Countering indifference: feeding the hungry in Angola - Editorial

Christian Century, July 13, 1994 by James M. Wall

EACH YEAR the industrialized countries send $60 billion in aid to Africa. But these same nations earn $125 billion annually in arms sales to that continent, where one-third of the countries (16 of them) are fighting civil wars. Even worse than this disparity between helping and destroying is the industrialized nations' indifference toward Africa. James Gustave Speth, administrator of the United Nations Development Program, recently proposed that the international community create a Peace Fund to provide resources to "effectively mount pre-emptive responses to potential conflicts." He points out that when the Rwandan president's plane was shot down, setting off the massive slaughter between Hutus and Tutsis in that Central African country, what followed could easily have been predicted. Indeed, there is strong suspicion that the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana was a carefully planned part of the war, now rapidly moving toward a military "victory" for the minority Tutsi forces.

Western nations do little to anticipate crises in Africa. I was reminded of this on a two-week trip in June to Kenya, Uganda and Angola. The war in Angola takes place out of sight of the rest of the world. The media rarely visit this place where death from malnutrition is routine and war constant. Indifference, as George Bernard Shaw once noted, is the "essence of inhumanity." As the world's remaining superpower, the U.S. has a responsibility to address world problems that are solvable if we attack them with the sort of vigor we display in war. The director of the World Health Organization has noted that Operation Desert Storm cost 20 times what it costs to design a basic HIV prevention program for developing countries.

There is little concern for international suffering in the current U.S. foreign policy, which is driven not by a coherent vision--much less a coherent moral vision--but by domestic politics. The continuation of a political campaign mode while governing is a Clinton practice described in considerable detail in Bob Woodward's The Agenda. This mode guarantees that the White House will scramble to respond to media-driven crises instead of developing a sharply focused policy that addresses long-range humanitarian needs.

The familiar statement attributed to Edmund Burke, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing," is an appropriate text for Africa. The U.S. has actually done a great deal in Africa, much of it with disastrous consequences--beginning with participation in the slave trade that stripped the continent of 12 million men and women, and concluding with extensive use of African states as pawns in the cold war. Now that the Soviet Union is no longer around to determine U.S. policy in the region, the U.S. notices the area only when starvation and slaughter attract media attention.

World indifference toward Angola is driving that potentially rich nation toward mass starvation. We cannot always stop wars, but we have a responsibility to try, especially when we have helped start them. Angola's civil war, which has raged since Portugal relinquished its colonial grip in 1975, continues between the elected government of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos and rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, who was formerly supported by the U.S. and South Africa, The rebels control much of the countryside, while the government holds the coastal cities, including Luanda, a city flooded with refugees from rural areas, many living in temporary shacks with no running water.

Malnutrition among children is a critical problem in Luanda. On a visit to Josina Machel Children's Hospital, I saw families waiting in long lines to reach a triage admission desk where it was determined whether to send the child to an emergency feeding center, directly to the hospital emergency wards (where as many as 20 children a day die of starvation), or home. I saw rows of tiny cribs where IVs are attached to frail arms. In other rooms mothers sat by crowded cribs, coaxing their babies to accept spoonfuls of a corn-soya blend and mixtures of maize and cassava root. The babies are so weak they rarely cry or smile.

These are children of the folly of war, many of whom have lost fathers during the 20-year power struggle which continues only a short distance from the city--a war that should have ended years ago, and certainly should have ended after dos Santos's 1992 election. Savimbi rejected that vote, claiming electoral fraud. He may be partially right--democracy emerges slowly in Africa. But Savimbi, who was backed by the CIA before that agency was reined in by Congress in the 1970s, and who was then given new life by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, may have surmised that with dos Santos's former patron, the Soviet Union, no longer a world power, he could expect Western support. To its credit, the Clinton administration reversed years of Republican support for Savimbi and officially recognized dos Santos's government.

South African leader Nelson Mandela, who was in jail when the all-white South African government was supplying arms to Savimbi, is trying to start the stalled peace talks between the Angolan factions. But Savimbi, who continues to get support from some source (probably Zaire), has been a reluctant participant in the peace talks. One reason: by controlling Angola's diamond-producing region, he continues to have resources to purchase arms, and the U.S. has done nothing to halt the international arms trade.