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Secretary General, Kofi Annan, Boutros Boutros-Ghali UN Chief Faults Reluctance of
US to Help in AfricaBy Barbara Crossette
New York Times
May 13, 2000
Faced with wars on several fronts in Africa, Secretary General Kofi Annan said today that the United Nations' peacekeeping efforts needed the kind of military help that the United States was now unwilling to provide. Instead, the United States is offering only to transport troops from other countries to confront the most immediate crisis in Sierra Leone, he said, but the United Nations is turning down those offers because the cost of using American planes is more than the organization can afford.
Given the reluctance of the Clinton administration to put American troops on the ground abroad, Mr. Annan suggested that there was little room for the United States in what he describes as a new style of peacekeeping for a different age. America's reluctance to take on any more than a limited role has become evident since the Sierra Leone crisis began two weeks ago.
"Washington will not put an American officer on the ground," he said.
Mr. Annan would like to send in sophisticated and experienced military teams to assess problems or set up missions. But the United States prefers to see missions in Sierra Leone carried out by other countries, many of them with poorly equipped, lesser trained troops.
In an interview today that ranged over the multiplying crises in Africa, where heavy fighting erupted today between Ethiopia and Eritrea, Mr. Annan said it was "disheartening" to confront a continent with calamities from end to end, and consider what this says about African leadership.
Only a few years ago, a new generation of leaders - among them Isaias Afwerki in Eritrea, Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and Paul Kagame in Rwanda - seemed to offer hope of a turnaround in African politics and an end to constant civil conflict.
"When everyone started talking about the African renaissance, President Clinton used to cite these four," he said. All are now embroiled in war, the Eritreans and Ethiopians on the Horn of Africa, and Rwanda and Uganda in Congo. In southern Africa, President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe risks civil strife to bolster his one-party state by igniting racial tensions, threatening the economic health of all of Southern Africa.
Mr. Annan, a Ghanaian, rejects the view that someone who makes himself president for life reflects traditional African tribal culture, where democracy can flourish within an essentially closed system. "That's not true," he said. "Take my own society. In West Africa, we have the Ashanti kings. But the king can be removed for wrongdoing, incompetence or lack of leadership. It's not as if they are anointed by God and can stay there forever."
His prescription for Africa is stronger nongovernmental institutions to curb the excesses of leaders who stay too long, and a market economy to reduce corruption by reduce government control of essential goods and services. He said young people across Africa understood this. "I'm stressing the question of institution-building, legal systems, the rule of law, the right regulatory systems and this whole area of privatization," he said. "Corruption is built on everything being in the hands of the government," he said. "So for everything you want, you need a permit. The person who gives you the permit wants a bribe. The person who's going to make the appointment for you wants a bribe. And so on."
Senseless wars take terrible tolls, he said, adding that he recently told the leaders of Eritrea and Ethiopia that they would pay a price in international assistance. "I had to tell them that as someone who was raising money for the famine, I was having difficulties," he said, "and donors were asking: How do you expect us to put up money when they are using their money for war?"
Given the disaster facing the United Nations in Sierra Leone, Mr. Annan focused most of his remarks today on that country, where hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers from a number of countries are being held hostage. He spoke of the lessons the organization is learning there about how to be better prepared for an era of messier wars and freelance warlords impervious to the international pressures that once helped rein in renegade governments.
"The nature of wars has changed and the dangers are also higher," said Mr. Annan, who was head of peacekeeping at the United Nations before becoming secretary general. "In the past one was dealing with international wars and established states with government leaders who understood international pressures - to whom you can say, 'If you don't do this, we will cut off your weapons, we won't trade with you, nobody will recognize you.' "What does this mean to Sankoh?" he continued, referring to the rebel leader in Sierra Leone, Foday Sankoh. "What does it mean to these warlords? Some may not even be warlords but national leaders who are so insular, whose vision is so narrow, that in their concerns about their own power and survival, the interests of their people don't count."
To confront such conflicts, Mr. Annan said, the United Nations will need a bank of rapid-reaction contingents on call from countries with well-trained and well-equipped troops, ready to move fast to pave the way for peacekeeping forces.
The Security Council will have to give those forces stronger combat authority and better equipment "because you never know what's going to happen on the ground." The organization will also need better intelligence and more intelligence sharing, he said. "We were completely sleeping on the issue of intelligence," he said, referring to Sierra Leone and its rebels. "The way things happened, they must have been reasonably well coordinated. We should have had a sense of what was going on."
The world also needs an international criminal court for dealing with leaders like Mr. Sankoh, whose rebel force is known for hacking off civilians' limbs to keep the population intimidated and who has disrupted peacekeeping in Sierra Leone, he said.
"It is a real missing link in all our efforts to contain these criminals who act with impunity in our world today," he said of such a court, now being created. The United States, almost alone in the industrial world, opposes it because Washington cannot extract ironclad guarantees from other nations that no American will ever face trial there.
When the United States offers support equipment, like planes to fly in other countries' troops, "the U.S. offers are usually three times the commercial rate," he said. Last week, the Clinton administration said it would provide transportation, but only for a fee, and that has proved too high for the tight United Nations budget.
Mr. Annan said, for instance, that the United Nations would have had to spend as much as $17 million to $21 million for an American military airlift of Bangladeshi soldiers to bolster the force in Sierra Leone. The organization has now chartered a commercial airliner for $6 million to do the same job. Although an American transport plane carried ammunition from Jordan to Sierra Leone today, the 300 Jordanian paratroopers who also arrived there today flew on a commercial charter, a Russian plane. Indian troops will be transported free on a Canadian government Airbus.
American officials acknowledged today that to date their assistance had been limited to flying in one load of Jordanian ammunition, but the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said the United States was still discussing other ways to help. He mentioned American discussions with Nigeria over the equipping and transporting of Nigerian soldiers, though there is disagreement between the United Nations and Washington over who will pay for the Nigerians and what their role will be.
In any case, Mr. Annan said, by the time they arrive, the situation in Sierra Leone may have stabilized. Mr. Annan, who was critical of the absence of authority from Sierra Leone's elected president, Ahman Tejan Kabbah, warned that removing Mr. Sankoh from the scene may not end the threat from other rebel groups that will move into the vacuum in the guise of government supporters. They have rearmed, he said.
The Secretary General stressed the importance of having well-trained and skillful commanders of peacekeeping operations and acknowledged that the situation in Sierra Leone has not been perfect. A commander has to coordinate disparate units from several countries, which have brought their own officers. Diplomacy is needed, he said. The commander in Sierra Leone, Maj. Gen. Vijay Kumar Jetley of India, has come under criticism from Zambia, whose troops have been taken hostage in large numbers, and from other contingents.
"There's tension in the command," Mr. Annan said. "Everybody who's met Jetley say that he's a very good officer. But some of the commanders complain that he just gives orders, implying that there is no consultation." "The commander should be not only a good commander," he said. "He has to be a good team-builder." In Sierra Leone, as in other conflicts in Africa, diamonds and other lucrative resources not only supply warlords but also have the potential to corrupt the peacekeeping operation, particularly when poor soldiers see the chance of sudden wealth.
"Normally when countries are rich in natural resources, it is a blessing," Mr. Annan said. "But it's turning out to be a curse in the case of Africa. Diamonds, greed, war, political ambitions - this is a very poisonous mix." "I have to make sure that my own peacekeepers down the line don't get caught in this situation," he said. "So when a whole Guinean battalion on its way to Sierra Leone - 900 men with A.P.C.'s - said they were disarmed, you wonder," he said referring to armored personnel carriers. "Did they sell them?"
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