUCOM, General Charles Wald, two weeks before the Stuttgart meeting.
More important was Washington's indirect involvement this March in a military operation by Sahel countries Mali, Chad, Niger and Algeria against the Salafist Group for preaching to combat the Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat (GSPC). The GSPC second in command, Ammari Saïfi, known as ‘Abderrazak the para’, is said to have been arrested in Chad in May.1 In June the Algerian army announced that it had killed Nabil Sahraoui, the GSPC's main leader. Like the Armed Islamic Group GIA, the GSPC is on the US list of terrorist organisations, and is suspected by Washington of having links with al-Qaida. It came to public attention when it kidnapped 32 European tourists in the Algerian Sahara in early 2003. This year's operation was a first in Africa and confirmed the close cooperation between the US and Algeria.
Since January the US army has used substantial resources to support local troops in their struggle against the GSPC. This was organised as part of the Pan Sahel Initiative PSI, a military assistance programme which has run since November 2003 and has $6.5m funding for 2004. It is designed to help Mali, Chad, Niger and Mauritania combat smuggling, international crime and terrorism.
Some 250 tonnes of equipment and 350 soldiers were airlifted to the region over two weeks from the Rota airbase in Spain. Once troops and equipment arrived, air defence resources were made available from Royal Air Force bases in Mildenhall and Lakenheath in Britain.
Elements of the 32nd Special Operations Group, a unit linked to the CIA, were mobilised to protect the operation. In the weeks before, elements of the 10th Special Forces Group, based in Stuttgart, were sent to supervise training of Malian troops. Colonel Victor Nelson, who oversees the programme for the US Defense Department's Office of International Security Affairs, explained that:
the PSI is an important tool in the war on terrorism and has gone a long way to open doors and strengthen relationships, notably between Algeria and Mali, Niger and Chad, in a region we have largely ignored in the past. We have said for a long time that if you squeeze the terrorists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and other places, they will find new places to operate, and one of those places is the Sahel/Maghreb. 2
Zaire and Zambia possess 50% of world cobalt reserves, and 98% of the world's chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South Africa. South Africa also accounts for 90% of reserves of metals in platinum palladium, rhodium, ruthenium, iridium and osmium. US thirst for oil will boost the importance of countries such as Angola and Nigeria.
After the failure of the US intervention in Somalia, from 9 December 1992 to 31 March 1994, President Bill Clinton relaunched US policy on Africa. The revived US interest was apparent when it hosted the first meeting between the heads of eight African regional organisations, plus 83 African ministers and their US counterparts in March 1999. The aim of the meeting in Washington was to strengthen the partnership between the US and Africa and encourage increased economic development, trade, investment, political reform and mutual economic growth.3
Although terrorism was on the agenda because of the 1998 attacks on US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, for which al-Qaida was held responsible, the main outcome of the meeting was the adoption of the African growth and opportunity Act (AGOA), giving African products greater access to the US market.
A coherent system of military assistance
Less obvious was the gradual introduction, from the mid-1990s, of a coherent system of military assistance. In 1996 Washington created an African crisis response force, which was soon replaced by the African crisis response initiative ACRI.4 ACRI's official mandate is to provide both training for peace-keeping and humanitarian aid; ‘non-lethal’ equipment was supplied. ACRI was actually designed to modernise local armed forces and bring them into line with US norms, particularly in response to emerging terrorism in Africa. Its other purpose is to avoid a repeat of the Somalia disaster.
Although ACRI is the creation of the US State Department, it is the US army's European Command that coordinates military resources, particularly the use of special forces. Private companies specialising in the sector, such as Logicon from the Northrop-Grumman group or Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) provide logistical support, including equipment or specialist civilian personnel. MPRI is a private security consultancy whose directors include former US officers; it works for governments the world over, including in Iraq. Although ACRI claims to have humanitarian objectives, its programme coordinator is Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a former US officer with an impressive record. He is a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 failed US landing in the Bay of Pigs. He is also a former special forces officer who served in Vietnam and Laos. During the Reagan era he belonged to the Inter-American Defense Board and, in the 1990s, he took part in clandestine operations against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, alongside the Contras. He was accused of having been involved in drug trafficking to fund arms sent to Central America.
The ACRI training programme is designed to develop basic military capabilities, strengthen combat formations and boost headquarters organisation. The programme revolves around using the minimum equipment for the maximum training. It is based on six keys: standardisation, inter-operability, training the trainers, transparency, support and team-work. There are plans to extend the training standards to programmes run by other countries such as France, Britain and Belgium, and to cooperate with them.
Between July 1997 and May 2000 ACRI organised training for battalions: 800–1,000 soldiers in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Mali, Ghana, Benin and Ivory Coast. The US State Department provided some 8,000 soldiers with light equipment - electric generators, vehicles, mine detectors, night-vision gear - and especially with communications. In 2001/02 the programme received funds of $30m. ACRI is extending selective military or civilian assistance programmes, developed by the US since the early 1990s and managed by the Defense Department as is the case in Mali. In July 2001, 400 Senegalese soldiers were trained in psychological warfare as part of the ACRI programme. According to Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, ‘accepted doctrine commonly used in NATO is being absorbed’.5 Political and military seminars were arranged for 65 officers to enable them to understand how best to prepare for peacekeeping operations. The exercise culminated in the computer simulation, using satellite technology, of a crisis. Logicon devised the Janus programme on which the exercise was based. The objective is to bring integration and operability into line with Pentagon norms and to install US equipment over the long term.
The Pentagon moves in
But ACRI is just one aspect of the US expanding its military commitment in Africa. The Africa Centre for Strategic studies, established in 1999, is a branch of the Pentagon's National Defense University, which trains high-level military personnel and civilian leaders, political leaders or the heads of associations and company bosses. The programmes cover civilian-military relations, national security and defence budgets. In May 2003 Mali was chosen to host a seminar on combating terrorism in the region. Algeria, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal took part. France and Germany were represented.
After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the US boosted military investment in Africa. The war on terrorism gave it the necessary pretext. As Bush made clear during his African tour in July 2003,
we will not allow terrorists to threaten African peoples, or to use Africa as a base to threaten the world. 6
While the forces deployed within the ACRI framework were never placed in a situation in which their security was threatened, those in the ACOTA framework will have to be prepared to face danger, since they will be responsible for restoring peace.7 ACOTA is linked to the training centres of the joint combined arms training system JCATS. Described as ‘indispensable’, they make it possible to maintain levels of qualification and military preparation; the first was opened in Abuja, in Nigeria, on 25 November 2003.
The JCATS are run by MPRI and are based on the use of sophisticated simulation software that mimics battlefield conditions. Nigeria and Canada are the only countries with JCATS software.8 According to Colonel Victor Nelson, former US military attaché to Nigeria and responsible for overseeing the Pan Sahel Initiative, this is an inexpensive way of providing officer training. Even countries with few resources can use JCATS. It involves bringing people together for a couple of weeks for war exercises, which the US military is already doing.9
Besides ACOTA, 44 African countries are taking part in a programme specifically for officers. The international military education and training programme IMET provided training for more than 1,500 officers in 2002. For the main countries involved, Botswana, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal and South Africa, the total cost of IMET increased from $8m in 2001 to $11m in 2003. The Africa regional peacekeeping programme includes training in offensive tactics and the transfer of military technology. Between 2001 and 2003, it received funding estimated at $100m.
Markets & communication channels
US strategy in Africa has two main axes. The first is unlimited access to the key markets, energy and other strategic resources, and the second the military securing of communication channels, particularly to allow the transport of raw materials to the US. According to a former secretary of state for energy, James Schlesinger, at the 15th World Energy Council in September 1992, what the American people learned from the Gulf war was that it was far easier to kick people in the Middle East into line than to make sacrifices to limit US dependence on oil imports. Clearly African oil interests the US.10 On 5 September 2002, Colin Powell travelled from Johannesburg, where he had been at the Earth Summit, to Luanda (Angola) and Libreville (Gabon), both oil-producing countries. Experts agree that over the next 10 years Africa will become the US's second-most important supplier of oil, and possibly natural gas, after the Middle East; at least until things calm down. Two strategic routes are at the centre of US thought: in the west, the Chad-Cameroon pipeline and, in the east, the Higleig-Port Sudan pipeline. There is talk of building a pipeline linking Chad and Sudan.
In July 2003 an attempted coup in São Tomé and Principe, a small state rich in oil reserves and associated with Nigeria, triggered US intervention in the archipelago. Three months later, oil companies, mostly US ones, offered more than $500m to explore the deep waters of the Gulf of Guinea, shared by Nigeria and São Tomé and Principe. That was double what the countries had hoped for. Shortly after, the US army announced a programme of aid to small local security forces. There is said to be the possibility of setting up a military base. The US Congress and Bush administration have formally declared the region of vital interest for the US. Washington has prepared the ground well, using the State and Defense Departments: the com-mander-in-chief of US-EUCOM, General Carlton Fulford, went to São Tomé in October 2002 to look into the possibility of establishing a regional mandate in West Africa and MPRI is training coast-guards in Guinea and Angola.
In Africa the US is trying to establish partnerships with all countries using a range of pretexts. The US claims, for example, that the South African army would be incapable of conducting a large-scale operation because a large proportion of South African soldiers are infected with HIV, and further claims that Pretoria would need massive support from Washington to reinforce those unreliable elements. As a result, South Africa is preparing to rejoin the ACOTA programme. (Although not all South African soldiers can be afflicted since thousands of them are employed by private companies in Iraq as civilian back-up).
In reality, it is South Africa's strategic position that is of interest to the US. During the cold war, Pretoria opened its bases to US armed forces, enabling Washington to control the Indian Ocean between Africa and the Diego Garcia naval base. It was also a vital element in the battle against African liberation movements that were suspected of attachment to Moscow. In 2001 US Ambassador Cameron Hume claimed that South Africa and the US shared a similar attachment to democracy, market economy and the search for a better future for all.11
US military interventionism in Africa is encroaching on traditional zones of influence of the former colonial powers, including France. That competition is evident in Djibouti, one of the poorest countries in the world, a desert without resources, a country of no apparent interest were it not for its strategic position. It juts out into a maritime zone through which a quarter of world oil production passes, the Sudanese pipeline is nearby, and it is also on the strategic strip between the Sahel and the Horn of Africa that Washington is trying to secure. Although France retains its main foreign military base, Camp Lemonier, in Djibouti, it has now become a permanent US base.12
US-EUCOM deputy commander General Charles Wald spends a lot of time in Africa. In March 2004 he travelled in a week to Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria, Angola, South Africa, Namibia, Gabon, São Tomé, Ghana, Niger and Tunisia. At a press conference held in Washington for African journalists, he stressed that the US and France had many interests in common:
They're francophile countries that obviously have strong lineage and history with France. The French would be involved in that respect. 13
Pierre Abramovici is a journalist and author of ‘Un rocher bien occupé’, Seuil, Paris, 2001. ©Le Monde Diplomatique; Translated by Julie Stoker.
Political destabilisation & ‘Blowback’ in the Sahel
Jeremy Keenan
This briefing was written in mid-Octo-ber 2004 and updates the situation in the Sahelian Sahara described three months ago in the previous issue of ROAPE. 1 That article concluded that America's interventionist strategy in the Sahelian Sahara, notably its Pan Sahel Initiative (PSI), which it now likes to refer to as its Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Initiative (TSCTI), was likely to lead to four possible scenarios. These were:
1) The increased likelihood of provocative and/or reprisal action against local peoples in the Sahelian-Sahara by their governments, possibly with the support of US facilities in the region (e.g. air strikes).
2) That the increased militarisation of the region would disrupt the highly lucrative trans-Saharan smuggling businesses to the extent that the major players might become the main agencies for alliances with Islamist extremists being drawn into the region.
3) That Libya's bombastic involvement in this affair in early July, when it was reported to have threatened to bomb the MDJT (Mouvement pour La Democratie et la Justice au Tchad) rebel movement in northern Chad ‘in a way it had never been bombed’, might be a precursor to Colonel Ghadafi's return to old form in terms of his designs on Chad, the Sahel and perhaps elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.
4) That America would use the pretext of the ‘War on Terror’ in the Sahel to firm up its basing rights and militarisation (aid!) programmes in sub-Saharan Africa, especially where US strategic interests are at stake.
During these intervening three months (July-October 2004) a number of disturbing developments have taken place within the region, which indicate that the first of these scenarios is already a reality and that the remaining three are the cause of increasing concern.
Increased regional instability & insecurity
The first and most apparent outcome of America's PSI has been to increase the political instability and insecurity of a region which, although politically complex and fragile, was nevertheless relatively stable. In spite of the claims of the US administration and its intelligence services, this region was not the home or shelter of ‘terrorists’. As an increasing number of the region's inhabitants are now coming to believe, and as issues 98, 99 and 101 of ROAPE have documented, the reported ‘terrorist’ activities across the region over the last eighteen months have been largely fabricated by the US-Algerian intelligence-media services. This is now having one very serious consequence, which is that the weak and dictatorially-inclined governments of the region (Chad, Niger, Mali and Mauritania), not to mention America's key regional ally – Algeria, are all benefiting from US financial and military support and consequently have a vested interest in both generating and maintaining the new climate of ‘terror’ which now pervades their desert regions.
Since early 2003 in southern Algeria, and since late 2003 in the Sahel, the indigenous peoples of the region have become increasingly aware and fearful of their governments’ attempts to provoke unrest and ‘incidents’ in order to justify both the US intervention in the region and their own alliances with the US in the so-called ‘War on Terror’. The last issue of ROAPE (Terror in the Sahara) referred to this fear. In the last three months, however, this scenario of provocation has become widespread.
Coup attempts in Chad, Mauritania & Niger
An attempted coup by disgruntled soldiers against Chad's President Idriss Deby, himself a former warlord, in May of this year was followed at the end of September by claims from the Mauritanian authorities that pro-Western strongman Ould Taya had foiled a further attempt, the third in 15 months, to depose him. Sources in N'djamena say that the attempted putsch came from within Deby's own Zagawa tribe who straddle the border with Darfur and who have been suffering at the hands of the Sudan's government-backed Janjawid movement. The putschists were reported to be venting their anger at Deby's soft line towards the Sudan government.
Mauritania's pro-western strongman, President Maaouiya Ould Taya, has pointed the finger of blame more widely, accusing Libya, Burkina Faso, Islamic fundamentalists and desert nomads of supporting the same dissident faction in the army that led an abortive coup in June 2003. The truth of the matter is that Ould Taya has angered many of his devoutly Islamic countrymen by establishing diplomatic relations with Israel and backing the US in its war against Iraq. There is also deep malaise within the country's poorly paid army, especially amongst officers and men from the southern and south-eastern regions of the country who have seen Ould Taya dispense the more lucrative posts to his own ethnic supporters in the north of the country. Indeed, most of the soldiers and civilians arrested in September belong to the Awlad Nasser ethnic group from the region around Ayoun el Atrous in southeastern Mauritania. This is the same ethnic group which backed the 2003 coup attempt and whose leader, Major Saleh Ould Hanenna, is still at large, leading many to believe that the govern-ment's latest claim of a coup attempt was merely an excuse to crack down further on the opposition and to divert attention from the fact that 123 people are still in detention and awaiting trial following the 2003 coup attempt. Many also believe that the government's allegation was also designed to persuade the Americans, whose troops are now garrisoned at Ould Taya's stronghold in Atar, that they would be unwise to diminish their presence in the country. Ould Taya's pro-US position certainly fits well into America's current neo-con view of Middle Eastern and ‘Islamist’ politics. But this view is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy in as much as it is Ould Taya's support for US policy, along with the US military presence in Mauritania, as elsewhere across the Sahel, which is provoking the various forms of political opposition (albeit repressed) and Islamic extremism. The inability of the current US administration to grasp this simple association lies at the heart of so much of recent US intelligence failure.
In Niger, where the first round of presidential elections is scheduled for 13 November, there is also talk of senior military officers seizing power in the event of the widely predicted electoral demise of embattled President Mamadou Tandja and his MNSD-Nassar Party.2
Mali: Unrest in the desert margins
Increased instability is also threatening Mali. In June, an attack by unidentified assailants on a humanitarian convoy near Bourem (100 km NW of Gao) was blamed on the Tuareg. Soon afterwards, the long-standing feud between Kounta and Arab tribes erupted in a fresh outbreak of fighting in the same region, with 13 persons being reported killed at a fight at a well near Bamba in September. Although these incidents appear to have had little to do with the US presence, they have nevertheless served to justify the increased militarisation of NE Mali, especially the region between Timbuktu, Gao and Kidal and north to the Algerian frontier, an area in which trans-Saharan traffickers of one sort or another have always moved fairly freely but where the US has recently become obsessed by presumed al-Qaeda activity.
Talk of a ‘New Rebellion’ in Niger
The most serious situation, for which the government of President Mamadou Tandja must be held largely responsible, is that now developing in the Tuareg regions of northern Niger. Tuareg in both Niger and Mali rebelled against their governments in the first half of the 1990s. Peace deals were eventually reached in both countries. However, although hundreds of Tuareg were drafted into the government security forces as part of the peace deals, both governments have paid insufficient attention to rectifying the underlying causes of the rebellions, with the result that the situation of the Tuareg people has improved only marginally and tensions have remained high. Herve Ludovic de Lys, head of the UN's Organisation for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) regional office in Dakar was recently reported as saying that ‘the peace agreements signed after the Tuareg rebellions were not respected, reintegration was not implemented, the political systems did not take into account the aspirations of the inhabitants.’3 In spite of this assessment of their situation, Niger's Tuareg have held to their side of the peace treaty, with the exception of occasional ‘bandit’ hijacks and robberies of passing traffic and some indulgence in clandestine goods trafficking – actions which say more about their economic situation and political marginalisation than any prevalence to terrorism. Indeed, since early 2004, when El Para's much publicised escapade through the Air Mountains thrust this remote region of northern Niger into the frontline of the ‘War on terror’, Niger's Tuareg have been increasingly fearful of their government's (and the US's) attempts to incriminate them in the ‘War on Terror’.4
It is still too soon to provide a full analysis of the events in Air following El Para's brief sojourn in the region. The arrest in February 2004 of Rhissa ag Boula, leader of the rebel Tuareg's now dissolved Air and Azaouak Liberation Front (FLAA)5 and subsequent Minister of Tourism, in connection with the murder of Adam Anamegi (Amangue),6 a young official in the ruling MNSD-Nassar Party, has clearly become the catalytic action in bringing the Air Tuareg to what some media reports now see as the brink of open rebellion. The reasons for Aman-gue's murder are too deep-seated and complex to be explained in this short brief, except to say that Rhissa is almost certainly innocent of the charges levelled against him and believed to be such by both his own Tuareg followers and many others in the country.
The question hanging over Niger is therefore: why was Rhissa arrested? There are many, especially amongst Rhissa's supporters, who believe that his arrest was a calculated move by elements within the government to provoke a Tuareg reaction and thus destabilise the northern regions for the purpose of securing more money and arms from the US. Similarly, stories of a ‘new rebellion’ in the north, which have been gathering headway since late April,7 have been denied by these same sources as nothing more than government-in-spired rumours designed to provoke unrest in the north. The government, for its part, has publicly denied both the outbreak of a ‘new rebellion’ and the reports in the local media in late May that large numbers of Tuareg had deserted from the army. According to the Minister of the Interior, only five soldiers were recorded as absent, with one of those being on short-leave. Local sources in Agades and in the Air region itself suggest that the number of deserters is considerably higher than the Minister's claim.
Whatever the truth behind these various claims, the fact is that northern Niger, especially Air, has been politically destabilised and transformed into a zone of insecurity over the course of the last four to five months. The summer months have seen an escalation of banditry in the region (the government insists on calling the gunmen ‘bandits’ or ‘criminals’, not ‘rebels’), with attacks being reported 5 June, 7 July, 10 August and 1 October.8 On the day after the 10 August attack, a private radio station, Radio Saraounia, carried a telephone interview, reported to be with Mohamed Boula, brother of Rhissa ag Boula, in which he presented himself as leader of the reconstituted FLAA and claimed responsibility for the attack. Following the 1 October attack, Radio France Internationale (RFI) carried a similar interview in which Mohamed Boula said he was leading a 200-strong group which was fighting to defend the rights of the Tuareg, Toubou and Semori nomadic populations of northern Niger, and that he was personally responsible for the attack.9
Latest indications are that some of the 150 troops, which have just been trained by US marines as part of the PSI to combat trans-Saharan arms, drugs and people smuggling and the establishment of ‘terrorist’ and ‘bandit’ networks in the Sahel,10 are being deployed into Air in a provocative move which really could ignite a new Tuareg rebellion.
Linking minority, marginalised groups to terrorism
These various incidents, namely the alleged coup attempt in Mauritania, the Kounta-Arab and alleged Tuareg attacks in Mali, the more serious events in northern Niger and the activities of the rebel MDJT in Chad, have all received widespread media coverage. A key feature of this coverage, especially in the Americanised media, has been the use of alliteration to link the Tuareg and Tubu minority groups with ‘terrorism’. Even the BBC, usually punctilious in its reporting, appears to have given little thought to the wisdom of running a highly evocative news report on the US PSI in Chad alongside its coverage of two major, but false, terrorist scare stories that had broken that day in the USA and London.11 It thus managed to create associations between terrorism in the USA, London and the Sahel through three stories that were all based on falsehoods. The more the local governments of the Sahel can provoke and hence portray these minority and marginalised populations as ‘rebels/bandits’ or as arms, cigarettes, drugs or people traffickers, the more money and arms they are likely to receive from the US. For these governments, the PSI is likely to become big business, especially now that EUCOM has requested Congress to increase PSI spending from its original $7 million to $125 million.
The destabilisation of this region and its newly acquired status as a potential ‘terrorist’ haven stems from the huge deception described in the last issue of ROAPE (Terror in the Sahara…). For some two years now, the US propaganda agenda has insisted that its operations in the Middle East and Afghanistan forced a number of ‘terrorists’ out of these areas into ‘the wide-open, relatively desolate and ungoverned areas of Africa’ – notably the Sahel. Right-wing, quasi-academic institutes, such as the Center on Terrorism and Counterterrorism at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, now talk indiscriminately about the Sahel as: ‘the perfect location for an al-Qaeda organization… to establish its training and recruitment camps’,12 as a ‘huge breeding ground for terrorism’ and as ‘another major terrorist front’.13 The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has also taken to reiterating the American line: he told a conference on African economic development in Addis Ababa on 7 October that:
Even before September 11, Al-Qaeda had bases in Africa. They still do. Hiding in places where they can go undisturbed by weak governments where they can plan their next attack, which could be anywhere in the world. 14
Maladministration & Tuareg Harassment in Algeria
In southern Algeria, the government has adopted the more heinous strategy of personal harassment and threats of litigation to quell any opposition from local Tuareg, especially those who run the local tourism agencies – the lifeblood of the indigenous economy – and who have been at the forefront of attempts to bring the attention of the central government to the region's maladministration. As the general situation in southern Algeria has deteriorated over the last eighteen months in the wake of the supposed ‘terrorist’ threat, there has been much debate amongst local Tuareg as to whether the government strategy in the Tamanrasset wilaya has simply been a reflection of the wali's15 malevolence, endemic corruption, the north's jealousy of the south's ability to attract foreign tourists (and their money), or a deliberate attempt to provoke a reaction from the Tuareg (as in Air) that would justify a larger and more repressive military presence in the south. I have documented the details of this decline in the quality of regional governance elsewhere.16
For the purpose of this briefing, it is enough to say that an intensification of personal harassment by the wali against critics of his regime culminated in the President of UNATA (Union Nationale des Associations des Agences de Tourisme Alternatif), a Tuareg named Mohammed Rouani, being served with four lawsuits for defamation. The main litigation was brought by the wali, Messaoud Djari, who, to strengthen his case, instructed the regional Directors of Tourism, Taxation and Public Works to also lodge cases against Rouani. Documents submitted as evidence by these government officials were found to be forged and on 20 October, their cases were thrown out of court. In the meantime, the wali has refused all press interviews and requested that his own case be adjourned for another week (see Postscript). The immediate reaction of the Tuareg, many of whom had packed the court, was one of disbelief, as this was the first time that a citizen of Tamanrasset had won a case against a senior government official. The ramifications of this case are likely to be profound, especially as most of the aggrieved Tuareg parties believe that the ‘War on Terror’ that has engulfed their region and curtailed their livelihoods over the last eighteen months has been a deception, engineered by elements within their own government. The question of damages being demanded against the government cannot now be ruled out.
Pensioning off a ‘Terrorist’?
In the meantime, the mystery surrounding El Para, the alleged emir of the GSPC (Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat) ‘terrorists’ in the Sahara, remains. As already mentioned in Terror in the Sahara (ROAPE, 101), some people believe that he returned to Algeria from Air and did not go to Chad, while others believe that the GSPC paid the MDJT a ransom for him in June. The official story, from US, Algerian and Chad sources, is that he is still held captive by the MDJT in Tibesti. The lack of effort by either the Americans or Algerians to ‘take him out of Chad’ strongly supports the conclusion of Terror in the Sahara… that he was the key instrument in the US-Algerian attempt to launch their ‘War on Terror’ into the Sahel. Now that El Para has served his purpose, it is significant that the official position of the Algerian government, as stated by Interior Minister Yazid Zerhouni, is ‘that El Para is no longer of great importance to Algeria's fight against terrorism as he has been out of the country for over a year’!17
The seeds of ‘Blowback’
US rhetoric is that ‘the aim of the Pan Sahel Initiative is to enhance regional peace and security’.18 However, an increasing number of regional experts, as well as local people themselves, believe that the US initiative will backfire in as much as the US-led crackdown on terrorism is likely, as we are already seeing, to simply fuel existing tensions in the region. As life in the desert has got harder, especially since the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, nomads have become increasingly dependent for their livelihoods on tourism, state subsidies and, to a lesser extent, smuggling and banditry. All these forms of income have been decimated as a result of the US initiative. In times of impoverishment, people resort to desperate means. As Amadou Bocoum, the deputy chairman of Mali's government commission to combat the proliferation of small arms, made clear:
cigarette, fuel and weapon smuggling is carried out by the population (especially the desert nomads) and it is difficult to consider them as bandits as it is their only source of income and allows them to survive. 19
In all five of these desert countries, government actions against and provocations of its desert populations, ranging from Ould Taya's crackdown on his ethnically based opposition, to the reckless methods being adopted by Algeria's government to deprive local Tuareg of their tourism industry, are fuelling resentment of both the local governments and the US administration that supports them. As most residents of the Sahel recognise, the increased impoverishment of the region is such that if groups associated with al-Qaeda did come into it, they would quite likely find support at the local level if they were able to provide resources. As Aboubacrim Ag Hindi, professor of law at the University of Bamako (Mali) told IRIN,
the biggest danger in this region is not al-Qaeda. It is famine. If the development of these zones is not undertaken, we may see more rebellion there.21
Particularly pertinent for the American PSI is that it coincides with the worst locust plagues to blight the Sahel for at least fifteen years. Chronic food shortages are imminent. Mauritania estimates that it will lose 40% of its crops and harvest this year, while Mali reckons a third of its grain crop will be wiped out. Niger is also under attack and locust swarms have already moved into much of southern Algeria. While the Bush-Blair axis has said much about the link between poverty and terrorism, they have been singularly slow (as has the EU) in responding to appeals for funds and means to fight the locust plague. West African leaders have tried to impress on Washington that the locust invasion should be treated like a war, as its capacity for the destruction of human life is far greater than that of the worst conflicts. But, as some residents of the Sahel have remarked,
if the US had spent the same on locust control as ‘terrorist’ control, we would not have this imminent loss of life.
Postscript: Tamanrasset, 26 October 2004. The court reconvened this morning to hear the final case of defamation brought by the wali against Mohamed Rouani, the President of UNATA. The wali, already the subject of widespread ridicule, declined to make a personal appearance in the packed court. The defence lawyers (from Algiers) considered that his nonappearance marked the effective end of the case, and a formal verdict will be given on 2 November. The removal of the wali, for which the Tuareg have struggled for some four years, is now considered imminent. In the meantime, the celebration of this unique victory, which will have profound political consequences, has begun.
Jeremy Keenan , Director of the Sahara Studies Programme, University of East Anglia, UK; e-mail: jeremykeenan@hotmail.com
US aid to Africa
Gayle Smith
During his campaign for president, George W. Bush said that even though it was ‘a country with many problems’, Africa was not an area of strategic importance to the US. But Bush's recent actions have proved to speak much louder than his words. Late last year, his administration secured a dramatic increase in funding to fight the global HIV/AIDS pandemic and establish a new, robust foreign aid fund targeted to the world's poorest countries. Much of this new aid funding will go to Africa. Contrary to candidate Bush's previous assertions, the continent has assumed strategic importance as the focus of two of the Bush administration's primary policy goals: fulfilling the agenda of ‘compassionate conservatism’ and the pursuit of new supplies of oil.
Although Americans contribute to private charities at commendable levels, official foreign aid has never been popular in the US. Funds allocated by Congress to foreign aid programmes are commonly viewed as competing with domestic spending, and most Americans believe that the US spends far more on international development than is actually the case.
The annual negotiations between the legislative and executive branches of government over the foreign operations budget do little to build public confidence, as they traditionally feature sharp attacks on the US Agency for International Development USAID and battles over the ‘earmarks’ that allow members of Congress to target aid to specific projects or constituencies. These battles reached fever pitch in the mid-1990s, when arch-conservative Senator Jesse Helms attacked the Clinton administration for pouring taxpayer dollars down ‘foreign rat holes’.
There was initially little indication that the new Bush administration would move the ball forward. But midway through his term, President Bush dropped two surprise announcements. The first came at the March 2002 Conference on Financing Development in Monterrey, where he announced the ‘Millennium Challenge Account’, a US$5 billion dollar fund designated for the developing world's poorest, yet best economic and political ‘performers’. In his State of the Union speech nine months later, Bush stunned critics and fans alike by following his ‘take-no-prisoners’ stance on Iraq with the announcement that he would triple US spending on global AIDS.
The president's announcement marked a significant departure from his admin-istration's earlier stance. Six months before his State of the Union announcement, Bush had announced a three-year, US$500 million international AIDS programme focused on mother-to-child transmission, thus undercutting a proposal by Senators John Kerry (Democrat) and Bill Frist (Republican) to provide US$2.1 billion in international AIDS funding in fiscal year 2003 and US$2.5 billion the following year. Meanwhile, when time came formally to request the newly proposed funds from Congress, the Bush administration undercut its own pledge, asking for less funding than had been forecast by the president's announcements. Activism and advocacy by development and AIDS organisations, as well as by Bono and key members of Congress, brought the numbers up, and almost one year later Congress was set to approve a new foreign operations budget for 2004 and provide the administration with US$2.4 billion for HIV/AIDS programmes in 15 countries, most in Africa and the Caribbean, and US$1.3 billion to launch the Millennium Challenge Account.
No doubt, these are aid levels that set historic precedents, define George W. Bush as a champion of foreign aid and mean more money for Africa. And given how hard it has been to increase US development spending since the end of the Cold War, the Bush administration deserves credit for doing what many had thought impossible. But consistent with his other grand gestures, Bush's new aid policies bear the trademark of his administration: the triumph of ideology over facts.
The conservative side of George W. Bush's global compassion was evident from the first day of his administration, when he reinstated what is called the ‘Mexico City’ policy, less charitably referred to as the ‘global gag rule’. Originally announced by President Ronald Reagan at the Second International Conference on Population in Mexico City in 1984, this provision dictates that US aid for family planning cannot be provided to foreign non-governmental organisations that use funding from any source to provide abortions or abortion counselling, or which lobby to make abortion legal in their countries of residence. These restrictions remained in place throughout the Reagan and Bush Sr administrations, but were rescinded by President Clinton. In 1998, leaders in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives conditioned the payment of US back dues to the United Nations on imposition of the global gag rule. Clinton vetoed the legislation, but caved in to Congressional demands a year later in order to pay US$900 million in outstanding dues to the UN; he subsequently exercised his authority and waived the restrictions.
George W. Bush went further than his father, however, and coupled the reinstatement of the global gag rule with the requirement that one-third of new US spending on international HIV/AIDS programmes be allocated to abstinence programmes. The highly regarded American Medical Association and US National Institutes of Health have long backed comprehensive sex education. But supporters of abstinence from among conservative think tanks and the US radical right carry more weight with the Bush administration, and the weight they carry is substantial. Congress has allocated more than US$100 million to domestic abstinence programmes; the Centers for Disease Control has removed a page from its website that reviewed effective, comprehensive sex education programmes; US NGOs that do not advocate abstinence-only programmes, or have criticised the global gag rule, report an unusual number of audits by the federal government; the Bush administration has allied itself with Pakistan, Libya, Saudi Arabia and other non-democratic regimes to oppose references to ‘gay men’ or ‘sex workers’ in UN resolutions, and with members of Congress to ensure that USAID avoids the same references in its own public materials.
Bush's conservatism is fast trumping the effectiveness of his compassion, particularly in Africa. The gag rule has forced the closure of clinics in Kenya, curtailed community outreach programmes in Ethiopia, Zambia and Uganda, and forced established family planning organisations to close or reduce services. According to recent reports by the Center for Reproductive Rights and Population Action International, USAID – once the world's leading provider of condoms to the developing world – has terminated condom shipments to 16 developing countries whose family planning associations are affiliated with International Planned Parenthood and to another 13 countries whose main, but not only, family planning organisation will not sign on to the gag rule.
In August of 2003, Bush expanded the coverage of the gag rule to include, in addition to USAID funds, family planning assistance provided by the State Department. Significantly, however, the administration has not imposed the gag rule on the new funding allocated under the president's new HIV/AIDS programme which, in a marked departure from past practice, will be managed by the State Department rather than USAID. While this compromise has been heralded by critics of the gag rule, they point out that the rule still applies to other funds, and are concerned that the NGOs already rendered ineligible for USAID funding will be similarly avoided by the State Department as it implements the new HIV/AIDS programme. And even if the new HIV/AIDS programme operates free of the gag rule, the wisdom of shutting down health clinics with one aid programme while fighting an epidemic through another is questionable at best.
It is certain that the Bush administration will retain the gag rule as it applies to other development assistance, and possible that the State Department will opt for elective compliance with the gag rule as it allocates new AIDS funding. One of the administration's core constituencies is the radical American right. According to the New York Times, 40% of those casting their votes for Bush in the 2000 presidential elections hail from historically ‘evangelical’ denominations. In recent years, they have expanded their focus from a purely domestic agenda to the international arena. It was to this constituency that Bush directed his comment, in 2002, that new funding for mother-to-child transmission would help ‘the innocent victims of HIV/AIDS’, and his references to sex trafficking in his 2003 speech before the UN General Assembly. Having struck common cause with traditionally liberal foreign aid advocates, conservative America has become a key actor in campaigns to increase AIDS funding, particularly in Africa. The Bush administration enjoys the best of both worlds, receiving the praise of liberal advocates for increasing the quantity of foreign aid, and from conservative pundits for ensuring that its quality reflects their particular values.
If compassionate conservatism is one leg of the Bush administration's Africa strategy, then calculated consumption is the other. Early in its term, the Bush administration made clear its intent to diversify US oil supplies, and an administration task force, headed by Vice-President Dick Cheney and informed largely by the US oil industry, concluded in 2001 that Africa would soon emerge as a leading supplier to the US. Driven more by industry than by innovation, the Bush administration has given far less attention to alternative sources of energy or conservation than it has to securing these new oil supplies. And the need is urgent: the US burns an estimated 19 million barrels of oil per day and consumption is growing.
It is estimated that Africa today provides the US with between 12 and 14% of its oil supplies; industry experts estimate that the continent could provide as much as 25% within the next 15 years. The Persian Gulf states today provide an estimated 26%, with Canada and Mexico combined providing close to 30%. Middle Eastern oil reserves, however, are estimated to be much larger than those in Africa. US imports now draw heavily on Nigerian and Angolan oil supplies, but are slated to expand to a new generation of producers in West Africa including Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé and Príncipe.
African oil is of particular appeal. Transportation of West African oil to the US takes just over two weeks, as compared to the six weeks it takes oil to move from the Middle East to US shores; major oil supplies in West Africa are within reach of US military forces positioned in the Atlantic; and, because much of Africa's oil is offshore, exploitation requires neither stability, nor a highly visible industry presence. Finally, a majority of Africa's oil exporters are not members of OPEC, and are thus unconstrained by OPEC price controls and free to tie their revenues to the US dollar.
US interest in African oil is not new. While US support for UNITA forces in the Angolan civil war was ostensibly rooted in the global fight against communism, it had at least as much to do with preventing the Soviet Union from monopolising that country's oil reserves. George Bush Sr facilitated introductions of African leaders to oil industry magnates in Texas. And the strong support by the Clinton administration for the democratic transition in Nigeria was not unrelated to consideration of Nigeria's prominence as a leading oil supplier.
What is new is the alliance between the White House and the oil industry. George W. Bush was himself an oilman; DickCheney left a position as CEO of Halliburton to join the Bush administration; National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice served on the board of Chevron before assuming her position; and a host of White House advisers earned the lion's share of their personal wealth from investments in the industry. Policy, therefore, gives due consideration to the industry's interests, and less to the ad-ministration's oft-stated desire to promote ‘American values’ around the world. The State Department recently opened a new embassy in Equatorial Guinea, not because that country has reformed but because it has begun to exploit significant reserves of oil. Angola has been given the equivalent of a political free pass despite its failure to pursue promised reforms following the death of Jonas Savimbi. Former Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner made several visits to São Tomé while Secretary Colin Powell stopped off in Gabon. Neither state can be said to be among the ‘good performers’ that the Bush administration has identified as its priority.
The Bush administration has abandoned the Clinton administration's emphasis on a new US ‘partnership’ with Africa, making clear its disdain for a ‘soft’ policy that reeks of liberal hand-wring-ing and opting instead for a hard-headed policy rooted in the realities of a world it believes to be more cruel than collaborative. That this has allowed Africa to gain status as ‘strategically important’ is not all bad, for the fact of the matter is that the allocation of US attention and resources derives directly from its perception of strategic interests. But it is also a setback. Even if it does signal heightened US compassion, a family-planning strategy that delivers dollars but closes clinics is unlikely to bolster Africa's ability to fight HIV/AIDS or future epidemics. And the Bush administration's reversion to the realpolitik of the Cold War, even if it is buttressed by a significant investment in the fight against HIV/AIDS, means that the US need for oil will trump Africa's need for progress.
Gayle Smith is an adviser to USAID and former senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration. ©Index on Censorship 2004
World bank ignores own advice!
Nadia Martinez
The World Bank has declared itself to be more concerned with the needs of oil companies than the impoverished people it officially serves, by ignoring most of the recommendations of a path-breaking report that the lender itself commissioned over three years ago. After spending millions of dollars having an independent team of experts evaluate the effects of its energy lending, the bank brushed off most of the final report's conclusions – one of which was to pull out of oil and coal projects by 2008. By doing this, the lender has failed to distinguish its goals and standards from the likes of Halliburton, ExxonMobil, Shell, and other profit-driven institutions. US taxpayers' contributions to the World Bank are supposed to constitute international development assistance, not corporate handouts.
Here's what happened
After years of pressure to make the World Bank more accountable for its investments, the bank's president, James Wolfensohn, pledged in Prague in 2000 to undertake a review of the World Bank's support for the extractive industries, particularly oil, gas, and mining.
A year later, Mr. Wolfensohn appointed Emil Salim, a former Indonesian environment minister who served under the Suharto dictatorship, to lead the review. Dr. Salim was also on the board of a coal company at the time of the appointment (though he resigned later). With those credentials, most of the environmentalists, faith-based groups, development advocates, and human rights activists who'd demanded this assessment were pessimistic about ever seeing the bank change.
To every observer's surprise, the report concluded in January that World Bank support for fossil fuel and other mining projects simply doesn't alleviate poverty. The bank sat on the startling report for six months.
The report called on the World Bank to improve its practices in the energy industry by setting in place better mechanisms to ensure that money gained from extractive projects will be used for basic needs such as education and health, instead of weapons. It urged the World Bank to adopt policies to guarantee the rights of people affected by large extractive projects, especially indigenous people. Most important, the report concluded that the World Bank should stop financing oil and coal projects altogether.
The bank's board of directors finally discussed this report, known as the Extractive Industries Review, on 3 August 2004 and opted merely to endorse minimal commitments to change the way the bank does business. For example, while they pledged to increase renewable energy financing by 20% annually, the base line the lender is using is so low that the target for renewable support in 2005 is lower than the bank's loans for renewables in 1994. Currently fossil fuel financing at the World Bank exceeds renewable lending by a factor of 17 to 1.
Although the World Bank is a taxpayer-funded institution whose mission is to help the poorest people on the planet, it is putting the interests of oil companies based in rich countries ahead of the needs the world's poor.
Twelve years have passed since the World Bank and most of the nations in the world committed to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the Rio Earth Summit. Yet the Bank remains one of the biggest catalysts of fossil-fuel extraction in the developing world, and nothing that the board did in response to the Extractive Industries Review will reverse that trend.
The World Bank's rationale for continuing to subsidise oil companies is that people in developing countries need energy. However, the Institute for Policy Studies' research suggests that 82% of the bank's oil extraction projects wind up supplying consumers in the United States and Europe. The Institute has also calculated that the main beneficiaries of World Bank fossil fuel extractive projects are Halliburton, Shell, ChevronTexaco, Total, and ExxonMobil, in that order, and the list continues.
Another rationale the World Bank offers is that its involvement in these projects offers oversight that makes them more environmentally sound and less prone to corruption. In reality, many of the bank's projects are riddled with these kinds of problems. For example, the president of Chad reportedly used part of the first proceeds from the World Bank-supported Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline on military weapons.
The bank's own review of extractive industries was proof enough that oil companies' profits don't trickle down to the people the institution is supposed to serve – but the World Bank chose not to bring its lending more in line with its stated mission.
Blair & Africa: the Africa Commission
Martin Plaut
The announcement
In February this year Tony Blair held one of his regular press conferences. But instead of tackling the domestic issues of the day, he announced the establishment of a Commission for Africa.
Africa is the only continent to have grown poorer in the past 25 years, its share of world trade has halved in the generation, and it receives less than 1% of direct foreign investment, 44 million children do not go to school, millions as you know die through famine, or disease, or conflict, and Africa risks being left even further behind. That's why in the context of our G8 Presidency in the year 2005 I have decided with others to form a Commission for Africa to take a fresh look at Africa's past, present and future. It will be a comprehensive assessment of the situation in Africa and policies towards Africa. What has worked, what has not worked, and what more can and should be done.
Despite this, the announcement contained a good deal that was of interest. In particular, it gave an indication of the reason for the Commission, which include the fact that the Millennium Development Goals, adopted by the world's leaders are fast approaching, and are looking unlikely to be met. Unless action is taken immediately this could lead to considerable political opprobrium, particularly given Mr Blair's well known remark about Africa as a ’scar on the conscience of the world’.
How will the commission work?
The Commission, which Tony Blair chairs, brings together leaders from the developed world and Africa. Of the seventeen commissioners, nine are from Africa. The Africans include President Benjamin Mkapa of Tanzania, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, K. Y. Amoako of the Economic Commission for Africa and Anna Tibaijuka, a UN Under Secretary and Executive Director of UN Habitat. In addition to Tony Blair the commissioners from the developed world include Gordon Brown, the former head of the IMF, Michael Camdessus and Nancy Kassebaum – the former US Senator. Finally there is Sir Bob Geldof, former singer with the Boomtown Rats, and aid campaigner from the Ethiopian famine of 1984, whose brainchild this Commission is. In a memorable phrase Sir Bob described it as ‘a generational opportunity’ to tackle Africa's many ills.2
All the Commissioners participate in their personal capacity, but since most are current political figures in their own right, they are expected to carry real clout. Mr Blair has promised to use the British presidency of the G8 and the European Union to provide an African focus. The Commission met for the first time in London in May. It will meet again in Ethiopia in October and then again in the spring of 2005. This is when its report will be published. The Commission Secretariat has begun work on background papers on a wide range of subjects, from economic issues to health and education. It has also begun to talk to a number of groups, including the development community and the African diaspora.
Reaction
The first reaction from the aid agencies and development sector was generally hostile and sceptical. The World Development Movement (WDM), one of the leading British aid lobby groups appeared to have little time for the prime minister's initiative.
In light of existing analysis on the problems facing Africa, the range of previous political declarations from African Governments themselves, the range of existing – and still unfulfilled – promises of industrialised countries, and the way the UK and EU have ignored African governments in the WTO, WDM is deeply sceptical over the need for, and usefulness of, the Commission for Africa.WDM believes that the plight of many African countries is not due to a lack of research or understanding. In fact, the analysis of Africa's problems is already well developed and a wide range of progressive solutions for many of Africa's problems has already been proposed. What is lacking is political will in the industrialised world to make good on existing commitments and make use of this wealth of knowledge and the strength of feeling in Africa in favour of lasting and radical change. 3
Some reaction from the African diaspora was also hostile. Chukwe-Emeka Chikezie, director of Afford (Africa Foundation for Development) called for the Africa Commission to consult Africans, while at the same time predicting that this process was probably doomed, since the agenda would already have been set, and complaining that ‘Most of us, in any case are suffering from acute ‘consultitis’ – we're all researched out.’4
But organisations based in Africa appeared to be more relaxed in their approach. Dennis Kabaara, of the Institute of Economic Affairs in Kenya welcomed the Commission as a real opportunity for African initiatives to win support from the developed world.5 At the same time he raised a series of issues that it would have to tackle to meet African needs, including multilateral trade, debt and aid.
Considered reaction from the British aid community as a whole was positive, if somewhat cautious. BOND, the alliance that links nearly 300 organisations working in the development sector – supported the Blair initiative while placing on record what it felt the Commission should achieve in order to succeed.6 In particular, BOND asked for a clear outline from the Commission of how any consultation process would take place and what had been learned from the process. Having said that, the organisation offered to provide the Commission with support and advice through its network of partners in the UK and in Africa.
Son of Brandt?
There was a clear recognition from the start of the Commission's work that it would be treading a path that had, at least in part, been walked by the Brandt report twenty-five years earlier.7 The Brandt 21 Forum, which has nurtured the work undertaken by the former German Chancellor and his associates all those years ago, helpfully published an excellent report for the Commission, laying out exactly what had to be done to learn the lessons from Brandt.8 James Quilligan, of the Brandt 21 Forum, outlined some of the main differences in the historical circumstances in which both commissions took place. On the positive side these included:
- 1.
Global security is no longer defined by the nuclear arms race;
- 2.
The fall of Communism has ended the bi-polar world;
- 3.
The successful development paths opened up by the Far East and India;
- 4.
The success in regional and subregional integration (e.g. The African Union, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (Nepad), etc.
- 1.
The world's population has risen by 1.7 billion people;
- 2.
Absolute poverty has increased from 800 million to 1.8 billion;
- 3.
The HIV and AIDS pandemic has swept through the developing world;
- 4.
The debt burden has increased, trade is still skewed against African producers and they still have an unfair representation in the world's major organisations (IMF, World Bank, WTO, etc.).
Perhaps most importantly Quilligan believed that after nearly twenty years of inactivity on the Brandt agenda, the conditions may at last be ripe for the implementation of its recommendations. As evidence he pointed to the following:
- 1.
The adoption of the Millennium Development Goals by 191 members of the UN in 2000, with defined targets for 2015;
- 2.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 launched a series of public-private partnerships for development;
- 3.
The New Partnership for Africa's Development is providing a bridge for co-operation between the developed world and Africa;
- 4.
The ‘Doha’ trade negotiations provide a forum in which African concerns over trade could be addressed.
No one need lament the fact that the Blair Commission does not have the advantage of independence, a broader mandate, more time for deliberation, or a broader global focus – the Brandt Commission served that role. From this perspective, the more limited scope of the Commission for Africa is necessary in order to implement the first step of the Brandt Commission's plan – immediate action for those countriesdeserving special attention.
Why did Blair choose Africa as a key focus for 2005?
There are two answers to this question: his father and his religion. In February 2002 the prime minister went to Sierra Leone to celebrate Britain's role in successfully ending eleven years of civil war. It was an emotional time for Mr Blair, with crowds lining the streets to celebrate the achievements of his troops. Before a crowd that included fire-eaters, dancers and acrobats as well as local dignitaries, Mr Blair said ‘My first introduction to Sierra Leone came many, many years ago because my father used to come to Freetown to the University here to teach’ (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1812394). Blair's father, Leo Blair, visited Fourah Bay College several times in the 1960s to lecture in law and administer exams. This early exposure to Africa gave the prime minister personal familiarity with the continent and its concerns.
There is no doubt that Tony Blair, like Gordon Brown, also feels a strong, personal commitment to Africa – something that Bob Geldof attested to when he wrote:
I like Brown and Blair as men. Whatever you read about the cynicism and spin behind this Commission, it's simply not true. In private conversations over many years, both these men have been ferociously impassioned on this issue. 9
I am a practising Christian and that's part of me – there's no point in denying it; but I suppose that what I drew from Peter Thomson is the idea that your religious belief wasn't something that shut you away from the world but something that meant that you had to go out and act. 10
To note this is not to suggest that Mr Blair is anything less than an utterly determined, frequently ruthless politician. Rather it is to indicate that he is also driven by a set of ideals that cannot simply be explained in terms of electoral advantage. Sending troops to Sierra Leone was a risky venture that could easily have backfired. Adopting Africa as a key theme for the 2005 presidencies of the EU and the G8 also carries risks, but can, at least in part, be explained by Mr Blair's fundamental beliefs.
Is Africa ready for change?
The Commission comes at a fortuitous time. As the twentieth century drew to a close a good deal of thinking was taking place inside Africa. Much of this focused on just why the continent had so spectacularly failed to emulate the development achievements of the Far East and still languished at the bottom of all economic growth charts.
The first African initiative was therefore primarily economic. In 1998 South African President Thabo Mbeki's delivered a speech launching the concept of ‘African Renaissance’. This then came to be incorporated into a number of similar initiatives – including the ‘Omega Plan for Africa’ proposed by President Abdulahi Wade of Senegal. These ideas were transformed into a ‘Millennium Africa Renaissance Programme’ after discussions between the presidents of South Africa, Nigeria and Algeria in 1999. Finally, in October 2001 a meeting in Abuja, Nigeria launched the ‘New Partnership for Afri-ca's Development’ or Nepad.11 Although Nepad has come in for considerable criticism on the left, it did provide Africa with an agreed strategy that it could then take to the rest of the world.12
When African heads of state met the leaders of the world's richest countries at the G8 summit in Kananaskis, Canada, in June 2002, they were able to extract promises of support for the Nepad agenda, despite the fact that it containing an extraordinarily ambitious set of programmes, which together were priced at a staggering $64 billion a year. The question was how to translate generalised support into the hard cash needed to bring to fruition Nepad's plethora of projects.
In addition to its economic proposals Nepad contained an important political dimension – it incorporated a ‘Peer Review Mechanism’, which was designed to ensure good governance by African governments. In return for an end to corruption, conflict and chronic waste, the developed world agreed to accept the African development agenda spelled out by its leaders.
The second initiative was directly political – the abolition of the Organisation of African Unity and its replacement in 2002 by the African Union. This was considerably more than a mere change of name. In particular, Article 4(h) of the Constitutive Act that brought the African Union into being provides for ‘the right of the Union to intervene in a member state pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity’ (African Union Constitutive Act, adopted 9 June 2002, Durban, South Africa. Article 4h). For Africa, which had always rejected any intervention in the internal affairs of a member state of the OAU this was little short of revolutionary. The Peace and Security Council of the Union is now attempting to put this into practice in Sudan, although it is proving to be no easy matter.
By early 2004 it was therefore possible to say that Africa's leaders had outlined the kind of economic agenda they wished to follow, and had begun to tackle the chronic problems that had plagued the continent for generations. As the African Union Commission Chairman, Alpha Oumar Konare, told the opening session of the organisation's summit in July this year, war and instability were key barriers to growth on a continent that had seen 186 coups d'etat and 26 major wars in the past half century.13
This was the kind of realism that the developed world could recognise and embrace. Mr Blair, and the Commission that he has initiated, can therefore genuinely be said to have partners in Africa with whom they can work.
The South African dimension
There is one other reason for optimism, which is the re-emergence of South Africa as a major force in Africa, following the ending of apartheid.
Pretoria, which used to spread war and instability across vast swathes of southern Africa by its cross-border attacks on Angola, Zambia, Mozambique and Lesotho, as well as its occupation of Namibia, is now generally a force for good. First President Nelson Mandela and now President Mbeki have worked tirelessly to try to resolve a host of African conflicts. Their intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi are perhaps the best-known examples of this. On the other hand, there has been President Mbeki's well-known reluctance to criticise other African leaders, something that has resulted in his continuing support for a dictator like Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Despite this, there is little doubt that the overall account is positive.
Even more significant has been the reemergence of South Africa as an economic force in Africa. Although the statistics are far from accurate and tend to vary wildly, one reputable source (UNCTAD) estimates that South African investment in the rest of the continent has been worth US$1 billion a year since 1994.14 Much of this has been concentrated in southern Africa, in former British colonies and in sectors in which South Africans had expertise: mining, agriculture and infrastructure construction (roads, bridges, airports, harbours, pipelines) and in the management of energy generation and telecommunications.
Despite this, as the South African economist Wolfgang Thomas points out, these investments bring a range of benefits to Africa, including job creation, skill and technology transfers and improvements in infrastructure.15 Not that South Africans have always been welcomed in their newfound role. Some African politicians and commentators now look upon the country's involvement in their countries as a form of ‘sub-imperialism’. Although there is some disquiet in this regard, this has not been widespread, so far.
Can the commission change anything?
No sneering, please. Let's go for it. Give us a hand. 16
First, its commissioners will have to forge a united vision that can be sold to the international community in general, and Africa in particular. This will require skilful political footwork in its meetings and in its consultations both in Africa and with the diaspora.
Second, it will have to come up with a well-written report that is accessible to a wide public and backed by papers that bear academic scrutiny across a broad range of issues.
Third, the commissioners will have to hope that no major disaster befalls any of their countries. Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia could, for example, become a considerable embarrassment if his country becomes engaged in a fresh round of fighting with Eritrea, or if his plans to resettle a million highland Ethiopians in the western lowlands were to go badly astray.
Finally, the Commission will have to come up with the money to back its vision. There is no point in Mr Blair complaining that this is not the purpose of the exercise. Africa has drawn up its plans (Nepad), is beginning to reform its governance (Peer Reviews) and to tackle its coups, crises and wars (African Union). Now it is for the rich and powerful of the world to back their words of support with concrete actions. Some of these will, of course, have to come in other fora, including the World Trade Organisation. But additional resources will have to be mobilised for Africa or else the Commission will be judged a failure.
This has already been recognised, if somewhat obliquely, by Sir Nick Stern, the Commission's director of policy research. Speaking in South Africa he said:
The Commission wants to work and interact with pan African institutions and to find ways to support their programmes. It will not have its own money but will try to argue for and pressure rich countries to give support. 17
The Facility is designed to achieve both the additional finance and the value for money necessary to meet the internationally agreed Millennium Development Goals so that by 2015 every child has schooling; infant and maternal mortality is reduced and poverty halved.
If the necessary resources can be found, and if there is a fair wind and careful political footwork, the Blair Commission could provide useful assistance and support for the changes already under way in Africa. But there is no magic wand or silver bullet. In the end Africa's destiny lies in its own hands. It will have to find its own way out of its difficulties, implementing its own plans and finding its own solutions.
Martin Plaut , Africa Editor, BBC World Service News.
Building & sustaining stability in Lofa County, Liberia
Jonathan Temin
Wedged between Guinea and Sierra Leone and a day's drive from the capital Monrovia, Lofa County is one of Libe-ria's more remote regions. In recent history it has also been one of the more volatile. In the series of wars fought since Charles Taylor began his insurgency on Christmas Eve, 1989, Lofa has frequently been a primary battleground. In the fighting from 1998–2003 – referred to as ‘World War Two’ by some Lofa residents – death and destruction in Lofa was particularly severe. Reliable casualty figures are not available, but the evidence is everywhere: communities are populated by a small fraction of their pre-war population (some residents were killed and many are now refugees and internally displaced peoples (IDPs)), almost no permanent buildings remain intact and markets are devoid of the most basic goods, such as charcoal and bread.
This briefing is based on one month spent in eastern Lofa County in May and June 2004. It describes the current situation and identifies challenges to stability and reconstruction likely to arise in the near future, some of which may threaten the national-level peace and reconciliation process. Observations are based on dozens of community meetings and more than a hundred individual conversations, but they are not the result of any formal survey and should not be interpreted as such.
Lofa's two conflicts
Lofa residents often speak of two conflicts that devastated the county over the past fourteen years: the national conflict involving Charles Taylor, government forces and various rebel groups, especially Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) during ‘World War Two’; and a more localised ‘tribal’ conflict primarily pitting people of Mandingo ethnicity, the majority of whom are Muslim, against people from the Lorma and Kpelle ethnic groups, both generally Christian (though members of all three ethnic groups practice traditional religions as well).1 The two conflicts are certainly interrelated – Taylor very effectively manipulated ethnic animosities for strategic purposes – but it is worth distinguishing between the two because the apparent end of the national conflict does not necessarily signal the end of the Lofa conflict.
While the national conflict has been the focus of the international community's interventions and appears to have been resolved, for the time being, by the Accra Accord of 2003, the local Lofa conflict has largely evaded the attention of both the transitional national government in Monrovia and the international community. Ethnic tension in Lofa remains high. Few communities are inhabited by both Mandingoes and either Lorma or Kpelle, and in those that are the community tends to be geographically divided by ethnicity. In the first half of 2004 reports of inter-ethnic violence were common, though difficult to verify. Also common were disturbances by LURD excombatants1 eager to disarm to the United Nations Mission In Liberia (UNMIL) and frustrated by the absence of what they perceive as their ‘just rewards’ for ending Taylor's rule.
Threats to stability in Lofa
As UNMIL and various local and international NGOs spread throughout the country and bolster their presence in remote areas including Lofa, they should bear in mind threats to stability and reconstruction in Lofa that come from various sectors and pose substantial challenges. At least six stand out as major concerns: ‘tribalism’ and intermarriage, land disputes, ex-combatant dissatisfaction, leadership concerns, retribution and retaliation, and instability in Guinea. Each is described below.
‘Tribalism’ & inter-marriage
When asked about what threatens their security most, many Lofa residents respond in one word: tribalism. By this they generally mean ethnic divides between Mandingoes and other groups, especially the Lorma and Kpelle. Much of the ethnic animosity stems from the widespread perception of Mandingoes as foreigners who comprised the majority of the LURD forces held responsible for much of the destruction in Lofa. Mandingoes are often associated with neighbouring Guinea. According to Ellis,
of all [Liberia's] Muslim populations, only the Mandingo are considered outsiders, people whose real home is elsewhere. 2
Interestingly, an informal survey of Lofa residents suggests that they rarely cite religion as a source of tension, only ‘tribalism.’ But the religious divide between Christians and Muslims overlaps the ethnic divide between Kpelles and Lormas on one side and Mandingoes on the other, so it can be difficult to determine how much of the existing animosity is due to ethnic differences and how much is due to religious differences. For whatever reason, explanations by Lofa residents overwhelmingly focus on the former.
Land disputes
As many refugees and IDPs return to their communities, disputes over land claims are inevitable. Most disputes occurring so far happen within communities and are relatively small-scale. Many involve the location of ‘house spots’ on which returnees build their new residences (because virtually every structure was destroyed during the war, returnees almost invariably cannot return to their previous residence, but they can build on the land where their previous residence once stood) and some involve the location and size of farm land. There have already been several observed instances of returnees building on land that may belong to community members who have not yet returned, and those returnees often find themselves confronted by fellow community members who tell them they cannot build there. In at least one community, residents temporarily living in Monrovia are said to have sent messages to the community warning returnees not to build on their land.
There is also the potential for land disputes between communities. Several such disputes have occurred so far, but in general they are less likely to happen than intra-community disputes because communities are often separated by large swathes of uninhabited forest.
Disputes over farmland sometimes take on ‘tribal’ overtones. In one community we heard complaints that Mandingoes were harvesting crops planted and tended to by Lormas (the Lormas making this complaint added that they had no problem with fellow Lormas other than the farmers working the particular farm harvesting the crops – they just didn't want Mandingoes to benefit). In this same community, LURD ex-combatants (implied to be Mandingoes) have been accused of preventing Lormas from harvesting palm nuts while allowing Mandingoes to do so.
Ex-combatant dissatisfaction
Many ex-combatants express strong dissatisfaction with the UNMIL-led Disarmament, Demobilization, Rehabilitation and Reintegration (DDRR) process, especially because disarmament did not occur as planed in Lofa County. Some of their complaints seem justified; UNMIL has sent mixed signals concerning the starting date for disarmament, at one point posting announcements that it would commence on a certain day but then delaying disarmament indefinitely, ostensibly so that construction of the cantonment site in Voinjama could be completed.3 Communication between UNMIL and LURD leaders is sporadic, and LURD leaders and ex-combatants sometimes feel left in the dark.
Complicating the situation is the fact that many LURD ex-combatants believe they are heroes who ‘liberated’ Liberia from the Taylor regime. This sentiment is clearly not shared by non-combatants, many of whom blame LURD for the destruction of their communities. Some ex-combatants may not appreciate the reception they receive when they return home: even if they are welcomed back to their communities, they are not going to be treated as heroes (see section on retribution and retaliation below).
Another complication is the weak LURD command and control structure, as it seems that in some areas ‘every soldier is his own commander.’ For example, in Zorzor town there have been a series of LURD leaders in control in recent months and at times there appears to be no leader in place. Even when there is an identified leader he or she (a significant portion of ex-combatants are female) does not necessarily command the respect of subordinates and may exert only minimal control over them. With many LURD ex-combat-ants essentially leaderless they are increasingly difficult for UNMIL and NGOs to engage.
Finally, drug abuse among ex-combat-ants is rampant and poses a major concern. During the wars drugs, were used by warlords to lower the inhibitions and increase the cruelty of their fighters, and as a result many ex-combat-ants are now addicted. While under the influence, ex-combatants' behaviour can be unpredictable and their addiction means they are constantly seeking drugs or money to buy drugs. Unfortunately, there are no comprehensive drug rehabilitation programmes in Lofa.
Leadership concerns
Leadership structures in most communities were disrupted by the war. Like almost everybody else, local chiefs were forced to leave their communities during the conflict. Some communities are now led by interim chiefs, in place, in theory, until the permanent chief returns (many permanent chiefs remain in IDP camps or in Guinea or Monrovia). Some of the interim chiefs are fairly young and inexperienced leaders, evident by their lack of influence in the communities (a few struggle to convene straightforward community meetings). When the permanent chiefs return to these communities leadership struggles between the interim and permanent chiefs could ensue, particularly if the interim chief has been relatively effective in rebuilding the community.
The fact that some chiefs gained their positions under the Taylor regime, and that some may have gained their positions due to allegiance to his regime, could become an issue in the near future. To date this doesn't seem to be a major concern, but as more people return to their communities pressure could mount to remove formerly (or currently) pro-Taylor chiefs.
Retribution & retaliation
Retribution for atrocities committed during the war is a major concern as more and more people return to Lofa. Most Lofa residents say that the war and all of its atrocities are forgotten and that they are ready to forgive and accept anybody into their community. Some, though, say that ex-combatants' deeds ‘will be forgiven but will not be forgotten.’ Most people are undoubtedly sincere in their willingness to forgive, but it is difficult to predict how an individual will react the first time he or she is confronted with somebody who committed a particularly heinous act against a friend or family member. They could accept that person unconditionally, they could react with rage and seek vengeance, or they could do something in between these two extremes. Retribution could lead to coun-ter-retribution and an escalation of violence. Retribution could also take on an ethnic dimension, with Lormas and Kpelles retaliating en mass against Mandingoes, or vice versa, in some communities.
Instability in Guinea
Recent history leaves little doubt about the potential for conflict spillover in the Mano River region. Increasing instability in Guinea could have major implication for Lofa, particularly for Salayea, Voinjama and Zorzor districts, all of which border Guinea. The border between Liberia and Guinea is extremely porous and there is a regular flow of ex-combatants, arms and illicit goods between the two countries. Many LURD ex-combatants and some LURD leaders reside in Guinea and the Guinean government has consistently supported LURD in the past. Instability in Guinea could draw Lofa-based LURD ex-com-batants into fighting in Guinea, but conflict could easily spill over into Liberia. Conflict in Guinea could also push Liberian refugees living in Guinea back into Liberia before they are ready to return and before their home communities are ready to receive them, which could worsen the already difficult conditions in many communities and create greater competition for scarce resources.
From relief to development
The concerns detailed above make the transition from relief to development in Lofa all the more imperative. Since the end of the war the focus of both Lofa residents and the international community and NGOs has been on subsistence. Consequently, some Lofa residents have grown dependent on handouts from NGOs and others and have come to see these handouts as an entitlement. But subsistence and handouts will not help Lofa residents address any of the aforementioned concerns. If anything, dependence on outside handouts leaves these concerns unaddressed and unresolved. Before long, the focus will need to shift from subsistence and handouts to ensuring long-term stability and reconstructing Lofa communities, both physically and psychologically.
There is little time to waste. While former IDPs and refugees have been returning to Lofa in relatively small numbers throughout the first half of 2004 that is likely to change towards the end of the year when the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) closes the IDP camps and transports many IDPs back to their home communities. There will be a substantial influx of returnees who will put a strain on communities and their resources, which could exacerbate some of the aforementioned concerns. Long-term stability and successful reconstruction in Lofa will depend, in part, on how effectively these returnees are reintegrated into their communities.
Jonathan Temin works for CHF International, an international development organisation active in Lofa County and funded by the United States Agency for International Development; e-mail: jontemin@yahoo.com
Counter-Insurgency on the Cheap
Alex de Waal
Darfur's landscapes have a cruel beauty, and few are more unyielding than the nomadic encampment of Aamo. It is in a stony wasteland on a plain ringed by mountains formed from ancient volcanic cores. A distant sweep of pink sand marks the course of a seasonal river, Wadi Kutum. Many years ago, I stayed there as a guest of the nazir (‘paramount chief’) of a clan of Arab nomads known as the Jalul. With their broad black tents pitched on the sand, camels browsing on the thorn trees, and sparse but finely worked possessions, they were the stuff of coffee-table ethnography books. Today, Aamo lies at the centre of the violence that is disfiguring Darfur: tens of thousands are already dead and hundreds of thousands have been driven from their homes. The first massacre of the conflict took place just a few miles from Aamo, when the Janjawiid militia murdered several dozen villagers who had sought safety in the town of Kutum.
I met the elderly nazir, Sheikh Hilal Musa, in 1985. His tent was hung with the paraphernalia of a lifetime's nomadism – water jars, saddles, spears, swords, leather bags and an old rifle. He invited me to sit opposite him on a fine Persian rug, summoned his retainer to serve sweet tea on a silver platter, and told me the world was coming to an end. At that time, Darfur was gripped by drought and disturbing changes were afoot. The Saharan winds were blowing sand onto fertile hillsides, and when it rained the water was cutting gullies through the rich alluvial soil along the wadi. Worse, the villagers who had always played host to camel nomads were now barring their migrations, and stopping them from using pastures and wells.
Hilal rebuked me for not speaking Arabic like an Englishman: all colonial officers had been schooled in classical Arabic, not the Darfurian Sudanese version I had picked up. He said that the last Englishman who had enjoyed his hospitality was Assistant District Commissioner Thesiger, who had served in Kutum. Thesiger was famous in Darfur chiefly as a crack shot. In those days, only British officers were permitted to own rifles with enough power and accuracy to bring down a lion. By the time of my visit in 1985, privately owned firearms were a rarity. The nazir gave me a giraffe-tail fly whisk when I left. More as a result of ecological change than colonial hunting parties, lion and giraffe have now vanished from all but the southern fringes of Darfur, where the forests stretch into southern Sudan and Central African Republic. In the semiarid plateaux of north Darfur, as the savannas fade into desert, we saw only the occasional gazelle.
Hilal was a commanding figure, even in his eighties, thin, stooped and nearly blind. The Sufis – and almost all Darfurians are followers of one or another Sufi sect, mostly of West African origin – talk of baraka, a God-given charisma or blessing. ‘Sheikhdom comes from God,’ Hilal believed. ‘The degrees of sheikhdom are man-made.’ Rather than the formally superior title of nazir, he stuck with the lowlier but more meaningful sheikh: he was known across the vastness of Darfur simply as Sheikh Hilal. Today the name of his son Musa is known even more widely: Musa Hilal is the leader of the Janjawiid; his name is first on the US government's list of suspected war criminals.
Sheikh Hilal was unbendingly proud of his nomadic way of life. He insisted that everyone in his tribe possessed camels. ‘Look at that small boy,’ he said, pointing to his grandson. ‘Even he owns camels.’ This was probably true: even in those straitened times, Hilal's family was reputed to have several thousand, although the sheikh was too old to ride a camel and rarely saw them. His herds were three hundred miles to the north, pasturing on the sweet grasses of the desert, after the rains. His nephew had recently sold 120 camels to provide food for hungry kinsmen, and Hilal had loaned many to poor relatives, from a herd that was shrinking faster than he knew. ‘We assist each other. No Jalul will ever need to cultivate,’ he said.
But only an hour's walk away, we found an encampment of Jalul who had lost their camels and goats during the drought and had settled in an attempt to farm. The local villagers, from the Tunjur group (a close relation of the Fur, the largest ethnic group in the region), had given them only dry, sandy soil, keeping the alluvium next to the wadi for themselves. Famous for its sweet dates, Wadi Kutum is among the most valuable farmland in north Darfur, and the Tunjur were careful to register it long before other farmers realised the importance of legal title to land. The Jalul farmers were resentful, scratching at the arid uplands in an attempt to grow a few heads of millet. Their sheikh did his best to keep up pretences. In the evening he served a lavish meal of goat and rice, and gave us directions to where we could find his sons and camels. When we finished, having eaten more than enough, he called out to his niece: ‘Bring the next course!’ There was no next course.
The British conquered Dar Fur (‘Land of the Fur’) in 1916, defeating the army of Sultan Ali Dinar, descendant of the 17thcentury founder of the Fur sultanate, Suleiman Solong, whose long neglected grave lies in the mountains a day's drive south of Aamo. Like many of Darfur's key political leaders, Solong was of mixed ancestry, the son of an Arab father and a Fur mother. Despite talk of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Africans’, it is rarely possible to tell on the basis of skin colour which group an individual Darfurian belongs to. All have lived there for centuries and all are Muslims.
Many maps of Darfur have tribal names scrawled across wide territories, implying that some areas are inhabited exclusively by one of the region's thirty or more ethnic groups. This can be misleading: there is such a long history of internal migration, mixing and intermarriage that ethnic boundaries are mostly a matter of convenience. Individuals, even whole groups, can shed one label and acquire another. When the British overran the region, they found it convenient to suppose that paramount chiefs had precisely demarcated authority over ethnic groups and jurisdiction over the corresponding territory. Darfurians concurred with this fiction, which helped the British administer Darfur with just a handful of colonial officers. The key to making this ‘native administration’ system work was to award a territory, or dar, to each group. It wasn't land ownership exactly, but the paramount chiefs were allowed to allocate land rights to residents. Until the drought of the 1980s, there was enough land to provide newcomers, of whatever ethnicity, with a plot to farm.
The nomads were an anomaly in this system. Most of those conventionally described as nomads are in fact herders who occupy well-defined areas, but there were a few true nomadic groups in Darfur, such as Sheikh Hilal's Jalul Rizeigat. They moved vast distances between dry-season grazing areas in central and southern Darfur and wet-season pastures on the edge of the desert in the north. In the 1970s, the socialist government of Jaafar Nimeiri gave the Jalul a ‘rural people's council’ in the form of a village called Fata Borno (where we left the road to find Aamo), but this was merely an administrative convenience, a place where they could register to vote and send their children to school. For pasturing their herds, the Jalul relied on mobility, traversing the migration routes between the farms of Fur and Tunjur villagers, grazing their camels on the hillsides. Sheikh Hilal described what can best be thought of as a ‘moral geography’ of Darfur. It resembled a chequerboard, with the red squares representing farms, and the white pastures his herds could graze. ‘Wherever there is grass and rain, Allah provides that that is my home,’ he said. Ahmed Diraige, a former governor of Darfur and, since then, a long-time opposition politician, recalls how his father, Ibrahim, a Fur shartai (shartai is another word for a paramount chief), hosted Sheikh Hilal's clan and their camels every season in his village, Kargula, on the southern slopes of the mountain of Jebel Marra. Shartai Ibrahim would slaughter a bull to welcome the Jalul, who would pasture their camels on the harvested fields, thus fertilising them, and help the villagers transport their grain to market. When he left, Hilal would present two young camels to his host. Like many other Darfurian Arabs, Hilal casually used racist epithets, such as zurga (‘black’), to refer to the Fur and Tunjur farmers. The farmers in their turn described the bedouin as savages and pagans. But the two communities relied on one another, and their leading families intermarried.
Without a dar, the Jalul and the handful of other nomadic groups relied on a socio-geographical order that gave them customary rights to migrate and pasture their animals in areas dominated by farmers. This worked for decades, but by the 1980s, drought, desertification and the expansion of farms were threatening these rights. Sheikh Hilal's moral geography had been disturbed: the cosmic order had given way to chaos. But he would rather die than change.
‘Native administration’ was local government on the cheap. The chiefs were paid a pittance, receiving their reward through local despotism. After Sudan achieved independence in 1956, successive governments attempted to build up local services such as police, schools and clinics. The positions of sheikhs and nazirs were formally abolished and ‘peo-ple's councils’ set up to do the same job. But Khartoum never delivered the funds and, by the early 1980s, local government was bankrupt. If the governor of Darfur wanted to mount a police operation against bandits, he had to commandeer vehicles and fuel from two rural development projects funded by the World Bank, or from an aid agency. If he wanted to hold an inter-tribal conference to resolve a dispute, he had to ask wealthy citizens to cover the expenses.
A succession of local conflicts erupted in Darfur in the wake of the drought and famine of 1984–85. On the whole, the pastoral groups were pitted against the farmers in what had become a bitter struggle for diminishing resources. The government couldn't intervene effectively, so people armed themselves. A herd of a thousand camels represents more than a million dollars on the hoof: only the most naïve herd-owner would not buy automatic rifles to arm his herders. The villagers armed themselves in response. There was an attempt at a reconciliation conference in 1989, but its recommendations were never implemented.
It was also in 1989 that the Islamists toppled Sadiq al-Mahdi's government in Khartoum. (Sadiq had won elections in 1986, the year after Nimeiri was deposed.) The head of state was now the devout and ruthless soldier, Omar al-Bashir, who ruled in uneasy alliance with Hassan al-Turabi, the charismatic leader of the country's Islamist party. With the Islamists in power, the Darfur regional government tried to compensate for the rarity with which it caught criminals by the savagery of the punishments it meted out: execution and public display of the corpse for armed robbers, amputation for thieves. In 1994, the government brought back the old native administration council and allocated territories to chiefs. With no funds to provide services, a suddenly renewed authority to distribute land (now becoming scarce) and self-armed vigilantes all around, this was a charter for local-level ethnic cleansing. Immediately after this administrative reform, there was another round of killings in the far west of Darfur. Much of the present conflict, then, has its origins in land rights and the shortcomings of local administration. But central government, too, is implicated in Darfur's plight, with neglect and manipulation playing equal parts.
Geography is against Darfur
The large town of el Geneina, at the westernmost edge of Darfur, close to the border with Chad, is said to be further from the sea than any other town on the continent. This part of Darfur, popularly known as Dar Masalit after the dominant group, was only absorbed into Sudan in 1922, by a treaty between the sultan and the British. Quite recently, the sultan's grandson, holding court in a decrepit palace, used to joke that he still had the right to secede from Sudan, and he pointedly hung maps of Dar Masalit and Africa on his wall, but not of Sudan.
The train from Khartoum terminates at Nyala in southern Darfur after a three-day journey. It is at least another day's drive to el Geneina, if the road is not cut by wadis carrying rainwater from the massif of Jebel Marra. Khartoum has ignored Darfur: its people have received less education, less healthcare, less development assistance and fewer government posts than any other region – even the Southerners, who took up arms 21 years ago to fight for their rights, had a better deal. Within Darfur, Arabs and non-Arabs alike have been marginalised, and it is Darfur's tragedy that the leaders of these groups have not made common cause in the face of Khartoum's indifference.
Another geographical misfortune is that Darfur borders Chad and Libya. In the 1980s, Colonel Gaddafi dreamed of an ‘Arab belt’ across Sahelian Africa. The keystone was to gain control of Chad, starting with the Aouzou strip in the north of the country. He mounted a succession of military adventures in Chad, and from 1987 to 1989, Chadian factions backed by Libya used Darfur as a rear base, provisioning themselves freely from the crops and cattle of local villagers. On at least one occasion they provoked a joint Chadian-French armed incursion into pursuing them. Many of the guns in Darfur came from those factions. Gaddafi's formula for war was expansive: he collected discontented Sahelian Arabs and Tuaregs, armed them, and formed them into an Islamic Legion that served as the spearhead of his offensives. Among the legionnaires were Arabs from western Sudan, many of them followers of the Mahdist Ansar sect, who had been forced into exile in 1970 by President Nimeiri. The Libyans were defeated by a nimble Chadian force at Ouadi Doum in 1988, and Gaddafi abandoned his irredentist dreams. He began dismantling the Islamic Legion, but its members, armed, trained and most significant of all – possessed of a virulent Arab supremacism, did not vanish. The legacy of the Islamic Legion lives on in Darfur: Janjawiid leaders are among those said to have been trained in Libya.
It was in the mid-1980s, when Nimeiri was overthrown, that the Ansar exiles began to return. A few weeks after meeting Sheikh Hilal, I went in search of his sons, herding their camels in the desert. As we travelled north, we saw the tracks of military vehicles crossing the desert heading south. In 1987, returnees from Libya took the lead in forming a political bloc known as the Arab Alliance. At one level, the Alliance was simply a political coalition that aimed to protect the interests of a disadvantaged group in western Sudan, but it also became a vehicle for a new racist ideology. The politically insignificant racist epithets of earlier times began to take on an alarming tinge in Darfur. The Alliance also latched onto the dominant ideology of the Sudanese state, the very different Arabism of Nile Valley. The war in Darfur at the end of the 1980s was more than a conflict over land: it was the first step in constructing a new Arab ideology in Sudan.
It is hard to find a news account of the present war in Darfur that does not characterise it as one of ‘Arabs’ against ‘Africans’. Such a description would have been incomprehensible twenty years ago, when Darfurian conceptions of ethnicity and citizenship were still cast in the mould inherited from the Sultanate of Dar Fur and the string of comparable Sudanic states that stretched westwards to the Atlantic. The short but dramatic political career of one Fur politician, Daud Bolad, illustrates the way in which the terms ‘African’ and ‘Arab’ took such a hold.
Bolad was one of the leading young Islamists of his generation, but abandoned political Islam after leaving Khartoum University and joined the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA), led by John Garang. Nothing could be further from the Islamist doctrines Bolad had once championed – and nothing more inimical to them – than the ideology of the SPLA. Although Garang is a Southerner and many in his movement urge a separate state for southern Sudan, he is not a separatist himself. He believes that the non-Arabs in Sudan – an alliance of Southerners and marginalised groups in northern Sudan, such as the Fur – form a numerical majority and should dominate a secular, pluralist and united Sudan. Garang has therefore recruited from exploited non-Arab communities on the fringes of northern Sudan, such as the Nuba, and the string of peoples along the Blue Nile valley close to Ethiopia. In 1992 the Sudan government launched its largest ever offensive, aiming to empty the Nuba region entirely under the banner of jihad. It failed and today the Nuba have achieved modest autonomy within the wider framework of a peace deal signed in Kenya in May.
Bolad and a clandestine network of local activists were Garang's entrée in Darfur. As he had done for the Nuba and Blue Nile, he dispatched a small expeditionary force into Darfur in 1991, aiming to begin an insurrection. It was a disaster. Bolad and his troops had to cross a vast distance in the dry season. The only water available was in deep boreholes, which were situated in villages and carefully guarded. Moreover, the territory was occupied by cattle-herding Arab groups, who were fiercely hostile to the SPLA. The government quickly traced Bolad's unit and hunted it down, using both the regular army and a militia of Beni Halba Arabs. A handful of fighters escaped and walked for months through Central African Republic back to southern Sudan. Bolad was captured and interrogated by the governor, Colonel al-Tayeb Ibrahim, a military doctor and leading Islamist known as ‘Sikha’ or the ‘Iron Rod’, because of his skill at wielding reinforcing rods during student demonstrations when he was bodyguard to the leader of the Khartoum University Islamists – Daud Bolad. There is no record of the encounter between the two. Bolad was never seen again. Worst of all, his diary was seized. In it were names and details of every member of his clandestine network.
Prisons & ‘Ghost Houses’
Many disappeared into prisons and ‘ghost houses’, others were so unnerved by how much was known to their interrogators that they renounced their cause and were freed, although they were sure that their every movement continued to be watched. A generation of opposition leaders was annihilated or neutralised. Thereafter, radical Darfurian leaders were suspicious of the SPLA, fearing that it would swallow them whole, or misuse them for its own purposes. But as the SPLA continued to resist everything the Sudanese army could throw at it, and gained a high international standing, they, too, learned to characterise their plight in the simplified terms that had proved so effective in winning foreign sympathy for the South: they were the ‘African’ victims of an ‘Arab’ regime.
The ‘African’ label may have played well to international audiences in the 1990s, but it had little purchase in Sudan. One reason for this was the prevalence of radical Islam and its appeal to many Darfurians – the result of the success of a political experiment by the regime in Khartoum, masterminded by Hassan al-Turabi. Historically, political Islam in Sudan was dominated by an Arabised elite originating in the Nile Valley, with strong links to Egypt. Theirs was a conservative movement, identified with the Arabi-sation professed by all of Su-dan's rulers, both military and civilian. But Turabi broadened the agenda and constituency of the Islamist movement. For example, he insisted that women had rights in Islam, and today more than half of the undergraduates at Khartoum University are women. He also recognised the authenticity of western Sudanese and West African Islam, thus embracing the traditions exemplified by the early 19th-century Fulani jihads and the wandering Sufi scholars of the Maghreb.
In ensuring that citizenship was extended to all devout Muslims, Turabi revolutionised the status of the Sudanese of West African origin, known as the Fellata. This group, several million strong, consists of ethnic Hausa and Fulani whose ancestors were from Nigeria, Mali and Niger and settled in Sudan either on their way to Mecca or as labourers for colonial-era cotton schemes. The Fellata are famous for their piety. Until the Islamist coup of 1989, they were not recognised as Sudanese citizens; Turabi also increased the status of the Fellata sheikhs, thereby correcting a longstanding anomaly and creating an electoral constituency. In Darfur, too, he reached out to the religious leaders of the Fur, Masalit and other groups. As governor of Darfur, al-Tayeb Ibrahim made a point of praising the Fur for their piety and took lessons in the Fur language. The concept of common citizenship through common faith seemed for a time to be a route to Darfurian national emancipation.
But the Islamist promise was a sham. In practical terms, little changed. Only a handful of Darfurians were elevated to high positions in the party and the administration. The national government was relatively even-handed in its treatment of the region's Arabs and non-Arabs, but only in the context of continuing neglect. Local government was still bankrupt; banditry was still rife; drought and desertification continued to spark local conflicts that the governor could not, or would not, try to stop. And before long Sudan's ‘westerners’ found that their version of Islam was not, after all, accepted on its own terms: they were regarded as true Muslims only if they adopted Arab values and culture.
In the decade following the 1989 putsch, the differences between President Bashir and the mercurial Turabi became ever more apparent. Turabi had ambitions for revolution throughout Africa and the Middle East; Bashir held to the traditional view of Sudan as the possession of an Arabised elite. It was a protracted struggle, over ideology, foreign policy, the constitution and ultimately power itself. Bashir won: in 1999 he dismissed Turabi from his post as speaker of the National Assembly, and later had him arrested. The Islamist coalition was split down the middle. Most of the administration, and all of the security elite in control of the military and various off-budget security agencies, stayed with Bashir. The students and the regional Islamist party cells mostly went into opposition with Turabi, forming the breakaway Popular Congress. Among other things, the dismissal of Turabi gave Bashir the cover he needed to approach the United States, and to engage in a more serious peace process with the SPLA – a process that led to the signing of the peace agreement in Kenya.
The Bashir-Turabi split reverberated in Darfur. Many Darfurians who had come into the Islamist movement under Turabi's leadership now left government – and decided to organise on their own.In May 2000, they produced a ‘Black Book’ which detailed the region's systematic under-representation in national government since independence. It caused a stir throughout the country and showed how northern Sudan was becoming polarised along racial rather than religious lines.
In describing Daud Bolad as a ‘martyr’, the ‘Black Book’ marked a symbolic rapprochement between the Islamists and the secular radicals of Darfur. Hence the unlikely alliance between the latter group, who were busy putting together the Darfur Liberation Front (renamed in early 2003 the Sudan Liberation Army, or SLA) and the Islamist-leaning Justice and Equality Movement (JEM). The rebellion should have taken no one by surprise. But observers of the Sudanese political scene – myself included – had become so accustomed to the quiescence of Darfur that we thought the militants were crying wolf when they predicted a major insurrection. Evidently, the Sudanese government was just as surprised: its peace overtures in the early months were as half-hearted as its military preparations. In April last year, the rebels attacked el Fasher airport, destroyed half a dozen military aircraft and kidnapped an airforce general. The SPLA had managed nothing of the kind in twenty years. The rebels in Darfur had mobility, good intelligence and popular support.
Critically for Bashir, the central pillar of the Sudanese state – a cabal of security officers who have been running the wars in Sudan since 1983 – was still in place. Faced with a revolt that outran the capacity of the country's tired and overstretched army, this small group knew exactly what to do. Several times during the war in the South they had mounted counter-insurgency on the cheap – famine and scorched earth their weapons of choice. Each time, they sought out a local militia, provided it with supplies and armaments, and declared the area of operations an ethics-free zone. The Beni Halba fursan, or ‘cavalry’, which had been used against the SPLA in 1991, was an obvious instrument to employ in Darfur. The northern camel nomads, including former Islamic legionnaires, were also on hand. Some claim that their name – the Janjawiid – derives from ‘G3’ (a rifle) and jawad (‘horse’), but it is also western Sudanese dialect for ‘rabble’ or ‘outlaws’. Unleashing militias has the added advantage for the security cabal that it may derail the near complete peace process with the SPLA and allow them to retain their extra-budgetary security agencies; it also immunises them against being charged in the future with committing war crimes.
Janjawiid atrocities
The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.
Sheikh Hilal's world, with its stable cosmos and its relaxed reciprocity between farmer and nomad, has disappeared, as he feared it would. Unrelenting poverty has been transformed into violence by misgovernment and imported racisms. What to do now in the face of genocidal massacre and imminent famine? Legal action – trying Musa Hilal and his sponsors as war criminals – is essential to deter such crimes in future. But condemnation is not a solution. The Janjawiid's murderous campaigns must not obscure the fact that Darfur's indigenous bedouins are themselves historic victims.
As they did twenty years ago, the people of Darfur face destitution, hunger and infectious disease. Apocalyptic predictions of mass starvation were made after the 1984 drought – up to a million dead, aid agencies said, if there wasn't food aid. The food didn't come, and many died – around 100,000 – but Darfur society didn't collapse because of the formidable survival skills of its people. They had reserves of food, they travelled huge distances in search of food, work or charity, and above all they gathered wild food from the bush. Today, food reserves and animals have been stolen, and what use is the ability to gather five different kinds of wild grasses, 11 varieties of berry, plus roots and leaves, if leaving a camp means risking rape, mutilation or death? Predictions of up to 300,000 famine deaths must be taken seriously.
A huge aid effort is grinding into gear. But the distances involved mean that food relief is expensive and unlikely to be sufficient. It's tempting to send in the British army to deliver food, but this would be merely symbolic: relief can be flown in more cheaply by civil contractors, and distributed more effectively by relief agencies. The areas controlled by the SLA and JEM contain hundreds of thousands of civilians who are not getting any help. As soon as an intrepid cameraman returns with pictures of this hidden famine, there will be an outcry, and pressure for aid to be delivered across the front lines. There's no reason to wait for the pictures before acting, although it's clear that cross-line aid convoys will need to carry armed guards.
The biggest help would be peace. In theory, there's a ceasefire; in practice, the government and Janjawiid are ignoring it, and the rebels are responding in kind. The government denies that it set up, armed and directed the Janjawiid. It did, but the monster that Khartoum helped create may not always do its bidding: distrust of the capital runs deep among Darfurians, and the Janjawiid leadership knows it cannot be disarmed by force. When President Bashir promised Kofi Annan and Colin Powell that he would disarm the militia, he was making a promise he couldn't keep. The best, and perhaps the only, means of disarmament is that employed by the British seventy-five years ago: establish a working local administration, regulate the ownership of arms, and gradually isolate the outlaws and brigands who refuse to conform. It took a decade then, and it won't be any faster today. Not only are there more weapons now, but the political polarities are much sharper. A detachment of 60 African Union ceasefire monitors is in Darfur with a slightly larger number of African troops providing security for them. So far no one is providing security for Darfur's terrified civilian populace. If troops are to be sent from outside Africa, this should be their mission. If the local intelligence is good, and a political process is afoot, the hazards should be minimal. But reconstituting Darfur will be slow, complicated and expensive. Understanding what has been lost may be a good place to start.
Alex de Waal is the Director of Justice Africa and the author of Islamism and its Enemies in the Horn. A revised edition of Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan 1984–85 is due from Oxford; © London Review of Books.
Editor's Note: Also see ROAPE 97, September 2003, ‘The Horn of Conflict’ edited by John Markakis.
The Betrayal of the Intellectuals by Ali Moussa Iye
The Ethiopia-Eritrea War by Leenco Lata
TPLF: Reform or Decline? by Medhane Tadesse and John Young
State Collapse in Somalia: Second Thoughts by Ken Menkhaus
Sudan: Liberation Movements, Regional Armies, Ethnic Militias & Peace by John Young
Anatomy of a Conflict: Afar & Ise Ethiopia by John Markakis
Somaliland: Choosing Politics over Violence by Mark Bradbury, Adan Yusuf Abokor, and Haroon Ahmed Yusuf
Women & Conflict in Darfur by Adan Azain Mohammed
Briefings: ‘Djibouti: From French Outpost to US Base’ by Amedee Bollee; ‘Food Crisis in Ethiopia: Drought or Poor Economic Policies?’ by Franc¸ois Piguet; ‘Sudan: Prospects for Peace’ by Justice Africa; ‘Peace in the Horn this Year?’ by Lionel Cliffe; ‘Sudan: Oil & War’ by Jemera Rone
Reviews: The Black Book of Sudan reviewed by Abdalla Osman El Tom & M A Mohamed Salih; Emma's War: Love, Betrayal & Death in the Sudan by Deborah Scroggins reviewed by Peter Woodward; The Root Causes of Sudan's Civil Wars by Douglas H. Johnson reviewed by Lam Akol.
Europe: Partner or exploiter of Africa? The G-90 & the ACP
Paul Goodison & Colin Stoneman
Following the failure at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Cancun the European Commission (EC) began a period of reflection on the causes of the breakdown of trade negotiations. One important area which the Commission felt contributed to the breakdown in Cancun was the belief of a substantial grouping of developing countries – the G-90 – that they had little gain and much to lose from a new round. On the basis of this analysis the EC looked to develop a series of proposals to give G-90 countries a clear stake in a successful conclusion to the Doha Development Round.
With this in mind, speaking in the Caribbean in April 2004, the EU Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, indicated that the EC ‘could defend the view that the G-90 be treated where possible in a similar manner to LDCs in the DDA modalities’.1 According to Commissioner Lamy this would in large part extend the treatment accorded least developed countries (LDCs) to ‘any small economy, landlocked developing country or com-modity-dependent country’, provided that they are ‘particularly weak or vul-nerable’.2
This was the starting point for the EC's proposal that the G-90 should effectively ‘get the round for free’, with these economies not being asked to make further tariff-reduction commitments in the context of the Doha Development Round. This proposal, along with the long-standing EC proposal that other developed countries and advanced developing countries should adopt EBA3 style trade preferences in favour of LDCs, was taken up in the 9 May 2004 joint letter of Commissioners Lamy and Fischler which proposed that:
the least developed countries and other weak or vulnerable developing countries in a similar situation – essentially the G-90-should not have to open their marketsbeyond their existing commitments and should be able to benefit from increased market access offered by both developed and advanced developing countries. 4
Somewhat ironically the venue for the first high-profile launching of these proposals was the opening of the Caribbean Configuration-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations in Jamaica. A process of negotiations where the EU, as in other EPA negotiations,5 is seeking the elimination of import duties (and all measures having equivalent effect) on ‘substantially all trade’6 with the EU, within a 12-year period.
Given that the G-90 includes all ACP countries, there would appear to be a fundamental contradiction in the EC's position, insisting on a standstill in tariff reductions for ACP countries in a WTO context, while insisting on progressive tariff elimination by the ACP on substantially all imports from the EU as part of the EPA negotiation. Given that for most of Africa the EU is its major trading partner this is a significant contradiction in the formal position of the EU in the WTO and EPA negotiations.
The EU offer to the G-90 in the WTO (which was reflected in the 31 July 2004 WTO agreement) only makes sense if it applies not only to tariff commitments entered into by these countries at the multilateral level, but also in the context of EPA negotiations. If this offer were not to apply in the context of EPA negotiations then this would amount to a sleight of hand, whereby the EU secures continued protection of markets in LDCs and other small and vulnerable economies against its OECD competitors, whilst negotiating the elimination of tariffs on EU exports to all LDCs and other weak or vulnerable economies ‘in a similar situation’. This would constitute an act of the uttermost duplicity, whereby narrow predatory self interest was cloaked in the mantle of altruism. It would be a duplicity, the burden of which would fall hardest on the shoulders of African and particularly southern African economies, since they have most to lose from opening up their markets to duty-free access to EU goods under current circumstances.
For eastern and southern Africa the double standards reflected in this EU position are a ‘double whammy’ for most of these countries7 are classified as LDCs and thus will already enjoy full unrestricted access to the EU market by 2009 under the EU's non-reciprocal EBA initiative. This is particularly the case for the ESA configuration where 84.5% of the population live in LDCs. It is therefore difficult to see what benefits LDCS could gain from an EPA, given that the wider economic benefits of EPAs that the EC commonly cites,8 are likely to prove illusory given wider developments in EU policy and the unaddressed supply-side constraints facing LDCs.
For the SADC configuration9 countries, where once again (excluding South Africa) the majority of the population live in LDCs, the benefits would appear to be equally illusory. However, for these countries the threats from an EPA would appear even more acute as a result of the existence of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU) and the current implementation of the EU-South Africa Trade Development and Co-operation Agreement (TDCA).
The SADC Configuration & the TDCA
The SADC Configuration-EU EPA negotiations were formally launched in July 2004. However these negotiations are haunted by the reality of the EU-South Africa TDCA. Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, and Swaziland (BLNS) have long been part of the SACU along with South Africa. Since the provisions of the TDCA with regard to trade in goods necessarily apply to the whole territory of the customs union, effectively the BLNS countries tariff regimes vis-à-vis the EU will be determined by the TDCA. As EU Development Commissioner Poul Nielsen pointed out at the launch of the SADC configuration-EU EPA negotiations:
an individual state can only be a member of a single trading arrangement with the EC. 10
This is a vitally important question, for the TDCA was structured primarily with the economic needs and constraints of South Africa in mind, not the specific economic needs and constraints of the smaller neighbouring BLNS economies11 let alone the needs of LDCs such as Mozambique, Angola and Tanzania.
The very real danger exists that the free-trade area provisions negotiated with a ‘developed economy’ will be applied equally to the small developing economies of Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland and the LDCs of Lesotho, Mozambique, Angola and Tanzania. The simple incorporation of Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland into the EU-South Africa TDCA would create a number of problems with regard to market access, since a number of the provisions of the TDCA provide less favourable tariff access to the EU market than the Cotonou Agreement.12 This would lead to a re-imposition of duties on fisheries products; beef and beef products, and sugar and sugar-based products. In the case of Namibia this would affect over 50% of current exports to the EU, while for Swaziland it would affect 82.7% of current exports to the EU. There would be problems arising with regard to the application of the existing reciprocal obligations which South Africa has entered into and which are currently subject to revision. These vary considerably from country to country. In Botswana for example, a key issue is actually securing duty-free access to EU wheat exports for its milling industry, a sector currently excluded from tariff-reduction commitments. In Swaziland, in contrast, interests exist in keeping high-sugar content processed food products out of the South African market even though tariff-elimination commitments have been made.
As can be seen, food and agricultural sector issues are of particular concern to South Africa's neighbouring economies. South Africa has agreed to an extensive programme of tariff elimination on EU food and agricultural product exports which de facto applies to the whole territory of the SACU at a time when EU agricultural policy reforms will be greatly enhancing the price competitiveness of EU food and agricultural product exports. This potentially poses serious problems, which current WTO agreement do little to address.
The threat from EU CAP reform
Since 1992 across a range of sectors, the EU has begun to shift from systems of price support to systems of direct aid to farmers. The overall aim of this reform process is to make EU food and agricultural products more price competitive on both domestic and international markets. The immediate aim of the reform process is to reduce the internal price of EU agricultural products, without undermining farm incomes. Lower EU prices have generally served to:
- 1.
reduce the gap between EU and world market prices;
- 2.
reduce the need for export refunds;
- 3.
reduce the need for and costs of public storage;
- 4.
boost consumption;
- 5.
reduce ‘surpluses’ (by boosting domestic consumption and export possibilities).
Reform, by lowering EU prices and closing the gap with world market prices has also greatly reduced the need for export refunds. In the arable sector, export-refund expenditures fell from Euro 3,733 million in 1991 to a mere Euro 99.3 million in 2002, a remarkable 97.3% decrease. However, this was simply because such payments were no longer needed to the same extent. When the value of the euro increased dramatically against the US dollar (widening the price gap between euro and US dollar-de-nominated world market prices) export-refund allocations for cereals were again increased to meet the needs arising. From a southern African perspective this process of reform, through bringing down EU market prices, is having two important effects:
- 1.
It is making the EU market less attractive for basic temperate agricultural exports from ACP countries;
- 2.
It is enhancing the price competitiveness of EU exports to ACP markets.
| Country | Sugar Protocol quota (tonnes) | Current Earnings (at 523.70/t) | Earnings after Stage 1 Reform (at 329.0/t) | Income Losses from Reform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malawi | 20,824 | 10,905,528 | 6,851,096 | −4,054,432 |
| Mauritius | 491,031 | 257,152,935 | 161,549,199 | −95,603,736 |
| Swaziland | 117,845 | 61,715,426 | 38,771,005 | −22,944,421 |
| Tanzania | 10,186 | 5,334,408 | 3,351,194 | −1,983,214 |
| Zimbabwe | 30,225 | 15,828,832 | 9,944,025 | −5,884,807 |
| Total | −130,470,610 |
The impact of CAP reform in eastern and southern Africa in terms of the erosion of the value of traditional trade preferences can most vividly be illustrated by the likely impact of current proposals for EU sugar-sector reform on the annual income earned from raw sugar exports to the EU. In July 2004 the EC proposed to abolish the intervention price for sugar and replace it by a ‘reference price’ one-third lower. This will lead to a fall in the EU sugar price from Euro 632 per tonne to Euro 422 per tonne and a fall in the price offered for ACP raw sugar from Euro 523.7 per tonne to Euro 329 per tonne. The following tables set out the losses arising from the implementation of the reform proposals by country and current arrangements.
To these losses will need to be added the losses in future income which LDC sugar exporters in southern Africa (Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania) will face under the EBA. At a minimum this would result in annual income losses on trade with the EU for the six countries concerned of over Euro 155 million. In eastern Africa, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda will suffer similarly. This follows the trend already established in the beef sector, where CAP reform has caused prices of southern African beef marketed into Europe to fall by between 28 and 30% over a three-year period.
In terms of the increased price competitiveness of EU exports this is a particular area of concern in the sector of value-added food products. This can best be illustrated by general trends in EU exports of cereal-based food products, for it is in the cereals sector where the process of CAP reform is most advanced. EU exports of ‘products of the milling industry’ (CN 11) to ACP countries increased in value terms by 83% between 1996 and 2002, while exports of ‘preparations of cereals’ (CN 19) increased 163% in value terms. This increased the importance of the ACP market to EU exporters of these products from 12.6% to 20.6% of total exports in the case of ‘products of the milling industry’ and from 4.9% to 9.5% of total exports in the case of ‘preparations of cereals’.13
EU cereals sector reform thus served to fuel the export of simple cereal-based value-added food products to ACP countries. Unfortunately these simple value-added food products in many cases could be produced in southern African countries themselves. This trade thus potentially has the capacity to undermine the basis of agriculture-based industrial development in southern Africa, with serious consequences for employment and rural incomes.
While these trends are not so strongly apparent in southern Africa as they are in West Africa, the elimination of tariffs which EPAs would give rise to, along with the impact of the liberalisation of services on ownership patterns in the retail sector, could lay the basis for a similar expansion of EU exports of value-added food products to southern Africa as has occurred in West Africa. This could occur either directly to these markets or via South Africa and the South African retail giants which are increasingly entrenching themselves in the southern Africa region.
| Country | SPS Sugar Exports (tonnes) | Current Earnings (at 523.70/t) | Earnings after Stage 1 Reform (at 329.0/t) | Income Losses from Reform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Malawi | 10,000.0 | 5,237,000.0 | 3,290,000.0 | −2,747,000.0 |
| Mauritius | 41,980.1 | 21,984,978.0 | 13,811,452.0 | −8,173,526.0 |
| Swaziland | 30,000.0 | 15,711,000.0 | 9,870,000.0 | −5,841,000.0 |
| Tanzania | 2,485.9 | 1,301,865.8 | 817,861.1 | −484,004.7 |
| Zimbabwe | 25,000.0 | 13,092,500.0 | 8,225,000.0 | −4,767,000.0 |
| Zambia | 12,731.5 | 6,667,486.5 | 4,188,663.5 | −2,478,823.0 |
| Total | −24,491,353.7 |
The 31 July 2004 WTO agreement offers little hope for relief from the adverse effects of EU CAP reform, entrenching as it does acceptance of the EU's trajectory for CAP reform, on the basis of an acceptance of the EU assertion that the whole system is less trade distorting. An assertion belied by the production and trade outcomes of the reform process in the cereals sector.
A further dimension of EU agricultural reform further adds to the downside in terms of the development of future southern Africa-EU agricultural trade relations and this is the increasingly strict EU food safety standards which are being universally applied.
The challenge of EU food safety standards
In the 1990s Europe was plagued by a series of food safety scares, largely arising from over-intensification of agricultural production. These ranged from the BSE crisis in the UK to the dioxin contamination scandal in Belgium. As a consequence of these shocks to the EU's agriculture and food industry, in 2000 the EC began work on a comprehensive new policy designed to guarantee food safety from ‘farm to fork’. This new more comprehensive approach involved the adoption of an integrated approach to food safety covering all sectors of the food chain, including feed production, primary production (on the farm), food processing, storage, transport and retail sale and came into effect on 1 January 2002. Most recently the EC has submitted, and the EU Council is in the process of approving, a food-and-feed control regulation. In addressing the executive directors of the World Bank, EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner Byrne rather ominously noted that:
unless there is a serious effort to also strengthen the capacity of developing countries to meet the food safety standards of the developed world, the opportunities presented by trade liberalisation in the food area may prove illusory.
Unless producers can meet the basic food safety standards and governments in southern Africa can establish systems to credibly verify and certify compliance, at a cost which is economically sustainable, then future exports from southern Africa to the EU could be severely disrupted. This issue is of such profound importance that it has to be a central focus of discussions in EPA negotiations, regardless of the configuration for such negotiations. Indeed it would appear essential that any EPA arrangements should constructively address food safety issues at four levels:
1) Establishing a substantive dialogue on the development of new standards and their application in the specific context faced in the ESA or SADC, in order to ensure that no unnecessary trade barriers are created as a result of addressing genuine EU food safety concerns;
2) Ensuring that financial assistance is made available through simple and easily accessible procedures to enterprises needing to upgrade to EU standards, so that part of the costs associated with higher EU standards can be defrayed;
3) Ensuring that financial assistance is made available through simple and easily accessible procedures for the creation and operation of institutional structures for the effective verification and certification of compliance with EU food safety standards;
4) Establishing an immediate dialogue on how to deal with transitional problems arising from the application of the new regulations.
The provision of financial assistance to producers and processors along with financial assistance to building institutional capacity for certification and verification would be wholly consistent with internal EU practice where under a variety of financial instruments in the region of Euro 3 to 4 billion per annum is being made available to support the implementation of new food safety standards within the EU. Whether the EC departments dealing with EPA negotiations, the wider EC, and the EU as a whole are open to getting to grips with these important questions is far from certain. While senior Commission officials have been strong on rhetoric acknowledging the need for such support, this has yet to translate into support on a scale commensurate with the size of the challenge faced.
What can be done?
While to date the EC has sought to completely ignore the problems arising for the SADC configuration from the preexistence of the TDCA (despite Commissioner Nielsen's acknowledgement that ‘an individual state can only be a member of a single trading arrangement with the EC’14) and wider developments in EU policy there are those in southern Africa who are keenly aware of the difficulties arising and who are concretely seeking to elaborate mechanisms for dealing with these difficulties. On the eve of the launch of the SADC configuration-EU EPA negotiations, the Namibian Manufacturers Association and Agricultural Trade Forum issued a declaration setting out a range of specific measures which should be taken to deal with the problems arising from the TDCA. This implicitly called for the negotiation of a series of ‘parallel’ agreements with the EU which would address specific national concerns, with these agreements then being annexed to the EU-South Africa TDCA, and forming an integral part of the agreement. At their core such ‘parallel’ agreements would variously involve:
- 1.
endorsing the granting of market access to EU products on exactly the same terms as under the EU-South Africa TDCA, with a provision being made for tariff-rate quotas (TRQs) for EU exports to certain SACU countries in areas where agricultural raw materials form important inputs into national food processing industries or contribute to wider national food security objectives (e.g. for Botswana and perhaps Namibia);
- 2.
immediately extending and enhancing the current trade preferences enjoyed by Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland under the ACP-EU trade agreement, through the immediate implementation of the October 2003 EC proposal to the Article 133 Committee to introduce EBA-type preferences for ACP countries upon their entry into an EPA;
- 3.
restructuring the regional safeguard provisions of the TDCA on the basis of the Cotonou Agreement safeguard provisions, to create simple and effective pre-emptive safe guard arrangement, particularly through the establishment of consultative and statistical surveillance mechanisms for products considered sensitive, so that actions can be taken to avoid market disruptions;
- 4.
establishing the basis for comprehensively addressing the food safety issues now arising, which could profoundly undermine southern African access to the EU market for food and agricultural products;
- 5.
establishing firm commitments on the financing of programmes of restructuring assistance for industries adversely affected by the implementation of the TDCA agreement, in the context of wider policy and market developments;
- 6.
establishing firm EU commitments on the provision of assistance to appropriate programmes of fiscal restructuring.
The parallel agreement approach would further provide a framework for addressing the concerns of least developed Mozambique, Angola and Tanzania, within a framework which would recognise their continued right to non-reciprocal preferences under the EBA framework, with a number of specific improvements being made with regard to the rules of origin applied under the EBA15 and through the establishment of comprehensive programmes to address supply-side constraints on competitive forms of production. In addition for countries like Tanzania there would need to be detailed consultations on how to address concretely the problem of the functioning of commodity markets. In 2001 Tanzania exported 29,659 tonnes of coffee to the EU and received Euro 45,236,000, a unit value of Euro 1,525 per tonne. In 2002 it exported 16,541 tonnes of coffee and obtained an income of Euro 21,091,000, a unit value of Euro 1,275 per tonne, a 17% decline in the unit value. This was but the tip of the iceberg however, for in 1995 Tanzania was exporting 21,168 tonnes of coffee and obtaining ECU 57,741,000 in income, a unit value of ECU 2728 per tonne. Clearly coffee markets have not evolved in Tanzania's favour and this has resulted in coffee declining from the single largest Tanzanian export, accounting for 30% of exports to the EU to the fourth largest category of exports accounting for only 4.9% of total exports.
Control of the industry in Europe
The oligopolistic control of the industry in Europe may well be a factor in this loss of revenue from coffee exports (along with the emergence of new low-cost suppliers and new technologies which allow lower-grade coffee to be used without losing flavour). Certainly the issue of the functioning of commodity markets is a policy issue which should be taken up and comprehensively addressed in the context of EPA negotiations, if such agreements are to meaningfully benefit commodity-depend-ent economies.
Under this approach LDCs would only be expected to take on reciprocal tariff elimination obligations if they entered a customs union agreement with South Africa and the BLNS.16 Unfortunately to date the EC has responded only with a ‘non-response, response’ to the effect that:
It remains to be seen whether the EC is willing to adopt this alternative approach, which offers real options for addressing the specific issues faced in the development of EU-SADC configuration trade relations. Prospects however do not look good if one considers the broader context within which the EU's EPA policy has been developed. To do this it is necessary to go back to 1996, when the EU was first discussing its policy on free-trade area agreements in the context of the new post-cold war economic configuration.The commonly overlooked benefits to the EU
The roots of the EU's approach to EPAs can be found in the 1995 EC Staff Paper on ‘Free trade areas: an appraisal’. In this paper the EC frankly set out the underlying benefits which the European Union could expect to gain from this policy. This paper stated quite clearly:
FTAs are economically beneficial, especially where they help the EU to bolster its presence in the faster growing economies of the world, which is our overriding interest…
More recently, this direct economic justification has also been supplemented by strategic considerations regarding the need to reinforce our presence in particular markets and to attenuate the potential threat of others establishing privileged relations with countries which are economically important to the EU…
… the level of tariffs in many of our partner countries, particularly newly industrialised and developing countries remains high. Tariff averages of 30–40% are not uncommon…
It, therefore, can seem obviously in our interest to persuade such countries to enter into FTAs with the Union, enabling us to encourage both tariff elimination and deregulation. 17
… the European Union has much to gain from an FTA with South Africa. The further opening up of the South African market in the context of such an agreement will create competitive advantages for EU exporters compared to exporters from the USA, Japan and other suppliers of South Africa. The price the EU would have to pay for such an improved position in terms of loss of customs revenues is relatively low, due to the high level of existing duty-free access for South African imports and the relatively modest average level of the remaining tariffs at the EU side. 18
However the reality is that many of these alleged benefits will prove illusory, given the wider developments in EU policies. This is of little concern to the EC of course since its underlying motivations have nothing to do with the structural transformation of southern African economies, which governments in the region would like to see advanced by trade relations with the EU. For the EC, the kind of proposals being put forward in southern Africa simply serve to complicate their wider game plan, be it with regard to: dealing with the difficult problem of ‘selling CAP reform’ domestically and internationally; or securing a WTO agreement which allows the EU to continue with its chosen trajectory for agricultural reform and market expansion; or be it with regard to gaining commercial advantage for EU producers over their international competitors throughout the world.
In this context it would be an act of foolish optimism to expect integrity or honesty in the EU's trade policy towards southern Africa and the wider ACP group.
Paul Goodison, 2pg@pandora.be; Colin Stoneman, cfs2@cfs-hull.demon.co.uk