Big Men Little People

by Alec Russell

  By 1989 the Angolan war had reached a hideous stalemate with neither side able to deliver a knockout blow. Even with the help of South Africa's armed forces, the most powerful in sub-Saharan Africa, Unita could not defeat the MPLA. South Africa and Cuba withdrew their troops in accordance with the terms of a 1988 peace agreement. Although the fighting continued into 1991, this was widely seen as final skirmishing as Unita and the MPLA sought to gain the best bargaining position. With talks under way for the end of white rule, South Africa's old guard had more pressing matters. Washington and Moscow continued to give backing until 1991 but agreed to stop as part of the settlement that was to end in the election. The irony was that the intensive Western involvement of the Cold War era was succeeded by a withdrawal that threatened to be almost as damaging. Africa badly needs all the help it can get.

  The departure of the Russians was no great loss. The Soviet President Gorbachev was desperate to cut his puppets' strings - he could barely afford to pay his own army, let alone fund adventures in southern Africa. The only Russians in the continent these days are blue-eyed blond Slav 'men of action' piloting the 'seat-of-your-pants' flights that go where commercial air lines have long since feared to fly. They are key players in the network of organized crime, private armies and shady businesses that criss-crosses the continent and deprives Africans of the mineral revenues which could fund much-needed development. But at least they are no longer directing bombing raids on densely packed villages as was frequently the case in the Cold War in Angola and Mozambique.

  America's withdrawal, while less thorough, was even more momentous. As the sole superpower, it has maintained a profile and interest in Africa: Washington sees East Africa as an import ant base to keep track of the world's radical Islamic movements traditionally backed by Sudan; the upheavals in the Great Lakes region which led to the overthrow of Mobutu were treated by the CIA with the same short-sighted intensity that marked their record there in the early Sixties. But nonetheless, when President Clinton visited Africa in March 1998, he was able to claim with some justification that it marked the start of a new partnership between America and Africa.

  The Clintons' ten-day tour, which was billed by his aides as an end to 'paternalism, dependency and indifference', drew a line under the more brazenly interventionist policies of the past. Halfway through the visit, Mr Clinton came the closest that Washington has ever done to apologizing for its Cold War role when he conceded that America had not always 'done the right thing by the continent'. He also promised a new relationship via America's new 'Africa Growth and Opportunity Act' which he vowed would help revitalize the continent's economy.

  ‘It used to be that when US policy makers thought of Africa - if they thought of Africa - they said: "What can we do for Africa or about Africa?"' he told South Africa's parliament.

  'They were the wrong questions. The right question today is what can we do with Africa? Yes, Africa still needs the world, but more than ever the world needs Africa.'

  But Africans were probably right to be skeptical. Many politicians were concerned that the Americans' talk of trade and not aid was tantamount to neo-colonialism. Thabo Mbeki, then South Africa's deputy president, pointed out that most of the continent still badly needed development, and could not hope to compete with American markets. As the American entourage swept through Africa, I asked a Ghanaian guide at St George's Fort, one of the old Atlantic slave centres on the Ghanaian coast, for his thoughts on the American promises. 'Apologies are free,' he said, gesturing to the mouldy dungeons behind him where hundreds of thousands of slaves were kept before being shipped to America. 'What about some money?'

  Not only is the flow of money drying up, so is the attention. Events on the ground in central Africa suggested that Washington was often struggling to keep pace with events. The disappointment of Kabila's government in Congo fuelled disillusionment in Washington about Africa and a belief that there was little point in getting involved. Nowhere was this ennui more apparent than in Angola, where the UN ran a series of operations whose shortcomings and lack of funding and support reflected how the West was losing patience with Africa.

  With its shiny white paint glistening in the sun the washing machine shimmered in solitary splendour. It had arrived a week or so after Major Kundalkar had taken up his post at Quibala, a collection of huts deep in the Angolan bush. Amid the dust and flies it was understandably his pride and joy.

  The major had been posted there in early 1995 on reconnaissance for the UN's third Angolan mission in the previous decade. Even as he started work, the UN's bureaucracy was whirring remorselessly in his wake. According to the rulebook, new UN posts were to be equipped with a washing machine. Quibala, some bureaucrat looking at a map in New York had decreed, was to be no exception, even though, as every Angolan knew, it was in the middle of the war zone and had had neither electricity nor running water in years. Loyal soldier that he was, Kundalkar would not consider ridiculing his superiors. Instead he proudly related the tale of his washing machine's delivery.

  'It came by air, of course, as the roads from Luanda are impassable. One day we were told on the radio to expect a shipment and suddenly there it was sitting on the airstrip. It was a terrible to-do getting it from there to here. We could hardly fit it in a vehicle. Now we use it as a table when we are entertaining visitors.'

  As we bumped down the track away from Quibala I caught a final glimpse of the washing machine. It was, I reflected, a striking symbol of the UN's mission. There was a remote chance that one day it could work, but like the UN it would need considerable ingenuity, effort and good fortune.

  A vast administrative machine like the UN lends itself to satire. As the UN's peacekeeping mission ground into action in 1995 there was no shortage of 'washing machine' material. The supply depot housed 250 ten-tonne containers shipped from the UN mission, which had just ended in Mozambique. The British UN officers in charge of the warehouse were more forthright than my Indian host at Quibala; their guided tour was deliberately brimming with farce.

  First, we inspected the rows of shiny Chinese 'Pheasant' bicycles, which had been sent from the UN mission to Cambodia. Quite who would dare to ride a bicycle in the most densely mined country in the world my guides failed to understand. Po faced they passed on to boxes full of 'Bright and Breezy' washing powder, presumably soon to be shipped at considerable peril (not to mention expense) to my Indian major friend. Like conjurors they saved the best for the end- a ten-tonne container of rubbish which had come via Mozambique from Phnom Penh.

  The UN embarked on the Angolan mission inspired by the successful conclusion of their operation in Mozambique, which, as a former Portuguese colony embroiled in a long and Cold War-fuelled civil war, had long been seen as the mirror image of Angola. Mozambique's two-year peace process, culminating in elections in October 1994, was a triumph. As with the Namibian mission in the late Eighties and early Nineties it was a testimony to the benefits of allocating sufficient money and time, home of the West's early post-Cold War optimism. But the Angolan mission rapidly degenerated into a joke. Devoted officers like Major Kundalkar did oversee the disarmament of thousands of troops, but most of the best units from both sides stayed in the bush. Far from bringing Angola nearer to peace, the mission gave UNITA a chance for a breather to regroup and rearm. With a few honourable exceptions, the mission became little more than a chance for Third World soldiers to live the expat life by banking hard currency salaries and living off expenses.

  The decline and fall of the mission was all too familiar to Angolans. Its predecessor had been appointed amid much fan fare to oversee the 1992 elections, but it was the Cinderella of UN operations. Margaret Anstee, the UN special envoy, was reduced to making fun of the Security Council Resolution 747 which had authorized the mission. She had, she joked, been given 'a 747 to fly with only enough fuel for a DC3'.6 In time, Angolans altered the remark to 'only enough fuel for a car'. Anstee's complaint was valid. While the Namibian peace process of 1988/9 had a
budget of $430 million and 10,000 UN personnel, Angola was allocated $132 million and barely a thousand personnel for a far more complex task. Tragically for Angola, penny-pinching was merely a symptom of a greater malaise.

  The list of mishaps and mistakes was endless. The first error was the choice of the special envoy. Anstee was a highly experienced diplomat, but her appointment suggested that political correctness counted more in New York than realpolitik. To send a white woman to a chauvinist country like Angola was never going to work. Africa is the most sexist of continents. Neither Savimbi nor Dos Santos would take kindly to receiving instructions from a woman, as any African veteran could have told the UN headquarters staff. Anstee's colour and nationality also stood against her. In Angola the scars of colonialism are still unhealed.

  Her successor, Alioune Blondin Beye, a Malian, argued that one had to understand that the West's 'bull in a china shop' approach would never work in Angola. 'An African understands as a [citizen of a] more developed nation might not, that a conflict that developed for years gathers many layers, all of which must be rooted out before peace can be built on a clean foundation,' he said, in an interview with the Associated Press, shortly before his tragic death in a plane crash in June 1998. His 'African solution to African problems' chimed very well with the West's disinclination to get involved, but as time passed with little progress his softly-softly approach seemed perilously close to subservience.

  Still more disastrous, however, than the choice of the leader was the timetable. Under pressure from the three peace-brokers, Portugal, Russia and America, the UN pushed ahead with the election. Representatives of the troika were anxious to bring to an end their long and convoluted history of involvement. And so they ignored repeated warnings that Savimbi had not disarmed his principal forces. It was also patently clear that the UN had not had enough time to oversee a climate conducive to free and fair elections.

  If the UN was to achieve anything, it had to be willing for a long haul. Angola needed a two- or three-year peace-keeping force to oversee an interim period before elections and then it needed adequate resources for a follow-up operation. Africa is littered with the debris of elections which were held without sufficient support. The classic example was Sierra Leone, where the West funded elections in 1996 to end military rule. The poll was a triumph. Images were duly transmitted around the world of happy lines of voters. But after years of chaos and civil war the new civilian government needed more than democratic legitimacy to stay in power. It needed money - and muscle - to defend the hard-won civilian rule and entrench democratic institutions and values. Within a year there had been a military coup and the elected president was in exile.

  The fundamental problem was Third World fatigue. The crisis in Angola in 1992 was low on the list of the world's priorities in comparison to the war in the former Yugoslavia. I was in Bosnia in the winter of 1992 when Boutros-Ghali visited the besieged Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, and outraged its beleaguered inhabitants by declaring that it was far from being the most dangerous city in the world. Like many other correspondents I was angered by what seemed an attempt to deflect attention from the shortcomings of the UN's Balkan commitments. The UN was indeed then desperate to wriggle off the hook of responsibility for the carnage in the Balkans. But Boutros-Ghali was stating the truth. The people of Huambo, Cuito and other Angolan cities were in a worse plight than Sarajevans, but the artillery and planes that were shelling them were being fired in deepest Africa, and the Saraje ans were in Europe. During the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, advocates of Western intervention regularly argued that morality and a defence against barbarism had to start somewhere. But, as Africans repeatedly protested, that in itself is selective morality.

  The UN's reputation in Africa reached its lowest point in Somalia and Rwanda. The Somalia mission began in a blaze of publicity in December 1992 when American marines stormed ashore before banks of waiting television cameras. Their task, code-named Operation Restore Hope, was to restore peace and order after two years of civil war and famine had killed several hundred thousand Somalis. But a series of humiliating defeats by Somali militias showed they had wholly failed to understand the nature of the problem they were facing. The operation reached its nadir in October 1993 when a plan to abduct the leading Somali warlord General Aidid, who had been identified by Washington as the main villain, went terribly wrong. Two helicopters were shot down and eighteen crack Rangers, who had been flown in especially for the task, were killed. It later emerged that their armoured vehicles were driven by Malaysian drivers who lost their way. One American was captured and shown on television. The dead body of another was filmed being carried through the streets of Mogadishu, the capital, by a Somali mob. The images brought back all the old Vietnam fears of body bags. The Somali mission effectively killed any desire in Washington for serious involvement in Africa. Fifteen months after their colourful arrival the Americans made an ignominious withdrawal, leaving a pared-down multi-national UN force. By the end, the UN forces were barricaded in their bases, spending all but a handful of the operation's billion-pound budget on merely staying alive. Kofi Annan, the then UN Under-Secretary of Peace-Keeping, remarked acidly: 'The impression has. been created that the easiest way to disrupt a peace-keeping mission is to kill Americans.'

  The Rwandan operation was even more of a disaster, or rather disgrace. When the genocide started in April l994, there was a UN peace-keeping force in Kigali to monitor the recently signed peace accords. But they were forbidden by New York from intervening on the grounds that they had only a monitoring mandate. Even as mobs with machetes slaughtered civilians in the city centre, the blue berets were confined to their barracks. A patrol of ten Belgian soldiers was ordered to the house of the prime minister, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a moderate Hutu opposed to the killing, to escort her to safety. When they arrived, they were surrounded by a mob baying for her and their blood. On radioing for instructions, they were told to put down their weapons. As soon as they did so, they were hacked to death. The Security Council ordered Boutros-Ghali to with draw the troops. As the killing intensified, it backtracked and tried to raise an intervention force, but nothing happened. The UN monitors were left literally to pick up the bodies.

  Major-General Romeo Dallaire, the UN commander, was later vilified back home in Canada for failing to act, but the blame lies with the Western governments for whom an African genocide was not worth risking any lives. I met Dallaire shortly after the genocide ended and he could barely control his anger at the Western powers for, he said, failing in their duties. When America finally did respond, they restricted their involvement to flying in tonnes of supplies to the Hutu refugees in the very camps that were sheltering the killers. Even that was a disaster. They delivered the wrong sort of food to the wrong place. I accompanied the first C-130 transport plane from Entebbe Airport, in Uganda, and watched the excited faces of the aircrew as they offloaded giant bundles of food into the sky. The next day, as recriminations reverberated from Washington, the airmen shuffled around the airport; they wanted to help but they just could not get it right.

  The one positive development that emerged indirectly from these botched missions is that they encouraged a new spirit of self-sufficiency. The disastrous record of the West and the UN in Somalia, Rwanda and Angola stirred bitter memories of the partisan UN mission in the Congo in the Sixties and entrenched a deep cynicism in Africa about the morality and commitment of the international community. In a handful of African capitals the realization grew that the time had come for Africa to look to its own interests.

  There are still plenty of voices arguing that the West has a debt to repay which requires it to intervene. But such an abdicatory philosophy has been waning steadily since the Sixties when it was in vogue. There are indeed signs of a growing wariness about Western involvement. The impetus for this new approach came from the Horn of Africa, where Eritreans and Ethiopians had learned the hard way that liberation only comes through your own efforts. The Eritreans
fought a thirty-year war to win independence from Ethiopia. The Ethiopians simultaneously fought a long guerrilla war against the Marxist government, which culminated in 1991 in the overthrow of the dictator Mengistu.

  The philosophy of President Issaias Afewerki of Eritrea and Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia was simple. They argued that Africans had to learn to solve their problems. The corollary was that they should be left alone to get on with the job. Hopes that they were the forerunners of a new pragmatic breed were dashed in 1998 when they began a pointless war over a disputed strip of land. But the idea that the American 'cavalry' would not and even should not bale out Africa took root elsewhere, particularly in Uganda under President Museveni and in Rwanda, where the UN relief agencies and non governmental organizations were regarded with open contempt by the RPF, who tolerated their charity only as long as it suited their ends. As the years passed, so Museveni and Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s post-genocide leader, became more authoritarian. While Rwanda’s economy grew and the government fostered a business-friendly climate Kagame’s human rights record deteriorated. Without naming Kagame, Kofi Annan clearly had his style of leadership in mind when he told me that ultimately Africa could only prosper with representative government.

  Yet this self-determinist vision while not the long-term answer was arguably a first step from anarchy or tyranny. As the twentieth century closed, Angola needed a dose of it. But it was never going to come from either of the feuding leaders. Dos Santos became fixated on crushing Savimbi and Savimbi had long since lost sight of everything but the quest for power. In January 1999 the UN acknowledged its ten-year peacekeeping mission had failed and prepared to pull out. Such was the elemental force of Savimbi's personality that at the end of the century he was reported to be training a new generation of cadres to replace those that had defected, died or been purged. The loss of his Cold War allies had been a blow but it was surmountable as he was blessed by access to fabulous supplies of minerals - the modern key to the continent.