Africa

It doesn't work.

By Jason McLure

As Islamist militants tighten their grip over southern Somalia, the international community is searching in vain for ways to keep the country's weak, U.N.-backed government from collapsing. The latest plan: sanctions for nearby Eritrea, which has channeled weapons to Somalia's Shabab and other Islamist militias. At the recent African Union summit in Libya, the continent's leaders reiterated their call for the U.N. Security Council to take action; condemnation of Eritrea has resonated from every corner of the globe.

There's no doubt that Eritrea has an awful government (Human Rights Watch recently labeled the country a "giant prison"). As gratifying as it may be to punish bad behavior, however, the question here is different: Would sanctions actually change this tiny dictatorial state or its delinquent behavior? It's a quandary that has plagued policymakers for decades -- from Cuba to North Korea to Burma. And despite sanctions' status as a go-to foreign-policy gadget, the answer is often no. When used on already-isolated regimes, sanctions may even be counterproductive. The Eritrean example shows us why.

Sanctions are made to cut countries off from vital international exchange. The trouble is, Eritrea already trades less with the outside world than any country in Africa and places 210th out of all 226 countries and islands for global commerce. The country's president, Isaias Afewerki, isn't interested in being a globe-trotting statesman. He regularly skips African Union summits and meetings of East African leaders. And anyway, sanctions won't deter his few, less savory allies in Libya, Sudan, and Iran who provide Eritrea with aid and diplomatic support. Sanctions will only drive the Eritrean government further into the arms of its dubious allies.

Nor will sanctioning Eritrea choke off the flow of arms and money heading toward Somalia's militants. There has been an arms embargo on Somalia for more than a decade, and it has been about as effective as a chastity belt on Silvio Berlusconi. The country has a 3,000-km coastline that the world has struggled to patrol for pirates -- let alone under-the-radar arms shipments. On land, Mogadishu is home to a dizzying array of traditional money-transfer services that keep Somalia's economy from further collapse -- and its Islamists propped up with foreign funds. Besides, as the United Nations has pointed out, both African Union peacekeepers and Ethiopian troops have apparently sold arms and equipment in Mogadishu to their ostensible enemies.

Aside from being ineffective, sanctions on Eritrea could carry a rather debilitating liability for the international community. Sanctioning Eritrea would dangerously border on taking sides in Eritrea's frozen conflict with Ethiopia, one that has stretched on in one form or another for nearly a decade. Following the two countries' border 1998-2000 war, Ethiopia refused to give back land that a U.N.-backed border commission awarded to Eritrea. So both sides took their struggle to Somalia, where Eritrea backs Islamist militias and Ethiopia props up a flailing government. Eritrea has behaved badly, true, but both countries have been arming Somali militias in a proxy war for years. The United Nations and the United States would do better to mediate the Ethiopia-Eritrea conflict rather than taking sides.

These lessons apply to sanctions on dictators more broadly. How do you punish North Korea with sanctions when its trading partners are already limited to a handful of countries -- none of which are likely to pay heed to a harsher set of rules? How do you choke Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe when his strongest rationale for staying in power is to save his country from the hands of countries who would (and do) impose sanctions? Perhaps it's no wonder that such countries' leaders not only survive sanctions, but use them to justify bad behavior.

After 18 years of civil war, it's possible there's nothing outsiders can do to fix Somalia. Certainly, sanctions on Eritrea are not the answer. Trying to get Ethiopia and Eritrea to stop using the country as a proxy battleground would be worth a shot.

Jason McLure is a journalist based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His reporting has appeared in Newsweek, The Economist, and Bloomberg News.

Photo: ASHRAF SHAZLY/AFP/Getty Images

As violence escalates again in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, the world must recognize the need for sustained attention and intervention.

By Colin Thomas-Jensen and Rebecca Feeley

This winter, the militaries of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda -- much to our surprise, given their historical antipathy -- joined forces in an offensive against a rebel group based in eastern Congo: the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or the FDLR. Led by the architects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, the FDLR has terrorized Congolese civilians for nearly 15 years. The group's presence has also served as a pretext for Rwandan intervention that has frequently worsened an already grim humanitarian situation in eastern Congo.

We and many other observers predicted at the time that the joint offensive would lead FDLR rebels to conduct reprisal attacks upon civilians. So, we weren't surprised to hear that atrocities against civilians have escalated dramatically in recent weeks. In one instance, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Congo, MONUC, reported that the FDLR had massacred more than 60 people in the village of Busurungi. Local officials tell us that the FDLR killed nearly twice that number, after clashes with the notoriously inept Congolese Army.

While human rights groups catalog atrocities and advocacy groups sound the alarm, U.N. officials tell us that the situation in eastern Congo is "tense but under control." The gap between the rosy assessments we frequently hear from MONUC and the grim accounts we hear from Congolese affected by the conflict is outrageous and infuriating. And as the Congolese government launches a new offensive this summer, we think the worst is ahead.

Doing research and advocacy to help end the crisis in the Great Lakes region around Congo can feel like screaming into an empty room. The region has been so violent for so long that the United Nations, donor governments, and the press have become numb. But there is a cure to even the worst cases of "conflict fatigue": an understanding that solutions are within reach if we just have the will to pursue them -- solutions that can prevent thousands of senseless deaths.

With greater operational capacity, firmer direction from the U.N. Security Council, and decisive leadership on the ground, MONUC could provide greater protection for civilians.

With high-level multilateral diplomacy led by the United States and the European Union, the Congolese and Rwandan governments could go beyond their current uneasy military cooperation and achieve lasting political solutions to the regional conflict. With bigger incentives for disarming, an emphasis on civilian protection, and tactical support from Western militaries, a regional counterinsurgency strategy could succeed against the FDLR.

With greater coordination among donors, conditioned support to the Congolese government could begin to end impunity, professionalize the Army, and improve governance. And with corporate due diligence in the mining sector, the Congolese could begin to benefit from their country's immense natural resources while drying up the trade in conflict minerals that remain a lifeblood for predatory militias.

That's a laundry list of "coulds," but in a place like Congo -- a desperately poor country where nearly 6 million people have died from 13 years of chronic conflict -- the world has a lot of work to do. Anyone advocating for an end to the conflict must be content with slow and steady progress and not expect a quick fix. In fact, this is true of most conflicts. Conflict fatigue only takes root when we forget that.

Colin Thomas-Jensen is policy advisor to Enough, the Center for American Progress's project to end genocide and crimes against humanity. Rebecca Feeley is Enough's former field researcher based in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.  

UN Photo/Marie Frechon

South Africa's next president will have to work hard to reclaim the country's moral leadership -- and its place at the international table.

By Janis van der Westhuizen

When the South African government failed to grant a visa to the Dalai Lama last month, ostensibly because his presence would distract attention from the 2010 World Cup festivities, the decision triggered a domestic outcry. Although foreign policy has rarely played a role in South African election campaigns, this issue hit a nerve -- resurrecting a long-standing debate about South Africa's commitment to international human rights. Failing to tread the moral high ground in foreign policy, many feared, would rob South Africa of its soft power on the world stage. In fact, that process may already be underway.

The South Africa of 2009 is very different from the one governed by Nelson Mandela in the mid-1990s. The iconography of an irreproachable Mandela gave the country an equally unblemished reputation and opened diplomatic doors often denied to others. Mandela's stature was not the only factor. South Africa used its reconciliation process as the basis for its role as a global bridge builder, mediating in conflicts far from home, such as East Timor, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and the Lockerbie incident. It played a crucial role in getting African support for the international campaign to ban land mines and was instrumental in extending the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In fact, shortly before U.S. involvement in Iraq, Colin Powell in his address to the UN Security Council heralded South Africa’s decision to unilaterally disassemble its nuclear capacity as a model for Iraq to follow. South Africa occupied a degree of symbolic power disproportionate to its size.

Of course, South Africa's popularity had to come to an end -- and it did, abruptly, in 1995 when Mandela decided to withdraw the country's representative from Nigeria in protest of the military execution of activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Many Western powers had done the same, prompting accusations that South Africa failed to conform to African norms; it was a "white country with a black president."

Since then, South Africa has struggled to balance its identity between that of an African regional power and a global moral leader. Mandela's South Africa won points in the West for its emphasis on international human rights. Yet some South African foreign- policy hands counter that conforming to regional sentiments will bolster the country's African and developing-country credentials and boost its acceptability as a continental leader. South Africa has tried to evade this dilemma by, for example, deferring controversial cases -- such as the U.N. Security Council debates about Zimbabwe and Burma -- to other bodies within the U.N. system.

Unfortunately, through its ambivalence, South Africa is implicitly privileging continental solidarity over its waning moral authority, as was most evident in the case of Zimbabwe. Pretoria prioritized protecting a fellow African government over upholding human rights. The result has been disastrous for both countries. While Zimbabwe fell into disarray, Thabo Mbeki, the former South African president and negotiator on a deal for Zimbabwe's transitional government, lost much of his credibility on the world stage. Thanks in part to his unwillingness to push Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe into concession, Mbeki was unable to sell to the West his ambitious agenda of a kind of Marshall Plan for Africa.

There is much work to be done in reconstructing South Africa's soft power after the Zimbabwe debacle. Yet after the upcoming South African elections on April 22, the likely next president, Jacob Zuma, may well be tempted to spend more time at home. If he can demonstrate an unflinching commitment to the rule of law there, he might lay the groundwork for regaining the confidence of the international community.

But if South Africa does not want to become "just another country" in Africa, Zuma needs to demonstrate that global leadership entails rising above pressures to kowtow to bloc sentiments. Maintaining soft power will require South Africa to take risks and hold unpopular regional or even global positions. That means representing independence by deciding whether to grant the Dalai Lama a visa, give Mugabe another chance, or host Fidel Castro, not based upon conformity, but on merit. In a word, South Africa will have to answer, at last, to its own uncertain identity.

Janis van der Westhuizen is associate professor in political science at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and Lester B. Pearson visiting professor at Dalhousie University in Canada.

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