Washington, DC — United States President George W. Bush departed Friday on his second trip to Africa, accompanied by his wife Laura. The traveling party – including White House aides and other officials, security personnel and reporters – totals several hundred, although a smaller number, including a limited press pool, will accompany the president and first lady on their first stop in Benin.
Shortly before she departed Washington with the entourage, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer told AllAfrica's Katy Gabel in a wide-ranging interview that the purpose of Bush's trip is "to look at his major initiatives," including efforts to fight HIV/Aids and malaria. "As the president always says, there's no reason for a child to die because it's been bitten by a mosquito," Frazer said. She also discussed other major Bush initiatives, including the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the newly formed Africa Command. Excerpts:
What are the major aims of the president's trip?
He is going to the five countries that have been mentioned - Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, Liberia - to look at the key areas of his policy toward Africa, specifically, to look at his major initiatives - Pepfar (the President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief) and the Millennium Challenge Account, a new way of doing development assistance. And the malaria initiative, which is intended to wipe out malaria, which President Bush believes is definitely a feasible goal and certainly one that reflects compassion because, as the president always says, there's no reason for a child to die because it's been bitten by a mosquito.
[The trip will also focus] on initiatives that have gotten less attention, especially the work that the president has been involved in on conflict mediation with his efforts to train peace-keepers. He will be reviewing peacekeepers both in Rwanda and in Liberia, but he could also do the same in Ghana.
What contribution is First Lady Laura Bush making to the president's efforts in Africa?
The first lady's consistent engagement over time has played a central role in the success of his Africa policy. [She] has been to Africa five times, and she's been a major factor in promoting and engaging these initiatives. When people like President [Amadou] Touré of Mali or President [John] Kufuor [of Ghana] come to Washington, they all note the central role of the first lady in achieving the president's Africa policy.
Does President Bush plan to address some of the continent's crises on this trip?
Of course he will, and he has been. He will be meeting with the former chairman of the African Union, President Kufuor in Ghana. He will get an update of President Kufuor's year and how he sees the regional issues, [and] he will be meeting with the incoming chairman, President [Jakaya] Kikwete, in Tanzania. Over the past seven or eight years the president has had a significant impact in helping to reduce the wars in Africa.
As the president said in his speech today, in 2002 there were six major wars - southern Sudan, Liberia, [the Democratic Republic of the] Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Burundi, and Angola. Independent institutions like the Heidelberg Institute for International Conflict say that in 2007 there were only two wars left in Africa - Somalia and Darfur.
There are, of course, seven other severe crises – Kenya being the latest, but also including Nigeria in the Delta, eastern [Democratic Republic of the] Congo, the Ogaden in Ethiopia, Central African Republic, Chad, and - an area that's not part of sub-Saharan Africa but is still part of Africa – Algeria.
So we think the president's approach... in terms of working in partnership with Africans, having joint ventures with Africans not only in the economic realm, but in the ways he's approached conflict mediation - working with the AU and with subregional organizations and African mediators – has been effective.
President Bush announced on Thursday that your boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, is going to Kenya and she will arrive on Monday. What does she hope to accomplish?
First - and most importantly - she's going to back [former United Nations Secretary-General] Kofi Annan's mediation, as the president stated. Secretary Rice has been very much involved in this since the beginning. She's had numerous conversations, both with President [Mwai] Kibaki and [Orange Democratic Movement leader] the Honorable Raila Odinga. She's going get a brief from Kofi Annan about the state of affairs. She spoke with him today and she has spoken with him several other times as well. Then she's going to deliver the president's message directly to President Kibaki and to Raila Odinga.
She will also meet with civil society organizations, the private sector, the media, because these have been forces of moderation, and we want to bolster their role and we want to bolster their voice. We want to try to find additional ways in which we can create barriers to further conflict, to further violence, and civil society plays a key role in that. Really, she's going to urge both principals to be flexible in their negotiations, to find a way to return Kenya to a country of the rule of law and a country where there's some form of power sharing so that there can be legitimacy in the governing institutions.
That's Kofi's third point, but the fourth point in this agenda is longer-term institutional reform - electoral, constitutional, and land reform. She will look at how we can concretely support those initiatives.
Colin Thomas-Jensen of the Enough Project has accused the administration for having no policy strategy for Chad. What's your response?
That's kind of a silly statement. Regional leaders know we have a strategy for Chad. The Chadian government knows it, as do the French and the Sudanese. In fact, our strategy for Chad is to work on three points:
To support their efforts internally to deal with the issues of governance, which is key to long-term stability, continuing to push for dialogue between the government and legitimate opposition and including in that dialogue marginalized people who would try to overthrow the government through military means, i.e. rebels. That's the internal strategy.
Regionally, we're working with the neighboring countries, the Ceeac countries [Communauté Économique des États d'Afrique Centrale - the Economic Community of Central African States], to try to strengthen a regional framework to create capacity for the African Union.
Then we're trying to push for a bilateral dialogue between the government of Sudan and Chad to end support of Chadian rebels in the Sudan and the Sudanese government's support for rebels in Chad.
So there's a three-pronged approach or strategy for addressing the insecurity – the long-term instability and insecurity in Chad. That instability has crossed administrations - it's not a new development.
In the latest crisis, the United States was one of the first countries to condemn Sudan's involvement in this latest attack in N'Djamena by rebels. I was on the phone with AU chairman Kikwete, President [Yoweri] Museveni [of Uganda], who was on the phone with President [Thabo] Mbeki [of South Africa]. We're working very closely with the French to mobilize diplomatic support. We've done démarches to all of Sudan's friends to put pressure on them to stop supporting these rebels and we've done démarches to all the neighboring countries to support that effort. We've worked very closely with the French in the United Nations on the presidential statement calling for those who could support Chad to do so.
I think it's an uninformed comment that the United States doesn't have a strategy for Chad. In fact, we have a very robust strategy for Chad.
With violence continuing in Somalia, what policy goals has the U.S. set for achieving lasting peace?
There again we've been working very closely with the international community and in the region. Particularly, our efforts have focused on the International Contact Group on Somalia, which just met on the margins of the AU summit at the end of January. We think that we've made significant progress over the year, particularly and most recently, the appointment of the new Prime Minister [Nur Hassan Hussein, also known as Nur Adde] and his cabinet, which has moved to Mogadishu [Somalia's capital]. That prime minister has tried to reach out to the opposition, to reach out to humanitarian organizations and international organizations, to reach out to the media and to release people who were arrested, whether they were humanitarian workers or members of the media, because of alleged association with extremists and terrorists.
So we think that this change of administration to President Yusuf [Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed] and Prime Minister Nur Adde and their new cabinet forms a good basis for moving forward. The feeling at the Contact Group was that on the political front, there is a new dynamic, and that's a dynamic that we hope will lead to the transition in 2009.
On the peacekeeping or security front, we have the Ugandan peacekeepers that have been there for most of last year, but we also had the deployment in early 2008 of Burundian contingents bringing the AU force - the Amisom [African Union Mission in Somalia] force - up to about 2,500. Burundi is also prepared to deploy another battalion, and the United States has been key to training, airlifting, and equipping the battalion that's already gone, and to training the battalion that's soon to deploy.
We're also, of course, continuing to urge the United Nations to also look at putting peacekeepers into Somalia, to do contingency planning for a peacekeeping operation. I think the AU is meeting with the UN on trying to develop that further. So that's on the security front.
On the humanitarian front, the United States continues to be the major donor of humanitarian assistance, and we are working very closely with the French and others to stem piracy off the coast to make sure that those humanitarian deliveries get to the people in Mogadishu.
In Comoros, where you recently traveled, the stalemate between Anjouan authorities and the federal government has worsened, despite AU mediation efforts. President [Ahmed Abdallah Mohamed] Sambi recently threatened to take over the island of Anjouan by force. What is your assessment of the situation on the ground, and what steps is the United States taking to resolve the crisis there?
I went to Comoros because of the situation in Anjouan but also because of a long-term commitment to President Sambi that I would come. We held a meeting [with] the AU peace and security commissioner, [Ambassador Said] Djinnit, and [South African] Foreign Minister [Nkosazana] Dlamini-Zuma, my counterpart in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in France, and a few others.
We are looking at the possibility of a mission there that would be led by the South Africans as the lead AU mediator. That mission would go to talk to Colonel [Mohamed] Bacar [of Anjouan], and tell him, essentially, that he is acting unconstitutionally, that he must move aside so that there can be an election, and that if he doesn't, that there will be consequences. We're also working to look at sanctions. The AU already has sanctions, but [we're looking at] how we can make those sanctions work to be more effective to bring pressure to bear on Colonel Bacar.
The greatest leverage would really be with the French, so we're in good dialogue with the French and the AU, working together to solve this peacefully rather than militarily. But time is running out. President Sambi has lost all patience, as he stated at the AU summit. We do have a very serious crisis on our hands that we're trying to manage with the AU in the lead.
Will President Bush address confusion and disagreement surrounding the new Africa Command (Africom)?
I don't think there's too much confusion about Africom. Clearly, there are many countries that support it. There's a minority of countries that have vocally said that they don't, Libya in particular.
The president will talk about the Africa Command and the fact that it is a reorganization of how the United States does its business. It's not really going to change our engagement in Africa, because right now Africa is controlled, in terms of our engagement strategy, by three different commands – Central Command, European Command, and Pacific Command. [The reorganization] brings that engagement under one command – Africa Command – so we would expect [it] to do all the things that [the other three] are doing – stable visits, flag officer visits, medical exercises – providing what we call Medflags , providing medical assistance – training, joint operations in rare cases. So it's not a major, new development. We're rationalizing that engagement under one command.
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Will the restructuring of a more traditional command for Africa be used as a test model for foreign aid restructuring?
No, certainly not. There's nothing new about the way we would engage Africa. There is something new about the way the command is constructed. That is, there is the traditional combatant commander, General [William E. (Kip)] Ward, but underneath him there is a deputy for civil-military affairs, who is a State Department person, and there's a deputy for military operations, who is a traditional Department of Defense person. That structure is somewhat different, in that they're trying to develop more of an inter-agency structure within the combatant command itself. That's more of an internal impact.
It's not the way in which we are expecting to deliver assistance, and I think that the president was fairly clear in his speech [on Thursday, February 14] about what Africom's mission will be. It certainly won't be a takeover from USAID. USAID is doing an excellent job. Our effort to deal with development assistance differently is through the Millennium Challenge Account - not through Africom.
Some are frustrated with the slow process of getting funds from the Millennium Challenge Account. Is there a longer-term plan to shift foreign development assistance to the kind of corporate model the Millennium Challenge Corporation uses?
The aid that goes through the Millennium Challenge Corporation is focused on countries that meet certain criteria, whereas USAID tries to address development and humanitarian challenges more globally. MCC is much more selective.
Part of the challenge in getting these compacts [five-year MCC agreements for targeted aid money] developed is that the new model is very much African ownership – and not just African ownership, because it's a global program. The countries themselves have to be central in writing the compacts, and there have to be very clear accountability measures – because we're talking about huge amounts of money – to ensure that that money is going to what that compact says it will, and it's not being diverted into someone's bank account.
So yes, there are significant accounting controls, and the process is a little bit slower because you have to get the ownership of the country, and the country has to get the ownership of the sectors and citizens that they are going to be operating in and with. Initially it's taking a little longer, but we think it's a model that will be quite successful, and it certainly is a model that has been appreciated by the African leaders whose countries have qualified.
