MONROVIA, LIBERIA – African peacekeeping has perhaps at last found the right turning on the dangerous road of ethnic strife, tribal war and warlordism that besieges too many countries in Africa. When President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, engineered, or rather enticed, the removal of the Liberian despot, Charles Taylor, to exile in Nigeria last month it turned the page on a new chapter in African peacekeeping efforts.
It has been nine years since the U.S. /UN debacle in Somalia when the U.S. command of the UN peacekeeping force decided to cut and run after the gruesome death of 18 American soldiers. This was followed by a period during the Clinton Administration when the U. S. stood back from Africa’s wars. The administration effectively vetoed a major peacekeeping operation that might have stood a chance of forestalling the Rwandan genocide.
The combination of a rebirth of political confidence in now democratic Ghana, Senegal, Mali, South Africa and, most importantly, Nigeria, together with the surprising decision of the Bush administration to play back up to Nigerian-led diplomacy and peacekeeping in Liberia and to support UN peacekeeping in the Congo, has transformed at a stroke the outlook for dealing with African wars present and future.
It can be seen here on the streets of Monrovia. After 23 years of on and off war which has witnessed atrocities of unbelievable cruelty there is now a semblance of peace. Fighting is still going on in the bush with the rebel movements unwilling or perhaps unable to persuade their troops to down arms as the recent peace agreement mandates them to do, but the capital itself is taking its first tentative steps to normalcy. The markets have been reopened. The streets have been cleared of accumulated rubbish. UN agencies are chlorinating 5000 wells and the Red Cross and others are battling the outbreak of cholera that has so far claimed a thousand deaths. The Nigerian and other West African peacekeepers appear omnipresent and this time they seem disciplined, effective and well trained – unlike 1995 and ’96, when a badly conceived, badly led, peacekeeping operation led my Nigeria’s military government brought dishonour on the country. Its soldiers were brought ignominiously home, a thousand in body bags, after earning an appalling reputation as rapists, looters and brutalizers. Today, in total contrast, observers, including the UN chief representative, the American ambassador and American officers on the ground, speak highly of their proficiency.
When Obasanjo flew into Monrovia early this week the crowds thronged his route, waved and shouted, clearly immensely joyful. He had a sober yet essentially idealistic message both for the interim government of President Moses Blah (Taylor’s deputy) and for his own troops. He reminded the government, still peopled with the ranks of mass murderers whose hatred for the rebels runs deep, that “you need to forgive one another. The only thing that can give peace is love.” And to his troops he said, “even if you are provoked you must not provoke. You are here to help serve not to harm or oppress.”
In conversation on his three hour plane ride from Nigeria, Obasanjo talked in detail of how this peacekeeping effort has been a breakthrough. “African-led diplomacy, combined often with African troops, backed up by the UN and now the U.S. (‘if we don’t have superpower support our chances of success are slim’) is the recipe for success”. He sees this pattern as one to be replicated elsewhere – including in the Congo where this week the UN began a large scale deployment in the country’s violence-torn eastern provinces.
One cannot underestimate the sea change that has come about. This generation of West African leaders, many of whom like Obasanjo came to power by the ballot, seems more confident, less seized with living out a reaction to colonialism and more prepared to work hand in hand with the western powers and the international community at large. Likewise the U.S. and its western allies, in particularly Britain and France, seemed to have found a way to work with African leaders without being counterproductively overbearing.
Nevertheless, there is one thing that spoils the picture and will perhaps be the stumbling block that stops Obasanjo winning the plaudits he seeks, both at home and abroad. It is the refusal to countenance handing over Taylor to the UN War Crimes Court in Sierra Leone. He gets angry at the suggestion this must be done. “By giving this one man asylum I have saved thousands of lives. What more does the international community want?” Actually the Security Council for now is giving him an easy ride on this one. But in three or so years’ time, if peace and democracy still prevail, it might be opportune for Obasanjo to encourage Taylor to return home. Then, as in Yugoslavia, a democratic Liberian government can decide, just as Serbia’s did with Milosevic, that the time is right to turn him over to a war crimes’ court. Obasanjo, when pressed, seems open to such a solution. Then the world would really know the worm has turned in Africa.
I can be reached by phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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