02 November 1998
PROFESSOR CITES BASIC DILEMMA IN U.S. MILITARY AID TO AFRICA
(Georgetown University's Howe speaks on Worldnet) (570) By Jim Fisher-Thompson USIA Staff Writer WASHINGTON -- There is a "basic dilemma" that underlies U.S. military aid to Africa, says Georgetown University Professor Herb Howe, which is that there are no guarantees that it will be used for its intended purposes -- peacekeeping. Howe, who fielded questions October 29 from African audiences linked electronically to Washington via the U.S. Information Agency's (USIA's) Worldnet satellite broadcast service, said he believes the United States "very sincerely wants to further both its national interests and those of particular African states." But such aid is "fungible," said Howe, the director of African studies at Georgetown University, and "the problem with providing military technology, whether it's training or equipment, is that you never know how it's going to be used, in the next year or 10 years down the road." Howe is writing a book, Pax Africana: Can Africa Defend Itself?, that takes an overall look at how Africans are coping with defense and security issues. Enhancing the capabilities of African militaries for peacekeeping roles -- the major objective of the Clinton administration's African Crisis Response Initiative -- is a good idea, Howe said. But if those same militaries use U.S. training and equipment to support insurgencies in neighboring countries or to suppress democracy in their own states, then the aid is counterproductive. "Basically, we don't know what the end use of the [ACRI] training and equipment will be," he stressed. Howe acknowledged that "ACRI does have a [country] selection criterion that says, 'We will not help governments unless they have a record of democracy...and don't have a history of military coups or human rights abuses." Janet Fleischman, Washington director of Human Rights Watch's Africa division, told the Worldnet audience that the content of U.S. military programs, such as ACRI, is "fairly innocuous. It's training and things that one wouldn't normally have a problem with." The problem arises, she explained, in "the context" in which the U.S.-African military programs go forward. Often they occur "at a time when human rights abuses are continuing, when the military itself is implicated in those abuses, and therefore the image and the impression created by those training programs is often very different from the content of the training itself." That can be a problem, Fleischman asserted. And "the U.S. government and military have not paid sufficient attention to that kind of repercussion of the training and the impression that gives throughout Africa and elsewhere." Commenting on a viewer's suggestion that in its military programs the United States might perhaps "favor one African country over another," Fleischman responded: "Of course." Such aid is "an extension of U.S. policy," she said. "And the way the U.S. will pursue its diplomatic policies is mirrored in the way it's pursuing its military policies." The problem, she said, reiterating Howe's comment, is "that such training is fungible, and those militaries can use such training as they see fit further down the road." Benin is the latest African nation to request inclusion in the ACRI partnership, and 60 soldiers from the U.S. Army's 3rd Special Forces Group were recently sent there to help train the West African nation's troops. So far, 2,000 troops from Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Mali, and Ghana have trained under the initiative.
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