Print This Page
Visit�The�Publisher's�Site
Sunday Times (Johannesburg)
OPINION
February 2, 2003
Posted to the web February 1, 2003
William Pfaff
Johannesburg
THE affair in Iraq, in its way, is banal - just another story of a Third World despot, victimising principally his own people, who will come to a bad end.
In Africa, there is no avenging Captain America waiting to do justice.
Join allAfrica's Discussion:
How to Wage the War on AIDS�>>
Captain America has very little interest in Africa at this moment.
Africa's wars are intimate and communal, motivated by threats to identity and collective survival. The world is largely indifferent to them.
Technological war in Iraq a decade ago produced the "highway of death", pictures of which were prudishly left unpublished by Western television and press. It consisted of the calcified remains of thousands of Iraqi soldiers in their vehicles, arms akimbo and rictus faces, seized in a moment of mass incineration.
The spectacle of past wars in West Africa is merely missing limbs, stumps, children bearing half-healed slashes.
West African war has been waged with machetes and hatchets, as well as guns, sometimes among former friends, and conducted by impressed adolescent or pre-adolescent soldiers, in a way meant to spread terror.
That was in Liberia and Sierra Leone. There was also the genocide in Rwanda. And terrible as it all was, it possessed no essential difference from what went on in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, or in Central Europe in the 1940s. Thus we share a common humanity.
Sierra Leone and Liberia are now uneasily pacified. The Ivory Coast is on the brink. The three countries have overlapping and rival ethnic groups who have been exploited and manipulated across artificial frontiers by ruthless or reckless leaders to sequester and exploit the products of the region's natural wealth.
Added to this is the ancient and crucial division separating sub-Saharan Africa, generally Christian or animist and agricultural, from the pastoral and often nomadic Muslim people to the north.
The Ivory Coast was once France's showcase of neocolonialism under the charismatic and brilliant F�lix Houphou�t-Boigny, who held the country together until his death in 1993. Then a military coup introduced a period of troubles in which the ethnic issue became dominant, as it remains today under President Laurent Gbagbo.
The current crisis sees regional rebellion in the west and north, essentially ethnic in character but political in origin, and in recent days there has been Muslim-Christian violence.
The insurgent groups, whom the French have tried to bring into a coalition government with Gbagbo, all have ethnic or political ties to neighbouring countries. Left alone, the situation risks falling into the anarchic and murderous conflict already experienced in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia.
After more than 10 years of civil war in the former British colony of Sierra Leone during the 1990s, British troops intervened to support a hapless UN peacekeeping force, and successfully stopped the war, establishing conditions in which, in 2000, a new government could be formed.
The French, under their Socialist coalition government in the 1990s, renounced African neocolonialism, which had culminated in President Francois Mitterrand's complacent relationship with what proved to be the genocidal government of Rwanda.
Now the French are back, with an intervention force of more than 2 500 men in the Ivory Coast, in part because of the successful British example in Sierra Leone.
Whether they will be as successful is uncertain. The spell of colonial power is weakened, and the beleaguered Gbagbo government is playing the anti-French card against brokered compromises with his ethnic rivals.
But what is the alternative? Africa lacks educated people, responsible middle classes, the institutions of education and socialisation that are essential to what has come to be called civil society, which in turn is necessary for successful self-government. Its economic problems pale by comparison.
The former colonial powers are the only ones with a real ability to help, whatever their responsibility for the creation of today's conditions.
More importantly, they are the only ones likely to help. International assistance, the UN, the African regional associations, all no doubt have parts to play in the African struggle toward maturity, but today the French army is the only force available to prevent a catastrophe in the Ivory Coast.
It took the British army to put an end to a decade of violence, terror and pillage in Sierra Leone.
The UN force lacked the mandate, means and morale to succeed. To intervene in Africa in today's conditions is a thankless undertaking.
If the former African colonial powers as a group were to set up a structure of intervention, in collaboration with the successful African states, the task might become less thankless and more effective. Without outside help, much of Africa will continue to founder. - � Tribune Media Services International
Pfaff is a columnist for the International Herald Tribune
