Support
anti-war,
anti-racist
news

:: Donate now ::

Email this article 

Printable page

Email the editor

Holbrooke in Africa spells trouble

By Johnnie Stevens

Every activist in solidarity with Africa should be alarmed at the recent nine-nation tour by Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

"I wish to announce today that we intend to make Africa the priority of the month" when the U.S. assumes the presidency of the UN Security Council in January, said Holbrooke Sept. 6 in Pretoria, South Africa.

He promised big changes: "Our delegation has come to Africa on this trip as part of the commitment of President Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the entire national security team to elevate African issues on our list of national priorities."

When the sole superpower sends its most notorious hawk to announce a major policy change, it is committing an act of national chauvinism.

Holbrooke's trip is an attempt to hijack the Congo peace process--the Lusaka Accords--which South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and other African leaders worked so hard to bring about. It was signed by Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Rwanda and Namibia in addition to the Congolese rebel groups.

His trip is meant to shore up U.S. leverage in this region, rich in natural resources from minerals to diamonds. Washington is especially worried that major defeats for the destabilizing UNITA group in neighboring Angola promise an end of hostilities on both sides of the long Congo-Angola border. And that would weaken Washington's hand, because it was the CIA that first built UNITA into a mercenary army.

The U.S. economic rival in the region, France, which has had its own interests in central Africa since the days of colonialism, has just given a billion dollars in loans, grants and credits to the Democratic Republic of the Congo government, led by Laurent Kabila. This offsets some of Washington's destabilizing efforts.

Five hundred UN "peace keepers" are scheduled to go into the Congo during the U.S. presidency of the Security Council. Neighboring Angola opposes this deployment.

New possibilities for
African cooperation

In the recent period the countries of southern Africa have found ways to come together and cooperate in the face of decades of U.S. policies designed to Balkanize and set them against each other. The Southern Africa Development Community, a 14-nation pact that involves a customs union and mutual defense, has ushered in military cooperation that led to the defeat of UNITA and support for the Congo.

This is just one of a number of signs that the victory over apartheid in South Africa has opened new possibilities in African development.

The same old ruling classes, however, still run the economy in the countries of southern Africa, which face a confrontation with the mass of landless Black people demanding some economic improvement. In Harlem during a recent trip to United Nations headquarters, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa complained that "the economy is still in white hands and we want to change that."

"The biggest challenge we face today is the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Holbrooke said. The U.S. envoy talks in terms of development, but what U.S. transnational corporations really want is to accelerate the extraction of Africa's wealth.

Holbrooke himself is most remembered in recent times for his decisive role in the breakup of Yugoslavia. He is the author of the Rambouillet Accord, which laid the groundwork for the U.S.-led NATO intervention in Yugoslavia. The result was loss of life, mass bombings and the breakup of peoples, families and communities. What was once a federated socialist state of many nationalities is now in tatters after embittered divisions.

Rambouillet was rejected by Belgrade because it imposed impossible conditions of total occupation of their country in a military appendix whose text was not revealed until the bombing of Yugoslavia was well under way. How can Holbrooke be trusted in Africa?

Holbrooke ominously declared, "As we set out to create the structure for peace to prevent future conflict, we must do all we can to solve current crises like those in Burundi, Angola, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Eritrea and the Congo." This is the new argument for intervention--that only the U.S. can insure the safety of all the nationalities. It is a most cynical lie, since it was imperialist intervention in the first place that envenomed what had been peaceful relations.

When Holbrooke spoke in South Africa, he managed to talk about the devastation caused by HIV-AIDS without once referring to that country's struggle to acquire affordable medicines against the resistance of the super-rich U.S. pharmaceuticals.

In fact, the U.S. government has been acting as an agent for these corporations, making dire economic threats against South Africa for passing a law legalizing generic medicines and parallel imports. With 3.5 to 5 million HIV-positive people in South Africa and as many as 32 million in all of sub-Saharan Africa, Pretoria must take measures to protect the population.

Nor did Holbrooke mention that the end of U.S. international funding for family planning has exacerbated the AIDS epidemic, since free condoms are no longer an option for most poor countries.

What Africa really needs is the cancellation of the $600 billion debt, which has chained many governments to debt payment and prevents economic development or health care for the millions of poor dying in the HIV epidemic. The West turns a blind eye and counts their profits while people are dying on a wide scale without compassion.

As the German Communist and poet Berthold Brecht wrote years ago, "When the leaders speak of peace, the mobilization orders have already been written." Holbrooke's trip to Africa is one of the most ominous events for African people in many years.

Copyright © 1999 workers.org