Among other things, Ethiopia has been accused of indiscriminate bombardment of residential areas of Mogadishu. But in the assessment of Somalia in the Foreign Office’s latest annual human rights report there was not a single mention of Ethiopia, let alone the conduct of its troops.
The reasons for Britain’s failure to speak out against Ethiopia’s abuses are no secret. Ethiopia is one of the largest recipients of UK aid in Africa and is judged to be doing well in reducing poverty. Furthermore, Ethiopia is seen by the UK and the United States as a crucial regional ally in counter-terrorism.
Every day when I worked in the Africa directorate of the Foreign Office as a conflict adviser from 2001 to 2003, we faced dilemmas and choices of the kind presented by Ethiopia’s role in Somalia today. What do you do when a government that is a major recipient of UK development assistance steals an election, invades a neighbouring country, locks up a prominent opposition leader, or carries out a massacre?
We kicked the more difficult or controversial policy choices up to ministers in carefully crafted submissions. Then we waited for decisions to emerge based on their political calculations, ideological convictions and compromises.
The Labour government quickly understood that what Africa needed was conflict prevention and state-building. Since 1997 Britain’s development budget for Africa has more than quadrupled. Clare Short, Labour’s first development secretary, pioneered new forms of aid partnership with a group of African leaders she judged were going in the right direction. Tony Blair spent much political capital cajoling world leaders to collaborate in lifting Africa out of conflict and poverty. In 2000 he deployed troops to rescue Sierra Leone from disaster.
The results have been mixed. There have been major achievements in crisis management and conflict prevention in Africa since 1997, and Britain has played an important role. However, the UK has been less successful in efforts to build African states that are capable of providing their people with security, prosperity and political freedom. Three crucial obstacles and failures stand out.
The first is the problem of limited leverage, illustrated by the UK’s helplessness in the face of the Zimbabwe crisis. No amount of diplomatic manoeuvring and development assistance, even when backed up by military intervention, can conjure up responsible government and the rule of law where they do not exist.
The second is the problem of limited knowledge. When foreign powers act without understanding the local politics, unintended consequences multiply and progress is difficult or impossible. As the Department for International Development’s Africa budget increased so did its influence on British policy in Africa. Meanwhile the government ran down the Foreign Office’s capacity to report on and analyse African politics. As a result, policy was often being implemented without sufficient knowledge of national and regional contexts.
The third problem is that ministers often fail to reconcile Britain’s competing commercial, strategic, developmental and political interests. In different ways the dogged pursuit of energy contracts in Nigeria or Angola, arms sales in Tanzania or South Africa, poverty reduction in Rwanda or Uganda, and counter-terrorism in Somalia or Kenya has led British ministers to downplay, excuse or ignore the abuses and corruption of their African allies. In turn, abuse and corruption fuel exactly the radicalism, state failure, poverty, conflict and mass migration that the UK seeks to reduce.
My sojourn in Whitehall left me with a keen appreciation of the pressures under which decision-makers operate. But it also convinced me that if the UK is to do better in Africa, it needs urgently to revisit two approaches that are simply wrong: a counter-terrorism policy that pays insufficient attention to human rights and political reform; and a heavy reliance on development assistance as a means of nurturing law-abiding, responsible states. Both are ineffective, counterproductive and dangerous.
· Tom Porteous is the author of Britain in Africa, an analysis of the policy on Africa developed under Labour, and London director of Human Rights Watch. [email protected]
