Washington, DC — "Terrorism has no religion, no ethnicity," says Uganda's Ambassador to Washington, DC, Edith Ssempala. "In Africa, many innocent people have been killed 'in the name of God'." She was referring to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Christian rebel group terrorizing Northern Uganda that emerged in the late 1990s and whose tactics include attacks on civilians and kidnapping.
Ssempala and more than a dozen ambassadors from Africa discussed terrorism Wednesday at a symposium hosted by the Africa Society of the National Summit on Africa and the Carnegie Endowment's Africa Policy Initiative. Opening the session, Ambassador Ssempale described the terrain on which all the ambassadors staked a claim. "It is in Africa's vital interest to be part of the global coalition against terrorism."
Far away in Senegal, also on Wednesday, ten heads of state and delegates from 20 other African nations held an anti-terrorism summit. Although the meeting ended with a declaration against terrorism, no final decision was reached on how Africa should respond as a continent.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade had opened the meeting hoping for a binding anti-terrorism platform. "A pact against terrorism, which is operational and adapted to the current circumstances, is essential," Wade said.
An African Convention Against Terrorism was agreed to in Algiers two years ago but only three countries have ratified it, "which means it does not exist," Wade said.
But both privately and publicly, African leaders say the situation has radically changed in the aftermath of September 11.
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To start with, difficult-to-get resources for fighting terrorism may now be more easily available. Referring to the August 7, 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in his country, Tanzania Ambassador Mustafa Nyanganyi recalled that the next day, "we sealed a partnership with the United States."
Kenya's US envoy, Yusuf Nzibo, recalling the simultaneous attack suffered by his country in which over 200 people were killed, said: "We probably have more stake in this fight than anybody else; we are vulnerable societies."
Berhane-Gebre-Christos, Ethiopia's Ambassador to Washington, noted that back in 1965, Ethiopian Airlines was the first airline to suffer a hijacking and then reminded his audience that Osama Bin Laden had dramatically emerged into public view after organizing a failed assassination attempt against Egyptian President Mohammed Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa.
Terrorism is not easily defined, the ambassadors agreed, but as Nigeria's envoy, Jibril Aminu put it, provoking laughter as he borrowed a well-known aphorism about judging pornography: "I may not be able to define terrorism, but I know it when I see it."
But, as in Senegal, when the meeting ended it was not clear what was being sought in an anti-terror relationship with the US and how a collective anti-terror approach might be shaped on the African continent.
