BY LEE SUSTAR
The rhetoric was about AIDS and poverty, but the agenda is oil and empire. US President George Bush's July tour of Africa highlighted the ways in which the US is consolidating its economic and strategic role across the continent — from preparing a possible deployment of US troops amid Liberia's civil war, to praising pro-market policies in Uganda, Senegal and South Africa.
But the more involved the US becomes in the crisis-wracked continent, the clearer it is that Washington isn't the solution — in fact, it bears responsibility for civil wars and social catastrophes across Africa. Exhibit A is Liberia.
Established in 1847 by wealthy Americans determined to rid the US of slaves by sending them to Africa, Liberia functioned as a virtual US colony, ruled by a tiny elite of the descendants of former slaves. Known as Americo-Liberians, they worked with US companies like tyre giant Firestone, which established the world's largest rubber plantation there in 1926, while the indigenous population remained impoverished.
During the Cold War, Liberia, despite its small population — still only 3 million today — became a key outpost for US efforts to undermine national liberation movements and prop up pro-Washington dictators in the name of fighting communism.
In 1980, master-sergeant Samuel Doe took power in a coup against the Americo-Liberian elite. When the administration of US President Ronald Reagan took over the White House, it flooded the new regime with millions of dollars in aid, in exchange for help in its efforts to destabilise nearby Libya.
Doe ruled through assassinations, repression and fraud. Once the Cold War was over, the US cut him loose; he was assassinated by rebel forces in 1990. "Master-Sergeant Doe is the latest victim of imperial euthanasia", wrote Nigerian journalist Tunji Lardner. "He died because his treatment was withheld by the United States and his life-support system shut off."
After a civil war in the early 1990s, the power vacuum was eventually filled by Charles Taylor, an Americo-Liberian who used widespread hatred of Doe and ethnic tensions to mobilise support. Taylor had backing from Libya as well as the former French colonies of Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, and he successfully exploited regional rivalries to divide a series of peacekeeping forces sent by West African nations — principally, Nigeria — in the mid-1990s.
A combination of brutality and bribery allowed Taylor to win presidential elections in 1997 with 75% of the vote. Key to Taylor's success was his control of much of the region's diamond trade and his constant shifts of alliances in the region.
To tighten his grip, Taylor sponsored an insurgency by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in neighbouring Sierra Leone. The RUF seized the former British colony's diamond mines and smuggled the gems to Liberia, where Taylor took a cut and top Western mining companies also cashed in.
Like Taylor in Liberia, the RUF — known for amputating the limbs of its opponents — was brought into the government in Sierra Leone in 1999, with the blessing of neighbouring countries, as well as London and Washington. When the "power-sharing" deal threatened to unravel, a British-led contingent of some 13,000 United Nations peacekeepers moved in to prop up the government; RUF leader and Taylor ally Foday Sankoh was awarded control of the ministry that controls diamonds. Taylor also backed a militia's attempted takeover of diamond mines in neighbouring Guinea, another former French colony.
The pattern is similar in Ivory Coast, where violence by Taylor-backed militias and an anti-immigrant backlash has split the country between a mostly Muslim north and a Christian and animist south. Some 3000 troops from France — the former colonial ruler of the country — are maintaining the status quo, leading some Ivorians to call for US troops to replace them. Meanwhile, Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo has intervened in the Liberian civil war by sponsoring yet another militia — the Movement for Democracy in Liberia.
The US has been reluctant to become directly involved in Liberia — but faces increased pressure to do so from United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Anan, whose native Ghana is a close US ally and key player in the region. Even France, which opposed the US war on Iraq, has called on Washington to intervene — despite its competing interests in the region — to keep the situation from spinning out of control.
The fact that the Liberian capital of Monrovia, a city of 1 million people, remains without running water or electricity has led many who opposed the war on Iraq to support a US peacekeeping force on humanitarian grounds. But anyone who believes that Washington will act out of concern for innocent people in Liberia should take a closer look.
Until now, the US has been content to pressure Taylor by working with the government of Guinea — which got US$3 million in US military aid last year — to support the main anti-Taylor rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy. While Taylor has been indicted for war crimes by a UN tribunal, LURD is little different.
"There is not one person who wields real power within the LURD who has clean hands or comes close", a European diplomat told the July 4 Washington Post. "The upper tiers are filled with the perpetrators of rape, looting and cannibalism."
According to Human Rights Watch, LURD forces have been involved in kidnapping, summary executions, looting, rape and forced recruitment. Like Taylor and the RUF, LURD forces young boys to become combatants.
So while Bush has called for the ouster of Taylor — who has provisionally accepted an offer of exile in Nigeria — Washington's solution is to replace one "warlord" with another. If the US does move to intervene militarily, it's because Liberia sits near substantial oil reserves in the Gulf of Guinea. US oil companies — including ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco — are expected to invest more than $10 billion in African oil this year.
At the same time, Washington is moving to boost its military bases in "the Arab countries of northern Africa and in sub-Saharan Africa, through new basing agreements and training exercises intended to combat a growing terrorist threat in the region", the New York Times reported on July 6. Add to this Washington's pursuit of free-market policies across Africa, and George Bush's real goals in Africa become all too clear.
So does the need to oppose them.
[From Socialist Worker, newspaper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit .]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 23, 2003.
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