Global Policy Forum

By Barbara Crossette

Faced with renewed fighting in Congo and a human catastrophe in Angola, the Clinton administration is planning a series of new policies for Africa, the American representative at the United Nations, Richard C. Holbrooke, said Sunday. He intended to lay out the policies in a speech on Monday in Pretoria, South Africa's administrative capital.

Holbrooke said the United States will throw its weight behind a Canadian-led effort to tighten and enforce sanctions on the Angolan rebel movement led by Jonas Savimbi, a former cold war ally against the leftist Angolan government.

The United States will assume the Security Council presidency on Jan. 1 and will schedule public debate on the crises facing Africa, Holbrooke said in a telephone interview while traveling in Africa. "It will be the month of Africa," he said. The Clinton administration has been criticized for what many Africans see as a lack of followup after high-profile visits by American officials, including President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright. Holbrooke said that high priority would be given to Angola, where intense fighting in a decades-old civil war has driven hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Whatever course the Security Council chooses, he said, there will be no American troops for another African mission.

Holbrooke said that he and those in his party currently traveling in Africa -- including Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Howard Wolpe, a former Congressman who was chairman of the House African subcommittee before becoming President Clinton's special envoy for Africa -- were appalled in Angola by the continuing destruction of one of the continent's potentially richest countries.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose mission is primarily to help those who flee their own countries, has been unable to protect displaced people adequately, Holbrooke said. While much of the blame for the disruption and death is placed on die-hard opponents of the government, he said, the human rights situation and political climate created by President Eduardo dos Santos appears to leave much to be desired. Among the Angolans Holbrooke met, he said, was Rafael Marques, an editor who was imprisoned and tortured. "It is very important that as we tighten sanctions, we don't want to appear to be encouraging some things the government is doing," he said.

Canada, under its United Nations representative, Robert Fowler, has formed a commission of experts to gather evidence on the illegal diamond trade that finances weapons purchases for Savimbi's movement, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Fowler's group is preparing to name names when it has compiled evidence on those who are buying diamonds and selling arms in violation of United Nations sanctions.

Holbrooke, who is to outline the Clinton Administration's initiatives in a speech to South African International Relations Society, is on an extended trip around the continent that will culminate next week with a stop in Kinshasa, Congo's capital, for talks with President Laurent Kabila. Congo, the former Zaire, is engulfed in a civil war involving more than half a dozen countries. Holbrooke called it "the largest interstate war in African history."

The United Nations is weighing options for involvement in Congo, and Holbrooke said that he will warn Africans that the United States -- especially Congress -- will not support a peacekeeping operation there until the Organization of African Unity "gets its act together" and appoints a special envoy to coordinate peace moves and see that an accord reached earlier this year is put into effect.

Holbrooke said the United States did not want another crisis like the one in Rwanda in 1994, when the Americans blocked Security Council action while hundreds of thousands of people were massacred. "Rwanda was the symbol of neglect followed by genocide," he said. The unchecked attacks, in which militant Hutu attacked Tutsi and moderate Hutu, led eventually to the regionwide conflict still being played out in neighboring Congo. Washington does not want another Somalia, either, Holbrooke said, referring to the peacekeeping mission under United States command that took the lives of 18 American troops in a 1993 street battle, scaring the Administration and Congress away from future missions in Africa. "In the Congo," he said, "it is essential that the United Nations and the United States get it right."