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-------- Original Message --------
| Subject: | Article on likely intervention in Mali: Reply |
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| Date: | Wed, 19 Dec 2012 00:29:34 +0000 |
| From: | Lorna Zukas <llueker@NU.EDU> |
| Reply-To: | H-NET List for African History and Culture <H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU> |
| To: | H-AFRICA@H-NET.MSU.EDU |
Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga mavhunga@mit.edu MIT Mali: Is Outside Military Intervention even an Option? I read Ramzy Baroud's piece on Mali with numbing shock, not so much for its call for military intervention, but in particular a Western intervention. In it I heard a familiar trope of Africa as the infant in diapers that has messed itself up again and the adults must intervene. If not, the mess might spill all over the place to the smelly detriment of everybody else. I was shocked because the piece initially sounded very savvy, before it degenerated into a wonderful account of war as a chess-game in which the various 'power play' actors slug it out. I did not see the mother crying out for her young, swallowed up by the bursting shell, the mile upon mile of refugees, carrying the little loads they can carry with them, perhaps trailing or pulling their tired goat along, just so as to get the little milk left to feed the rapidly malnourishing children. All I could see is the usual war story written by a journalist who is stunned by realities far too nuanced for him to comprehend, a Kony2012 mimic in which Africa the victim needs the world's conscience to survive. How then does one restore agency and centrality to the figure of the African who is not the warlord, the dictator, or Paris, London, and Washington, or even generalize the populations of the West as if all of them love that their countries wage war on and in other countries and intervene as they please? Here are a few things that could help us along that path, because I see in it the possibility of establishing across the world a progressive atmosphere that is capable, through new media, of reaching out to each other for good causes, instead of the alienating grammar that lumps 'Americans,' 'Africans,' and 'Britons' into monolithic masses of warmongers. 1. The Undecolonizable 'Postcolony': We need to understand that when states in Africa fail to hold together, it is always important to recall the deficit of cohesion they inherited, viz., unworkable structures and indeed physical technopolitical infrastructures, almost un-decolonizable, that the departing colonizer, whether forced out at gunpoint or leaving without blood spilled, bequeathed upon them. 2. The Fallacies of the Founding Fathers: How enthusiastically and naively the 'founding fathers' of the newly independent states embraced the idea of "national independence" as one unified people, sometimes even suppressing ethnically diverse divisions as counter-revolutionary and feudal, as they created the new 'nation'. Here we had collections of many different people masquerading as one nation. In other words, the language of taking power was 'nationalist' but the population itself, while excited about getting rid of oppression, probably sang from a different page and hymnbook than the 'nationalists' (viz., political elites who had imbibed Marx, Pan-Africanism, and Negritude). In most cases the leaders were the worst 'tribalists'. So there was no robust critique of what 'nation' entailed. Katanga, Biafra, Eritrea, the list of festering grievances against the top-down unitary system goes on and on. The debate on what alternatives there could have been was never put on the table or entertained. People died for it, many disappeared, yet it was an African debate worth having. 3. The Fallacies of Democracy: The cultures of governance either willingly imposed by the savvy political elite or the ethnically diverse populaces, or foisted upon these 'nationalists' by the departing colonizer to safeguard the ex-colonizer's financial and other interests was either contrary to or adaptable to the ethnic and religious-secular cleavages that had historically divided people prior to and during the colonial periods. In many cases, if one was Kikuyu or Shona and there was a multi-party democracy, they would always be in power. How then does democracy or multi-partyism become when rule by the majority becomes rule by the dominant, always-winning majority 'tribe'? Then there was the problem of democracy as a right and a responsibility. It has not quite become clear what part the ordinary person must play in it, whether the politicians are accountable to the ordinary person or owe accountability, what voting means, what power it wields, if at all. 4. Ordinary People Caught between Bad Rulers and Manipulating Interventionists: After Qaddafi, two disturbing trends. One is that of leaders who provoke rebellion from their own people, who seek outside forces in order to (re)assert their rights as democracy is said to permit. The other is a certain element within Western countries that intervene, or have a penchant for intervening in the name of spreading democracy or protecting vulnerable ordinary people. Contrary to popular generalization even from those who should know better, the parties that love to ride shotgun and those that believe in minding their 'Goddam business' and fixing their own domestic messes first are well known. Anyone remotely familiar with current affairs in America would know better. As African citizens in the world, we ought to be doing more to tell our own citizens that there is no monolithic America, Britain, or Germany, and that opportunities for progressive global citizenship exist even if they are not always going to be completely unanimous in outlook. Having experienced America as such, I am unable to make generalizations even if, when the nation intervenes, it is no longer 'Republican' or 'Democrat' never mind who instigated what. The particular elements that sees every opportunity of military confrontation in Africa and the Middle East as an opportunity to make billions of money through defense contracts, selling guns to the warring functions, and siphoning out blood resources will always pressure their favored political parties to send troops to 'trouble spots,' even when the reasons are rather stretched. For them, the existence of extremist elements genuinely dangerous to their own country's or global security is but just the perfect loss leader. But there are many Americans, Britons, or French who would obviously not feel so. War, no matter for what cause, is never fought out there solely between two armed military forces. It always involves the innocent, the civilians. They are the theater of war, its dispersed. The bad rulers who provoke their own people into revolt know that when needs must and they are attacked by outsiders, they will use the people as human shields to make the aggressors look like murderous. These intervening forces also do not hesitate to use devastating force upon civilians because they will say and sell their actions as means to removing a very bad person who was molesting his own people. 5. War is business. Dirty yes, but then, the real money lies somewhere in the dirt. The 'Responsibility to Protect' doctrine of the United Nations has made it easier to sell war as a humanitarian necessity. Who could say preventing Qaddafi from getting into Benghazi to 'massacre everybody' was not a noble, humanitarian mission? Who can say that intervening now in Mali to stabilize and make possible conditions for people to freely express themselves is a bad thing? 6. A Double Erasure: The problem is this: so much that we have seen of Africa since its decolonization constitutes an erasure of what ordinary people believed they were fighting for during anti-colonial struggles. And so much that they have got since represents everything they were fighting against in colonialism. Here we have politicians who cannot listen to the ordinary people and dictate what independence, what people fought for, ought to mean. And here are western countries that owned the colonies or supported the colonial structures that oppressed people, that people fought against, now returning to Africa as paragons of democracy, pushed by certain elements that believe in the old way of doing things. They get into alliances with dictators when it suits them, against the wishes of people who supported African political elites in removing the colonizers, in the hope that they would abhor the very system that was oppressing them. 7. Beyond Condescending Critiques of the West in Africa: So, a condescending critique that points out the witchcraft of the West in Africa while portraying African leaders or the ordinary people as mere victims is likely to be delusional and dated, just as one that portrays the incapacity of Africans to 'hold their marbles in one shell,' a shell presumed already empty anyway. What is even worse is to enjoy writing about suffering in Africa as if it is some chess-game—factions here, manipulative ex-colonizers intervening over there, a tank here, another over there, Africom here, Al-Qaeda over there. We are talking about people's lives. That's who war kills. It is not some game. For some reason, I cannot help but wonder if the doomsday scenario Ramzy Baroud paints of Mali is something one would not have said of just about every part of Africa once embroiled in war. That inevitability, certainly, would have been as true of Somalia as it is of eastern Congo, where the emergencies and necessities for intervention are far more dire, yet there is a reticence to intervene. Instead we have seen African countries volunteer troops to those countries without negating the path of negotiation. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) did not even have to militarily overtly intervene in Ivory Coast, but it has a track record of doing so if the emergencies necessitate. The idea that only military means are left scares me because it reifies this characterization of the African as irrational being given only to the menial and violent. When will a time come when there will be some modicum of acknowledgment about what Africa can and is doing to fix a geopolitical legacy of etch-a-sketch countries that colonizers put together to exploit the continent's wealth, then left without resolving those legacies of difference? Isn't it a fact that Africans were governed as separations through the dictum of divide and rule, only to be left to forge nations when the colonizer's heels were out the door? Conclusion The right formula to Africa's problems can only be accomplished if we ask Africans themselves what they think and think with them, not for them, or intervene on their behalf. We have heard that before and it's a scratched record totally at odds with the now. Instead, if the outside world must intervene at all, it could do well to add to the peacekeeping and peace enforcement capacity of ECOWAS to put boots on the ground and to send the essential negotiation teams. Africa not only has the AU to coordinate effectively its regional security needs. Every region has an economic and political bloc. Beside ECOWAS, there is the Southern African Development Community (SADC) which has done a good job so far in holding the political leadership in Zimbabwe to its 2008 agreement, as well as working to stabilize Eastern Congo and Mozambique. There is the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), arguably the biggest and most promising economic bloc and boasting strong militaries. Then there is, in the north, countries allied to the Arab League. The human resources for intervening and containing conflict are there. What they sometimes lack is a budget. That is a good, less arbitrary and alienating starting point. Always, Africans always want to talk things over, to deploy bodies on the ground to hold off the antagonists and pull them to negotiations. That is the African way of fighting a good fight--it must never exclude dialogue.
-- kenneth w. harrow faculty excellence advocate distinguished professor of english michigan state university department of english 619 red cedar road room C-614 wells hall east lansing, mi 48824 ph. 517 803 8839 harrow@msu.edu
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