African Dilemmas
Thomas Callaghy Looks at a Troubled Part of the World

You might hire a company like Executive Outcomes to help you. It's based in London and has a proven track record as an effective performer. It charges high fees but takes on very challenging situations. You'd get your money's worth. No, Executive Outcomes is not a consulting firm. It's a private mercenary army organized as a corporation. Such firms, says political scientist Thomas Callaghy, are a trend of the last half-decade, and Africa provides a good market for their services.

Callaghy is a long-time student of sub-Saharan Africa and its complex relations with the developed industrial nations. When we talked with him, it became clear that those relations have always been troubled. As the nature of the trouble has changed, Callaghy's research has shifted, from the formation of new African states out of former European colonies - he has been especially interested in Zaire, the former Belgian Congo - and to their fate in the rapidly changing world economy. Despite their struggles, too many have suffered from tyranny, violent conflict, and discouraging levels of debt. Has the West contributed to these woes? Can external help become a new form of exploitation? Once Western powers went into Africa with guns to carve out colonies and exploit her abundant wealth. Now they meet quietly in Paris to reschedule her debts. Callaghy studies the long arc of these changes, moving from the smaller to the larger international scene. And he notes that some Western-based enterprises in Africa still require guns.

"Executive Outcomes uses both white and black soldiers, many of whom were involved in the apartheid military apparatus in South Africa. A recent and striking intervention of theirs was in Sierra Leone, where they essentially ended the civil war - in return for mining and other concessions from the current government. They're a private business that's trading stability through force for economic profit. They claim they will only work for 'legitimate' governments."

Would they work for the long-time president of Zaire whose situation matches that of our hypothetical dictator? Perhaps, says Callaghy. The government of Zaire is very shaky. The vast country is menaced from within and without; it's even menaced by its own army, which discovered a long time ago that looting fellow citizens is easier than fighting enemies. "A lot of us who study Zaire have been convinced for some time that it may come apart." Like a number of other African nations, Zaire gained its independence from European colonizers back in the 1960s. The democratic, multi-party governments of those early days collapsed with distressing speed, however, and what emerged next was often dictatorship.

That meant "thirty years of authoritarian rule, most of it economically unproductive. There's no functional equivalent of a Taiwan or a South Korea or even an Indonesia where authoritarian rule was used for major economic transformation." By the late 1970s, a good number of the new African nations were in decline. The '80s were worse, hitting countries that were already being quietly "hollowed out" with a general economic crisis that impaired their capacity to govern. "The major international financial institutions - the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank - came in and 'advised' these governments to undertake certain kinds of economic reforms. They came close to imposing reforms because they controlled access to help the African countries needed.

"Economic reform is going on worldwide now, but it has had the weakest effect in Africa. If you begin weak, have long periods of unproductive dictatorship, and are then hit by a systemic economic crisis, you wind up the poorest region in the global economy and increasingly marginalized." Enfeebled governments must contend with local factions and rebellions that can flare up, burn fiercely, and spread to nearby countries. Central Africa is seeing such an effect, as the terrible genocide that took place in Rwanda has repercussions in Burundi, Tanzania, and Uganda, as well as in Zaire. The spread of ethnic violence and the flight of a massive number of refugees are two of the worst consequences of the Rwandan massacres.

Of the affected neighboring countries, Tanzania and Uganda have been making remarkable efforts to reform their economies and stabilize their governments. It would be tragic to lose these gains to strife that began somewhere else. Even in shaky Zaire, the situation could get far worse. If it succumbed to full-fledged civil war, that could create hundreds of thousands of new refugees. This possibility characterizes "what has been referred to as Afro-pessimism. Weak states that have been flailing quietly for years actually begin to fail," embroiling their neighbors in the process. "On balance," Callaghy concedes rather grimly, "the general social and political situation in central Africa is very stark, and it's not likely to get significantly better anytime soon."

But when the young African countries gained their independence, weren't they in reasonably good shape? Can colonial powers like France and Belgium be blamed for Africa's later troubles? To some measure, they can, according to Callaghy. "The nature of the colonization has contributed directly to the present situation. The European powers carved up the continent based on their own strategic "conflicts and interests. That's why you have a country the size of Zaire, as big as the U.S. east of the Mississippi. And a country like Gambia, which, except for a small coastline, is completely inside Senegal and thirty miles wide at its widest point. Colonization created very uneven units.

"Africa was also the last part of the world to be colonized by European powers: the formal process didn't really begin in a major way until 1884 or '85. It was the last big part of the world to be decolonized." At independence, some countries on the crazy quilt map were stronger than others. From then on, their fate "depended a lot on what kind of leadership emerged during the 1960s and '70s." It's still true, Callaghy says, that Africa is like a neighborhood in the world community: some houses in a neighborhood are bigger, better built, and better maintained than others. "What's happening in Africa is uneven."

He is unconvinced that much of the strife in Central Africa can simply be attributed to old tribal enmities, like that between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and elsewhere. Although these tribal groups have identities, "they're not absolutely distinct corporate groups," nor can they always be recognized by obvious physical differences. In Rwanda there have been governments with mixed membership. The current government has highly placed Hutu officials, even though it's dominated by Tutsis. There have been long periods when the two groups were able to live together. "But in periods of strife and economic stress, once one group sees an advantage to use enmity as a political tool, then nasty things can happen. The genocide came out of a situation like that, from a group of Hutu who had ethnic cleansing aspirations. They gave it a good try. As a result, they've set up a dynamic with very negative consequences inside and outside their own country."

For example, there are many Tutsis living in Zaire. They had Zairian citizenship, but as the Hutu refugees from Rwanda came into Zaire, armed Hutu militia came with them. The militia collaborated with local Zairians who saw a chance to push Tutsis off land they'd held for decades. "Officials of the Mobutu government assisted this land-grabbing and moved to strip Tutsis of their Zairian citizenship. So, with some outside help, the Tutsis created their own armed force and struck back. They completely changed the strategic balance in Zaire. As the Tutsi force moves through the country, it often acquires new soldiers from the local population, which changes the ethnic composition of the movement. Local villages have to make very difficult, on-the-spot decisions about what to do. Resist? Collaborate? Try to stay neutral? Now everybody knows Mobutu's ill, and it's not clear what will happen to the central government. Will the rebels overthrow the government? Will there be a military coup d'etat? Will a group of feudal barons just try to carve up Zaire? Will some parts of the country try to secede? All sorts of things are possible."

With the Cold War over, Western powers are more reluctant to intervene in major ways in Africa. France is a possible exception, but even France is partly constrained by American unwillingness to spend lives and large amounts of money on countries no longer seen as allies against Communism. Some Western commentators have said that if a Zaire collapses, the western powers should step back and let it happen. Callaghy maintains that the West could do much to help in such situations, but in the current political climate it may be all that we are willing to do.

"There's an economic marginalization that parallels the political and strategic ones. Much of the liquid and investable capital in the world is bypassing Africa and going elsewhere. What you have left are outside companies interested in pockets of primary export resources, mainly minerals - diamonds, gold, even timber. They make special deals, usually with weakened regimes. For much of the continent, that's increasingly becoming the norm in economic activity." The one bright spot is South Africa. "Relative to the rest of the continent, the economy still looks quite good. Many people hope that the Mandela government will maintain democracy and serve as an example to the stronger countries in East and West Africa. But if Central Africa implodes in a major way, it could affect many other countries that are doing better."

Meanwhile, Callaghy thinks, it would be useful to help those African countries that are engaging in serious economic reform. "Provide them more substantial debt relief, for example, in order to free up foreign exchange for economic reform and stabilization." His own research into the politics of debt and economic reform has changed his desire to write a second book on Zaire. Instead he wants to write about something that almost no one else has investigated - the Paris Club. "This is a very powerful but informal and almost unknown international organization. It's a group of western creditor countries that are owed money by debtor countries. The Paris Club reschedules those debts. It started with Argentina in 1956. By 1970, it was dealing mostly with African countries. More recently it's been moving into eastern Europe and will eventually deal with countries on the rim of the former Soviet Union."

Over time, the Paris Club has been forced to offer more favorable terms to the debtor countries, whether the debtors were strategically important to the West or not. The reasons, Callaghy says, provide insight into how the international financial and political system has changed over the last 40 years. "For example, there are more and different kinds of actors on the international scene now. A striking instance is the emergence of private voluntary organizations such as Oxfam, a British-based voluntary organization, and Christian Aid. There's a lot of these groups now, and they're increasing their ability to coordinate what they do among themselves. Their influence is based on local knowledge, mutual cooperation, and sophistication in getting their views out. In regard to debt, they've mostly focused on the Paris Club, the World Bank, and the IMF. Criticism and pressure from these new actors has had a real influence on getting better terms for weak debtor states."

Examining the Paris Club will allow Callaghy to describe and evaluate some major trends of the last half-century, including the nature of decolonization after World War II, the globalization of the world economy, and the rise in power of the IMF and World Bank. "The Paris Club is run by a very small administrative staff in the French Treasury. The IMF and World Bank became pretty direct participants in the negotiations over Paris Club rescheduling. Private investment banking firms have acted as advisors for debtor countries. So there is increasing interaction among all these actors."

But couldn't all this financial activity be seen as a new, more subtle form of colonialism?

Callaghy nods. "Yes. It certainly could. And many Africans see it exactly that way."

Thomas M. Callaghy chairs the Department of Political Science, is a professor of political science, and holds the Max N. and Heidi L. Berry Term Professorship in the Social Sciences. He has written extensively on Africa and on the politics of debt and attempted economic reform in Third World countries. The State-Society Struggle: Zaire in Comparative Perspective was chosen as one of the ten best books on Africa published in 1984 by the Herskovits Award Committee of the African Studies Association. His most recent book is Hemmed In: Responses to Africa's Economic Decline.