Comment: Wounded Memories (by Rashid Zuberu)

Politicians like to talk vaguely about a "Global Village", but if foreign policy is to be ethical as well as effective, conflict resolution will have to entail more than getting two sides around a table. In Africa there has to be an acknowledgement that although Africans are primarily to blame for the state of their continent, the rich world has to shoulder its share of the blame as well. In the decades since decolonization, Africa has been ill-served by those who claim to be its friends.

Policy is too often driven by competition between the various powerful nations over a continent's vast resources. The West has argued for free trade, while it really wanted African states to open their doors to their goods while continuing to restrict exports from them. Instead of extending the ideas of social justice, they have all too often allowed their companies to deny Africans those very demands. How fair is it that a cocoa farmer in Ghana should get less than one penny from the proceeds of a bar of chocolate that sells for 90 pence in Britain? Why did it take a court battle in South Africa in 2001 to persuade the great pharmaceutical businesses that some people simply couldn't afford their AIDS drugs?

International schools are always set up for expatriates in a poor continent for people who claim that they love Africa, but really look down upon her citizens and her systems. What they mean is that they love what Africa stands for in their imaginations, as do the chattering classes in Western capitals who are right behind the idea of multiculturalism, but make sure they live as far as away as possible from those parts of the city where the cultures actually mix and sometimes clash. International schools usually make a point of advertising the fact that most of their teachers are trained abroad, which seems to be an implication that local teachers cannot be any good. These institutions are filled to the brim with the children of ambassadors, multinational executives, and so-called development experts. And always there is a smattering of pupils from the local elite who end up developing views and accents that are utterly at odds with the nation they are being groomed to run.

If Ghana's independence in 1957 had been a milestone for Africa so too was the coup of 1966, in which General Joseph Ankrah took power, deposing President Kwame Nkrumah, one of the historic leaders of the African anticolonial movement. Independence had marked the end of subjugation and the coup signified the start of a new era for this continent of changing fortunes. Since the first coup in Ghana, the continent has witnessed many more. There have been over eighty violent or unconstitutional changes of government, nearly ninety leaders have been deposed, and at least twenty-five heads of government have been killed in political violence. Thirty-one countries have been plagued by the violent overthrow of government and in twenty of them this kind of turmoil has occurred more than once. Benin had six coups, five different constitutions and twelve heads of state all within the first ten years of independence. It is a measure of Africa's volatile politics that some of these statistics will almost certainly be out of date.

In 1980 in Liberia, a gang of low-ranking soldiers, disgruntled about their pay and working conditions, overwhelmed the executive mansion and murdered President William Tolbert. This brought the American-Liberian rule to a violent end as 12 cabinet ministers accused of corruption were killed. Among the soldiers was a semi-literate master sergeant named Samuel Kanyon Doe. He claimed to be a reluctant leader, but it didn't take him long to acquire a taste for power and its trappings. He promoted himself to the rank of a General, arranged for an honorary doctorate to be awarded to him and indulged his desire for Mercedes Benzes. After a swift condemnation from the White House, America gave its support to the coup plotters. Diplomats were sent to Liberia, inviting Samuel Doe to the White House to lavish him with praise and offer economic and military aid and assistance to their new partner in West Africa.

Operation Restore Hope is code for an intervention based on the notion that Somalia's ills could be solved if one could sidestep the rapacious warlords and get food directly to the people who need it. It is a bit like organizing a soup kitchen for the homeless without stopping to work out why people are homeless in the first place. The U.S. SEALS were an advance guard, who came dressed to kill on the first occasion on which the International Community authorized a military intervention for purely humanitarian means, an act Sanctioned by UN Resolution 794.

Unlike the intervention in Korea in the 1950s, and Kuwait in 1991, troops were deployed without the prior approval of the local government. President George Bush (Senior) had sent his men to foreign fields before. In Panama and Kuwait it had been in the service of America's strategic interests, but this was supposed to be different. Here, gum-chewing, flag-loyal American boys were putting themselves in harm's way for no other reason than to uphold our common humanitarian values.

Racial stereotyping may well have played a part in America's ultimately fatal underestimation of the task at hand. They saw poverty but mistook it for weakness. The Americans, with their unthinking arrogance, managed to alienate the UN troops who has already been in Somalia for some months and had borne the brunt of the conflict. In the months that followed, the 25,000 or so troops began to behave as if they were just another faction. In theory, they made up the most powerful force in the land but power was not enough. In May 1993 they launched a manhunt for Mohammed Farah Aideed, the warlord who ran much of Mogadishu in the surrounding area, even putting up "Wanted" posters with a $25,000 asking price.

On 3 October 1993, American troops launched yet another raid, this time on a location deep in Aideed's territory where they believed he would be present at a meeting. A team of US Delta Force Commandos were dropped onto the site from helicopters. The plan was that they should make the arrests while the US army rangers made the area safe, but it all went disastrously wrong. No sooner had the commandos made their arrests than they realized that they had been surrounded with Aideed nowhere to be seen. The whole area was teeming with gunmen. It was as if every Somali man became a fighter that day. In every alleyway lay an ambush and out of every window an AK47 spewed hot metal. Not only had the Americans lost any advantage they might have had on the ground, but their air power was also dented. Two Black Hawk helicopters were drowned and one of the pilots was captured alive. It was well into the night before the Americans were rescued. Hundreds of Somalis were wounded, but the number of fatalities may never be known; however, it is known that eighteen American soldiers died – the highest number in a single battle since the Vietnam War.

The events of October 3 were recreated in Ridley Scott's film "Black Hawk Down", which was shown in Western cinemas in early 2002. I use the word "recreated" loosely, in its Hollywood sense. Scott managed to reduce the whole sorry episode to a simple tale of good guys versus bad guys. Though British by birth, he contrived to Americanize the film, twisting it into a story of heroic Americans struggling against nasty and evil Somalis. No mention was made of the so-called crack troops acting on flawed intelligence or even the fact that when the surviving commandos were rescued that evening, Malaysian soldiers played a brave and crucial part. Somali teenagers danced around the bodies in a the celebration of the weak when the strong are brought down to size. They were rejoicing in the belittling of America's power, not in the murder of one its sons.

When historians review the crisis in Somalia, they will identify in it the false dawn of the new world order. The question we should ask ourselves about Somalia is not why the famine happened, but whether it could have been avoided altogether. People went hungry because of the failure of the rains in successive years compounded by the effects of civil war; however, the war itself might have been avoided if foreign policy strategists in Washington, London, and Paris had been as concerned about the effects of post-Cold War transition in Africa as they were about its repercussions in Europe. Huge amounts of money, some of which was originally destined for Africa, were poured into central and Eastern Europe in order to ease the passage from totalitarian rule to quasi- democracy. Basically, Africans didn't matter, or at least not as much as Europeans.

Somalia did to the collective U.S. psyche in the 1990s what Vietnam had done in the 1970s. Rejected and hurt, Americans vowed privately to stay away from this ungrateful and complicated world. After sustained and concerted pleas from their allies in Europe, they reluctantly got involved in Bosnia, but when it came to Africa, no amount of pressure would persuade the White House to put its men in harm's way. So when the first whispering of genocide in Rwanda reached America's diplomats at the UN two years later, they turned their backs.

Africa is much more complex than its detractors often suggest. If you carry away one thought let it be this: that although Africa's failings are many, so are the reasons for them. Africa's conundrum is not its own. It got where it is today because the vast majority of its people were let down primarily by our leaders, but also by those in the rich world who made common cause with dictators and despots.

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