6 November 2009
interview
Howard Wolpe has spent the best part of three decades helping to form and implement American policies on Africa. After chairing the Subcommittee on Africa of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives for 10 years, he later served as President Bill Clinton's special envoy to the Great Lakes region.
Earlier this year Wolpe returned to government in a similar role for the Obama administration. AllAfrica interviewed him in Cape Town at the beginning of his first trip to Southern and Central Africa in his new capacity. This is Part One of a two-part interview.
The appointment of General Scott Gration as the U.S. special envoy to Sudan has drawn far more publicity – promoted by the administration, or at least the White House – than your appointment. Yet millions have died in Central Africa. Why the disparity in publicity?
Well, I think globally there is far more attention paid in the media to Sudan than to the Great Lakes. As you suggest, the enormity of the deaths that have occurred as a consequence of war over the last decade is extraordinarily high in the Congo. I guess maybe [the Great Lakes region] is less media-accessible – I don't know what the full explanation is. I do know that in the United States, the issue of Sudan has mobilized various domestic constituencies in ways that the Great Lakes issues have not.
So U.S. domestic policy imperatives have driven American foreign policy decisions in Africa?
Well, I think that there's a change now. In fact, one of the things that I think will become increasingly clear in the months ahead is that the Obama administration and Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton are determined to address three areas of conflict that have been terribly neglected because of the preoccupation with Sudan and Somalia as the dominant issues.
One of those is the Great Lakes Region, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The second is Kenya, which is in a very fragile condition at the moment and many are really worried about it falling off the precipice. The third is Nigeria, which faces a huge number of challenges in the future, including an election that's coming up, against the backdrop of an election that didn't have much legitimacy last time around.
So I think you're going to find a much more balanced approach to these other areas of critical importance to Africa and to the world.
Secretary Clinton, on her recent visit to the DRC, paid admirable attention to the issue of sexual violence there, but what we didn't see coming through from recorded public statements were the broader parameters of the administration's policy. Who are the major players involved in the conflict in the eastern DRC? What needs to be done?
There is no question that the FDLR presence in eastern Congo remains the principal continuing source of instability in the DRC. [The FDLR is the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda and include Hutu militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide of 1994.] A lot of our own preoccupation now will be with that effort, trying to neutralize and encourage the repatriation [to Rwanda] of those members of the FDLR who had no complicity in the genocide, and to try to deal with that subject, which is still unresolved.
A second source of instability increasingly in the Congo is the activities of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). They are no longer in Uganda but they are marauding and pillaging and killing throughout the eastern DRC and the Central African Republic.
And then the third source is unfortunately the FARDC (the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo) itself, the Congolese army, which is the largest perpetrator of rapes in the DRC right now… [and what] has happened with the Kimya II operation… in which the FARDC is going after the FDLR with the logistical support of Monuc [the UN peacekeeping mission, the Mission de l'Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo].
Unfortunately, though there have been some modest security achievements – in some places the FDLR has been pushed out of areas it controlled – there is very little evidence of significant achievement in security. According to most reports, FDLR command and control remains intact. But one of the effects of the Kimya II operation is that we have seen the killing, rape and displacement of large numbers of civilians.
So one of our preoccupations now – and I think this is shared widely by the Europeans, by the South Africans, by everyone who cares about the DRC – is to find a means of minimizing those civilian casualties. And so there is talk being given to some modification of the resolution of the United Nations that gives Monuc authority to do this work, to build in much more concrete initiatives on civilian protection.
One example might be joint planning with Monuc and the FARDC of all operations. Perhaps the condition for Monuc participation is that they sign off on those plans after they have assurances that everything possible is being done to protect civilians in the way in which the plans are being implemented.
There was criticism at the beginning of these operations about Monuc's involvement with the Congolese government forces at all. Does this mean that the criticism was justified and that Monuc shouldn't have been given authority to back the Congolese forces in the way it did?
I wasn't in government at the time the decision was made and Monuc was not acting on its own. It was acting pursuant to a unanimously-enacted UN Security Council resolution. So it's a little bit hard, not having been there at the time, to know exactly what went into the calculation.
But clearly one of the consequences of Monuc's involvement, with the FARDC committing so many of these atrocities, is that Monuc's own credibility has been further weakened. In the Congo today Monuc has very weak credibility in many parts of the country. That's not to say it can't be regained but it's been a real problem.
Does Monuc's mandate need to be changed?
At the end of the year it comes up for renewal. There's a debate going on now… and there's some consideration being given to a six-month extension in order to allow more time to flesh out the elements of the longer term. Others are arguing that there should be a one-year extension. I don't know how that will turn out, but I do think that some of the issues I raised regarding civilian protection will be addressed, even in the short-term extension.
And that would give Monuc more power to insist on joint operations or approval of operations?
Well, it would toughen essentially the conditionality of Monuc's support of the FARDC. The other thing that is being discussed is that a lot of people would like to give Monuc authority to assist the Ugandans in respect to the LRA. Monuc is willing to take on that responsibility [but] they are arguing there should also be some resources to go with the expansion of that mandate.
What is the role of the United States specifically? Can you act on your own, do you act with Europe, how are you acting?
One of the first things I did when I was appointed as special adviser was to travel to Europe to visit the six capitals that were most engaged in the DRC – Brussels, Paris, London, The Hague, Oslo and Stockholm.
The reception I received was quite surprising. There was a very deep feeling in Europe that for the last eight years there's been a total loss of energy and unity in [U.S.] international diplomacy. After I left government, there was no special envoy appointed by the Bush administration and the Europeans felt that they needed a strong partner in the United States, so they just rejoiced at the fact that the U.S. was now re-engaging in the Great Lakes region.
I also discovered, much to my surprise, that there was a strong harmonization of views. Many people recognized that issues had been neglected, saw the situation in much the same terms and felt it was necessary for a much more engaged international partnership.
I formed a very good relationship and partnership with Roland van der Geer, the European Union special envoy, and we decided that we would do everything on a partnership basis henceforth. We then had a contact group meeting of two days in Washington that brought together several European players, particularly those that are involved in security sector reform in the Congo and the United Nations. It was a remarkable two days in which we came away with a lot more specificity of agreement than had been the case in the past.
Following that, five special envoys gathered in Washington – South Africa, the European Union, Sweden, Norway and myself. We had some consultations with Washington officials and then we travelled to New York together and met with a number of people in the [UN] Department of Political Affairs and the DPKO (Department of Peacekeeping Operations).
Probably in January sometime, Roland and my old friend Dumisani Kumalo (South Africa's envoy for the Great Lakes region, previously its UN ambassador and an anti-apartheid activist in the U.S.) and I are all going to travel together both to Angola – we met the Angolan ambassador in New York, and he was very keen on Angola becoming an active member of this joint diplomatic effort – and then… to China as well. [We] hope that the Chinese will join us as well in this in what would be more of a common effort than a divided, unilateral set of efforts.
What role does China play?
China has become a very active player in the DRC, commercially and also in security sector reform. They've got some trainers from China working in the DRC.
There's a lot of discouragement among donors who have worked on security sector reform in the last several years – there's been very little that's been sustainable. A number of local battalions have been trained up but those battalions were subsequently seldom paid, there was no clear command and control and often these units were disbanded.
So I think many people who were involved feel that it's almost necessary to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch and begin also to pay attention to the absence at present of a united, integrated army high command, because if there's no integrated, cohesive high command there's no superstructure into which to place all these local initiatives. So there's a lot of rethinking.
The other thing that people feel quite strongly about is that it would be very useful if we could harmonize a joint training doctrine so that whether it's Chinese trainers, or South African trainers, or Belgian trainers, that everyone's using basically the same guidelines so that units trained up by different national groups will be much more able to work effectively together.
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