Obama forgot resource wars that are the bane of Africa | James Gathii

Monday, December 21, 2009 (Posted Sunday, December 20 2009 at 18:16)
Source: The Daily Nation, Kenya

PRESIDENT OBAMA GAVE A masterful speech in Oslo last week, addressing head-on a major contradiction -- that a war president can get the world’s premier peace prize.

But he himself introduced another contradiction. Commerce, he suggested, is a powerful antidote for war. In addition, he noted that commerce had helped lift billions out of poverty.

He could not be more right -- and more wrong. Commerce may, indeed, help uplift people’s standard of living. But far too many conflicts are actually caused by it -- particularly in Africa.

The movie, Blood Diamond, raised some awareness. But it takes more than a movie to drive home the tragic reality that millions are essentially being killed by Western consumers.

This happens as Western corporations continue to benefit from diamonds and gold being mined under slave labor conditions.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S NOBEL PEACE Prize acceptance speech focused too much on the evils of war, and much less on the massive suffering and casualties that commerce-driven conflict has caused.

The speech focused primarily on the war against terrorism while conveniently staying away from conflicts where Western capital is making a killing.

In the continent, it is clear that conflict is driven by the commercial greed of corporations which sell violently extracted high-value minerals in Western markets.

Thus, prosperous consumers in the West are helping create and sustain war and its tragic consequences for Africans trapped in resource-rich zones.

While the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are driven in large part to defend and protect commercial interests, the wars in Africa are different. They rank much lower in US strategic and national security purposes.

Unlike the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, African wars have received much less attention than the oil interests in Iraq and Central Asia. Yet, these conflicts have resulted in an estimated five million deaths since the late 1990s in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone.

Thus while it was gratifying to hear that President Obama was aware of the widespread rapes in the Congo, it was clear the deadliest conflict since World War II in this mostly rebel-controlled territory did not rank anywhere near the top of his speech.

In short, there has developed a two-tiered global response to conflict. In the first tier, Western countries led by the US, have instigated wars to pursue governments and terrorists who threaten their access to vital resources like oil, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia.

By contrast, the US and most Western countries have refused to respond to resource conflicts in Africa.

Such African conflicts include those in Liberia, DRC, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire. This has, in effect, created a second tier of responses that shows neither a similar resolve nor determination as those that have defined wars to ensure access to vital resources like oil in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The West benefits from this tepid response to African conflicts as much as it benefits from its aggressive use of force in the Middle East and Iraq.

The primary beneficiaries of these conflicts are Western companies such as private military and security companies, banks, insurance companies and airlines that are the pipeline of valuable minerals like diamonds to retail outlets in the West.

Nascent efforts to regulate the market for blood diamonds, like the legally non-binding multi-stakeholder Kimberley Transparency Initiative, pale in comparison to the massive use of brute force against terrorism that is being conducted against non-State actors like Al Qaeda.

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S SPEECH REFLECTED the choices made by the current set of international institutions which allow commerce to continue to thrive in African conflicts while causing massive suffering, dislocation and wanton loss of life.

This view of commerce as an antidote to war and conflict fails to address how illicit commerce is itself a threat to the very values that President Obama so vigorously and eloquently defended in his Nobel acceptance speech.

For commerce to play the same role it has played to lift people out of poverty, more attention and resources must be devoted to the manner in which it has become an engine for wars in Africa.

Prof Gathii is the Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship and the Governor George E. Pataki professor of International Commercial Law at Albany Law School.