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| Author: | Princeton N. Lyman |
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June 12, 2003
Council on Foreign Relations
Council on Foreign Relations
New York
June 12, 2003
Note: Remarks as prepared for delivery
Thank you very much, Frank. Thank you Pete Peterson.
I am deeply honored to have been selected for the Ralph Bunche Chair. It is a major responsibility!
The establishment of this chair is very significant. It is a strong statement by the Council that Africa must be a permanent, significant focus of American foreign policy. That is, strangely, something new in the world of policy analysis. This is not just the first permanent chair in Africa policy studies in the Council on Foreign Relations; it is the only endowed chair for Africa policy in any foreign policy institution in the United States.
It is also a tribute to Les Gelb, the President of the Council -- until the end of this month! Les made this happen. He determined to make it happen and would not rest until it did. Over the past year, he organized, cajoled, persuaded, proselytized, charmed, and seduced everyone he could reach to make sure that this chair would be funded and established by the end of 2002. You just had to see Les in action to know how persuasive he was. It is indeed one more great tribute to him, among so many achievements in his leadership of the Council, that he has put Africa firmly and fixedly on the radar screen of American foreign policy.
I also want to pay tribute to Carl Ware and Vincent Mai who co-chaired the fund raising committee. I want to express appreciation from all of us who care about Africa and its importance to American policy, to Les, to Carl and Vincent and to all those individuals and corporations that contributed and made the endowment possible. Thank you all very much.
I want to acknowledge as well, the accompanying gift from the Behrman family for a new annual lecture and dinner on Africa policy in the memory of Darryl G. Behrman. This will complement the annual David Rockefeller lecture and add another high profile event on Africa each year.
But it is all the persons in this room, and others not here tonight, that have kept the issues of Africa on the agenda of American foreign policy, who have devoted their professional lives to these issues, and indeed who have lobbied the Council over the years for this more permanent commitment to African affairs -- you are the ones that deserve the credit for putting Africa on this more prominent stage. The chair is a tribute to all of you.
I want to acknowledge too the work of Salih Booker and Gwendolyn Mikell who led Africa programs in the Council for many years, without the benefit of an endowed chair! Their work has provided a solid base on which to build.
Ralph Bunche
This chair is named for Ralph Bunche. It is a wonderful coincidence that we inaugurate this chair as we celebrate the centenary of Ralph Bunche’s birth. We are honored tonight to have Ralph Bunche’s son and other members of the family with us. .
I am particularly moved to hold a chair named for Ralph Bunche. I grew up in San Francisco, and I recall (as a child to be sure) the signing of the United Nations charter in San Francisco. It was a big thing for my family. My parents had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Having followed with deep distress the terrible events of the second world war, they felt as so many did that the United Nations might open up a new age in international cooperation for peace and progress. It has not quite been so. But Ralph Bunche not only believed in that potential but came as close as anyone has to realizing it. His extraordinary contributions to peace in the Middle East, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize, and in Africa are among the finest achievements of multilateral diplomacy.
It is another irony, or coincidence if you will, that we inaugurate this chair, in honor of Ralph Bunche, just weeks after the United Nations authorized a peacekeeping force for the Congo. Ralph Bunche largely invented U.N. peacekeeping, and one of the first such deployments was in the Congo in 1960. Bunche devoted himself to trying to keep the chaotic and dangerous situation there from descending into all-out civil war. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold lost his life in the same quest.
That we are here, in 2003, witnessing a new crisis in that country, and a new test for the international community, tells us much about how far we have come and the challenges we still face.
Fascination of Africa
But before delving into that, and what may lie ahead in this new program, I want to talk a bit about what makes Africa not just a significant focus of policy, but what makes it so spellbinding, so compelling for those of us who have devoted much of our careers to it. Once one becomes engaged in Africa, it is almost impossible to let go. There are a lot of people in this room who know that experience. C. Payne Lucas and Kevin Lowther put their finger on it some years ago when they wrote: in a continent with some of the harshest environments, one sees a stirring struggle of noble and sensitive people. “Africa is not a place for the weak and lazy,” they wrote. “Africans are survivors, by necessity.” Reporters may focus on coups, corruption, and disasters, but those do not tell of the accomplishments achieved through painful trial and error. “We do not learn much” they went on, “about the evolution of political systems appropriate to African conditions, about the ability of African farmers to coax food from the soil or about the ‘soul’ of Africa -- the people’s understanding of their place in the cosmos.” “While Africa needs help from abroad,” they concluded, “Africans, in their deep consciousness of nature, inhabit in the words of Kenneth Kaunda, a larger world than the sophisticated westerner.” That is their gift to mankind.
We need to remember those insights as we look, without blinkers to be sure, at the troubles, the travails, the disappointing setbacks that have occurred on the continent. In that mode, we need to look and indeed marvel at some of the extraordinary accomplishments, accomplishments that offer lessons to the rest of the world.
Purposes of the Chair
The Council had this perspective in mind when it established the purposes of the Ralph Bunche chair. The objectives are threefold:
There are a variety of ways in which these objectives can be achieved.
But I have a strong bias about the priorities of this chair. I believe that the primary outcome of all these activities must be to have an impact on policy. Beyond analysis and understanding, which are critical objectives to be sure, the various programs under this chair should lead to solid policy recommendations and we should use the resources and influence of the council to have those policy implications considered at the highest and most relevant levels of our government, multilateral institutions and in Africa.
Growing importance of Africa
All of this happens at a propitious time. For several reasons, some positive, some unfortunately, negative, Africa is rapidly assuming a greater importance for the United States. One of the reasons is the recognition that in failed or failing states, there lies the potential for terrorist exploitation, for the trafficking of drugs and of precious resources in support of both conflict and terrorism, and that there are dangers to broader American interests and indeed to American lives. Witness, the recent French evacuation -- and note French evacuation -- of 100 Americans from Liberia as the civil war there reached the capital.
NATO’s supreme commander recently predicted that NATO’s carrier battle groups of the future would spend half the time going down the west coast of Africa. A senior defense official added, “Why do we need a joint defense force in Germany where there’s nothing happening?” You have to have troops close to ports and airfields that are closer to the action.”
Some of that action is more constructive than indicated in those comments, if not free of complications. Africa is expected to account for 25% of U.S. oil imports by 2015. Significant offshore deposits are being developed off Angola and Nigeria and new production is being developed in Equatorial Guinea and Sao Tome and Principe. Production through the Chad-Cameroon pipeline is expected to begin quite soon. One American oil company plans $100 billion of investment in new production facilities in the coming years, of which $30 billion will be in Africa. Natural gas supplies will also increase in importance as Shell’s third and fourth stages of its Nigeria LNG investment come on line.
Africa is thus not only a source of conflict and instability. There is much going on in new trade opportunities, regional cooperation, and political development. Africa is also playing an increasingly coordinated and active role in world trade talks. Indeed the success of the Doha round may well depend on the ability of negotiators to meet African demands in agriculture and medicines.
The good news
Part of the work of the Council is to promote recognition that in Africa there are processes under way that are not only relevant to Africa but also to American policy generally. Recalling C. Payne Lucas and Kevin Lowther’s comments about evolving political systems, we see in Africa today a wide variety of evolving democracies, working to address the complex legacies of colonial boundaries, populations diverse in language and religion, and in many cases situations of abject poverty. In Mali, Senegal, Zambia, Benin, Gambia, Kenya, Malawi, Ghana, and now Nigeria democratically elected governments have survived transitions and reelections, have sought various ways at ensuring inclusion, and are putting down roots for stronger civil and political institutions. South Africa continues to demonstrate its remarkable ability to address historical depredations with stable economic policies, a spirit of reconciliation and commitment to multi-racial democracy.
Understanding and lending support to these processes is important for American policy. But there are also valuable lessons from Africa as the United States supports the evolution of democracy in central Asia, the Caucuses and now the Middle East. Earlier this month. the Council sponsored a meeting on the lessons of truth and reconciliation programs in Africa -- South Africa, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone -- for post-war Iraq. Africa is in other words not something separate, but part of some of the most important developments in the world today, a participant, a contributor, and source of experience and wisdom. That is a message that the Council can bring to the fore.
Problem areas: conflict
Africa is also beset with challenges and tragedies that are unfortunately also of massive proportions. Conflicts rage across central and west Africa, and threaten in Burundi and internally in Zimbabwe. An important positive development is the growing determination of African nations to take the lead in addressing the conflicts on the continent. first through ECOMOG and ECOWAS in west Africa, and through IGAD in Sudan and more recently in the Congo, African nations and diplomats are in the forefront of efforts to bring an end to devastating wars. The Africa Union has just dispatched a peacekeeping force to Burundi. But Africa cannot alone address the magnitude of the tasks involved, political or materially. Yet we have not established the modes or means of appropriate international cooperation to make these efforts work. In almost every case, we are improvising, and all to often making the same mistakes over and over.
We spoke earlier of the Congo. How is it, we must ask, that still -- after Rwanda, after Sierra Leone, -- the United States and the international community is reluctant to commit the necessary resources and peacekeeping capacity to prevent massive human disaster? As the International Rescue Committee has recently pointed out, more than 3 million people have died in the war in the Congo, a tragedy that barely broke through the news media’s focus on Iraq and the Middle East. We could surely have known that if it required 11,000 UN peacekeepers to bring an end to the tragedies of sierra Leone, 5,000 UN peacekeepers would be virtually helpless to address crises in the painfully complicated peace process in the Congo. Only after terrible human rights depredations has the force been increased. Reluctance also bedeviled efforts to provide UN peacekeepers to Cote d’Ivoire, where containing that conflict is perhaps one of the most critical priorities on the continent today.
There are other areas of international cooperation that need examination. One is the trafficking of small and medium arms, trafficking that has served to aggravate conflict, magnify traditional disputes into larger and more menacing civil wars, undermine UN embargoes and sanctions, and more recently serve terrorists operating on the east coast of the continent. The Fund For Peace has done important work in documenting this problem and the policy implications. The Council can do well to build on this effort to focus on the policies that the United States and the international community as a whole should undertake.
Our interests in energy intersect with our concern over conflict, human rights, and reconstruction. Studies in this area need to examine with corporations, governments, NGOs and other relevant stakeholders how responsibilities can be allocated and relevant actors resourced to assure justice, environmental protection, and sound and transparent use of proceeds.
In sum, the issues of conflict and reconstruction must be high on our agenda. In this area, to broaden attention to Africa and bring new eyes and minds to the issues, the Africa program will collaborate with the Council’s Center for Preventive Action, which has heretofore focused on Asia and Latin America, to inaugurate at least two African studies in the coming year.
Health
For many years, improvements in health were considered a by-product of development. Only recently, through the work of the World Health Organization, and its study headed by Jeffrey Sachs, have we come to realize that poor health is a critical obstacle to growth and that improvement in health must be recognized as an important investment. For example, the death and morbidity from malaria is now recognized to reduce Africa’s annual growth by 1%. AIDS lowers it another percentage point.
Unfortunately, this comes at a time when Africa is ravaged by the worst pandemic of modern times, HIV/AIDS. I don’t need to go into with this audience the enormous impact this disease is having on Africa. It is cutting down Africa’s most productive populations, some of its most skilled, eating into the military and security forces, and leaving children and families gravely weakened. The World Food Program found HIV/AIDS to have been the most serous aggravating factor in the recent food crisis in southern Africa.
We are only beginning to understand however the long-term consequences of this and other health factors on the capacity for governance, on social cohesion, the direction and intensity of conflict, and on the broader aspects of development. This is especially important as the international community responds to this situation with more funding, more programs, and more advocacy. We cannot assume that we can treat this pandemic, or health in general in a vacuum. Health impinges on our interest in governance, democratization, conflict prevention, and development.
For example, we can only welcome the President’s initiative to triple the U.S. funding for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, to a total of $15 billion, in Africa and the Caribbean over the next five years. This is an enormous breakthrough and all those who worked on this issue, in business and policy circles, in the Congress and the Executive, in foundations and corporations, deserve an enormous amount of gratitude for making this happen. It can truly be a beacon to the rest of the world to match and surpass this contribution.
But, without taking away for a moment the importance and value of that step, we must also recognize that the United States will be spending three times as much on these health problems as for all other development programs in Africa together. This has enormous implications for African governments as they seek to respond not only to the health crisis but other aspects of poverty.
This is the one legitimate fear of those who, though erroneously, were resistant to recognizing aids for the threat it is, i.e. that our attention to HIV/AIDS would crowd out our broader concern for poverty, for malnutrition, for development of jobs and education, for overcoming the ancillary factors that made Africans more vulnerable to the disease itself.
This need not be the case, but it is in need of close attention. There is another presidential initiative that could add significantly to Africa’s development resources, i.e. the Millennium Challenge Account. In fact, however, few Africa countries will benefit from this account in the first one or two years. Moreover, the various qualifying requirements that are now being placed on African and other potential recipients for the President’s HIV/AIDS initiative, the Millennium Challenge Account; for the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria; for the World Bank’s strategy for the reduction of poverty; and various other programs pose enormous challenges to African managerial capacity. We are far from simplifying the aid business despite all the complaints about it.
Those concerned with Africa must monitor carefully how these and other funds impact on Africa’s capacity to manage the plethora of demands upon it. We must assure that these and other funds build basic infrastructure, increase government capacity, and mitigate the social and political fallout of health issues.
Once again, the Council provides us a unique opportunity to broaden attention to some of these issues on the African continent as well as recognize their relevance to the impact of HIV/AIDS and other health issues in China, India, Southeast Asia and increasingly in Russia and the CIS states. Thanks to the Gates Foundation, the Council will soon inaugurate an endowed chair on global health, one that will build on the work of the earlier Council study on health and foreign policy and the subsequent health roundtable. The Africa program will develop specific programs to focus on the implications of the various health issues for Africa and will work closely with the new global health programs in carrying out the necessary studies and analyzing their relevance beyond Africa.
Development
On other aspects of development, we will take advantage again of other sources within the Council to broaden attention to Africa and to tap into highly skilled expertise. We plan to work with Jeff Sachs’ program in support of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals to include several Africa case studies, examining progress and obstacles in advancing education, job creation, food security, and other development objectives. The Council’s new Maurice R. Greenberg Center for Geoeconomic Studies will be another focus of collaboration. Issues of trade and technology must also be an integral part of these studies, and fortunately these collaborative partners bring such expertise to the table.
James Harmon has just completed a study on attracting investment capital to Africa. This provides us a solid basis for pursuing this issue in the coming year. The Council is planning a formal presentation of this study in New York in the fall.
Ah but reality!
Oh, oh! I hear Michael Peters, the Council’s Executive Vice President and Director of Studies, mumbling under his breath. “Didn’t I tell you, Princeton, just a few days ago, that with one person in this chair, and even with one able research assistant, and even with a good roundtable of experts and collaborators, one cannot do everything at once, not even in the first year or two!”
Well, I just cannot resist looking at the wide array of issues that deserve our attention. And there are several I haven’t mentioned. But Mike, I promise you, we won’t try to do them all at once. That is the benefit of this audience tonight. The expertise here, on which we must draw heavily, is needed to guide this program to the proper priorities, the ways for even wider collaboration, and for having the intended impact.
And as I said earlier, the point is to have impact. It is very important to broaden knowledge, and very important to widen appreciation of Africa’s role in our world interests. But in the end, this program should have impact on policy. That has to be the test of our success.
We also need to keep from drowning in the negatives. The South African novelist and poet Mangane Wally Serote wrote, during a dark time in that country’s history, “Where, where is that magic moment, that would bind us and tie us, that would make our brief life a glitter and sparkle with ripples of hope.” That is the spirit in which we should undertake this work on Africa. Face the issues squarely but with ripples of hope.
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