Military

As delivered

The Architecture of Peace in Africa and the World

I'm joined at the podium by my friend and colleague, Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. She was President Clinton's senior advisor on Africa in the White House during the first term of his presidency and has served in the same capacity for Secretary Albright for the past three years. She will participate in our discussion.

Susan, Ambassador Lewis and I wish we could be here for the entire conference, but we must leave at 10 o'clock for Pretoria to meet with President Mbeki. We will talk with him about relations between the U.S. and South Africa, which are excellent. We will talk about his state visit to the U.S. in a fortnight. We will talk about the global agenda that befits a nation of South Africa's stature and role. But our discussions will, I'm sure, also touch on the more immediate subject of multiple crises elsewhere in Africa.

Sierra Leone is back on the precipice of civil war; Ethiopia and Eritrea are back on the brink of a new round of bloodletting; renewed fighting between Uganda and Rwanda has deepened the crisis in Congo.

I can only imagine how dismaying these setbacks and outrages must be to you as Africans--and especially to you as South Africans. Your people have done so much, in a few short years, to transform this country from an international pariah into an international leader. You've given promise and meaning to President Mbeki's idea of an "African renaissance."

More than that, you've earned the admiration and cooperation of the United States. That was President Clinton's message during his visit to South Africa and five other states in the region in March '98. It was Secretary Albright's message on her three visits to this region, and again in January, when she participated in the Month of Africa at the United Nations Security Council.

The United States not only supports what's best and most promising about this continent, we're just as committed to helping you overcome what is worst and most destructive. That's why Susan Rice has been virtually commuting between Washington and Africa; that's why Tony Lake has made seven trips to the Horn; that's why Howard Wolpe, President Clinton's special envoy to the Great Lakes, has been working closely with former President Mandela on Burundi over the last several months; and it's why Dick Holbrooke, who spent last week working on peace in Congo, was in Addis Ababa yesterday, and he's in Asmara today.

They are all working to fulfill our government's commitment to peace on this continent. When the job gets harder as it has in recent days Susan, Tony, Howard and Dick work harder.

What I'd like to do is step back from the crises of the moment and discuss with you the architecture of peace in Africa and the world that is, how the U.S., South Africa, and other countries can work together to build international structures that will ensure the security of our own countries and of the regions where we live.

Let's start with the nature of the enemy. The most obvious threat to peace comes from the barrel of a gun, or from the blade of a machete. But insecurity can also come from dictators and corrupt politicians; it can come from crime lords and narcotics syndicates. It can come from diamond mines as well as land mines.

And, of course, it can come from microbes. That's why the Clinton Administration announced in April that, for the first time, a disease, HIV/AIDS, should be officially designated a threat to international security.

That's why ensuring security is not just about defeating machete-wielding thugs--it's also about defeating hunger and disease and misery; it's about providing food and health, it's about good governance and civil society; it's about education and jobs and social welfare; it's about clean water and clean air. It's as much a social, political, economic, environmental and public health issue as it is a military one.

That being the case, the international organizations best able to bolster security are those that foster development, cooperation and integration in all areas of society and state-to-state relations. A sturdy architecture for world peace depends on there being such organizations at the regional and sub-regional levels.

Strengthening those structures is a task for all of us, wherever we live. It's a subject on which we should be brainstorming together, comparing notes and experiences, learning from each other, helping each other whenever and wherever possible. In that spirit, before offering some thoughts about Africa, let me say a few words about the region where I live, the Euro-Atlantic Community.

The principal institutions in that region are NATO, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the European Union and the Council of Europe. They have different but overlapping memberships; they have different but mutually reinforcing missions. In recent years, they have closed ranks behind two vital principles:

First, borders must not be changed by force, whether through aggression or violent secessionism. Political boundaries cannot and must not be redefined along ethnographic lines. To redraw the map in that way is to risk soaking an entire continent in blood. Europe, like Africa, has learned that lesson the hard way.

The second principle is this: national leaderships must not be allowed to define national interests or national identity in a way that leads to crimes against humanity or threats to international peace. The way a government treats its own people is not just an "internal matter"; rather, it's the business of that country's neighbors and of the international community as a whole.

Why? Because there are often issues of both universal values and regional peace at stake. The peace, prosperity, security and stability of a region depend in no small measure on whether those same qualities exist within the individual countries that make up the region.

It was with these principles in mind that the trans-Atlantic community stepped in and ended the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. The United Nations has been part of that effort too. No less than 28 non-European countries--including 9 African ones have contributed almost 2,000 personnel to the UN mission in Kosovo. It's a classic example of acting locally while reaching out globally.

I'd like to stress another, absolutely essential point about the architecture of Euro-Atlantic security: several of the institutions I mentioned--NATO, the EU, the Council of Europe have a membership requirement: you've got to be a democracy to belong. That's because democracy itself is a security issue in this sense: democratic states are far less likely than non-democratic ones to make war against each other; democratic states are far less likely than non-democratic ones to create conditions leading to war within their boundaries.

The Western Hemisphere operates on that same principle. The most encompassing institution there is the Organization of American States. It's based on a consensus among its 34 members that freely elected governments and the rule of law are necessary conditions for regional peace and prosperity.

Nine years ago, in 1991, the member-states of the OAS made a landmark compact. It was called Resolution Number 1080. It committed the organization as a whole to take action if democracy is "interrupted" in any member-state. Over the past decade, the OAS has applied that principle in defense of democracy when it was threatened in Peru, Guatemala, Haiti and Paraguay.

But here again, the OAS has not taken on this task all by itself. It has defended democracy in collaboration with global organizations, notably the United Nations, and also with sub-regional ones, most notably MERCOSUR. That's a grouping of four South American nations that started out as a common market, but that has come to play an increasingly active role in promoting and defending political values and institutions.

Let me turn now to East Asia and the Pacific Rim. Security structures there are less numerous and less developed than in the trans-Atlantic area and in the Western Hemisphere. However, there is already in place a promising foundation on which to build in the future. Six years ago the Association of Southeast Asian Nations established a Regional Forum that brings member-states together with the U.S., the European Union, Russia, Japan and China. It provides a mechanism for discussing sensitive, potentially dangerous security issues, such as the South China Sea, where no fewer than five members of the ASEAN Regional Forum have conflicting claims.

There's also the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, or APEC. As its name suggests, its original and principal purpose is to give leaders from 18 countries a chance to discuss economic issues. But it has proved useful in promoting peace and security as well. For example, last year's APEC Summit in Auckland gave the assembled leaders a chance to work with Indonesia on resolving the crisis in East Timor.

Before coming to Africa, there are two other areas I should mention: South Asia and the Middle East. Those neighborhoods do not have effective regional security structures because of deeply impacted, frequently violent antagonisms between the neighbors themselves. The Arab-Israeli conflict and the Indian-Pakistani dispute have several times flared into war over the past half century. A durable peace will require the emergence of inclusive regional mechanisms to promote economic integration and political reconciliation and, conversely, the emergence of such mechanisms will require more willingness by the parties to engage constructively than exists today.

With that quick tour of the horizon as a backdrop, let me now turn to Africa, which has, I hardly need tell you who live here, suffered disproportionately from political violence. Of the 4-to-5 million people who have died in communal and regional conflicts worldwide over the past decade, more than 3 million have died on this continent: that's more than 1.5 million in Sudan, a million in the Great Lakes Region, half a million in Angola, perhaps a quarter of a million in Sierra Leona and Guinea-Bissau.

The current tragedy in Sierra Leone reminds us that the UN, all by itself, is inadequate: it's over-burdened, over-extended, under-supported and under-equipped.

The same can be said of the Organization of African Unity. To its credit, the OAU has established the Crisis Management Center and sent military observers to Rwanda, Burundi and the Comoros. And as Susan can attest from her recent work in Algiers, the OAU has put its shoulder to the boulder in the Sisyphean labor of trying to broker peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia.

But as she and Dick Holbrooke can also attest, the renewed crisis there is just the latest proof that bringing peace to the Horn--or to Africa as a whole-is much too great a task for the OAU or the UN or even the two of them working together.

That's why it's fortunate that Africa has a network of sub-regional structures that are increasingly willing and able to fill the gap between individual nations on the one hand and the OAU and UN on the other.

It's been 10 years since ECOWAS established ECOMOG as Africa's first sub-regional peacekeeping force. It contributed substantially to the settlement in Liberia, and to the election there in 1997. Then, ECOWAS played a helpful role in easing tension between Guinea and Liberia.

ECOWAS has also been active in Sierra Leone. ECOMOG intervened there two years ago to restore the elected government; it then defended that government against rebel assaults early last year and sponsored the peace talks that led to the Lome Accords.

Today, as they gather in Abuja, the leaders of ECOWAS face an urgent challenge: to salvage the accords by getting Foday Sankoh to release the UN personnel and disarm his forces.

Let me now turn to another reason for hope in Africa--the Southern African Development Community. Like ECOWAS, SADC is making itself part of the solution to the problem of regional instability.

The whole world was impressed last year when SADC's Inter-State Security and Defense Committee helped establish a dialogue between Angola and Zambia. I'm flying to Maputo today to lead the American delegation at the annual Meeting of the U.S.-SADC Forum. That will give me a chance to see first-hand in Mozambique how SADC member-states, first and foremost South Africa, saved some 15,000 lives during the recent flooding.

However, looking north, the picture is bleaker. Despite the good work of SADC in general and Zambia in particular, Congo remains far from the kind of peaceful neighbor that southern Africa wants and needs. That's why we salute South Africa and Nigeria for their recent commitment to send peacekeeping troops to Congo as part of a UN peacekeeping operation.

But a cautionary thought, if I may: as we and our own partners have found in Haiti and the Balkans, military intervention, while sometimes necessary, is never sufficient. A peacekeeping force will have no peace to keep unless there is prompt, sustained and effective civilian follow-up. Nations with long history of conflict whether we're talking about Yugoslavia or Haiti or Liberia or Sierra Leone or Congo or Rwanda will never know peace unless they address the underlying historical and social causes of conflict. And quite simply, they can't do that alone. That's why there must be concerted effort and mutual reinforcement on the part of multiple regional and global bodies. And that, in turn, is why my government hopes that, over time, the OAU will work out an effective division of labor with ECOWAS, SADC and other sub-regional organizations in the field of peacekeeping and peace-implementat1on.

As African states and African institutions work with each other and with the UN, the U.S. is prepared to do more to help. We have already contributed over $1 10 million to ECOMOG peacekeeping operations in Liberia and Sierra Leone; $8 million to the OAU's conflict management efforts; and $380 million to UN-assessed peacekeeping missions in Africa over the past 5 years.

President Clinton attaches special importance to our continuing support for the African Crisis Response Initiative. We are spending nearly $20 million annually to train African military battalions in peacekeeping and humanitarian relief operations. To date, ACRI has helped train and equip 6,000 peacekeepers from seven African militaries.

It's still an uphill struggle, not least because warlords and guerrilla bands are all too well equipped, including with the most modern and lethal weaponry. With the end of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact is awash in everything from tanks and warplanes to rocket-propelled grenades and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles to pistols and rifles and bayonets.

South Africa and Mozambique have joined forces to identify, confiscate and destroy caches of small arms and light weapons. ECOWAS has imposed a moratorium on the import-export and manufacturing of small arms in West Africa.

In support of this trend, the U.S. is funding a project by the UN African Institute for the Prevention of Crime to survey various countries' ability to control of small arms. The results will help those governments identify and stop gray-market arms transactions.

The U.S. is also stepping up its effort to persuade Russia and other former Warsaw Pact countries to curb their export of armaments to conflict zones in Africa.

One important means we have of exerting that influence is the so-called Wassenaar Arrangement, which the U.S. and 32 other states set up after the cold war to keep conventional weapons and sensitive technologies from ending up in the wrong hands.

Since South Africa is itself a major exporter of military hardware, I'd hope it might join the Wassenaar Arrangement later this year. That would certainly seem consistent with the exemplary role this country is playing more generally in combating the spread of armaments. Long ago, your country wisely and bravely turned its back on a nuclear-weapons program and joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Thus, it would seem only logical for South Africa to follow its own good example with respect to conventional munitions. After all, in bloodbaths of the kind now endemic to your north, even a Vektor pistol or an AK47 can be a weapon of mass destruction.

Before concluding, I'd like to make one more observation about regional security. It goes to the key ingredient of democracy. As I stressed at the outset, democracy is a security issue. Without it, no nation and no region can be truly secure.

Several African institutions recognize this principle and are taking steps to reinforce it on this continent. For example, the OAU Heads of State Summit adopted a groundbreaking resolution last July in Algiers denouncing coups and barring from future Summits any regime that comes to power by force of arms. This measure is similar to one that the Organization of American States adopted nine years ago providing for the suspension of any member that turns its back on democracy.

Of course, the OAU's own resolution has yet to be tested in practice. The most likely test case will be Cote d'Ivoire. Will that country, in the absence of elections, be allowed to participate in the OAU Summit in Togo two months from now? We would hope not.

Here in southern Africa, SADC has been a major factor in keeping the process of democratization on track. SADC came to the defense of democracy when it was in jeopardy in Mozambique and Lesotho in 1994, and again in Lesotho in 1998.

Today, democracy is thriving in South Africa as well as in Botswana, Mozambique, Mauritius, Zambia, Malawi, Namibia and Tanzania.

It is not, alas, doing very well in Zimbabwe today. We all recognize that there are historical inequities in land distribution in that country--inequities that can, and must be, rectified. But that's no excuse for the Zimbabwean government to condone--and even instigate--blatant violations of the rule of law and violence against supporters of opposition parties. Non-racial democracy cannot flourish in an atmosphere of political intolerance. Neither can civic peace and stability.

What is happening today in Zimbabwe is tarnishing southern Africa's otherwise well-deserved reputation for building civil society, respecting human rights and establishing the rule of law. Moreover, southern Africa's second largest economy is at risk. So is the peace of the region as a whole, since violence could spill across borders.

That's why Africa's friends around the world look to SADC to do everything it can to encourage free and fair parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe before August, and to insist on an end to the violence. President Mbeki's statement to the nation last week helped reinforce that message.

For its part, the United States stands ready to help Zimbabwe achieve meaningful land reform. But we cannot, and will not, offer support in a climate of violence, lawlessness and intimidation. The people of Zimbabwe deserve and demand better.

So do the people of southern Africa as a whole. If your region can build on the success and promise it has already achieved, it will augur well for your entire continent--and for our entire world. You can count on us to help in every way we can, since African peace, African prosperity, African security is a global common cause--and an objective of American foreign policy.

We Americans will do a better job in advancing our own interests and meeting our own responsibilities in Africa if we better understand how you and your neighbors see the challenges we must face together. It's in that spirit that Susan and I have come to Johannesburg, Pretoria and Maputo--and it's also in that spirit that we look forward to hearing from you now.

Thank you.

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