Africans Must Save Africa

Note

This op-ed is one outcome of an African Leadership Council meeting held in May 2005, organized by the Belfer Center's Program on Intrastate Conflict and held at the Kennedy School of Government. Sir Ketumile Masire was President of Botswana from 1980–1998 and is the Chairman of the African Leadership Council, a group of a dozen present and former African heads of state and present and past cabinet ministers who are engaged in analyzing what should be done about the problems of African leadership and how best to build capacity for better leadership and better governance in Africa.

The Presidents of Africa need immediately to resolve the bitter conflict in Darfur. Too many people — upwards of 400,000 to date — have died needlessly, and 10,000 more are dying each month. We need the kind of African diplomacy that so effectively reduced mayhem in Burundi, Ivory Coast, and Togo

The leaders of Africa must not permit the Darfur crisis to come close to imitating the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Too many of us avoided action when Hutu were slaughtering Tutsi. Now it is incumbent on Africa to act — to show that Africans can end their own hostilities without outside intervention.

In Togo, the Economic Organization of West African States brokered an agreement to avoid bloodshed and encourage a peaceful transition after the death of President Gnassingbe Eyadema. In Burundi and Ivory Coast, Africans led by South Africa arranged cease-fires and peace agreements that led to a peaceful shift in governance in Burundi and seem to be smoothing bitter relations between north and south in Ivory Coast. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, too, South Africa helped operationalize an accord that is beginning to bring stability to that massive and conflicted country.

Disturbances in Darfur, the Sudan's westernmost province, have continued for far too long without vigorous African action. Fewer than 2,300 African Union monitors are now on the ground, attempting forlornly to observe and prevent depredations in a province the size of France.  Africa can do better.

We need a new burst of internal African diplomacy to eliminate all remaining barriers to peace in Darfur. We must together overcome the obstacle of sovereignty. When vast humanitarian emergencies occur, we as Africans must invoke the emerging world norm of protection. As African leaders, we have an important responsibility to protect the weak and underprivileged.

Several critical steps are essential. First, an emergency African Union heads of state meeting could quickly authorize a quadrupling of the number of monitors on the ground, to at least 10,000. That is roughly the number now demanded appropriately by the United Nations.

Second, the monitors will require a much more robust mandate than they now enjoy. They will need to be authorized to prevent attacks, either by the so-called rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army or the Justice and Equality Movement or by irregular militia loyal to the government of the Sudan, or even Sudanese troops themselves. Only a force capable of interposing itself, under African command, between the contending warriors will save lives and permit several million refugees to return to their homes.

Without both of those initiatives, the clashes in Darfur that have left so many dead will recur and the innocent people of Darfur will be too frightened to return home to plant crops. As African leaders, we have a responsibility to restore freedom from fear to all of the people of Darfur.

Western logistical help and air support will be necessary. I am confident that NATO, the EU, and the United States can supply that assistance. But African determination must be demonstrated first if the death rate in Darfur is to be brought much closer to zero.

Third, the leaders of Africa can play a strong, supportive role in encouraging the representatives of the rebels and the Sudanese government to forge a peace agreement. Current negotiations have produced little result; it is well past time for the benevolent brokers among our African leadership ranks to persuade both sides to understand how continued conflict in Darfur harms all of Africa as well as all Sudanese.

Remembering the lessons of Rwanda, and remembering what so many of us did to support the African National Congress struggle against apartheid-dominated South Africa, we must now exert our moral and political authority collectively for peace in Darfur.