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TITLE: Africa Off the Agenda? |
AUTHOR: Salih Booker |
DATE: January 25, 2001 |
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Will Africa be "off the Agenda" of a Bush administration? Only four days in office and we can answer that question with a resounding NO! It is far worse than that. Four days into the term of the appointed President, and Bush has already in effect declared war on Africa and Africans. George Bush's very first foreign policy action, and one in which it appears the Secretary of State was not consulted, has been to de-fund international public health and family planning services, by withdrawing U.S. money form service providers who also provide reproductive health education and abortion services using money from other sources. In light of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa, this is criminal. It amounts to throwing gasoline on the fire that is AIDS. Bush's next action has been to place under review the Clinton Executive Order (May 2000) that supports African rights to import or produce generic versions of HIV/AIDS medications that are still under U.S. patent. The impending reversal of this order is an anti-African measure of immense proportions. It would be the moral equivalent of carpet bombing Africa and done in the name of American pharmaceutical companies, the devastating consequences for Africa's economy and security to be felt later. We have predicted a return to the blatantly anti-African policies of the Reagan era characterized by a general antipathy toward black people and a fabricated perception of Africa as a social welfare case. We were not being pessimistic, but rather we were attempting to draw attention to the public record on the admittedly limited "thoughts" of the former Texas Governor and to the record of the Bush team members. During the campaign, Bush and his advisors repeatedly stressed that Africa did not "fit into the national strategic interests" of America. During the televised debates he said Africa was not a priority, and that he wouldn't intervene to prevent or stop genocide in Africa should such a threat, as occurred in Rwanda in 1994, develop. Dick Cheney's perspective on Africa is epitomized by his 1986 vote, while a member of Congress, in favor of keeping Nelson Mandela in prison and his opposition to sanctions against apartheid in South Africa. More recently, as the CEO of Haliburton the world's largest oil services company he was complicit in sustaining the dictatorship of the late Gen. Sani Abacha in Nigeria. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was until this year a Director of Chevron, another oil company that buttressed military rule in Nigeria and literally hired the regime's soldiers to fire on unarmed protesters at the sites of its operations. A Chevron oil tanker bears her name! With Bush himself coming from the oil industry as do so many in his cabinet, some observers have begun to refer to the administration as an "Oiligarchy". Indeed Oil is likely to top the list of American interests in Africa as defined by the Bush team and they will concentrate on helping oil industry friends reap maximum profits with minimum constraints. The selection of General Colin Powell as the first African American Secretary of State, along with Rice (the first African American National Security Advisor), is unlikely to be sufficient to obfuscate the base racism that remains the major determinant of U.S. policies toward Africa. And neither of them have demonstrated particular interest in or special knowledge of African issues (Powell's election observer role in Nigeria notwithstanding). Moreover, both are loyal Republicans with a shared conventional orientation toward international affairs that derives from a narrow militaristic understanding of human security. They are also unilateralists at a time when the need for multilateral support for peace and security in Africa rather than continued expansion of unaccountable bilateral military ties is one of Africans' highest priorities. Congo, Sierra Leone, Sudan are obvious examples where support of United Nations peacekeeping operations will become crucial. On two other priority issues, however, debt cancellation and the HIV/AIDS pandemic public pressure will make the difference in defining U.S. Africa policy, just as did the struggle for sanctions against apartheid in the Reagan years. During the debates Bush announced his support for debt relief for poor countries and he must be held accountable to that Republican skepticism of multilateral institutions, in this case the World Bank and the IMF, finds some common ground with critics on the political left. Large segments of the faith community with close ties to the Republicans support debt reduction African American activism for debt cancellation, repudiation and reparations will grow considerably during the Bush term. In the context of a Bush administration and a divided Congress, breaking through the systemic American disdain for Africa will not happen unless there are real shifts in public perceptions, comparable to those that happened in the 1980s regarding apartheid in south Africa. In this sense the AIDS pandemic is a wake-up call. The AIDS epicenter is Africa, and it is a consequence and a dramatic feature of global apartheid (an international version of Jim Crow segregation where access to basic human rights including to quality healthcare is denied along the Color line). Pharmaceutical companies continue to campaign against African production and importation of generic anti-retroviral drug alternatives to protect the existing price structure and their enormous profits instead of cutting funding for international public health, Bush should be considering setting aside five percent of the budget surplus to create a global fund for international public health crises such as AIDS, though AIDS has been declared a threat to U.S. national security, only a meager $300 million in new funds for AIDS programs worldwide was appropriated for FY2001. African governments are spending more on debt payments to rich countries and institutions than on health and education for their own people. Finally, there is the matter of Race. The basic illegitimacy of the Bush administration in the eyes of the vast majority of African Americans has foreign policy implications. It will make it more difficult for the White House or State Department to be taken seriously if they choose to support democratization in Africa, something that was missing during the Clinton years and which should be central to U.S. policies toward Africa. Beyond that, the return of such blatant discrimination as occurred in Florida or as is inherent in the record of Attorney General-designate John Ashcroft, along with the continuation of racial prejudice and double standards toward Africa that are at the core of U.S. traditions in foreign policy, will open up the terrain for equally blunt and direct action against racism and racist policies toward Africa and Africans. The real foreign policy priority for the United States is the threat presented by the structural inequities that perpetuate war and poverty in the world today where race, place, class and gender are clearly the major determinants of peoples' full access to the entire spectrum of human rights. The appointed president, George Bush, has now declared where he stands on this greatest challenge facing our world. This will not pass. This message from ACOA/Africa Fund and the Africa Policy Information Center is distributed through the Advocacy Network for Africa (ADNA). Vicki Lynn Ferguson Communications Facilitator c/o Africa Policy Information Center 110 Maryland Ave, NE #509 Washington, DC 20002 Ph: 202-546-7961 Fax: 202-546-1545 E-mail: vlf@africapolicy.org END |