Africa has been watching closely while Iraq descends into conflict.
Although events on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah may seem a long way from the struggles for daily survival in N’Djaména or São Tomé, Africans are increasingly aware that what happens in the Middle East will have far-reaching implications for their own lives.
In the lead-up to the war in Iraq, the stage seemed to be set for Africa to finally have a meaningful say in world decision-making. Guinea, Cameroon and Angola, who occupied Africa’s rotating membership of the Security Council at the time, suddenly became key players. Almost without warning, decisions made in Conakry, Yaoundé and Luanda were essential to the grave matter of whether the rush to war would have United Nations legitimacy.
The pressure from the pro- and anti-war camps was intolerable. An unprecedented diplomatic offensive of high level visits, phone calls and emails offered a crude combination of inducements—were Africans to have offered such things, they would have been called bribes—and threats.
When Guinea took over the presidency of the Security Council on 1 March, it immediately found itself caught between the United States and France, its two largest donors. In return for a
pro-war vote, the United States and its allies promised a substantial increase in military aid along with $US4 million to help Guinea cope with a massive refugee population whose numbers had been swelled by the escalating conflict in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. Soon after, the French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin touched down in Conakry. Publicly, he revealed little of what his government was promising in order to counter US overtures, but he left no-one in any doubt that a vote for the United States would be viewed most unfavourably.
Cameroon, the country with the closest ties to France, claimed to be more preoccupied with its own forthcoming elections than with any war in Iraq. To catch its attention, the United States warned the government of President Paul Biya, a government regularly described as the world’s most corrupt, not to upset the world’s only superpower and controller of the purse strings at the International Monetary Fund.
More than any other country, Angola had reasons to be sceptical of the need for war, having only recently emerged from decades of its own devastating conflict. Alongside such sensitivities were powerful facts of life—the US is Angola’s biggest trade partner (heavily involved in Angola’s oil industry) and aid donor ($US128 million