Obama: Failing the African Spring?
<
http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/helen-epstein-2/#tab-blog> Helen
Epstein
February 26, 2013, 5:53 p.m.
America's new drone base in the West African city of Niamey, Niger,
announced by the White House on Friday, further expands our
counter-terrorism activity in Africa. It's also consistent with the
militaristic emphasis of the Obama administration's engagement with the
continent. This may help contain the spread of jihadist violence in specific
cases, but by failing to address persistent abuses of human rights by our
African military allies, America is also undermining its own development
investments that are intended to lift millions of people out of poverty and
ensure the continent's peace, stability, and economic growth.
The administration's neglect of human rights in Africa is a great
disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out
ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was
only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast
Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were
shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the
tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to
build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders
accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed
Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for
Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect.
Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan
descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided
a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human
rights.
After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to
advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech. The US finally suspended
military aid to Rwanda last year, after it was forced to accept
<
http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/06/03/dr-congo-rwanda-should-stop-aiding-war-c
rimes-suspect-0> evidence of Rwandan support for the brutal Congolese rebel
group M23, but has otherwise ignored the highly problematic human rights
situation in that country. In Uganda, the US looked on for years as
President Yoweri Museveni's cabinet ministers
<
http://www.monitor.co.ug/News/National/High-profile-corruption-scandals-reg
istered-under-NRM/-/688334/1702448/-/view/printVersion/-/i4dsiw/-/index.html
> gorged themselves on American and other foreign aid intended for
impoverished farmers, war victims, roads, and health care. US diplomats have
recently begun <
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/prsrl/2012/197591.htm>
expressing support for Uganda's many oppressed civil society groups, but one
wonders what took them so long. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact
that Uganda is a vital US military ally in Somalia, where Ugandan troops
helped oust the Islamic militant group al-Shabbab from Mogadishu last year.
Meanwhile, Kenya, another important US ally in Somalia that is soon to be
<
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444097904577539362229840378.h
tml> receiving drones from the Pentagon, is preparing for national elections
on March 4. But some observers
<
http://www.opendemocracy.net/clare-castillejo/kenya%E2%80%99s-elections-mak
e-or-break-moment> say the country is more violent now than it was in 2007,
when post-election
<
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/aug/14/how-kofi-annan-rescued
-kenya/> ethnic clashes left 1000 people dead and caused economic chaos
across East Africa. Presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and his running
mate William Ruto have both been indicted by the International Criminal
Court for crimes connected with those events. It's
<
http://southafrica.usembassy.gov/mediahub_av_carson_20130207_kenya.html>
not clear what the US will do if Kenyatta wins, but it often seems as if
Obama will work with any African leader who furthers America's military
aims, regardless of how that leader treats his own people.
And then there is Ethiopia. Today, Western nations give $3.5 billion a year
in aid to Ethiopia, most of it for health care projects, food aid, and other
development programs. Of this, the US alone provides roughly $700 million-an
amount that has
<
http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/countryprofile/ethiopia>
quintupled in the past decade, even as the nation's human rights record has
deteriorated to the point that Freedom House now designates it one of the
least free countries in the world. The Ethiopian government has rigged
elections, taken control of the economy, and outlawed virtually all
independent media and human rights activity in the country-including work
related to women and children's rights, good governance, and conflict
resolution. Thousands of political prisoners languish behind bars and dozens
of editors, journalists, judges, lawyers, and academics have been forced
into exile.
But when Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died last summer, then-US
Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice praised him as a personal friend
and a "talented and vital leader." When she
<
http://usun.state.gov/briefing/statements/197275.htm> remarked that "he had
little patience for fools, or 'idiots,' as he liked to call them," some in
the opposition believed she was referring to them-and
<
http://open.salon.com/blog/almariam/2012/12/10/susan_rice_and_africas_unhol
y_trinity> approving Meles's sentiments. Rice's support for authoritarian
leaders in Africa was
<
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/12/what-susan-rice-ha
s-meant-for-us-policy-in-sub-saharan-africa/265833/> highlighted by critics
who opposed-and ultimately derailed-her nomination to be secretary of state.
Perhaps most worrying of all is the unwillingness of Obama and other Western
leaders to say or do anything to support the hundreds of thousands of Muslim
Ethiopians who have been demonstrating peacefully against government
interference in their religious affairs for more than a year. (The Ethiopian
government claims the country has a Christian majority, but Muslims may
account for up to one half of the population.) You'd think a nonviolent
Islamic movement would be just the kind of thing the Obama administration
would want to showcase to the world. It has no hint of terrorist influence,
and its leaders are calling for a secular government under the slogan "We
have a cause worth dying for, but not worth killing for." Indeed, the
Ethiopian protesters may be leading Africa's most promising and important
nonviolent human rights campaign since the anti-apartheid struggle.
Yet the United States, along with other major donors to Ethiopia's
government, including Britain, has stood by as women and men have been
hideously beaten by police,
<
http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/08/15/ethiopia-prominent-muslims-detained-crac
kdown> hundreds have been arrested, eight people have been killed, mosques
have been raided by security forces, and twenty-nine Muslim leaders,
including lawyers, professors, and businessmen, remain in jail, charged with
trying to use violent means to create an Islamic state.
The demonstrations started in late 2011, after the government began forcing
Imams to adopt an imported version of Islam. The Ethiopian government has a
long history of trying to control civil society groups, including religious
orders, by taking over their leadership. In 1992, Meles replaced the
Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Church with a party insider.
Many Christians still resent this. In 1995, he replaced the leader of the
Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council, also known as the "Majlis," again
with someone from his party. Muslims grumbled about this, but did little
more.
Then in 2011, on the pretext that the Islamic community was being
radicalized by fundamentalist groups, Meles invited a Lebanese Islamic sect
known as "Ahbash" to Ethiopia. The group, which was founded in Beirut by an
Ethiopian exile in 1983, preaches obedience to government and opposes
politicization of religion. All of Ethiopia's Imams were required to go to
meetings to listen to these newcomers, and were threatened with imprisonment
if they refused. In the meetings, government officials were invariably
present, and would lecture the imams about "Revolutionary Democracy," the
ruling party's particularly rigid political doctrine. Most Ethiopian imams
are volunteers, who work mainly as farmers, teachers, or in other trades to
support themselves. But those who resisted taking part in the meetings and
refused to preach the "Ahbash" version of Islam soon found themselves
replaced by government-appointed, salaried adherents of the new official
religion. The imams and their defenders began organizing nonviolent
demonstrations that have since spread across the country.
In response, the Ethiopian government has attempted to portray the
protesters as jihadists, most recently claiming in a government TV
documentary that they are under the influence of Salafist extremists from
Saudi Arabia. When a lawyer for the jailed movement leaders told a Voice of
America journalist that the documentary undermined the presumption of
innocence of his clients, he too was threatened with arrest. If this
fear-mongering has been intended to send a message to the US, which supports
Ethiopia's anti-terrorism activities along the border with Somalia, it seems
to have worked. Last year, former US Ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn
praised the Ethiopian reaction to the demonstrations,
<
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/11/ozatp-ethiopia-religion-idAFJOE84
A00W20120511> telling Reuters, "The government has done a pretty good job
over the years in ameliorating religious differences where there are
potentially serious conflicts."
Ethiopian Muslims and Christians have long coexisted more or less in peace,
as they do in Tanzania, Uganda, and other countries in the region. But since
the demonstrations started, government officials have tried to infiltrate
them and provoke violence among Muslim groups and between Muslims and
Christians. It hasn't worked. In recent months, Christians and secular human
rights defenders have even joined in support of the Muslims, and the
demonstrations have grown. The demonstrators use Facebook and secure
Internet sites to outsmart government censors, and warn people to stay home
when they learn that the government intends to plant violent hecklers among
them to discredit the movement. When the movement's leader, Abubakar Ahmed,
who had been detained with other protesters (he is one of the twenty-nine
awaiting trial), was paraded in chains before TV cameras, protesters showed
up at the next demonstration with his picture on their T-shirts, and stood
in a phalanx before the police with their wrists crossed, as if they too
were in chains.
The Ethiopian protests began around the time of the Arab Spring, when it
seemed the Obama administration might finally begin taking human rights in
Africa seriously. In late 2011, for example, then-Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton <
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16062937> joined British
Prime Minister David Cameron in declaring that their governments would
consider penalizing foreign aid recipients, including several African
countries, that cracked down on the rights of homosexuals. This rallying to
the cause of gay rights would be heartening, if it weren't for the fact that
Cameron and Clinton have done so little to protect everyone else's rights.
Such official statements could even undermine sympathy for the gay rights
cause in Africa.
For years, observers have
<
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/138158/todd-moss/missing-in-africa>
wondered what the US administration's policy toward Africa really is. Then,
three years into Obama's first term, the White House finally released its
first Africa
<
http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/africa_strategy_2.pdf>
strategy document. It states that the US will "promote strong democratic
norms" and "support civil society actors who are creating vibrant democratic
models.." But as the situations in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda make clear,
little has been done to further these aims. While continuing most of the
development and public health initiatives of the Bush Administration, the
Obama administration has given priority to US military aims.
Failing to challenge government corruption and repression undermines
economic growth and social development throughout East Africa and beyond, as
well the prospects for long term peace and stability. Even our direct
military interventions have had dubious results. Experts continue to debate
the wisdom of intervening in Libya, but there is no arguing with the fact
that it helped rally-and arm-al-Qaeda supporters, who have spread terror to
Mali and Algeria and perhaps other West African countries; impoverished
Niger agreed to host the new US drone base in part out of growing fear of
the jihadism that has spread from Libya.
More than half a century of post-independence African history has shown that
focusing on stability, security and development while ignoring democracy and
human rights is self-defeating, because it undermines those very goals. The
US and other Western donors to Africa must do more to use the many
instruments at their disposal to promote the reforms necessary to protect
basic freedoms and uphold the rule of law. This will pose diplomatic
challenges, but they could start by not turning their backs on peaceful
protesters, just when our moral support-at the very least-is most urgently
needed. As Czech playwright, dissident, and former president Vaclav Havel
put it during the depths of Cold War, "The 'dissident' movements do not shy
away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems too
radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough." At
the time, Western leaders rushed to support Havel and other non-violent
activists throughout Europe. Now that Africans are calling for the same
thing, why don't today's leaders do the same for them?
Awolia School Support Page
Ethiopian Muslims protesting in Addis Ababa, October, 2012
Received on Tue Feb 26 2013 - 10:25:38 EST
