adminbetter now without his delaying it and with some members no longer feeling as intimidated by him as they did. (What does Gaddafi’s death mean for Africa? (Africa Review: 22nd October, 2011).
Mr Zuma should know better. After all, he is not only the former chief intelligence officer of the ANC’s armed wing, the Umkhonto we Sizwe, but also the chairman of the AU High-Level ad hoc
Committee on Libya, who spent the recent months pleading with NATO allies to listen to the views of the AU, a regional body officially recognised by the UN as the first port of call for all issues affecting Africa.
For better or worse, since independence, the west has applied different strategies to maintain its political, economic and military presence in Africa. The intervention in Libya is only the latest in a long list of tried and failed strategies. From the sixties to early eighties, the west instigated violent military coups to remove alleged communist sympathisers such as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Kwame
Nkrumah of Ghana and Milton Obote of Uganda to mention but the most prominent. They abandoned this strategy because it gave birth to monsters they could not control, such as Idi Amin in Uganda, Siad Bare in Somalia, Mengistu Haile Miriam in Ethiopia, Jonas Savimbi of Angola, and Field Marshals Bedel Bokasa and Mobutu Sese Seko of Central Africa and the Democratic Republic of Congo (now Zaire) respectively.
By the time these leaders left, some of their unfortunate countries had become failed states in reality and symbolically. The Somali and the Central African Republic people are still paying the price to this day.
From late 80s to until early 1990s, they supported the experiment with multi-party elections coupled with economic liberalisation through the so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) across Africa.
These experiments exposed unprecedented financial and political corruption, which made a few people very rich and gave them total control over state institutions, making change of leadership through free and fair elections virtually impossible in Uganda and other countries. The failed experiment with multi-party democracy has led directly to the present strategy of “humanitarian intervention,” first proposed by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Washington in April 2004.
Mr Blair’s announcement followed the successful British intervention in the civil war in Sierra Leone and the ongoing NATO operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although some of these intervention operations were launched with full United Nations authorisation, the one in Iraq evidently lacked such authority, and has since been proved that it was fraudulently sold to the world as necessary step to disarm Saddam Hussein.
There are four different but closely related factors that underpin the so-called humanitarian intervention.
The first was the advent of 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, leading to the Security Council resolution 1373 of 28, September 2011. It called on all member states to “take all necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist acts, including by provision of early warning to other States by exchange of information.” The second factor is the close relationship between the United Nations, especially the Security Council and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). The third factor is the doctrine of the “Coalition of the Willing” which, curiously, has always been led or composed of mainly NATO member countries. The last factor is the deployment of the United States Africa Common (AFRICOM), which has surrounded the continent with US warships, aircraft carriers, and littered
African skies with satellite surveillance and facilities. – African Executive.
- Sam Akaki is a former independent parliamentary candidate in the last UK general elections. Director, Democratic Institutions for Poverty Reduction in Africa (DIPRA), London. DayAfrica.com
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