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UNITED NATIONS -- Politicians like to assuage fears and to create comfortable illusions. The politicos chant the comfortable mantra "Our world is at peace." But from Algeria in the North, to Zimbabwe in the South, to Ethiopia in the East, and Sierra Leone in the West, the African continent is tearing itself asunder with internecine and bloody conflict. If the political class perused over a map of Africa, they would discover that peace is not quite the word to describe this continental chaos.
Perhaps their excuse is geographic ignorance, moral myopia or callous cynicism.
Maybe it just that the Sierra Club carries more cachet than Sierra Leone.
Still in what the U.S. has proudly stressed would be a new African initiative at the U.N., Ambassador Richard Holbrooke led Security Council luminaries on an political safari across Africa to assure "the people on the ground we care." A truly style over substance road show followed where air miles were logged, meetings addressed, and plenty of political palaver ensured the oft bemused onlookers that "we really care."
Literally hours after Holbrooke's Security Council road show left the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, the Ethiopians resumed a devastating military offensive against neighboring Eritrea. Both Ethiopia and Eritrea renewed their border war, which pits two desperately destitute lands against each other using the old weapons caches the Soviet sent them a decade ago as well as new ordinance Russia and Ukraine recently sold to Ethiopia. Lethal enough to level villages, create pathetic refugee columns, and guarantee the grip of poverty. This in the midst of another Ethiopian famine!
The UN Security Council demanded that both combatants put down their arms; Sure, when we're finished. Having spent time in the Balkans, no doubt Ambassador Holbrooke can appreciate the macabre enthusiasm.
Holbrooke's well-intentioned political pilgrimage paralleled Sierra Leone's explosion into an orgy of hate, assuring that the original mission plan of putting the ducks in the row for a Congo peacekeeping mission would have to be shelved to address this crisis de jour.
In Sierra Leone, a ruthless rebel thug, Foday Sankoh has created havoc in this former British colony. U.N. peacekeepers with the bark of a cub scout battalion were sidelined or taken hostage as Sankoh let slip the rebel dogs of war. Soon the rebels were knocking at the doors of Freetown until turned back by the British Parachute Regiment. (Alas serious force deters!)
The Congo, formerly Zaire, is still looking for the suckers to staff a peacekeeping mission to enforce a calm which can be shattered on a whim.
Algeria, whose civil war between a secular socialist government and Islamic extremists needs no introduction except to say that more than 50,000 killed in the last decade are a sad comment on the sanguinary struggle in this once rich land.
Zimbabwe's tin drum dictator Robert Mugabe is trying to kill the golden goose of agricultural production by ensuring that abundantly producing farms owned by whites, should be occupied and confiscated so that the land be "distributed to the masses."
Former South African President Nelson Mandela, to his credit, has described Mugabe's latest socialist scheme as nothing short of madness.
And Angola's civil war continues...
The Economist of London advises editorially, "The Security Council, meaning the great powers which can render it useful or supine, is torn by all the usual arguments. It agonizes that it cannot stand idly by as it did in Rwanda in 1994. Moreover it cannot, turn its back on Africa." The Economist adds, "Neither can it keep a peace that does not exist, nor intervene in every war in every corner of the globe...African wars are, above all, matters for fellow Africans."
As Ambassador Holbrooke stressed, "Peacekeeping must be fixed in order to be saved. Unless we move decisively, those that threaten peacekeepers in Africa and elsewhere may draw the conclusion that -- rhetoric and resolutions aside -- the UN lacks the will, the cohesion, and the resources to challenge them." Sadly warlords the world over have already come to such conclusions.
Tragically if Africa's military conflicts are not frightful enough, we have not even discussed the endemic poverty, famine and AIDS.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
