Hillary Clinton's thin gloss on US aid in Africa
Clinton claims the US stands for democracy and human rights in Africa,
unlike China. But America's record does not bear scrutiny
* Chris McGreal <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/chrismcgreal>
* <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/> guardian.co.uk, Thursday 9 August 2012
21.39 BST
*
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/08/hillary-clinton-gloss-u
s-aid-africa#start-of-comments> Jump to comments (78)
American <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/aid> aid to the
country once called Zaire appeared to have an amazing effect.
The more the US gave its ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko, the shorter Zaire's roads
seemed to get. By the time Mobutu was overthrown in 1997, after two decades
of American and other western largesse, his country had just about one tenth
of the paved roads it had had at independence in the early Sixties. Once US
aid shrank, the roads started getting longer again.
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/hillaryclinton> Hillary Clinton, the US
secretary of state,
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/01/hillary-clinton-africa-china>
began a tour of Africa this month with a thinly veiled warning that
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/china> China is out to plunder the
continent and its governments would do well to huddle under the protective
wing of America's commitment to freedom. Clinton told an audience in Senegal
that, unlike other countries:
"America will stand up for democracy and universal
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/human-rights> human rights even when it might
be easier to look the other way and keep the resources flowing."
She didn't mention China by name, but everyone got the message. The US
secretary of state is getting at a point made by other critics of Beijing's
role in Africa: that China is so hungry for resources it does deals with
authoritarian regimes and doles out aid without consideration of issues such
as good governance.
That sounds an awful lot like what the US and its allies got up to for
decades - with the difference that Chinese aid does sometimes deliver
something tangible, such as thousands of kilometres of new roads in the
former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. Whereas US aid mostly
disappeared into Mobutu's buoyant bank accounts, or was used to buy off the
army to keep him in power, China's deal with the DRC government - trading
thousands of kilometres of new roads and rehabilitated railway track for
copper and other minerals - is transforming lives by linking up parts of the
country cut off from each other for decades except by air.
None of this happened with US and western money. US aid to Mobutu was tied
up with the cold war, his support of US-backed rebels fighting Angola's
Marxist government and his general hostility to communism. Barely a word was
said - by successive US administrations - about Mobutu's dire human rights
record. Few questions were asked about how, despite the billions of dollars
thrown at Kinshasa, Mobutu went on getting richer while the people he ruled
got poorer and his country's infrastructure fell apart.
Mobutu was always welcome at Ronald Reagan's White House, where the
president called him "a voice of good sense and goodwill". Only after the
end of the cold war did US policy shift. Washington didn't need Mobutu
anymore. Finally, it could afford to talk about principles without much
cost.
It was much the same story with western aid to
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/rwanda> Rwanda. Hundreds of millions were
poured into the tiny country, with France leading the way, to support a
regime that would ultimately resort to genocide in an attempt to hang on to
power. Yet, it took the Chinese to lift towns such as Kibuye out of their
isolation.
Kibuye is just 120km, or 75 miles, west from Rwanda's capital, Kigali.
Twenty years ago, the journey was as much as an eight-hour drive, depending
on the rains and on whether, as seemed to happen most days, a bus or lorry
was stuck in the deep muddy ravines that opened up on what could only be
loosely described as a road. China's road-builders changed all that, and the
journey now is well under two hours - with all the benefits to trade,
education and family life that brings.
The pattern across Africa was US support for ideological allies, which
included Washington siding with the apartheid regime in South Africa while
banning Nelson Mandela's ANC as a terrorist organisation. It also entailed
funding of wars against opponents. Human rights and democracy were too often
buried under the needs of cold war realpolitik, as Washington saw them.
US officials argue that "that was then", and it's different now. But is it?
For sure, Washington will make a stand on "democracy and universal human
rights" where it does not conflict in a major way with other interests. But
where money or security are involved it's another matter.
Take <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/equatorial-guinea> Equatorial Guinea.
Washington had plenty of public criticism for its appalling and bloodstained
dictator, Teodoro Obiang Nguema, who has ruled since 1979. The US even
pulled out its ambassador, John Bennett, in 1993 after he was accused of
being a witch on state radio and threatened with violence. In his departure
speech, Bennett named the regime's worst torturers and Washington closed the
embassy three years later. Then, large reserves of oil were discovered in
the 1990s: American companies started pumping and everything changed.
Or take <
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ethiopia> Ethiopia. The US is the
largest contributor of aid to Addis Ababa, which has been ruled by the same
man, Meles Zenawi, for 20 years. He's received billions of dollars in aid,
since American largesse rose sharply after the 9/11 attacks (from a little
more than $200m a year to close to $1bn) because Washington came to regard
Ethiopia as a frontline in the "war on terror", owing to the presence of
Islamist fighters in neighbouring Somalia. The
<
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/cia> CIA also used Ethiopia as a
<
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/4/5/outsourced_guantanamo_fbi_cia_interrog
ating_detainees> base for the secret interrogation of hundreds of detainees
abducted from other countries, which was likely to have involved torture.
While some of that aid money has benefited ordinary people, a Human Rights
Watch report two years ago said Zenawi was "using aid to build a
single-party state". It accused the ruling Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary
Democratic Front of exercising "total control of local and district
administrators to monitor and intimidate individuals at household level" and
charged that foreign governments, including the US, were colluding in this
repression.
<
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/9556288.stm> A BBC
investigation last year exposed how "the Ethiopian government is using
billions of dollars of development aid as a tool for political oppression."
It reported that villages failing to support Zenawi are starved of food,
seeds and fertiliser.
For all of Clinton's assurances, the US still finds it easier to look the
other way.
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Received on Thu Aug 09 2012 - 16:15:20 EDT
