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Bush’s Global Agenda: Bad News for AfricaSalih Booker, Current History, May 2001 (pdf version) “Today’s ‘global’ issues, from HIV/ AIDS to global warming, and from trade policies to the failure of international peacekeeping, have their most immediate and devastating consequences in Africa. . . . These vital challenges must be addressed in Africa, in solidarity with Africans, if they are not to overwhelm the world.” The greatest international challenge facing the United States in the twenty-first century is to devise a strategy to overcome the world’s structural inequities that perpetuate extreme poverty. In a world where race, place, class, and gender are the major determinants of people’s access to the full spectrum of human rights needed to escape poverty, Africa should be at the top of the United States foreign policy agenda. In a way— albeit the wrong way— it already is. To find the substance of United States foreign policy toward the nations and peoples of Africa, however, one must know where to look. During the tenure of the previous administration it was necessary to see beyond the travel itineraries of cabinet secretaries and President Bill Clinton himself to the parsimonious management of the budget and the rising death toll from conflicts and AIDS in Africa to discern the yawning gap between rhetoric in Washington and reality in Africa. With the new administration it will be necessary to look past the conventional categories of what it will call Africa policy— conflict resolution, political reform, and economic and commercial relations— to the broader use of United States power in determining matters of global governance. Today’s “global” issues, from HIV/ AIDS to global warming, and from trade policies to the failure of international peacekeeping, have their most immediate and devastating consequences in Africa. And it is equally true that these vital challenges must be addressed in Africa, in solidarity with Africans, if they are not to overwhelm the world. Africa policy is thus no longer to be found at the margins of United States global politics but in the mainstream. At present, however, this is bad news for Africa. When the snow caps of Mt. Kilimanjaro melt in a decade or two, the damage done by the real Africa policies of the world’s sole superpower at the dawn of this new century will be manifest. The floods that have devastated Mozambique and many other southern African countries in the past two years are but omens of that future. Like the AIDS pandemic that is wreaking havoc on African societies and economies, global warming is also taking its toll primarily among poor countries in the South, mainly in Africa. These consequences are not merely the result of “natural” disasters compounded by neglect on the part of the richest country on earth. Rather they are the strange fruit of what amounts to years of aggressive and irresponsible United States behavior. THE NATIONAL INTEREST During the electoral campaign, George W. Bush and his advisers repeatedly stressed that Africa did not “fit into the national strategic interests” of America. During the televised presidential debates he said Africa was not a priority, and that he would not intervene to prevent or stop genocide in Africa should such a threat— as occurred in Rwanda in 1994— develop. Since he took office, a few officials, Secretary of State Colin Powell most notable among them, have tried to amend this statement with reassurances that African concerns, such as AIDS, will be taken seriously by this administration. Other Bush supporters have noted, correctly, that although the Clinton administration gave much attention to Africa, it was slow to deliver in practical terms. They hold out hope that Bush will promise less and deliver more. Thus far the new administration has only promised a substantive Africa policy without revealing much in the way of details and taking no early positive actions. A fundamental problem is that the team of President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney will, like all its predecessors, shape United States foreign policy based on its own version of the national interest. At times the administration will slant it to concentrate on strategic or security interests. At other moments economic interests will get top billing. And on some occasions political interests, even values, will be put forward as the core of the national interest. But all these interpretations will share the limitations that stem from who participates in crafting these subjective definitions of the national interest, and who is excluded. With a cabinet composed of so many people recycled from his father’s administration and the cold-war era preceding it (when rank racism more visibly defined the American approach to African affairs), it is understandable that some observers have the impression that Africa will now be off the agenda. But Africa is not “off” the Bush administration agenda. It is worse than that. The net effect of the administration’s broader policies already a mount to a de facto war on Africa. Consider President Bush’s decision in March not to seek reductions in carbon dioxide emissions— as he had explicitly promised he would during the electoral campaign. Media commentators quickly noted how the move would arouse criticism from domestic and European environmentalists and doom hopes of completing negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol, the as-yet-unratified treaty that would require signatory states to cut their greenhouse gas emissions— including carbon dioxide— below 1990 levels by the year 2012. Such gasses are believed by most scientists to be responsible for the increased warming of the earth’s atmosphere during the last century. But few recalled the recent warning from Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UN Environment Program, that Africa would suffer the most from the effects of global warming: “Africa’s share of the global population is 14 percent but it is responsible for only 3.2 percent of global CO2 emissions. Africans face the most direct consequences with regard to extreme weather conditions, with regard to drought and storms.” Developed countries, principally the United States, produce the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions. In February, just weeks before Bush’s policy reversal, glaciologist Lonnie Thompson of Ohio State University released a study predicting that the glacier ice atop Mt. Kilimanjaro would disappear entirely between 2010 and 2020. And massive floods in Mozambique for the second consecutive year demonstrated the region’s vulnerability to extreme weather, which global warming may exacerbate. A January report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change laid out a long list of predicted damage for Africa, ranging from water shortages and declines in food production to expanded ranges for malaria and other vector- borne diseases. The decision on CO2 emissions makes the United States a rogue state in global environmental terms as far as Africans are concerned. WAR ON REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH George W. Bush’s first full working day as president of the United States was also the twenty-eighth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that first established a women’s constitutional right to abortion. On that day his first exercise of authority was to impose the contentious abortion politics of one narrow domestic constituency on millions of people in the poor countries of the world. By reinstating the “global gag rule”— slashing funding for family-planning services overseas— Bush did not really intend to reduce the number of abortions; rather his true purpose was to advance the ideological agenda of the antichoice religious fundamentalists who are among his strongest supporters. The rule was first imposed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 during a population conference in Mexico City, sustained by Bush’s father, President George H. W. Bush, but reversed by Clinton in 1993. The measure (also known as the Mexico City Policy) denies federal funding to international organizations that provide public health and family- planning services if they also provide reproductive health education and abortion services through their own funds. As a result of Bush’s action, organizations delivering important health-care assistance in Africa will lose funding. Projects providing contraceptives will be cut, which will contribute to a greater demand for abortions. More unsafe abortions will occur, as happened during the last period this policy was enforced. And with the decrease in the full range of family- planning services, there will be an increase in the incidence of HIV/ AIDS infections on a continent that is already experiencing unprecedented suffering and social destruction because of the AIDS pandemic. Congresswoman Nita Lowey (D- NY) said the president was “declaring war on the reproductive health of the world’s poorest women.” When members of Congress from both parties moved to stop Bush’s move, the White House announced that it would reissue the order through an executive memorandum, which is not subject to congressional review. The unseemly rush to reimpose the gag rule offers evidence of just how antagonistic the Bush administration is to the interests of poor people, especially black people. It is clear that the president was emboldened to take this decision in part because those who will become its casualties are poor people of color in Africa and Asia. This was a small price to pay for rewarding a favored band of fundamentalists for their loyalty and silence during the campaign. THE BLACK PLAGUE The gag rule suggests even deadlier future policies against what may become the defining human struggle of the new century, the fight for Africans’ right to health, indeed to life. While many global issues are important in United States relations with Africa, no issue is of greater immediate importance than HIV/ AIDS. Addressing the AIDS pandemic is not just a question of what to do, but of whether members of the international community— especially the United States— are committed to do all that is necessary to defeat it in Africa. During the past two decades 17 million people have died in Africa due to AIDS- related illnesses. Africans infected with HIV had been deemed as “untreatable” because of the artificially high prices of the anti- AIDS medications that became available five years ago. Now, responding to sharply falling AIDS drug prices brought on by competition from developing- country producers of generic versions; by African government moves to ignore patent rights to save lives; and by militant activism in the West— home to the world’s largest and richest drug companies— public policymakers the world over are under pressure to produce a plan to stop the AIDS pandemic. The World AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa in July 2000 and the African Development Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in December increased public attention about the pandemic last year, both globally and within Africa. News reports stressed not only the overwhelmingly disproportionate effect of AIDS on Africa, but also the failure of the international community to respond with more than token action. Drug companies were targeted by activists and exposed by the media for blocking efforts to provide affordable treatment drugs to combat the effects of AIDS. The “Statement of Concern on Women and HIV/ AIDS” issued at the conference drew particular attention to the significance of gender inequalities in the spread of the disease and to the fact that women and girls are placed at greatest risk of contracting it because of these disparities. But whether there is real progress during the year will depend on:
AIDS is the black plague. Its epicenter is Africa; the region with the next- highest infection rate is the Caribbean. In the United States, HIV/ AIDS infection rates are increasing mainly among young men and women of color. Although AIDS is a global threat that knows no borders and does not discriminate by race, at present it is mainly killing black people. And that is the cruel truth about why the world has failed to respond with dispatch. This global crisis poses the question of how much inequality the United States is prepared to accept in the world and the obvious corollary: do Americans believe that Africa is part of their com mon humanity? But to see how much inequality the United States government is prepared to accept globally, one only has to look at how much inequality it accepts at home. The glacial pace of the international response to AIDS has exposed an entrenched racial double standard. As Dr. Peter Piot of the UN AIDS program remarked just before the Durban World AIDS Conference, “If this would have happened . . . with white people, the reaction would have been different.” The AIDS crisis in Africa is a stark reminder of the racial double standard that has marginalized African lives for the past 500 years. This double standard divides the world between rich and poor, white and black. The past five centuries have brought not only progress, but also considerable suffering— and Africa has suffered disproportionately, and still does. The consequences of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism have kept Africa underdeveloped and poor, although African leaders are certainly not blameless. Now AIDS threatens Africa’s very survival. TREATING THE CRISIS The Bush administration has entered office at a moment of truth in the global struggle against HIV/ AIDS. For Africa, the question of how the poor can get cheaper, safer, and effective medicines is vital. What steps can the United States take? The Clinton administration’s proposal in August 2000 to lend Africa $1 billion annually at commercial rates for the purchase of antiretroviral drugs was a cruel hoax and a vivid example of governmentsubsidized corporate greed. The plan sought to protect American pharmaceutical companies that were threatened by African rights under the World Trade Organization’s rules to pursue parallel imports and compulsory licensing of anti- AIDS drugs. But the plan showed that the United States government was prepared to push Africa further into debt to prevent Africans from purchasing cheaper drugs from Brazil or India or from licensing local firms to produce generic versions at home. Some of the World Bank’s anti- AIDS programs are largely financed along similar lines, causing some countries, such as Malawi, to reject them as worse than unsustainable. As Peter Walshe of the University of Notre Dame wrote in the February 2001 issue of Common Sense, “One is hard pressed to imagine a more cynical example of usury— the sin of lending surplus funds to take advantage of another’s disadvantage.” The initial steps of the Bush White House have been no better. Within days of issuing the gag rule, the president expanded his assault on global public health by initiating a review of a May 2000 Clinton executive order mandating that the United States not challenge African countries seeking to exercise their rights to obtain cheaper versions of essential medications still under United States patent (Clinton issued the order to support Al Gore’s presidential bid after anti- AIDS activists targeted Gore’s early campaign rallies). Following a storm of protest, the White House announced that it would not reverse the executive order at this time. One way in which elected officials can begin to address the pandemic is to dedicate a modest 5 percent of the budget surplus— approximately $9.5 billion in 2001— to a global health emergency fund. This would still fall short of what is needed, but it would be a leap above the paltry $325 million the United States is providing for AIDS efforts worldwide. Such funding will be necessary to help finance the acquisition of AIDS medications, either through bulk- purchasing mechanisms used for international vaccine programs, or through regional and national mechanisms. In any case purchases should be from the safest and cheapest source available regardless of patents (which would require a major policy shift by Washington). Such a policy will ensure that prices continue to fall to levels realistically accessible to African countries. LIFE AFTER DEBT The other key elements of an appropriate United States policy response to Africa would include the cancellation of African countries’ bilateral debts to the United States and a leadership role in pressing for the outright cancellation of Africa’s debts to the other creditors, especially the international financial institutions and European governments. The average African government spends more annually to finance its foreign debts than on national health care, and many spend more on debt servicing than on health and education combined. Zambia spends 40 percent of its total revenue on debt payments, while Cameroon, Guinea, Senegal, and Malawi all spend between 25 and 35 percent of theirs in the same manner. These are mostly illegitimate foreign debts, contracted during the cold war by unrepresentative governments from Western creditors that sought to buy geopolitical loyalties, not to finance development in countries previously set back by Western colonialism. They beg the question: Who owes whom? Early gains in health care in the 1960s have been all but negated by the free- market reforms imposed by international creditors beginning in the 1980s. The “one- size- fits- all” structural adjustment policies that African countries were forced to implement generally included currency devaluations, reductions in government spending (slashing public investments in health and education), privatization of many government services, and a focus on export-oriented agricultural development undermining food self- sufficiency. The AIDS pandemic now finds African states unable to cope. At the end of 2000, the debt burden remained a pervasive obstacle to Africa’s capacity to deal with other issues, despite additional relief won from creditors. The $34-billion package announced under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative included $25 billion for 18 African countries, almost half the outstanding debt owed by those countries. HIPC is the predominant international approach to debt relief and poses as a scheme to reduce the debt of world’s most impoverished countries to “sustainable” levels by offering deep cuts in their total debt stock (including that held by the international financial institutions, governments, and private creditors) and pegging future payments to projected export earnings. The program is conditioned, however, on the lengthy implementation of economic austerity measures. In reality, HIPC seeks to protect creditors by using formulas designed to extract the maximum possible in debt payments from the world’s poorest economies, and by continuing to use debt as leverage to prescribe economic policies for African countries. Overall, the creditors’ announcements of progress have satisfied neither debtor countries nor activists engaged on the issue, because their programs do not provide sustainable solutions. In fact, HIPC should be pronounced dead. A continentwide meeting of debt- cancellation activists in Dakar, Senegal in December called not only for cancellation of illegitimate debts but also for reparations from rich countries for damage to Africa. Worldwide the demand is rising for a new mechanism to deal with the debt. In September UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for the immediate suspension of all debt payments by HIPC countries and others that should be added to the list, and for an independent body— not controlled by creditor countries— to consider new ways to address the debt. Substantial debt cancellation would not only free up resources for public investments in health infrastructure and education, but would liberate African countries from the imperial economic dictates of the international financial institutions, which currently undermine democratic development. It would also restore commercial credit- worthiness to countries still requiring a mix of grant and loan financing for long-term development efforts. The cancellation of German debts after World War II, or those of Poland toward the end of the cold war, are examples of previous Western willingness to provide a new lease on economic life to select deeply indebted states. DANGEROUS LIAISONS While most African countries are not at war, the effects of those that are embroiled in conflict touch the entire continent. Fragile cease- fires punctuated by episodes of violence, rather than open war, prevail in earlier conflict zones in West Africa (for example, Sierra Leone and the Casamance region of Senegal). A peace treaty between Ethiopia and Eritrea to end the 1998 border dispute that had escalated into a massive war claiming tens of thousands of lives was finally signed at the end of 2000, and deployment of UN observers began. The largest interlinked set of unresolved conflicts in Africa today include Angola in west central Africa; the Democratic Republic of Congo in the heart of the continent; Burundi and Rwanda in the Great Lakes region (tying in not only to eastern Congo but also to Uganda and to Sudan); and the perennial war in Sudan itself. If Secretary of State Powell is serious about contributing to peace in Africa, as he has suggested in appearances before Congress and elsewhere, then Washington must first pay its membership fees to the United Nations, including back dues for peacekeeping. Beyond paying its arrears, the administration will also need to give new and substantial financial, diplomatic, and security support to African and UN peacemaking efforts endorsed by the Organization of African Unity and legitimate subregional organizations. There should also be immediate restrictions on arms transfers to African countries, and greater public scrutiny of all American military training and education activities in Africa and for Africans in the United States. The Bush administration’s intention to continue the Clinton policy of training and equipping select African forces as a way to avoid greater responsibility- sharing for international peace efforts in Africa risks turning an unaccountable and unreformed Nigerian military into Africa’s Gurkhas. And the administration’s evident interest in Sudan could actually jeopardize a democratic solution to the conflict if military measures are mistakenly given more weight than diplomacy and economic pressures, especially against foreign oil companies now financing Khartoum’s war. THE AFRICAN CENTURY Despite the severe challenges Africa faces— or perhaps because of them and their centrality to global progress— there is no reason to despair of the continent’s prospects for transformation in the twenty- first century. For American and international engagement with Africa to have the most positive impact, however, much greater leadership is required from African countries themselves. A number of developments suggest such leadership is forthcoming. The heads of state of three of Africa’s subregional superpowers— Nigeria, South Africa, and Algeria— have been drafting what they call Africa’s Millennium Plan, an effort to promote a continentwide consensus on development and security priorities and on mechanisms for financing Africa’s economic growth while solving its debt crisis. The plan is likely to emphasize strengthening subregional institutions (in which they constitute dominant influential powers). Another initiative, sponsored by Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, proposes the establishment of a continental United States of Africa with mechanisms for cooperation similar to institutions of the European Union. These and other efforts reveal just how acutely aware African leaders are of the weak positions they will continue to occupy on the global stage absent a greater collective voice. In addition, African civil society actors— from human rights organizations to African entrepreneurs— are tackling immediate problems such as AIDS education, constitutional reform, poverty eradication, and conflict resolution. Nearly every African conflict has a peace plan and process crafted by Africans themselves, but which lack adequate international support. The promotion of peace, democracy, and development in Africa is necessary and vital to combat the global threats that will challenge the United States in the century ahead. The attainment of these goals is desirable on their own merits because of the economic and social benefits the United States will realize through savings from reduced expenditures on emergency relief activities, through the development of regional institutions able to cooperate more productively with the United States on various international issues, and through the expanding markets and investment opportunities that will help the United States sustain its economy while supporting African economic growth as well. Withdrawal, or neglect, would aid the establishment of a global apartheid that creates economic, social, and security disparities throughout the world and within countries along the color line— and that would put American democracy itself at risk.
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE? Looking at the lineup of policymakers now responsible for global affairs and Africa policies, it would be unrealistic to expect much progress in United States policy toward Africa were it not for the rise in public activism on African and Africarelated issues such as AIDS and foreign debt. The president himself has little foreign policy experience and, as with domestic policy, is likely to follow the lead of his vice president. Vice President Dick Cheney’s perspective on Africa is illustrated by his support for keeping Nelson Mandela in prison and his opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa while he was a member of Congress. More recently, as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil services company, he was complicit in lining the pockets of the dictatorship of the late General Sani Abacha in Nigeria. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was, until this year, a director of Chevron, another oil company that buttressed military rule in Nigeria and even hired the regime’s soldiers for crowd-control work— work that including firing on unarmed protesters at the sites of its operations in Nigeria. (A Chevron oil tanker even bears her name.) With Bush himself coming from the oil industry, oil is likely to top the list of United States interests in Africa as defined by the Bush “oiligarchy.” Neither Rice nor Secretary of State Colin Powell, both African Americans, has demonstrated a particular interest in or special knowledge of Africa. Moreover, both Powell and Rice are loyal Republicans with a shared orientation toward international affairs that derives from a narrow militaristic understanding of security. They are also unilateralists at a time when the need in Africa is for multilateral support for peace and security. The person chosen to become the top Africa policymaker at the State Department, Walter Kansteiner III, comes out of the right-wing Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, where he criticized mainline Christian denominations for supporting democratic change in apartheid South Africa. A commodity trader and adviser on privatization in Africa, Kansteiner also served in the White House under Bush’s father. Like Cheney, he opposed sanctions against apartheid South Africa years after they were in place and as late as 1990 considered the prodemocracy movement in South Africa, led by Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, to be unrepresentative of most South Africans. With analytical skills like those, he appears singularly unqualified for the job except that he fits the profile of many new Bush staff: conservative ideologues who served Bush’s father.
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