For an article last week on Salon.com, Laura McClure did something mischievous: She called the leaders of International answer (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and asked why they don't care about Congo. ANSWER, you may remember, coordinated this winter's protest against the Iraq war. But its agenda is far broader than that. As the preeminent umbrella organization of the hard left, ANSWER directs its outrage across the globe. This September, for instance, it plans "International Days of Protest against Occupation and Empire, from Palestine to Iraq to the Philippines to Cuba and Everywhere."
But, as McClure found out, "everywhere" does not include Congo. In fact, it doesn't include Africa at all. answer has organized no protests and issued no statements on Africa's four most ravaged countries Congo, Liberia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe although they contain exponentially more oppression and suffering than the four targeted by the group's "International Days of Protest."
Answer is symptomatic of the left in general. A LexisNexis search going back to 2000 finds not a single reference to the crises in Congo, Liberia, Sudan, or Zimbabwe from Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Michael Moore, Michael Lerner, Gore Vidal, Cornel West, or Howard Zinn. In Congo alone, according to the International Rescue Committee, five years of civil war have taken the lives of a mind-boggling 3.3 million people. How can the leaders of the global left men and women ostensibly dedicated to solidarity with the world's oppressed, impoverished masses not care?
The answer, I think, is that the left isn't galvanized by victims; it's galvanized by victimizers. The theme of answer's upcoming protest, after all, is "Occupation and Empire." In a recent essay, Roy explained that "the real and pressing danger, the greatest threat of all, is the locomotive force that drives the political and economic engine of the U.S. government." In other words, imperialism, what she elsewhere calls "a super-power's self-destructive impulse toward supremacy, stranglehold, global hegemony."
But, if the greatest injustice in the world is U.S. imperialism, the world's greatest injustices must be found where U.S. imperialism is strongest. And, here, Africa poses a problem. Africa, after all, has less contact with the United States than any other part of the world. The continent accounts for less than 1 percent of U.S. foreign investment, it receives less than 0.l percent of U.S. military assistance, and it hosts no permanent American troop deployments. If you are a left-wing activist scouring the globe for places suffocating under America's "stranglehold," you'll pass right over sub-Saharan Africa. And, even if you do find U.S. imperialism in Africa, you'll find it in countries stable and prosperous enough to attract investment and cooperate against terrorism, not in the disaster zones of Congo, Liberia, Zimbabwe, and Sudan.
During the cold war, the left's preoccupation with U.S. empire didn't require it to so thoroughly ignore African suffering. In the 1970s and 1980s, fearful of growing Soviet influence on the continent, the United States enlisted dictators and would-be dictators such as Liberia's Samuel Doe, Somalia's Mohammed Siad Barre, Congo's Mobutu Sese Seko, and Angola's Jonas Savimbi as clients. The left rightly saw U.S. support as critical to the tyranny and war that blighted so many African lives (even if it turned a blind eye to similar tyranny among Soviet-backed leaders, such as Ethiopia's Mengistu Haile Meriam).
But, when the ussr withdrew from Africa in the late '80s, so did the United States. In Somalia, Liberia, and Congo, U.S.-backed dictators quickly fell, but their would-be successors lacked the superpower backing to consolidate control. The result in all three countries has been Hobbesian civil war, sometimes drawing in neighboring governments and sowing devastation across whole regions.
The United States is not entirely blameless in this post-cold-war anarchy. It sells arms that sometimes find their way to blood-curdling militias. And it represents a market for the diamonds, copper, and coltan that these militias sell to fund their wars. But the United States is no longer a critical force in these countries' politics. The key players are the local warlords and regional power brokers who compete for power with minimal interference from the outside world men such as Liberia's Charles Taylor, who has helped destabilize four West African states, and the leaders of Uganda, Rwanda, and Zimbabwe, who have plundered Congo and plunged it into civil war.
By any reasonable assessment, in fact, Africa's post-cold-war disaster zones suffer not from too much U.S. imperialism but from too little. In Rwanda, Congo, and Liberia, the United States stood back while feckless, under-equipped peacekeepers mostly from the developing world failed to stanch the bloodletting. Only when a former colonial power has stepped in, as Britain has in Sierra Leone, have large numbers of African lives been saved. Hopefully, the Bush administration will follow suit in Liberia. But, so far, the United States has avoided acting like an empire in post-cold- war Africa, and, thus, the hard left has found little cause for moral concern.
The irony is that, in paying attention to Africa only when the United States wields power there, the hard left is not that different from the right. Once Africa was no longer a site of superpower competition, conservatives largely lost interest as well. Even today, most conservatives (with some honorable exceptions) oppose a Liberia intervention, which they deem "foreign policy as social work." The right, which on Iraq and Cuba speaks in high moral tones, adopts a cold and narrow realism when it comes to Africa, where it blithely assumes (sometimes ignorantly see Ryan Lizza, "Ace of Diamonds," page 14) the United States has no interests. http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20030721&s=lizza072103 Only the much-maligned liberal media for instance, ABC's "Nightline," which in September 2001 broadcast a stunning five-part series from Congo and liberal groups, such as Human Rights Watch, have labored to keep Africa's crises in the spotlight. And it is primarily liberal internationalist voices, such as The Washington Post editorial page, which have pushed for intervention in Liberia and an intensified U.S. role in Congo. If Africa's suffering represents a challenge to the conscience of the world, it is clear who on the U.S. ideological spectrum is willing to face it and who would rather turn away.
Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR.
Copyright 2003, The New Republic
-- Michael Pugliese
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