Washington, DC — New questions about security and stability in Africa have been raised by two major events - the ongoing war in Iraq and the March 15 coup in the Central African Republic.
The start of the fighting with Iraq sparked protests across Africa and raised concerns about a possible backlash, particularly against the United States and Britain. In the Central African Republic, where President Ange-Felix Patasse was ousted by his former army chief of staff, Francois Bozize, the takeover comes at a time when many areas of conflict on the continent seem to be making meaningful steps towards resolution.
To help evaluate the implications of these developments, Charles Cobb Jr. spoke with Richard Reeve, the Africa Editor of Jane's Sentinel Security Assessment, a monthly online service posting geopolitical and risk analysis, Excerpts:
The list of the "Coalition of the Willing" posted on the White House Web site includes five African nations: Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda. Why do you think there are so few? Do you think it is because Africa is on a kind of fault line in some respects - divided between Islamic and non-Islamic areas?
No. I think Africa is on an aid-recipients fault line, as it were. It doesn't want to be drawn between a Franco bloc and an Anglo bloc. Part of the benefit of the post-Cold War development makeup for Africa has been that countries didn't have to choose one side over the other. There wasn't such an issue of playing people off one another. If you played your cards right, at least, you could benefit from a multiplicity of donors, hopefully shooting towards the same kind of goals. Obviously, there are examples of playing Britain and France off against each other particularly, say in the Great Lakes conflicts, but generally it's been a kind of positive sum game for aid recipients. And it would seem that lobbying over votes in the UN could have served to alienate that as much as gaining from one side or the other.
What was interesting about the three [African] countries on the Security Council is that none of them is a convincing democracy. And so the role [that might have been] played by domestic forces - favoring a position for U.S. or French influence, or Islamic or pro-Arabic or whatever - was that much more limited than it would have been in countries with a genuine political pluralism.
Are we getting to something akin to what existed during the Cold War in which Africa gets whipsawed between contending parties as it was between the United States and the Soviet Union, this time within the context of anti-terrorism or even the war on Iraq?
The issue as the U.S. defines it, I think, is fairly specific in terms of terrorism. So far it's pretty much related to international Islamist terrorism. And if you're in Namibia or Angola somewhere on that side of the Continent then that's really not that much of an issue, and there's not that much you can be drawn into in terms of the U.S. agenda. Obviously a substitute oil production capability is in Angola's favor.
What are the implications for Africa of this war that has just started with Iraq? Will there be a backlash on the Continent with respect to the United States?
I think, yes, certain countries will feel it. To a great extent they are the obvious ones: the Swahili coast, the Sahelian belt and West Africa, to some extent. I guess the most worrying is northern Nigeria within the context of elections this year. I think that's the most politically aware area of pan-Islamic influence. It is certainly an area that was very vocal during the Afghanistan campaign. We may well see that during this campaign, and it certainly could be exploited by regional politicians there.
You've not mentioned Sudan, which has also had Islamist forces affecting the state and region?
Sudan has been cooperating pretty satisfactorily with the U.S. because it is so afraid of intervention. It has been neutralized by the threat of military action.
By the threat of military action?
Yes, military and economic action. Isolation in a broad context.
You think there was an actual threat of military intervention by the U.S. that Sudan feared?
I think that the Sudanese remember the cruise missile attack [against the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory] in 1998 and wonder what kind of response they could expect if they didn't cooperate. Now it would be unlikely to mean an invasion of the type we're seeing in Iraq because the defensive capability is so much less. But some kind of assistance against the government there would have been forthcoming.
Let's turn to the Central African Republic and the coup d'etat. Would you say that this was fairly predictable given the total lack of money the government has had for almost two years - being unable to pay its military or civil service? Or are we looking at something more political?
I think the coup was always going to be in the cards as long as the government didn't have money to pay the troops. That's not an uncommon problem in a lot of African countries or the developing world more generally. What's interesting about the CAR military is that it was so small in comparison to other militaries. Really funding it need not have been the huge problem that it was in comparison to countries with much larger militaries.
When you say 'small' what do you mean?
Even before the May 2001 coup attempt by [former President] Andre Kolingba, there were less than 3,000 men in the army. Nearly a thousand of those were alienated with Kolingba and another 300-plus went with Francois Bozize to Chad [after his dismissal as army chief of staff]in October 2001, so it became a reduced force of only around 1,500 men. Now in comparison to the militaries of other counties in the region that's really very small. A country like Burundi is extremely poor but has an army more than ten times the size of the CAR.
Why did the CAR have such difficulty getting money? Even the U.S Treasury Department would not sign off on an IMF loan that was really aimed at facilitating African Development Bank funds that would have enabled the government to pay its civil service and military.
I'm not sure exactly why except that there was so little confidence in Patasse from the wider community. He wasn't particularly popular with his neighbors. He wasn't popular with the French. They'd more or less given up on him by the time of this coup. It seemed like things were going to change a bit under Prime Minister Martin Ziguele, but again the government was so erratic, there were so many changes in the administration; it really didn't come across as a particularly responsible government.
It also looked bad with the diamond smuggling issue. It wasn't seen as a responsible player in the DRC [Democratic Republic of the Congo] either. Bemba's Congo Liberation Movement (MLC) was invited in and more or less incorporated into the military by President Patasse.
Yet it was an elected government and in that sense a legitimate government. Nobody questioned its desperate need for financial assistance and the likelihood that without that assistance, given any number of coup attempts in the past, it would be extremely vulnerable to being overthrown.
Yes, this is interesting, particularly since Patasse's second election was achieved under the administration of the UN mission in the CAR. Their mandate was to oversee the election, and they did that. Then they withdrew. There is an interesting parallel with Congo Brazzaville up to the mid-90s in terms of the [Pascal] Lissouba government being democratically elected and eventually overthrown, with Angola playing a similar role to the one Chad has played in the CAR. And again, France and the international community were not really willing to back Lissouba.
What was Jean Pierre Bemba's interest in the CAR? I understand he pulled his troops out under pressure from the United States.
That's what I'm hearing, too, that the U.S. was instrumental in urging him to remove those troops which was something that I think played a major role in undercutting Patasse's rather tenuous hold on power. But the MLC's interest in the CAR seems based around the use of [the capital city] Bangui and M'poko Airport as a logistics and smuggling center. It's the nearest airport with scheduled international flights. Also, the CAR was issuing diamond export certificates, which are necessary to export diamonds to the international markets of Europe, Israel and so on. They couldn't put their diamonds through Kinshasa as a legitimate, recognized state authority for the DRC so they needed someone to issue it for them. There was a lot of pressure on Congo Brazzaville earlier to stop doing that in relation to Angola and I think also on the DRC, though I am not as sure of that. So, the main direction of [Bemba's] MLC diamonds is going through to Bangui.
Do you think the African Union response to the CAR is a kind of test?
Yes, but there have been several tests to the AU so far, and I think its responded so far in a fairly rigid fashion which hasn't made it look too good. It looks very bad with the exclusion of the [Marc] Ravalomanana government in Madagascar last year.
The CAR is something of a test for African peacekeeping capability as well given that Cemac (Economic and Monetary Community of Central African States) protection force never looked like it was going to be a realistic deterrence force in Bangui or towards the border. Of course the protection force was tasked with protecting the president and the president wasn't in the country [when the coup occurred]. It wasn't specifically tasked to hold Bangui.
So will this government be recognized by the AU?
I don't think that it will be recognized before elections.
Do you take Bozize at his word, although he has suspended the constitution, when he says that he is simply a transition figure pending a new constitutional and democratic dispensation? We have heard this so often.
Yes, I don't see any other way for the CAR; it needs the money too much and is going to have to have legitimacy. But I think there is a willingness of a lot of regional states and international donors to have a kind of constructive engagement with Bozize because Patasse was so unpopular with them by the time he was overthrown. So they will certainly be pushing very hard for elections in the imminent future. Now whether he stands for those [elections] or not is kind of a lesser issue. I think he may well follow [Congo Brazzaville president] Sassou Nguesso towards having himself legitimized.
A broad question comes to mind here: where is Africa going? There are hopeful signs such as conflicts that once seemed intractable and now seem to be headed toward resolution: Sierra Leone, Angola, Sudan, perhaps Congo. And there are new African designs: the African Union, Nepad, the voices of 'civil society'.
On the other hand there are things like this coup in the CAR, the situation in Cote d'Ivoire and Liberia and Burundi, as well as continuing tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea. What signals Africa's direction these days - which set of events?
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Yes, Africa is going in so many directions. On the one hand you've got some fairly advanced power sharing-type governments like South Africa. Countries like Senegal and Kenya have their own very encouraging agendas. And you've got institutions like the African Union or Nepad, which look very progressive. But is there really institutional capacity to follow up on their agendas and the money to build those institutions?
But then you have what I think the recent events in the CAR are indicative of, which doesn't necessarily have to be seen in a negative context: the process of achieving power through force. That happened in Rwanda and Uganda and in Ethiopia and Eritrea 10 or 15 years ago. And those were seen as being model governments at the time; they were very much encouraged. And to some extent, some of those governments have worked on a stability level.
Perhaps what we're seeing with the Central African Republic is the patience of regional and international communities for peace stalemates wearing thin. You can have a situation like Cote d'Ivoire where the country is divided and you ask: Can we really piece this country together again with a power-sharing government or does somebody have to win and take all? And it seems like there was some kind of decision in the Central African Republic that Bozize had to be allowed to win to be able to come up with a new dispensation rather than stalemate and proxy war with Chad, with no real winner.
I think you can also see this reflected in the Bush administration's policy toward Africa. It's not really talking about conflict resolution or state building. It's talking about war terminination. This year it has replaced the African Crisis Response Initiative for peacekeeping training with the African Contingency Operation and Training Assistance program, which puts more of an emphasis on offensive tactics of peace enforcement rather than peacekeeping.
It's looking at winners rather than indefinite stalemate because too many of Africa's problems are seen as stemming from a recognized state which defacto does not have control of its territory.
Is this an improvement?
Not necessarily. The British example in Sierra Leone was looked upon as being fairly positive where you take a decision and say: 'Someone's going to win this conflict and we're going to help them.' That seems great within the context of Sierra Leone because the RUF seemed such bad guys. And it would certainly be easy to paint Charles Taylor in the same light.
But in other situations -- the Central African Republic being one of them -- it's much harder to draw a distinction.
Background: Lack of Money Underlies CAR Coup
White House: "Coalition of the Willing"
