Obama and the African Genocides

Poor Barack Obama. He will take over the US presidency in a little over a month, with extremely high expectations for change in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran, not to mention the economy and global warming. Will there be any space on his agenda for Africa?

There certainly will be, given his family history and the team he has formed. But it is also certain that his changes in African policy will be much less dramatic than in the other messes he has to deal with.

It is already certain, for example, that he will quickly close the Guantánamo prison in Cuba, and that he will immediately begin to remove troops from Iraq to reinforce those in Afghanistan. On the economy, he has already announced stimulus packages which a demoralized George Bush can only dream of. On the question on the environment, after eight years of virtual abandonment, things have nowhere to go but up.

Africa is more complicated because of the following: first, because Bush, with his record levels of development assistance, wasn’t that bad (seriously). Second, and more importantly, because it is not so clear what can be done to radically change the course there.

This week’s issue of British magazine “The Economist” has an interesting article about the challenges Obama will face when dealing with one of the themes (unfortunately) most often associated with Africa: genocide. A link to the article (in English) is below.

http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12773216

Obama committed more than once during his campaign to take the slogan “never again” seriously. It is used by activists who fight against the reocurrence of indiscrimitate killings against ethnic groups, the best example of which are the massacres in Rwanda in 1994.

His team could not be more qualified. Hillary Clinton, chosen for Secretary of State, has a very intense vision when it comes to the moral obligation to prevent genocide. The future UN embassador, Susan Rice, tells everyone that Rwanda-94 (when she worked at the State Department) is a personal trauma in her carreer. An influential adviser, Samantha Power (the same person who wrote an excellent book about Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed in Iraq) has a best-seller on the topic (“A Problem from Hell”).

On paper, then, African societies can rest assured. Never in the history of the US have the first choices made by the government been so favorable to them.

In practice, however, it is different. Preventing a genocide is one of the hardest things to do. In fact, the difficulty begins in identifying it. How will they know for sure the moment in which localized murders become part of a killing machine? The moment when it is perceived that a genocide is happening, it is likely that a great part of it has already occurred. Even the Rwandandan genocide, which was astonishingly fast (1 million dead in 3 months, four times the rate of the Nazi Holocaust), was only perceived as a catastrophy when it was too late.

The way to minimize the difficulty is by having a constant system of intelligence that permits the identification of suspect preparatory actions, which was a notorious failure in Rwanda. For months before the genocide, boxes and boxes of weapons, mostly French, landed in the country without causing concern. Three months before the start of the killings, a regime informant told UN troops in the country about the preparations, but the information ended up ignored in the institution’s beaurocratic chain of command.

Once the problem is identified, there are other questions that need to be taken into consideration. Who has the right to protection from genocide? The question may seem absurd and cruel, but let’s not be naïve in thinking that populations threatened by a government allied to the West will receive the same treatment as those in the sights of a regime belonging to the “Axis of Evil.” And what about the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, can it be considered genocide?

Academic discussions aside, we have yet to see any proof: For all Obama’s swearing of “never again,” I’m not betting on seeing a column of marines descending on the jungles of Eastern Congo. This would really be something new in American diplomacy.

And it would be equally improbable.