Global Policy Forum

David Harland

Overshadowed by the Iraq crisis, quite a lot has been happening in Africa recently. Ivory Coast, having first taken a step away from war, may be edging back toward the precipice. Sudan is walking a fine line between war and peace, with an agreement possible to end what is now Africa's longest-running conflict

Civil wars in Burundi and even Congo may be a little closer to resolution than they were a year ago. Sierra Leone seems to have put its horrible civil war behind it. As has Angola, until recently the scene of Africa's Thirty Years' War. The peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea is holding. Is Africa rejoicing offstage while the world worries about Iraq? Not at all.

Despite the small flashes of good news, Africa remains in a horrible mess. Liberia, already one of the worst places in the world, may be getting less stable. Rwanda is still struggling to cope with the aftermath of genocide. A forgotten war in northern Uganda forces a million people to live in camps waiting for handouts that often don't come.

A decade on from the American debacle, Somalia still has no government at all. Some of the things happening in the Congo, including cannibalism, seem barely believable. Pliny the Elder said that "out of Africa there is always something new." Ex Africa semper aliquid novi. These days it seems that the opposite is true: Out of Africa there is always something depressingly familiar.

Much of Southern Africa, beset by a combination of bad weather and worse government, is hungry. Across the continent, now starting in Mauritania in the far west and stretching all the way to the easternmost tip of the Horn of Africa, some 40 million people are in need of food assistance - the biggest total ever. AIDS is now a pandemic approaching the scale of the Black Death, with 11 million orphans already and many more to come. Malaria, diarrhea and a host of preventable diseases are killing millions every year.

All of this spawns a population that is young, sick, uneducated and used to death and violence. And it inevitably leads to the continued curses of high fertility, high mortality, low life expectancy and low economic growth.

There are structural causes, of course, for Africa's problems, which are quite well known: weak states, bad governance, fickle support from the outside world, and a host of others. But despite the well-known causes, there is very little agreement on what should be done, and less will to do it. In the absence of that agreement, and that will, the basic response of the world beyond Africa is to do more of the same. Humanitarian organizations are planning bigger feeding programs, bigger refugee camps, bigger vaccination programs. The peacekeepers are planning for a possible mission in Sudan - the United Nations' 20th mission on the continent.

There could also be new peacekeeping missions, perhaps under an African regional umbrella, in Burundi and Ivory Coast. Beyond the obvious point that none of this addresses the underlying causes of human misery in Africa, there is another problem. Humanitarian relief and peacekeeping are emergency operations. They are quick fixes. They go in, they assess the problem, appeal for money, do the job as best they can, and leave. They are built on the assumption that there is a temporary problem.

For the 20th time in 20 years, relief organizations are launching one-year emergency funding appeals for programs in Sudan. If the world beyond Africa is unable to grapple with the root causes, then it could at least recognize - as the best organizations are trying to do - that this troubled region is not in the grip of an "emergency."

Humanitarian operations, and peace operations, need to be planned and budgeted for the long haul. Budget cycles need to be changed, local capacities need to be built up, there needs to be a bigger role for ongoing commitments like education. Recognizing that Africa's weak states need long-term assistance won't make the problems go away, but it will make it a little easier to deal with the consequences of those problems.

The writer is a senior policy adviser on humanitarian affairs with the United Nations in Geneva.

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