Re: [L-I] "Democratising" Africa

[Louis Proyect]

Yoshie/Heartfield:

>In Uganda, the United States already had a useful ally in Yoweri 
>Museveni, whose rebellion had overthrown the democratically elected 
>independence leader Milton Obote.  

Democratically elected independence leader Milton Obote? What a joke.
Heartfield's attack on Museveni because he has refused to schedule
elections seems misdirected. I recommend that people serious about the
problems of Africa take a look at Basil Davidson's "The Black Man's
Burden", which explains exactly why there is more going on in Uganda than
suspending elections.

"Yet it was in this dire situation, however paradoxically, that some of the
worst sufferers from misrule and militarized mayhem had begun to present
evidence of social renewal. A regime of reconstruction in Uganda headed by
Yoweri Museveni after years of strong-arm misery under Idi Amin or Milton
Obote was a case in point, rare but by no means unique. This regime of
Museveni’s National Resistance Movement reached power late in the 1980s
when the whole of Uganda was in the last extremes of disintegration, and
the odds against its survival, let alone recovery, had to remain heavy. Yet
its early years into the 1990s produced the makings of peace and
reconciliation where no hope of either had existed before. Fear retreated.
The possibility of civil government instead of executive abuse began to
emerge. Genuine moves toward the democratization of executive power thrust
up their challenge to despair. It was even as though Uganda’s long years of
clientelist tyranny had cleared the way for grass-roots political life to
push a harvest of renewal up through soil that had seemed irretrievably
ruined. 

"Resistance committees at village, parish and district level have been
encouraged by the National Resistance Movement to elect local leaders,"
Victoria Brittain reported in 1987. These began to form themselves into
nine-person local executives which "take care of community security and the
distribution of basic commodities such as sugar, salt or soap, which had
simply vanished with the collapse of [Uganda’s] economic and social
infrastructure." And as may really happen in times of renewal "at the base
of society," all this began to create "new local initiatives, which range
from brick-making, maize processing, brewing, to co-operative shops,
football pitches and chess clubs for youths" who "used to roam about with
the soldiers, fighting, thieving, raping, outside any family or village
life." Yet all this was then found to be more than a flash in the pan of
optimism. Three years later Britain would report that "the old strongmen"
of Uganda’s statist structures had been successfully "challenged by the
resistance committees, many of them made up of peasants," to a point at
which "local decision-making, including the settlement of land disputes,
has given the committees control over the lives of their communities."

If Yoshie wants to understand Africa, I'd advise her to read Basil
Davidson--the author of 27 books on the continent and a radical--rather
than James Heartfield, who writes nothing but puff pieces on LBO-Talk.


Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/

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[L-I] "Democratising" Africa

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Mine says:

>Still, a discussion on Congo is a slight improvement for liberterian
>charecters like J.H however double fucked up his politics is ...

Here's another piece by James Heartfield on Africa:

*   The Week

Ending 22 October 2000

Democratising Africa: 10 years on

In October 1990 the expeditionary force of the Rwandan Patriotic
Front into Rwanda was shattered by the superior forces of President
Juvenal Habyarimana.  The RPF's popular Commanding Officer Fred
Rwigyema was killed early in the fighting, by a stray bullet, or
executed by jealous rivals.  RPF leader Paul Kagame cut short a visit
to Fort Leavenworth in the USA to take command of the forces in the
field.  But in the next 10 years Kagame's RPF not only took power in
Rwanda, but swept across central Africa, overthrowing the ancien
regime in Congo.  Just three years ago, Kagame was feted by the West
as one of a new generation of African leaders including his old
friend, Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni and the newly installed
Congolese president Laurent Kabila.  Just this year, though, the
Kagame regime looked exhausted and threadbare, rent by defections,
condemned by human rights activists and locked in a protracted war of
succession in the Congo, fighting both Kabila and Museveni's forces.

It is unlikely that the RPF and its allies would have enjoyed any
success without the influence of the West.  At the end of the Cold
War, the United States and the former colonial powers of Europe all
reworked their foreign policy with very specific consequences for a
number of African regimes.  As long as the Soviet Union was willing
to provide assistance to radical nationalists, the West backed local
strongmen, like Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko and Rwanda's Juvenal
Habyarimana to stem the nationalist tide.  As the challenge of
radical nationalism ebbed, the West took the opportunity to
destabilise its former allies in a policy euphemistically called
'democratisation'.

In Uganda, the United States already had a useful ally in Yoweri
Museveni, whose rebellion had overthrown the democratically elected
independence leader Milton Obote.  Museveni suspended party politics
in Uganda, but he did know how to play up to the rhetoric of
democratisation.  A large part of Museveni's US-trained officer corps
were exiles from Rwanda, part of the persecuted Tutsi minority.
Rwigyema had been Commander-in-Chief of Museveni's army, Kagame head
of military security.  The RPF was effectively the high command of
the Ugandan army.

Meanwhile in Rwanda, the creaking dictatorship of Habyarimana was put
under massive pressure by its European sponsor, France, to recognise
opposition parties.  At the time social progress in health and
education was being reversed by a collapse in coffee prices, and the
International Monetary Fund offered loans on conditions which
included democratisation.  But democratisation did not include
elections, only 'opposition parties', that owed their influence to
Western sponsorship.  Further, Hayarimana's new cabinet was obliged
to negotiate with the defeated RPF in Arusha, Tanzania, while it was
still raiding across the border.

The destabilisation of Rwanda was all the more pointed given the
ethnic divisions between the different protagonists.  Historically,
Rwanda's Tutsi minority had provided the country's ruling elite (as
it still did in neighbouring Burundi).  But in 1959 the soon to be
independent country launched a 'social revolution' in which the
Tutsis were victimised for their excessive wealth and power.  A
deeply conservative, overwhelmingly catholic one-party state
displaced popular resentment onto the former Tutsi elite, with
successive persecutions.  Now the exiled Tutsis were invading the
country as leaders of the RPF, and the West was demanding that they
be given a leading role in the cabinet.

Habyarimana bought time by letting his imposed cabinet negotiate away
his authority at Arusha, while galvanising opposition to the deal at
home - which meant stirring up hostility to the Tutsi invaders on
ethnic grounds.  Despite the best efforts of the RPF to garner
support from Hutus opposed to Habyarimana, they remained not only
predominantly a Tutsi force, but predominantly an exile army as well.

The RPF kept up the pressure, making ever more extravagant demands in
Arusha - half of the army to be RPF, Kagame to hold the interior
ministry with the president shorn of all powers.  Outside the RPF
broke the ceasefire in March 1991, February 1992 and August 1993
(Prunier 135, 174, 196).  Tanzanian authorities recorded president
Yoweri Museveni commanding the RPF soldiers 'Don't sign the peace
agreement.  I want you back [on the battlefield] immediately'
(Tanzanian newspaper The Mirror, No 126, second issue, May 1994).

The fateful step taken by the RPF was to seek to destabilise the
back-sliding Habyarimana regime.  In neighbouring Burundi, where the
first ever Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye had just been elected,
Tutsi officers allied t