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ENOUGH Project (Washington, DC)

Africa: Obama, Africa, and Peace

John Prendergast and John Norris

13 January 2009

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The Obama administration has an opportunity to fundamentally remake U.S. relations with Africa during its tenure, and a cornerstone of that effort needs to be a much greater emphasis on the most cost-effective element of our foreign policy tools: peacemaking. An investment in ending some of the world’s deadliest, most destructive, and costliest wars would yield great results in those countries and the positive repercussions from such engagement would rebound across the continent.

As the first president of the United States with immediate African roots, President Obama not only has an important reservoir of goodwill on the continent, he also has the ability to move beyond the tendentious “North-South” debate between developed and less developed countries that has made more transformational policies difficult to attain. Efforts by the dying generation of Africa’s strong men who believe they should rule for life, such as Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe, to portray President Obama as a former colonial master will have little resonance in Africa or elsewhere. President Obama will represent a fresh start, but the problems facing Africa and how best to address them will be no less acute.

Equally important, an Obama administration can also leave behind the “for-us-or-against-us” strategies of the Bush administration that tended to ignore the worst behavior of “allies” while demonizing every action of those who were deemed “enemies.” The Bush approach was in many ways a return to a Cold War calculus and approach to relations with the continent that did little to ameliorate the fundamental forces driving conflict on the continent or to improve the overall capacity of states to address such tensions. To be fair, the Bush administration did make a considerable investment in HIV/AIDS prevention in Africa through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief, or PEPFAR, and also deeply engaged in pursuit of an eventual peace deal between the Sudanese government and southern-based rebels. The Obama administration will need a much more nuanced approach, and it will need to work more closely with both governments and civil society on the continent to shape a shared agenda.

Given its thinly veiled hostility toward most forms of multilateral institution building, the Bush administration also placed limited emphasis on these issues in the context of Africa, despite a glaring need for Africa’s regional institutions to improve their capability and effectiveness. The Bush administration’s low regard for the United Nations in general also largely precluded the Security Council from playing an effective role in addressing Africa’s multiple crises.

It is essential that the new administration invest significantly in peacemaking and take a smarter, more comprehensive approach to this peacemaking. However, it is vital that these investments in peacekeeping are accompanied by long- term investments in development, crisis prevention, and in shaping African regional institutions that are built around shared values. Too often, membership in African regional organizations has simply been a matter of geography—with democracies and autocracies lumped together. Yet, it is impossible to imagine effective regional institutions in Africa that lack a shared commitment to certain essential values, including democratic government, the responsibility to protect their own populations, and relatively open trade. Indeed, regional organizations in Europe and Latin America have only become more effective when certain membership criteria were added on top of geographic considerations.

The African Union in particular, has a wildly mixed record in this regard. As an organization, it has been far too willing to practice lowest common denominator policies, such as its relative tolerance of the Sudan regime’s massive human rights abuses in Darfur. Similarly, both the African Union and the Southern African Development Community have struggled to come to terms with President Robert Mugabe’s ruinous rule in Zimbabwe. Yet, the recent decision by the African Union to suspend Guinea’s membership unless the military officers who conducted the coup in that country restore “constitutional rule” is exactly the kind of behavior a regional organization should be demanding. This also suggests that with the right kind of long-term support from the United States the mantra of “African solutions to African problems” could move beyond empty rhetoric. This will require two important developments:

African regional institutions need to become increasingly responsive to the needs of African citizens and not just the prerogatives of African heads of state.

The broader international community must recognize that war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are not “African problems.” They are international problems that demand international solutions.

Reshaping the overall approach to Africa will also demand that the Obama administration face some hard choices. Development resources are increasingly dominated by spending on HIV/AIDS. While responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic is a crucial priority, if U.S. development assistance becomes skewed too far in this direction, it will become very difficult to make long- term investments in state-building, the rule of law, basic education, and economic growth—the elements that are fundamental to changing Africa’s course over the long haul.

The administration will also need to take a hard look at continued agricultural subsidies in the United States. These subsidies continue to drain federal funds at a time when there are unprecedented budget pressures, while simultaneously making it harder for many African states to compete in one of the few areas where they enjoy a comparative advantage. Cutting these subsidies would benefit Americans in three ways: They would pay fewer tax dollars to support unneeded subsidies; they would enjoy the fruits of greater competition as consumers; and, over time, they would need to invest fewer dollars in development and humanitarian relief as Africa has the chance to achieve greater prosperity The same can be said for European agricultural subsidies. While it may sound strange to tie the issue of agricultural subsidies back to the questions of war and peace on the continent, it is essential to do so. For too long, U.S. efforts in development, economic development, trade, humanitarian relief, and diplomacy on the continent have been poorly connected threads, and all of these efforts have collectively suffered as a result.

A Focus on peacemaking

Sudan, Somalia, Congo, Chad, and northern Uganda are part of a region of east and central Africa that is battered by chronic conflict, with millions dead and even more displaced over the last couple decades. It is the deadliest zone of conflict in the world since World War II. Congo and Sudan alone account for nearly 8 million deaths due to the legacy of war in the past two decades.

As part of its fundamental rethink of Africa policy, the Obama administration will need to shift U.S. policy from simply managing the symptoms of Africa’s biggest wars—in the form of billions of dollars in humanitarian aid and peace observation missions that are often unable to effectively protect civilians—to ending these conflicts. The existing model of conflict resolution in Africa has focused on one conflict at a time, treating Africa’s wars as if they occur in isolation. Extreme examples of this include dealing with Sudan’s north-south war while setting the issue of Darfur and eastern Sudan to the side; focusing on the situation in Somalia without effectively addressing the standoff between Ethiopia and Eritrea that fuels the conflict; and negotiating in northern Uganda without involving or sanctioning Sudan’s ruling party, which has long supported the Lord’s Resistance Army as a proxy force. Most of Africa’s wars are complex and regional in nature, and they cannot be addressed by a bureaucratic process that encourages stove-piping rather than coordination and synthesis.

The new administration needs to make an investment in competent, sustained conflict resolution, backed by focused leverage that transforms the logic of regional combatants from war to peace.

Enhancing U.S. capacities for peace

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