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In dealing with Africa, previous U.S. administrations were largely unsentimental. Africa was too poor to affect the U.S. economy, too alien to command a powerful domestic lobby, too weak to threaten American security. As a result, past presidents spoke about Africa modestly and not very often (Lizza 22).

Not Bill Clinton. He has proclaimed frequently and passionately that Africa matters. He has insisted that black suffering has as great a claim on the American conscience as white suffering. He has vowed that the United States will no longer be indifferent. These words have borne no relation whatsoever to the reality of his administration’s policy. Indeed, confronted with several stark moral challenges, the Clinton administration has abandoned Africa every time: it fled from Somalia, it watched American stepchild Liberia descend into chaos, and it blocked intervention in Rwanda. But Clinton’s soaring rhetoric has posed a problem that his predecessors did not face–the problem of rank hypocrisy. And so, time and again, the imperative guiding his administration’s Africa policy has been the imperative to appear to care. Unwilling to commit American blood and treasure to save African lives, and unwilling to admit that they refuse to do so; the Clinton administration have developed a policy of coercive dishonesty. In Rwanda, afraid that evidence of the unfolding genocide would expose their

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inaction, they systematically suppressed it. And in Sierra Leone, unwilling to take on a rebel group that was maiming and slaughtering civilians by the thousands, the Clinton administration insisted that all the rebels truly wanted was peace and a seat at the negotiating table.

Abandoning Africans is nothing new. But the Clinton administration has gone further. It has tried to deny them the reality of their own experience, to bludgeon them into pretending that the horrors around them do not truly exist–so that they won’t embarrass the American officials who proclaim so eloquently that their fates are inextricably linked to our own (Tucker).

The Clinton administration helped design a peace agreement that was signed in Lome, Togo; an agreement that forced the democratic president of Sierra Leone to hand over much of his government and most of his country’s wealth. For close to a year, the Lome agreement did what the Clinton administration hoped it would do, but they should realize that to help end the conflict in Sierra Leone the international community should boycott the purchase of diamonds worldwide for at least the next year. It is reported Sankoh logged more than 2,000 diamonds mined by the RUF during his 10 months in government–gems that were never reported to the authorities (Masland et al.). Since the source of rebel funds for weapons is largely dependent on illegal diamond sales, the rebels will quickly feel the effect of this boycott.

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As a modest contribution to the defense of Freetown, the United States was scouring NATO depots in Europe for spare concertina wire, sandbags and other materials. Washington also offered to airlift peacekeepers to Sierra Leone, but at rates higher than those offered by commercial airlines. What the Clinton pledge does not mean, in any case, is that U.S. combat troops will be heading to Africa. (At the most, U.S. soldiers might help with logistics.) Clinton may be haunted by Rwanda, but the administration won’t risk a repeat of its failure in Somalia.

Now that the shaky cease-fire has come apart, another orgy of death, destruction and mayhem is beginning. The insurgency in Sierra Leone has left 75,000 dead and 2 million homeless (Gerry 338), and it is only the beginning. Only the insertion by the international community of enough forces to overwhelm the RUF can stop the barbarity. But that appears unlikely because the Western powers no longer see that they have any vital interests in places like Sierra Leone. It would be next to impossible to convince the American public that there is any reason to put the lives of American troops at risk in such a place, although humanitarian concern should be sufficient.

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