CAIRO: ‘Making the World a Safer Place’. It’s a mantra chanted by Western politicians to their fear induced nations and the cause d être of the Bush administration. In the eyes of many, it’s an inherently flawed principle, peddled by the elite who conflate economic self-interest with the interests of their nation at large.
For others, however, it’s a vision, real and achievable. The problem does not lie with the doctrine of liberal intervention itself, but rather the means by which policy makers implement it.
John Prendergast, US policy advisor for Africa turned human rights activist, is a staunch adherent of that vision. In the mid 1990s under the Clinton government, Prendergast enjoyed the position as African affairs director for the Security Council. But when Bush took over, Prendergast was advised to leave.
But even after an intense period of work, Prendergast did not sit back on his laurels. Instead, he immediately joined the International Crisis Group, an independent organization whose aim is to assist the international community in solving deadly conflicts. He went on to set up Enough, a civil society organization to ‘prevent genocide and mass atrocities by promoting Peace, providing Protection, and Punishing the Perpetrators.’
Last week Prendergast graced the lecture halls of the American University of Cairo as a visiting scholar. In his Monday lecture “The Bush’s Administration’s War on Terror: Implications for Human Rights and Peace in Africa, he threw up his main contentions with the recent US counter-terrorism policy and expressed his hopes for the future.
Prendergast depicts the all-consuming counter-terrorism tactics of the US as a series of blunders. Instead of developing “diplomatic relationships, the Bush administration has nurtured relationships with officials suspected of bearing responsibility for mass death, relying on allies with scrupulous credentials and even more unscrupulous agendas.
According to Prendergast, who has traveled extensively and unflaggingly around African danger zones, the arming and effective commissioning of Ethiopian troops against Sudan as part of a proxy war, only served to enflame passions and bring an already heated conflict to the broil.
This, added to a “disastrously narrow emphasis in Somalia, on whom, after the failed Black Hawk down mission in the 1990s, America has turned its back. The in-discriminatory policy of pursuing (with clumsy air strikes), alleged Al-Qaeda co-operatives has also meant the funding of ruthless warlords, whose failure thus strengthened the hand of the Islamic courts. The next step, he continued, was to send in little brother Ethiopia, only to lead to a war that would be branded as ‘Ethiopia’s Vietnam.’
With shoulder length dark silver hair, goatee and razor jaw-line, it’s no wonder Prendergast is something of a political heart throb. His dedication to the human cause has won him many fans, including UN ambassador Angelina Jolie, with whom he visited Eastern Congo.
But it’s his deep knowledge of African affairs, gathered through visits on the ground, talking to partisans and victims of the conflicts alike, that has earned him the de-facto position as a chief mover and shaker in the anti-genocide campaign.
And Prendergast is confident that US civil-society campaigning is taking off. Talking to him face to face on AUC’s busy Greek Campus garden, he talks with an almost fierce optimism about prospects for a change of US policy, motivated by civil-society pressure groups.
“I think it’s had a major positive impact on the US, not like Vietnam which made us shrink from the world. It made Americans much more interested in our foreign policy and getting to understand and know it, because they don’t want people like Cheney to come again and hijack our government for their interests.
But for all Pendergrast’s deep enthusiasm and unmistakable optimism in the 2008 elections as a ‘chance for redemption’, it will take more than the vague “development and democracy buzzwords to convince those directly, or indeed indirectly, affected by US policy.
With world-food prices soaring as well as renewed instability in Zimbabwe which has pulled the South African Rand into its chasm, many suspect an economic cataclysm, which no amount of World Bank loans and diplomatic lip-service can alleviate.
This is compounded by deep suspicion of any U.S intervention in Sudan, which is now self-sufficient after oil investment in the 1990s. China, reckoned to be the next superpower, takes over 60 percent of Sudan’s oil exports.
When I put this to Prendergast he turns in his chair, the sun glinting on his dark shades. “I don’t think oil has any remote factor on the US decision process in Sudan. It’s too small of a fish for the US to be driven by. I don’t think the US cares about the Sudan oil sector.
I’d probably be right in saying Prendergast’s opinion counts for a lot, but there’s something disconcerting in the ideal that, “American values are global values. There’s too much sweeping moral certainty to Pendergrast, and, despite his unflinching and glamorous conviction, it’s a certainty not all see as a positive grain for the future.
