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African Crises: A Continent in Continuing Trouble
By Frank Crigler
Eric Jensen's ingenious design for the structure of this conference afforded us a look, first of all, at areas closest to the United States and has now widened our focus to deal with the earth's remotest places and broadest issues. It is indeed in Africa, with its "continuing crises," that this conference's central question is posed most clearly: How is the United States to respond to the new century's political and humanitarian challenges — as a member of a multinational community, a pick-up posse, or as the global cop on the block?
Let me warn you, however, that I'm uncomfortable with a premise that seems implicit in Dr. Jensen's question — that dealing effectively with such crises implies the use of some sort of coercive force, whether unilateral or multilateral, by outsiders. In my view, we have too easily fallen into that habit of thinking since the end of the Cold War. Our relations with troubled nations and distressed peoples should consist of something more, in my opinion, than warmed-over scripts from "NYPD Blues."
There are, I believe, other choices available to us short of playing policeman to the world or isolating ourselves in Fortress America. Some of these dawned upon me during my years on the job in Latin America and Africa. But the more important lessons were those I learned afterward, especially under pressure from the inquiring minds that surrounded me at Simmons College. For I discovered here that, despite all my worldly experience, I had not come prepared to answer their probing questions.
As it happened, my time at Simmons coincided with a good deal of unpleasant news from Africa about countries I believed I knew well — notably Somalia, Rwanda, and the Congo (Zaire) — after years of exposure there as a diplomat. But Simmons showed me I badly needed new sources, information, and insight if I were to explain to students and colleagues what was happening there more recently. So let me speak for a few moments not so much about Africa itself as about my rather special Africa experience in the Warburg chair.
I arrived at Simmons in 1993 believing I understood the Somalis better than just about anyone. I had spent my last three Foreign Service years in Somalia, departing virtually on the eve of its collapse into anarchy, and I had just had the unusual opportunity of returning there as a private citizen to view the devastation and human suffering that resulted from two years of civil war. During those intervening years, I had lobbied in Washington for military-backed "humanitarian intervention" to halt the fighting and relieve the suffering of Somalis caught in the crossfire, so I was gratified to be able to tell my students how I watched the U.S. Army come ashore to do just that, as part of Operation Restore Hope. It had been a proud "Kodak moment" for me
Sadly, I had to note that our mission seemed to have gone off the track since then: halting the warfare and feeding the hungry turned out to be easy tasks compared to those of rebuilding public services and restoring a semblance of civil order. Beneath the surface calm imposed by our forces there remained the same hostilities among rival Somali clans that had spawned civil war in the first place. Despite our good intentions, these had already erupted tragically in our troops' faces and threatened to spread widely as soon as our troops left.
At first, these were merely interesting technical problems that served my purposes at Simmons as grist for classroom lectures and brown-bag discussions. But later complications caught me by surprise and left me without answers — perhaps because they had less to do with Somalia than with factional feuds in my own country. For a new administration had taken charge in Washington, impatient to set its own imprint on global affairs; resentful at having to clean up after President Bush's lame-duck "grandstanding" in Somalia; and, I believe, honestly hoping to come up with more effective machinery to deal with the ethnic disputes and political brushfires that had become the legacy of the Cold War.
At that point, the Clinton Administration's aim was not by any means to abandon the UN peacekeeping system (which had so recently won a Nobel Peace Prize for its quiet efforts over the years) but rather to imbue it with greater muscle and a more assertive sense of purpose. The buzz words were "robust" and "enforcement" — a tough-minded approach that would get at the root of problems and fix them, not merely paper them over.
Somalia, for its sins, was fated to be the proving ground for this new "robust" approach. The Clinton people wished to see peacekeeping responsibility there returned quickly to the United Nations — but only on terms that would lead to a successful outcome, not another quagmire. The UN secretariat readily agreed to the new "robust" format, and responsibility for keeping the peace, revitalizing the Somali economy, rebuilding basic infrastructure and — most important — restoring civil government and institutions was assigned to a newly "robust" UNOSOM II multilateral military force, under the command of an American admiral and his handpicked staff.
Almost immediately, Somali faction leaders sensed the weakness of our newly multilateral resolve. Problems began to erupt and minor skirmishes broke out between renegade armed clan factions and the blue-beret UNOSOM II forces. Not surprisingly, factions that had achieved the strongest military and political positions prior to our intervention (and therefore had most to lose) now became the most recalcitrant; those with the weakest positions and most to gain from our "even-handed" approach became our best friends.
Ultimately, these incidents climaxed in some of the ugliest fighting that ever involved UN peacekeeping forces anywhere in the world. No need to remind you of the details; suffice it to say that the TV images of Somalis and Americans brutalizing each other, at the nadir of a proud mission to "restore hope" in a country I had come to love, were personally appalling to me — and increasingly difficult to explain to my students and faculty colleagues. But their insistent questions eventually forced me to come up with some tentative answers about what had gone wrong in Somalia:
Somolia was hard enough to explain to my students, even though the facts were fresh in my mind. The chaos that erupted in Rwanda late in my first Warburg year was much harder. I'd been away from Rwanda for nearly two decades, and while I thought I still had a good fix on the country's basic dynamics, I found I had much to unlearn when reports of genocide reached us.
Rwanda had been a very special experience for me — a sort of three-year escape to Shangri-la. The country was breathtakingly beautiful, its fauna fascinating, and its people simply the sweetest and most decent I had met anywhere. I knew — we all knew — that Rwanda had serious underlying problems: in GNP per capita terms, it was among the poorest in the world, the most densely populated and fastest growing in Africa; its politics were dominated by a single socialist-style party, and its ethnic tensions were held in check by a no-nonsense military ruler. But we had not yet learned to despise African socialism or enlightened despots, and in the 1970s, Rwanda seemed to be making its way forward.
As you might imagine, then, when my students and colleagues began asking questions about the violence erupting in our African Shangri-la, I was short of satisfactory answers. At a brown-bag lunch session in the dining hall, my wife and I described the Rwanda we had known earlier and attempted to offer some some reassuring perspective on the awful reports that were reaching us in Boston (for lack of anything insightful to say, I recall demonstrating Tutsi warrior dance steps!). To their credit, the large crowd of students and others who attended were unimpressed:
How was it possible, they wanted to know, that such "sweet" people could be engaged in such ghastly brutality toward each other? Why had we American diplomats not foreseen the danger of such an eruption of violence and taken steps to prevent it or curb it? What were the United Nations, the Belgians, and the French doing? Or the Organization of African Unity? Shouldn't someone be taking the lead? Why was no one trying to halt the slaughter?
Not just a little chagrined, I felt compelled to do some long-postponed research into Rwanda's social and political history. With the help of the Simmons library staff and some personal contacts in Washington and New York, here is what I learned:
First, that differences between Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups were far older, deeper, and more complex than they had seemed to me. (In this regard, I must mention a particularly insightful book entitled The Premise of Inequality in Ruanda, by Jacques J. P. Maquet, which may be found in the stacks of the Simmons library.)
Second, and more unsettling, I learned that the U.S. and its European friends had indeed been quite active — perhaps too active — behind the scenes in Rwanda before the slaughter began, obtaining promises from the Rwandan president and ruling party of political and economic reforms, promises that may themselves have ignited the explosion of ethnic fear, violence, and murder.
Third — and this should not have been a surprise — I learned that Washington had no intention whatever of becoming further involved in Rwanda, so soon after its embarrassing fiasco in Somalia and its controversial intervention in Haiti. (Some months later, however, it was prevailed upon to fly relief supplies and personnel into the Kivu province of Zaire next door to aid Rwandan Hutus who had swarmed there as refugees.)
It was evident even as refugees from Rwanda's nightmare were flooding across the border into the eastern reaches of the Congo that the rising tide of ethnic conflict in the smaller neighbor was threatening to upset the always-precarious balance of Congolese politics.
Rwanda, after all, had been a mere footnote to the huge Congo, tacked onto King Leopold's colonial domain (along with its twin neighbor Burundi) as a prize for Belgium's role in defeating Germany in World War I. Even during the Congo's worst days, its leaders — and the rest of us — regarded Rwanda and Burundi as insignificant by comparison. So it was astonishing to me to watch the Congo's own strongman president Mobutu sese Seko — whom we had installed in power thirty years earlier — himself fall, his regime collapse, and his nation practically fall apart at the crest of a wave of change that began in Rwanda's hills.
Once again, the Warburg chair and the Simmons library were good to me, enabling me to dig more deeply beneath the news headlines. I had been aware that the Congo's mountainous eastern reaches were populated by people who were close kin of the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda, and I had got to know some of their chiefs and leaders when I served there many years earlier. I was vaguely aware too that these border areas had been used for a generation as a staging area for Tutsi guerrilla groups seeking to overthrow Rwanda's Hutu majority and recapture the feudal kingdom they lost at Independence early in the 1960's.
But I was surprised, as others were, by the flood of Hutu refugees — more than one million of them — who poured out of Rwanda into the same border region of the Congo during that awful summer of 1994, inevitably bringing with them the virus of ethnic hatred that had devastated their own country and that soon spread rapidly across the eastern third of the Congo.
Which they shortly did, to almost everyone's astonishment. But the story did not end there, either — where indeed do Africa's "continuing crises" end? — for the virus of ethnic conflict spread even beyond the Congo's broad borders to neighboring Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Uganda, Congo-Brazzaville, and the Central African Republic, involving all of them in what has been called Africa's own "World War." And although there is now a truce in that conflict, the virus has by no means expired.
I believe there are lessons here that should apply as we consider what America's global security role should be at the turn of the century, particularly in response to Africa's ongoing "world war." For me, these are among the most important:
First, we cannot disengage from Africa, no matter what the hard-liners say, because America's own roots run too deep there and because we as a people are too deeply touched by the fate of Africans.
Second and just as important, we outsiders cannot solve Africa's problems or end its "continuing crises" ourselves, either by imposing our own value systems through force of arms or by pouring our wealth and technology into its development. Africans must be allowed (and trusted) to discover their own solutions, whether by mining their old traditions or by inventing new ones.
Third, and closely related to the first two, we must avoid playing the role of bwana mukubwa — the arbiter and decision-maker — in African disputes. A century of authoritarian colonialism did colossal damage to Africa's social and political traditions, especially its conflict resolution systems. With diplomatic "tough love," we must allow Africans to work out their differences without appealing to powerful outsiders.
Fourth, and still in the same vein, we need to shape our future relations with Africa more modestly, steering a careful course between callous indifference and take-charge involvement. This is hard for Americans, impatient and self-confident as we are; but our solutions are not always the right ones for others, no matter how well they may work for us.
And finally, we must try ceaselessly to understand these people much better than we do. After three decades of flying through the Third World by the seat of my pants, I learned at Simmons that there is no substitute for studying more, reading more, questioning more, and probing deeper into the culture and history of the nations we deal with, no matter how much first-hand knowledge we may think we've accumulated on the job.