Both continuity and change capture the evolving role of the Clinton White House in the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. Elements of continuity are reflected in a familiar pattern of relationships between the White House and the principal foreign policy bureaucracies, most notably the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Defense (Pentagon), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and more recently the U.S. Department of Commerce. As cogently argued in Peter J. Schraeder’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy toward Africa during the Cold War era, the White House has tended to take charge of U.S. African policies only in those relatively rare situations perceived as crises by the president and his closest advisors. In other, more routine situations—the hallmark of the myriad of U.S. African relations—the main foreign policy bureaucracies have been at the forefront of policy formulation, and “bureaucratic dominance” of the policymaking process has prevailed. Much the same pattern is visible in the Clinton administration, with the exception of President Clinton’s trip to Africa in 1998. Until that time, events in Somalia in 1993 served as the only true African crisis of the administration that was capable of focusing the ongoing attention of President Clinton and his closest advisors. Given that the United States is now disengaged from most African crises, Africa has remained a “backwater” for the White House and the wider foreign policymaking establishment.

The definition of ethnicity and its application in Burundi represents a key stumbling block in the resolution of the country’s political crisis. Since 1990, successive power holders have elaborated fundamental documents (Charter of National Unity, Constitution, Convention of Government) and created institutions (Government of National Unity, political pluralism, National Reconciliation Commission) with the explicit goal of resolving the question of power sharing between Hutus and Tutsis. In this paper I wish to present the ethnic dilemma that confounds the democratic process, as well as the limits of initiatives undertaken to date.

Studies of U.S. government relations with Africa have generally focused on the role of the executive branch, specifically by examining and analyzing the views and activities of administration officials and the members of executive branch bureaucracies. This is only natural, given the predominant role that the executive branch has historically played in the development and implementation of U.S. policy toward the continent. However, the U.S. Congress has always played an important role in determining U.S. policy toward Africa due to its constitutional authority over the appropriation and authorization of funding for all foreign operations conducted by the executive branch. Furthermore, Congress enacted legislation on several occasions during the Cold War period that directly affected U.S. policy. For example, Congress approved the Clark Amendment prohibiting U.S. intervention in Angola (although it later voted to repeal the amendment) and also passed the 1986 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, which imposed sanctions on South Africa over the veto of the Reagan administration.

The war that brought Laurent-Désiré Kabila and the AFDL (Alliance of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo/Zaire) into power in Kinshasa must be placed in the broader context of three conflicts—that of the Great Lakes, of course, which is the most immediately obvious, but also those of Sudan and Angola. The proximity of these unstable locations and the game of alliances (every actor uses the “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” logic) brought these conflicts together, creating a potential war zone from Asmara to Luanda. Zaire is the connection among these three wars: Mobutu’s government supported Khartoum’s regime against the South Sudanese guerrillas, in particular the SPLA, who are supported in turn by Asmara, Addis Ababa, and Kampala. Zaire’s territory served as a rear base for attacks by the diverse armed movements against Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.

Surprising to some, African American leaders have expressed a relatively high level of dissatisfaction with the Clinton administration’s policies toward Africa both before and after President Clinton’s historic journey to the African continent in 1998. Well-publicized protests against the administration’s Nigerian policy were supported by Trans-Africa, many members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), and other organizations with large numbers of African American supporters, such as the Washington Office on Africa (WOA). Likewise, both TransAfrica and many members of the CBC were sufficiently unhappy with Clinton’s approach that they boycotted the 1994 White House Conference on Africa. More recently, the CBC refused to take an official stance on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, and over 30 percent of its members voted against the act in the House of Representatives. Given the contrast between an African policy perceived popularly as innovative and supportive of Africa, and the fairly high level of dissension and disapproval among African American leaders toward that policy, it is particularly worth exploring African American perspectives about Clinton’s African policies.

Prior to the start of the colonial era in Africa in the late 19th century, European states conducted relations with African rulers through a variety of means. Formal diplomatic exchanges characterized relations with polities that Europeans recognized as states, between European diplomats and officials of the Congo Kingdom of present-day Angola, Ethiopia, and Liberia, for example. Other African authorities occupied intermediate positions in Europeans’ views of international relations, either because these authorities ruled very small territories, defended no fixed borders, or appeared to outside eyes to be more akin to commercial entrepreneurs than rulers of states. Relations between Europe and these authorities left much more room for proxies and ancillary groups. Missionaries, explorers, and chartered companies commonly became proxies through which strong states in Europe pursued their relations with these African authorities. So too now, stronger states in global society increasingly contract out to private actors their relations toward Africa’s weakest states. Especially in the United States, but also in Great Britain and South Africa, officials show a growing propensity to use foreign firms, including military service companies, as proxies to exercise influence in small, very poor countries where strategic and economic interests are limited. This privatized foreign policy affects the worst-off parts of Africa—states like Angola, the Central African Republic, Liberia, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone—where formal state institutions have collapsed, often amidst long-term warfare and disorder.

“They call it a country. In fact it is just a Zaire-shaped hole in the middle of Africa,” wrote The Economist in 1995. Well before then, Erwin Blumenthal, who visited Zaire on behalf of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to assess prospects for reform, warned that, despite promises from President Mobutu (1965-97) that loans would be repaid, “there is no—I repeat no—chance on the horizon that Zaire’s many creditors will recover their money.’ Meanwhile, Mobutu did not use loans to build state bureaucracies or provide services; he actively discouraged them. Even by official accounts, the modest spending of 10 percent of Zaire’s budget on education and health services in 1982 fell to zero a decade later.

Like many analyses of African politics, much of the criticism of Laurent Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, formerly Zaire), examines his personal use of power. His policies as president reflect his track record as a “leader”—some would say a warlord—in the eastern part of the country who based his activities on smuggling and an occasional kidnapping. His policies as president include banning political activities, banishing prominent opposition leaders—such as Etienne Tshisekedi, who led the fight against Mobutu longer than anyone else—and detaining journalists who criticize his government. Focusing on the individual leader leads to the conclusion, among many who favor a more just DRC, that they should try to tie Kabila’s hands and preclude him from proceeding down a path remarkably similar to Mobutu’s.

Eighteen U.S. soldiers were killed and dozens were wounded in a fierce battle in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 3–4, 1993. Their deaths were a direct outgrowth of the Clinton administration’s handling of a series of United Nations (UN)-sanctioned military interventions in Somalia, which are popularly referred to as Operation Restore Hope. With the Cable News Network (CNN) providing almost instantaneous transmission to audiences in the United States and abroad, the victorious Somali forces not only paraded a captured U.S. helicopter pilot, Corporal William Durant, through the streets of Mogadishu, but also dragged the naked corpse of a U.S. soldier past mobs of Somali citizens who vented their anger by spitting on, stoning, and kicking the body.

On May 17, 1997, the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of the Congo (AFDL), led by Laurent-Désiré Kabila, took power in Kinshasa after a seven-month liberation war. According to the opinion of numerous observers, Kabila’s rebellion would be a saving act; it would distance the Congo from the specter of civil war toward which it was fatally headed. Ethnic opposition to the Mobutu regime was stirring. The rebellion would save the country from the claws of cynical politicians and from the political chasm they dug with the sovereign national conference, which created nonfunctional political institutions. Ten months after the new leaders were installed at Kinshasa, it is still too soon to evaluate their efforts to put the country back on its feet. But many praiseworthy initiatives, of which the Bulletin of the Congolese Press Agency daily informs us, touch all aspects of national life.

Since the end of the Cold War, support for democratization has become a central focus of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, something bordering on a presumption of democracy’s and capitalism’s inevitable global reach swept up senior Clinton administration policymakers and stimulated a major rebirth of interest in democracy and democratization within the academy. In this context, fundamentally important questions about the interface between external support and domestic demand for democratization have continued to go largely unaddressed: (1) who should set the agenda; and (2) what role should external assistance play in African democratization processes. A key dimension of the thesis of this article is that failure of policymakers and academics alike to pay more attention to these questions has impeded the formation of viable processes of democratic transition and consolidation in Africa, and will continue to do so as long as they remain underaddressed. In fact, one of the crucial roles and responsibilities of those who would provide external assistance for democratization, in Africa and elsewhere, should be to encourage countries to consider seriously these agenda-setting issues in their democratization processes.

After at least five years of international isolation— almost 10 years in Belgium’s case—the Congo (formerly Zaire) is once again “visitable.” The “friends of the Congo” conference sponsored by the World Bank last December 3-4 sanctioned the beginning of normalization. Those attending were cautious since the meeting did not take place at the ministerial level and since the only help considered urgent concerned currency, transportation, and health. The Congolese government obtained a total of $120 million, the majority from the European Union (E.U.). This represents only about 10 percent of Kinshasa’s assessed reconstruction needs. For the rest, there will be another meeting in six months.

The Clinton administration and its predecessors have had a difficult time assessing the impact of ethnicity and nationalism on international conflict. They are inclined to focus on state power and individual rights considerations, downplaying the importance of the ties of communal identity and the emotive appeals of ethnic self-determination. Then, when ethnic groups do gain political significance, U.S. officials often give the communal concerns a prominence out of proportion with reality. The primary challenge for the Clinton administration is that U.S. liberalism classically has involved commitments that preclude flexibility on communally based demands for self-determination and group rights. Such perspectives can at times complicate the formulation of effective foreign policies for a region only partially integrated into the global capitalist economy, and therefore autonomous for some purposes from U.S. manipulation. What is needed is an involved but pragmatic liberalism that links U.S. conflict management objectives with what Thomas Friedman describes as a “coherent post–Cold War strategic framework.” Without that framework, he writes, “the Americans look like naive do-gooders trying to break up a street brawl.”

To the many tragedies in Africa since the end of the Cold War one may now add the civil war that devastated the Congo Republic from June to October 1997. This war not only ended Congo’s fragile experiment with democracy but also left some 10,000 Congolese citizens dead and countless more homeless, bereaved, or embittered. Artillery bombardment followed by looting destroyed much of Brazzaville’s inner city. Since seizing power in mid-October 1997, former (and again) president Dennis Sassou-Nguesso has only slowly restored public order. As of March 1998, only a few parts of town had partial phone service, water, and electricity. Congo’s long-delayed development is once again on hold as the new government grapples to restore basic services.

The Clinton administration’s foreign policy toward Africa arouses strong reactions in France, most notably within the French policymaking establishment. This sentiment is directly linked to the end of the Cold War and the redistribution of power on the African continent. French policymakers commonly believe that the United States seeks to dominate the African continent. Such a representation could be seen as laughable through its excessive character. It is nonetheless maintained by a disparate group of facts and events that, when combined, lead French policymakers to overestimate U.S. impulses. In fact, U.S. African policies are not immune to the uncertainties and contradictions that pervade overall U.S. foreign policy. As insightfully noted by French Minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Védrine, U.S. foreign policy toward Africa conveys the aspirations of a “hyper-power” that, although lacking a worthy international opponent truly capable of challenging its power, remains incapable of implementing a viable African strategy—in essence conjuring up the much-acclaimed image in Gulliver’s Travels of the giant Gulliver finding himself hamstrung by hundreds of ropes tied by six-inch Lilliputians. An analysis of this policy also indirectly reveals the doubts inherent in France’s own African policy due to the inability of its leaders to accept the constraints of a transformed international system.

Africa occupies a special position in the foreign policies of the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In spite of their limited capacities, lack of colonial ties with Africa, or any significant economic interests in Africa, the Nordic countries have attained a relatively high profile, especially in Southern Africa. After Finland and Sweden joined the European Union (EU) in 1995, Africa assumed an even greater level of foreign policy significance for the Nordic countries. Most notable in this regard is Finland’s assumption in 1999 of the EU presidency, a position that makes Finland responsible for the negotiations over the continuation of the EU’s Lomé Convention with 71 countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. It is in this context that this article assesses Nordic perceptions of the Clinton administration’s foreign policy toward Africa. It is important to note, however, that there is no one monolithic “Nordic perspective.” The opinions and approaches documented in policy papers or informal statements by individual civil servants following African affairs can widely vary. People working with development cooperation, for example, tend to be more recipient-oriented than those looking at Africa from a more general foreign policy point of view. The tradition of outspoken human rights policy still differentiates Norwegian and Swedish approaches from the cautious policy of Finland. Yet behind these different tones, one can distinguish common premises stemming from the many similarities of the Nordic countries and their conscious efforts to generate coherent, coordinated foreign policies toward Africa.

From June 5 to October 15, 1997, three years after the first urban guerrilla battles, conflicts reignited in Brazzaville. The recurrence of confrontation is an appropriate time to examine the social background of the most virulent actors in these battles, the militia. The first guerrillas were principally youths born in Brazzaville, while those of 1997 came from secondary cities. This being the case, it is legitimate to wonder about the dissemination of political violence in the Congo. This paper will reconstitute a chronology of the confrontations, analyze the militia, and explain the entry of Congolese youths into political violence.