By a vote of 1.69 million for Robert Mugabe to 1.28 million for Morgan Tsvangirai, the people of Zimbabwe re-elected the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu) president last weekend. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), founded in September 1999, lost by more than in the last national election, in June 2000 when Zanu gained a small majority of parliamentary seats.
By almost any measure, the war on AIDS is more important than the war on terrorism. Yet Washington’s fixation with the latter—still loosely defined—campaign threatens to crowd out attention to Africa’s priorities. And those priorities, from obtaining support for international peacemaking and peacekeeping, to canceling illegitimate debts and arresting the growing disparities between rich and poor in the world, to defeating the AIDS pandemic, are all equally global priorities.
Peace is back on the agenda, if not yet on the horizon in Angola. With the death of rebel leader Jonas Savimbi and the state visit to Washington by Angolan president Jose Eduardo dos Santos, there is again a glimmer of hope that the country’s 27-year-long civil war may finally be coming to a real end. As Salih Booker, Director of Africa Action, puts it, “Savimbi’s death removes the principal obstacle to peace in that country. So long as he was alive, it seemed virtually impossible that Angolans would ever be able to conclude and implement a peace settlement. But his death does not automatically ensure that peace will follow.”
Somalia and the U.S. are apparently doomed by fate to collide at critical moments in global politics. The collision has never brought anything but trouble to both parties. We are about to crash into one another again, this time in an expanded war on terrorism.
The east African nation of Somalia is being mentioned with increasing frequency as a possible next target in the U.S.-led war against international terrorism. Somalia is a failed state–with what passes for the central government controlling little more than a section of the national capital of Mogadishu, a separatist government in the north, and rival warlords and clan leaders controlling most the remainder of the country. U.S. officials believe that cells of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network may have taken advantage of the absence of governmental authority to set up operation.
The U.S government’s announced intention to broaden the war on terrorism beyond Afghanistan has triggered growing concern that other important U.S. foreign policy goals and principles will be subordinated in the process.
Two years ago in Seattle, demonstrators in the streets brought previously esoteric negotiations of government ministers at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to the world’s eye as never before. Less noticed, inside the meetings, African trade ministers denounced the lack of transparency in the proceedings. “African countries are being marginalized and generally excluded on issues of vital importance for our peoples and their future,” they declared in a public statement. The next day the summit adjourned with no agreement, as developing countries rebelled at being pushed aside, and Europe and the U.S. also failed to resolve their own differences.
Let us take as a starting point that the broadly consensual strategy and basis for self-activity in what we can term Global Justice Movements is the following: to promote the globalization of people and halt (or at minimum radically modify) the globalization of capital. But this strategy conflicts with the objectives of at least four other tendencies that also appear to have solidified in recent years. Since the full-blown emergence of an international financial crisis around mid-1997, the world has witnessed a revival of Third World Nationalism, a Post-Washington Consensus reform option, obstinacy on the part of Washington Consensus powerbrokers, and a formidable Rightwing Resurgence.
A brutal civil war that has raged off and on for nearly half a century in Sudan is putting the Bush administration just where it does not want to be–under domestic political pressure to try to affect the outcome of a seemingly intractable African conflict. Congressional action may force the issue.
The United States, the self-described leader of human rights, effectively decided to boycott the UN conference against racism in Durban, South Africa. The U.S. could have made a strong, positive impression by sending its African-American Secretary of State, a descendent of slaves, and making a forceful stand against racism. Instead, it chose to send a low-level delegation.