By Lynne Duke
May 10, 1999
Johannesburg - As hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians have fled Kosovo in recent weeks, televised images of their plight have struck familiar chords here on a continent that is no stranger to humanitarian crises - and have spawned bitter resignation and envy among some Africans and Africa watchers.
As the United States and its NATO allies move into the seventh week of air strikes against Yugoslav forces, a handful of full-scale wars are being fought in Africa, as well as several smaller, sporadic conflicts.
Fighting between the government of Sudan and southern rebels has gone on for four decades, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The civil war in Angola, which began in 1975, recently flared anew. Congo is effectively divided by a rebellion that broke out last year and has drawn in several neighboring countries. Ethiopia and Eritrea, two of Washington's key East African allies, are fighting a trench war with casualty counts estimated in the tens of thousands. And the civil war in Sierra Leone, marked by summary executions, mutilation and huge refugee flows, remains unsolved.
Because Washington and its allies have not attached the same strategic significance to Africa as they have to the Balkans, Africa's recent crises have brought nothing approaching the international engagement on display in Kosovo. While President Bill Clinton and other NATO leaders define engagement in Kosovo in terms of principle and conscience, some observers in Africa say this continent's problems have not pricked the world's conscience in a similar manner, leading some Africanists to apply racial interpretations to the value the West places on European and African lives.
''It's a consequence of the fact that the West thinks that the world is centered around the West,'' said Mawampanga Mwana Nanga, finance minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
''What underlies the general response of the international community,'' said Peter Takirambudde, Africa director for Human Rights Watch, ''is the assumption that the security and other problems of Africa have few or no repercussions on the rest of the globe, which is yet another manifestation of a retreat from Africa. ''I would want to think that these responses, the inaction or action, are driven by justified, principled and rational considerations,'' Mr. Takirambudde said. ''But the repetitive lack of reaction to African crises compared to the rapid response to Kosovo does often encourage people to think that probably there's a cultural dimension to this.''
In Kosovo, Yugoslav security forces have flushed out more than 700,000 refugees. That is about the same number of Rwandans who were slaughtered in 1994 during the genocide in that country. There was no international intervention to halt the ethnic bloodshed. Indeed, the small United Nations peace force in Rwanda rushed to escape. And while the international community invested enormous sums to house Rwandan refugees in neighboring Congo, then called Zaire, the failure to police the refugee camps allowed them to be used by Rwandan Hutu to stage cross-border raids.
There are an estimated 8 million refugees in Africa, including 2 million from conflicts in Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea. In addition to refugees, there are millions of people displaced in their own countries, such as the 1.9 million adrift because of the recurrent war in Angola. ''We have hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Congo Republic and from Angola,'' Mr. Mawampanga said. ''We could really use some help. If we could get it, it would be great. But I don't think we will.''
