Washington in Africa 2012
Forget all the rhetoric. Increased access to oil, imposition of pro-corporate economic policy, hostility to China and attempts to gain cooperation in the ‘War on Terror’ are the most important factors in US foreign policy on Africa. The November elections won’t change that. ‘US actions since 9/11 represent the final stage in the US's century-long effort to complete the project of making US-led globalization a concrete reality across the world through three historical moments: 1) the attempted creation of a global Monroe doctrine between 1898 and 1919; 2) the Roosevelt administration's creation of the Bretton Woods Institutions – the World Bank and IMF – and the UN; and 3) globalization – the US-led effort to establish a new global regime based on free trade, deregulation, and privatization’. – Neil Smith, The Endgame of Globalization, 2005 The US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa and former three-time ambassador, Johnnie Carson, was feted by Brooks Spector recently at Daily Maverick, in an article entitled ‘America’s Mr Africa’. While it is always fitting to honour African-Americans who persevere to the top despite that country’s deep internal racism, Spector makes contentious political and economic claims about the ‘new’ US Africa policy. ‘For some observers at least,’ he says, ‘Barack Obama’s new partnership with Africa was announced in his speech in Accra [11 July 2009], when he declared the era of the authoritarian African big man to be over – kaput!’ As described below, however, Washington has maintained extremely cozy relationships with a variety of African dictators. THE US VERSUS AFRICAN DEMOCRACY Has Washington, as Carson claims, helped Africa democratise? The quaint US State Department notion is based on Washington’s ‘talking left’ about democracy. On closer examination, Obama and Carson are ‘walking right,’ along the same neo-conservative track George W. Bush prepared across Africa’s military, geopolitical and extractive-economic terrain. Thanks to White House patronage, murderous African dictators still retain power until too late, most obviously Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who is personally worth at least $40 billion (according to an ABC News report) and who was recipient of many billions of dollars in US military aid in the 18 months following Obama’s speech. As Carson’s boss Hillary Clinton remarked in 2009, ‘I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,’ and offered this gaffe a few days before the corrupt tyrant was overthrown in February 2011: ‘Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is stable.’ As a result of her affection for one of the worst African big men, Egypt’s democratic movement’s core activists turned a cold shoulder to Clinton again and again.Washington’s coddling of other dictators was signaled just weeks after Obama’s Ghana speech, when his UN Ambassador Susan Rice announced a New York luncheon with 25 African heads of state (40 had been invited): ‘We are looking to have a dialogue with responsible leaders about the future of Africa’s economic and social development.’ Obama dined with numerous tyrants that day, as only a few governments (Eritrea, Guinea, Kenya, Madagascar, Niger, Sudan and Zimbabwe) were specifically ‘left off the guest list because of disputes over their governance or an antagonistic relationship with Washington,’ according to Kenya’s Nation newspaper. Amongst the 40 were Cameroonian dictator Paul Biya, and as his office reported, ‘At the end of the two and half hours that they spent together, most of the African leaders left the dining hall visibly satisfied.’ Democracy and human rights were apparently left off on the agenda, according to a briefing by the main White House Africa security official, Michelle Gavin.Another attendee was Gambian president Yahya Jammeh, a colonel who after overthrowing a democrat in 1994 and later claiming to have found an AIDS cure, last month came under renewed criticism from international human rights advocates after carrying out the first nine out of a potential 40 mass death-row executions (those threatened include an elderly 84-year-old, eight prisoners with mental health issues and eight foreign nationals). As one local citizens’ network put it, ‘Given that the Gambia government uses the death penalty and other harsh sentences as a tool to silence political dissent and opposition, Civil Society Associations Gambia believes that any execution is a further indicator of the brutality with which President Jammeh’s regime is bent on crushing political dissent.’ Yet when asked whether, like the European Union, the US State Department would ‘also have some sort of response should they not heed these warnings not to proceed?,’ the official answer was chilling: ‘I think we haven’t telegraphed any response at this point.’ One reason not to annoy Jammeh was the US Central Intelligence Agency’s reliance upon a Banjul airport as a secret destination and refueling site for ‘rendition’ victims, that is, the illegal transfer of suspected terrorists to countries carrying out torture on behalf of Washington. According to former US air force veteran and Miami Herald journalist Sherwood Ross, amongst 28 countries ‘that held prisoners in behalf of the US based on published data’ are a dozen from Africa: Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, South Africa and Zambia.
With the possible exceptions of Kenya and Zambia, all these regimes remain close Pentagon allies, and hence difficult for genuine democrats. Last March, as the Arab Spring wave moved east from Tunisia, Obama backed the Djibouti regime of Ismail Omar Guelleh against pro-democracy protesters, apparently because of the tiny dictatorship’s hosting of several thousand US soldiers at Washington’s only solely-owned base on the continent. Such hypocritical relations are not new, and even though he served less than a term in the US Senate, Obama developed ties to some of the continent’s most venal elites. Promoting US interests in the form of petro-military complex profits, an ever-expanding ‘War on Terror’ and an anti-Chinese political block, are the common denominators behind Washington’s African alliances. Some examples are illustrative:In 2006, before becoming president, he visited Chad’s dictator Idriss Deby in part to press the case for Chevron Texaco, which Deby had just expelled for failing to pay sufficient taxes. 
Obama infamously extended red-carpet treatment to oil-rich Gabon’s world-class kleptocrat tyrant Ali Bongo 15 months ago in spite of nearly unprecedented controversy.This was followed by a similar invitation a few months ago to Ethiopia’s then prime minister Meles Zenawi, in spite of objections from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International leaders who complained, ‘The United States, the World Bank and other states and institutions have shown little or no attention to Ethiopia’s worsening human rights record. By inviting Meles to the G-8 summit, the US government is sending a message that at best shows a lack of concern about the human rights situation in Ethiopia, and at worst, will be perceived as a US endorsement of the Ethiopian government's policies.’ After Meles died in August, the New York Times acknowledged that ‘he was notoriously repressive, undermining Obama’s maxim that Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions.’ The article quoted former US National Security Council official John Prendergast’s concern about ‘a vexing policy quandary’ in Washington’s relations with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan: ‘All of them have served American interests or have a strong US constituency, but all have deeply troubling human rights records.’ (Whether this is a ‘vexing quandary’ or instead best described as a time-honoured tradition is up to the reader to decide.)Obama’s support for Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame, including $800 million a year in aid and in June 2012, protection against possible UN censure for supporting genocide in the Congo, attracted complaints by respected social justice groups (including the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation). Maurice Carney of Friends of the Congo explains: ‘Since Rwanda invaded Congo in 1996, millions of Congolese have perished, hundreds of thousands of women have been systematically raped and Congo’s wealth has been looted. So the impact of Rwanda’s role in destabilizing the Congo has been tragic for the people of the region and especially the Congolese people. And this is really the sad part about the whole situation, because it’s within the means of the United States to hold its ally accountable, but it has not done so to date.’Washington subsequently chided Kagame, apparently as a result of his turn to new Chinese patrons, according to analyst Eddie Haywood: ‘US State Department cables released by Wikileaks show that Washington has been keeping a close watch on Rwanda-China economic ties. Referring to meetings by Rwandan officials with a Chinese delegation, the cables took note of Rwanda's economic agreements with China and loans from Beijing for the construction of buildings to house the Office of Foreign Affairs and to finance a railway project. China also agreed to consider funding the construction of a new stadium, a women's center and a Confucius Institute. Rwanda requested the delegation for duty-free access to Chinese markets, and Rwandan rice cultivation and road projects were discussed. As Rwanda is a transportation gateway for the Congo’s vast resources to the global market, it goes without saying that China's ‘control by investment’ of a railway project traversing Rwanda through to a port in on the East coast of Tanzania would raise concerns in Washington.’ Last year, citing US national security interests, Obama issued a waiver so as to send more than $200 million in military aid to US-allied regimes in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen in spite of a 2008 US law prohibiting such funding because of their armies’ recruitment of child soldiers. According to Human Rights Watch’s Jo Becker, ‘The Obama administration has been unwilling to make even small cuts to military assistance to governments exploiting children as soldiers. Children are paying the price for its poor leadership.’Although Northwestern University professor Richard Joseph does give Washington credit for its roles in facilitating democracy (albeit in US interests) in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Malawi, the overall message is one of extreme hypocrisy: Obama is only opposed to African dictatorships which are anti-US (or allied to China), but if you are a sub-regional power, help hunt Al Qaeda or have substantial oil reserves, you may commit horrendous crimes and still get the prized White House photo op.

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