{"id":71125,"date":"2015-07-17T07:22:53","date_gmt":"2015-07-17T15:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71125"},"modified":"2015-07-17T07:22:53","modified_gmt":"2015-07-17T15:22:53","slug":"who-cares-about-africa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=71125","title":{"rendered":"Who Cares About Africa?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It could be argued that the UN power-politics of the 1970s, the
\nugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the
\norganization by Hammarskjold and his school, were responsible for
\nprolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years. According to one
\nauthority, the failure to take international action in 1972, when the
\nnature of the regime was already glaringly apparent, cost the lives of
\n200,000 Ugandans. Britain bore a heavy responsibility. The src
\nrecords revealed how important the ‘Stansted whisky run’ was to the
\nregime. British appeasement reached its nadir in June 1975 when
\nAmin threatened to execute a British lecturer, Denis Hills, for calling
\nhim ‘a village tyrant’. James Callaghan, a weak Prime Minister even
\nby the standards of the 1970s, sent out General Sir Chandos Blair
\nwith a letter from the Queen begging for clemency, and later he flew
\nto Kampala himself. But he allowed the Stansted run to continue
\nuntil 4 March 1979, the very eve of Amin’s overthrow. The only
\ngovernment to emerge with credit was Israel’s, which acted vigo-
\nrously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an
\nairliner at Entebbe in June 1976. <\/p>\n

Most African states actually supported Amin, in accordance with
\nthe old Latin- American principle of ‘Caudillos stick together’. Des-
\npite the revelations of his genocidal atrocities by his ex-ministers, the
\noau elected him its president and all except three of its members
\nattended the oau summit he held in Kampala. Nyerere objected, not
\nso much on moral grounds as because he was an Obote ally and
\nrightly feared an Amin invasion. ‘By meeting in Kampala,’ he
\nprotested, ‘the heads of state of the oau are giving respectability to
\none of the most murderous administrations in Africa.’ Furious, the
\noau even considered a motion condemning Tanzania. The heads of
\nstate showered Amin with congratulations during the summit when,
\nhaving consumed parts of his earlier wife, he married a new one, a
\ngo-go dancer from his Suicide Mechanized Unit. They applauded
\nwhen Amin was carried on a litter by four white businessmen, a
\nSwede holding a parasol over his head, and when the Ugandan Air
\nForce made a demonstration bombing on Lake Victoria against a
\ntarget labelled ‘Cape Town’ (the bombs all missed and the Air Force
\ncommander was murdered as soon as the delegates had left), oau
\nheads of state again gave Amin a warm reception in 1977, and there
\nwas no criticism of Amin whatever by the oau until 1978; even then
\nit was muted. 87 <\/p>\n

Most members of the UN, where the Afro-Asian-Arab and Soviet
\nblocs formed a majority, behaved equally cynically. As chairman of
\nthe oau, he addressed the General Assembly on 1 October 1975 in a
\nrabid speech which denounced the ‘Zionist-US conspiracy’ and
\ncalled not only for the expulsion of Israel but for its ‘extinction’ (i.e.
\ngenocide). The Assembly gave him a standing ovation when he
\narrived, applauded him throughout, and again rose to its feet when
\nhe left. The following day the UN Secretary-General and the President
\nof the General Assembly gave a public dinner in Amin’s honour. 88
\nAttempts to raise Uganda’s violation of human rights at the UN in
\n1976 and 1977 were blocked by African votes, which rendered Amin
\nthe same service at the Commonwealth Conference in 1977. Even
\nwhen he invaded Tanzania on 30 October 1978, an act which led to
\nhis downfall five months later, the oau refused to condemn him and
\ntold Nyerere to accept mediation. For once the Tanzanian socialist
\ndictator dropped his verbal guard: <\/p>\n

Since Amin usurped power he has murdered more people than Smith in
\nRhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is this tendency in
\nAfrica that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans …. Being
\nblack is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans. 89 <\/p>\n

That, indeed, was the consequence of the morally relativistic
\nprinciple introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans
\nwas not the UN’s business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking
\nthe UN had given him a licence for mass-murder, indeed genocide.
\nThe Amin regime was made possible by the philosophy of the
\nBandung generation as well as by the re-emergent barbarism of
\nAfrica. But within a year of his fall history was being rewritten. It
\nwas claimed the applause which greeted him at the UN was ‘ironic’.
\nThe terror was being linked to ‘imperialism’. 90 Nor did Uganda’s
\nsorrows end when Tanzania’s ‘army of liberation’ arrived, with
\nObote in its baggage. The first thing the Tanzanians did when they
\ngot to Kampala was to loot it. Though Amin himself was given
\nsanctuary in the Muslim world (Libya, then Saudi Arabia), his tribal
\nforces continued to occupy and terrorize part of the country. With
\nNyerere’s armed backing Obote ‘won’ the 1980s elections. Obote’s
\nupc party and the Nyerere-controlled ‘military commission’ gerry-
\nmandered constituency boundaries; illegally declared 17 seats un-
\ncontested upc victories; killed one opposition (Democratic Party)
\ncandidate and beat up others; illegally removed fourteen returning
\nofficers who were not upc stooges; sacked the Chief Justice and
\nother officials to intimidate the judiciary; and finally, after it became
\nclear on election night that the dp was nevertheless winning,
\nannounced on the official radio that all results would be ‘vetted’ by
\nthe military \u2014 whereupon the secretary to the election commission
\nfled for his life. The army subsequently destroyed evidence of dp
\nvictories and Obote was declared the winner. 91 The result was
\nregional and tribal civil war; and mass-terrorism by three undisci-
\nplined and mostly unpaid ‘armies’ prolonged indefinitely the agony
\nof Churchill’s ‘fairy-tale land’. 92 <\/p>\n

The case of Uganda illustrated the tendency of post-colonial
\nAfrica, from the mid-1960s onwards, to engage in internal and
\nexternal wars, and for both the oau and the UN, far from arbitrating
\nsuch disputes, to exacerbate the drift to violence. This was not
\nfortuitous. The militarization of the oau began at Addis Ababa in
\n1963, when passive resistance was renounced, force was adopted as
\nthe means to end the remaining colonial regimes and a ‘liberation
\ncommittee’ was formed with Tanzania in the chair. The next year, at
\nCairo, it was the ex-pacifist Nyerere who called for the expulsion of
\nPortugal by force, and in 1965 it was his second-in-command,
\nRashidi Kawawa, who told the UN Committee on Colonialism in Dar
\nes Salaam that its function was identical with that of the oau
\ncommittee, ‘two liberation committees of historical importance in
\nthe struggle against colonialism’. M.Coulibaly of Mali, the UN
\nchairman, at first protested: the UN could not be identified with a
\nregional military body, he said. Then he capitulated, and his commit-
\ntee ruled that it was legitimate for any state to use force to expel the
\nPortuguese. This was the first time the UN had committed itself to the
\nmilitary as opposed to the peaceful solution of political problems.
\nFour months later, in November 1965, Nyerere persuaded the oau
\nto extend the principle to Rhodesia. 93 <\/p>\n

With both the UN and the oau not merely endorsing but inciting,
\nindeed commanding, violence, individual African states employed it
\nincreasingly to resolve their inter-tribal civil wars and frontier
\ndisputes, which colonialism had frozen. Africa appears to have the
\ngreatest linguistic and ethnic variety of any continent. Of the
\nforty-one independent states, only Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Lesotho
\nand Somalia were basically homogeneous, and even these had debat-
\nable borders. 94 Most African civil wars, since they involve trans-
\nfrontier tribal conflicts, tend to become foreign wars also. One of the
\nearliest of them, the 1958 Hutu race-revolt in Rwanda against their
\nTutsi overlords, involved Burindi, and this pattern was repeated three
\ntimes over the next fifteen years. The revolt of the Polisarios against
\nMorocco and Mauritania, the struggle between northern Muslims
\nand southern Christians in Chad, the civil wars in Angola, the Sudan
\nand Nigeria, five of the longer and more serious conflicts, all
\ninvolved foreign intervention. The UN and the oau, not surprisingly,
\nproved wholly unable to arbitrate these conflicts. A typical example
\nwas the partition in December 1975 of the old Spanish Sahara
\nbetween Morocco and Mauritania, which recalled the partitions of
\nPoland in the eighteenth century (or in 1939). Algeria was left out,
\nand thereupon backed the Polisario insurgents. The UN passed two
\nmutually exclusive resolutions, one supporting Morocco, the other
\nAlgeria. The oau has never seriously attempted to enforce its
\nprimary maxim that states should not interfere in each other’s
\ninternal affairs, except (interestingly enough) in the case of Amin’s
\nUganda. It failed to censure Gadafy of Libya for his attempts to
\noverthrow Sadat in Egypt, Niheimi in the Sudan, Bourguiba in
\nTunisia, Francis Tombalbaye and Felix Malloum in Chad and his
\nblatant intervention in half a dozen other states. Nor was the oau
\nable to prevent incursions by non-African powers, since nobody
\nwanted to repeat the Congo’s disastrous involvement with the un,
\nand it was the individual states themselves which invited the help of
\nforeign troops, as did Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania with Britain and
\nthe Ivory Coast, Gabon and Senegal with France. 94 <\/p>\n

The trans-border complexities increased markedly after 1973-4
\nwhen Soviet Russia, with its satellite Cuba, first committed large
\nnumbers of troops to the African theatre. A case in point was
\nEthiopia, where the old Emperor Haile Selasse had run a semi-feudal,
\nsemi-liberal regime by a careful balance of foreign help. The Indians
\ntrained his army, the British and Norwegians the navy, the Swedes
\nthe air force, the French ran the railway, the Australians the hotels, the
\nYugoslavs the port, the Russians the oil refinery, the Bulgars his
\nfishing fleet, the Italians the breweries, the Czechs the shoe factories
\nand the Japanese the textile mills. 95 The Russians seized their chance
\nto overthrow the old man in 1974 – he was smothered to death with
\na pillow \u2014 and gain a monopoly of influence, dropping their
\nSomalian protege in the process. The worst that could be said about
\nthe Emperor’s censorship was that he had cut the death of the King
\nfrom Macbeth; after his fall Shakespeare was no longer performed at
\nall. The regime became totalitarian, massacred its opponents by the
\ntens of thousands, and engaged in large-scale frontier wars which
\ncontinued into the 1980s. After Russia extended the Cold War to
\nAfrica, it became the classic theatre of Realpolitik, of abrupt
\nformations and reversals of alliances, and of the principle ‘my
\nenemy’s enemy is my friend’. A characteristic instance was the
\nKatangan invasion of Zaire across the Angolan frontier in 1977\u20148,
\nwith the Communists, replacing the ‘imperialist secessionists’ of
\n1960, helping the Katangans with Cuban and Russian troops, and
\nMorocco and France backing Zaire. <\/p>\n

The thirty-odd civil and foreign wars the new African states fought
\nin their first two decades produced a swelling total of refugees. By
\n1970 there were a million of whose existence the un was statistically
\naware. The figure leapt to 4.5 million in 1978, plus 2 million
\ndescribed as ‘unsettled’ after returning to their home country. In
\n1980 there were 2,740,300 UN-recorded refugees in seventeen Afri-
\ncan countries, plus 2 million ‘displaced persons’, the vast majority of
\nthem the result of the military activities of Soviet Russia, Cuba and
\nLibya. 96 The possibility of a significant proportion of these people
\nbeing resettled was remote. By the early 1980s, all the newly
\nindependent states, with the exception of the Ivory Coast, Kenya and
\nthe three oil-bearing territories, Algeria, Libya and Nigeria, were
\npoorer than under the colonial system. Some had moved out of the
\nmarket economy altogether.
\nIn these circumstances, the quite rapid material progress which
\nhad been a feature of the final phase of colonialism, 1945-60, was
\nreversed. Though independence was fertile in regional pacts, such as
\nthe six-power Casablanca Group, the fifteen-power Monrovia
\nGroup and the Brazzaville Twelve, these were largely verbal
\nagreements for political purposes, and they proved ephemeral.
\nMeanwhile the specific and practical inter-state arrangements for
\ncurrencies, transport and communications were disrupted or lapsed.
\nWars, ’emergencies’ and the shutting of frontiers disrupted road and
\nrail links. Rolling-stock was not renewed. Roads deteriorated. Travel
\npatterns tended to revert to those of the 1890s, with links chiefly
\nbetween the coastal cities (though by air rather than by sea) but with
\nlittle long-distance movement inland. Mobility became patchy and
\nunreliable. In the late 1970s, the greatest traffic jams so far contrived
\nby man took place not in the advanced West but in Lagos: it was said
\nthat the head of state, General Mohammed, died because he could
\nnot solve the jam even for himself and his car got stuck at the same
\ntime, 8 am, each morning, making it easy to plan his murder. In
\n1976, after the Nigerian government had ordered 18 million tons of
\ncement, the approaches to Lagos harbour were jammed by nearly
\nfive hundred ships, and by the time most of them landed their cargo
\nit was unusable. 97 <\/p>\n

But in many inland areas, even in Nigeria, land traffic declined. As
\none account put it, ‘More and more of the observable life of Africa
\ntakes place within twenty miles of its three dozen international
\nairports.’ 98 With the decline in air traffic control standards and the
\nfrequent closings of internal air-space, it often became easier and
\ncheaper to travel between African capitals via Europe than direct.
\nThe same was true of phone-links: for instance, it was impossible to
\nphone Abidjan from Monrovia, four hundred miles away, except
\nthrough Europe or North America. The suggestion was made that
\nthis decline actually benefited authoritarian governments by immobi-
\nlizing critics, for most African governments maintained for their
\nexclusive use military transport and communications networks on
\nthe Iron Curtain model. But the state suffered too. In 1982 the Chad
\nambassador in Brussels complained he had not heard from his
\ngovernment for more than a year. 99 <\/p>\n

Equally marked was the deterioration in medical standards. The
\nprogress made in eliminating malaria, which had been spectacular in
\nthe late 1940s and 1950s, was reversed, who’s twenty-year pro-
\ngramme launched in 1958 was a failure. By the end of the 1970s
\nthere were 200 million cases in the world and 1 billion people living
\nin malaria-risk areas. The reversal was by no means confined to
\nAfrica; results in Central America and Asia were in some ways even
\nmore disappointing. 100 But the late 1970s saw a disquieting increase
\nin malarial cases returning from African capitals where the disease
\nhad been stamped out in the 1950s. 101 The return of traditional
\nscourges reflected the growth of malnutrition and famine, the
\nbreakdown of public health and hospital services and the shortage of
\nqualified doctors. In 1976 who reversed its policy and announced
\nthat henceforth ‘village healers’ would be employed in rural health
\nservices, though a distinction was still made between African-type
\nmidwives, bonesetters and herbalists, on the one hand, and ‘witch-
\ndoctors’ using ‘spells and superstitions’ on the other. In 1977,
\nhowever, this distinction was dropped and ‘witch-doctors’, patro-
\nnized by 90 per cent of the rural population, were given the same
\nstatus as scientifically trained practitioners. 102 In Lagos, within the
\npenumbra of the world’s largest traffic-jam, a joint teaching-hospital
\nwas opened for doctors practising medicine and ‘healing’. <\/p>\n

The varied but on balance sombre pattern of the African continent
\na generation after independence was reflected in the following
\nsummary of events in the last year of the 1970s decade and the first
\nof the 1980s. For 1979: Sudan: attempted coup. Morocco: War in
\nWestern Sahara against Polisario guerrillas cost \u00a3750,000 a day.
\nEthiopia: 20,000 Cubans plus Ethiopian troops were fighting wars
\non three fronts against Eritrea and Somalia, where refugees passed
\nthe 1 million mark. Djibouti: uprising in Adar region. Kenya:
\nsuccessful multi-party elections. Tanzania: 40,000 troops invaded
\nUganda, when Amin, supported by 2,500 troops from Libya, was
\nousted. Ghana: coup by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. Three
\nformer heads of state and many other politicians executed by
\nfiring-squad; public floggings and canings of corrupt citizens; police
\nstrike; country declared officially bankrupt. Nigeria: return to
\ncivilian rule. Liberia: food riots; seventy killed. Senegal: z fourth
\nlegal party created. Mauritania: coup. Ould Salack, who had ousted
\nOuld Daddah in 1978, ousted in turn by Ould Hardallah. Peace
\nsigned with Polisario guerrillas. Mali: single-party elections. Guinea:
\nrelease of political prisoners, including Archbishop of Conakry.
\nBenin: single-party elections. Togo: single-party elections; political
\nshow-trials of so-called ‘Brazilian elitists’. Cameroon: attempted
\ncoup followed by small massacre. Chad: civil war. People’s Republic
\nof Congo: coup. Equatorial Guinea: overthrow of dictator Macias.
\nCentral African Republic: overthrow of Bokassa. Zaire: most major
\nroads reported unusable; two-thirds of road vehicles unusable for
\nlack of spare parts; Benguela railway closed; 38 per cent of foreign
\nexchange earmarked for debt-servicing; 42 per cent of under-fives
\nsuffering from malnutrition. Burundi: fifty-two missionaries ex-
\npelled for ‘subversion’. Guinea-Bissau: revenue covered only 65 per
\ncent of expenditure. Cape Verde: over 90 per cent of food consumed
\nimported. Mozambique: death-penalty extended to sabotage, terror-
\nism and mercenary activities; many political executions; President
\nMachel attacked men with long hair and women with tight clothes.
\nCatholic and Anglican churches closed. Angola: civil war. Zambia:
\nmany political arrests. Malawi: import controls. Zimbabwe: end of
\nwhite rule after decade of civil war; 20,000 dead. Namibia: guerrilla
\nwarfare. Lesotho: guerrilla warfare. Swaziland: economy under
\npressure from refugees. Botswana: ditto. South Africa: guerrilla
\nwarfare. <\/p>\n

In 1980: Sudan: one-party elections. Tunisia: attempted coup.
\nMorocco: war against Polisario. Algeria: Soviet-style concentration
\non heavy industry abandoned as failure. Ethiopia: Soviet helicopter
\ngunships used against Somalis, Oromo, Gallas and other non-
\nAmharic races. Somalia: refugees pass 1.5 million mark. Tanzania:
\nNyerere, sole candidate, elected president; famine. Zanzibar: at-
\ntempted coup. Uganda: cost of maintaining 20,000 Tanzania army
\nof occupation, plus 6,000 Uganda army, rose to 37 per cent of
\nrevenue; fifty political murders a week in Kampala; famine. Ghana:
\n114 per cent inflation; universities closed. Nigeria: attempted coup;
\n1,000 killed. Gambia: opposition parties banned; many arrests.
\nLiberia: coup; many executions by firing-squad. Senegal: voluntary
\nretirement of Senghor after twenty-year rule. Mauritania: coup:
\nOuld Hardallah ousted by Ould Louly. Mali: schools on strike;
\neconomy described as ‘catastrophic’. Guinea-financed coup in
\nBissau, following dispute over oil-rights. Ivory Coast: one-party
\nelections. Upper Volta: coup. Niger: invasion by Libyan-financed
\nnomads. Benin: President Kerekou ‘converted’ to Islam during visit
\nto Gadafi. Cameroon: economy under pressure by refugees from
\nChad. Chad: civil war and invasion by Libya. Zaire: Mobutu
\ndeclared 4 February: ‘As long as I live I will never tolerate the
\ncreation of another party.’ Guinea-Bissau: coup. Sao Tome:
\nthreatened invasion by exiles; 1,000 Angolans and 100 Cubans
\nmoved in. Angola: civil war. Zambia: attempted coup. Zimbabwe:
\nBritish-supervised free elections. Namibia: guerrilla war. Lesotho:
\ninvasion by ‘Lesotho Liberation Army’. South Africa: guerrilla
\nwarfare. 103 <\/p>\n

The summary conceals many nuances. But it confirms a down-
\ntrend in the recurrent cycle of interest in Africa. The first cycle, what
\nmight be called the Rhodes period, ran from the 1880s up to the First
\nWorld War, when many believed Africa’s resources would be the
\nmainstay of future European prosperity. This was briefly sustained in
\nthe early 1920s, then evaporated. A further cycle of interest began in
\nthe late 1940s and reached its peak in the early 1960s, during the
\ntransfer from colonial rule to independence. It began to collapse with
\nmilitarization in the late 1960s. By the early 1980s it was dead: that
\nis, the interest of the outside world in Africa was confined largely to
\ncertain major primary producers, especially Nigeria and South
\nAfrica. By then it was apparent that the great bulk of the continent
\nhad become and would remain politically unstable and incapable of
\nself-sustained economic growth, or even of a place within the
\ninternational economy. Africa had become simply a place for
\nproxy wars, like Spain in the 1930s. In Africa, the professional
\npolitical caste and the omnicompetent state had proved costly and
\nsanguinary failures. We must now examine to what extent the same
\npattern had been repeated in Asia, especially in the two stricken
\ngiants which housed nearly half the world’s population, China and
\nIndia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paul Johnson writes in Modern Times: It could be argued that the UN power-politics of the 1970s, the ugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the organization by Hammarskjold and his school, were responsible for prolonging the Amin regime … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12477,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-africa","category-blacks"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t