Transcript
Susan Rice: President Armacost, ladies and gentlemen, members of the press, distinguished guests: Thank you for inviting me to speak to you this morning. I am pleased to be with you to discuss the Clinton Administration's policy in Africa.
We are at a pivotal time. Our relationship with African countries is being recast from one of paternalism, dependency, and indifference to one of genuine partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest. President Clinton's historic trip next week to six African countries will underscore the importance we attach to this evolving relationship and our long-term engagement with the African continent. It will be the only comprehensive trip to Africa ever undertaken by a sitting U.S. President, and it will be the first presidential visit to the countries of Ghana, Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, Botswana, and Senegal.
The Africa President Clinton will visit this year is not the same Africa visited by President Carter in 1978 or even the one President Bush visited briefly in 1992. It is not the Africa of televised images of famine, war, and genocide that have poured into our living rooms over the past decade. Those images are misleading us, for they are only part of a much larger story that is unfolding. The larger story is that of a wave of change rolling over the continent. As South Africa's Deputy President Thabo Mbeki has said, we can rightfully speak of an "African renaissance."
Democracy is gradually taking root as many African countries undertake significant political reforms. During the last decade, the number of democracies in Sub-Saharan Africa has grown five-fold. While the democratization process has been uneven, and is still tenuous, some 25 African states now enjoy some form of democratic governance. Citizens of African countries are increasingly demanding that they be involved in the decisions that affect their lives. They are increasingly demanding that their leaders be accountable.
Economic growth is also on the rise as those nations liberalizing their economies begin to reap the benefits of free markets and economic reform. Economic growth outstripped population growth in 31 of 48 Sub-Saharan countries in 1996, and annual GDP growth in Africa last year averaged almost 5%. As Africa's exports have grown, so, too, has its trade with the U.S. Since 1994, U.S. trade with Sub-Saharan Africa has grown, on average, 16.9% annually, outpacing growth in global trade in 1995 and 1996. U.S. exports to Africa reached $6.2 billion in 1997, while African exports to the U.S. totaled $16.4 billion. And let us not forget that as the huge, mostly untapped African market of 600-700 million people grows and our market share increases, thousands of new American jobs will be created.
Regions of stability are also emerging throughout the continent. This decade has witnessed not only the dramatic end of apartheid but the conclusion of protracted wars in the Horn of Africa and Mozambique. There is now hope for lasting peace in Liberia and Angola. In many countries — from Namibia to Mali — reconciliation is supplanting confrontation as the means of bridging differences rooted in the past.
In recognition of the winds of opportunity sweeping across Africa today, the U.S. is pursuing two overarching policy goals in Africa. The first is to accelerate Africa's full integration into the global economy. As the global village shrinks and nations forge closer economic ties, Africa must not be left behind. Increasing its trade and commercial links with the rest of the world is crucial to the sustainable economic growth and development Africa needs to alleviate endemic poverty.
Success will render both Africans and Americans safer and more prosperous. As extreme poverty is checked and the social unrest which often accompanies it subsides, the need for costly intervention by the international community will also diminish. At the same time, Americans will reap the benefits of increased trade and investment in Africa.
Democratic governance and respect for human rights are crucial to the goal of integrating Africa into the global economy. Recent history has taught us that democratic governments that safeguard political and economic freedoms foster more effectively the conditions for sustainable economic growth. Accordingly, a major theme of President Clinton's trip next week will be to continue promoting the principles of democracy and respect for human rights.
This Administration has actively supported the emergent democracy in Africa. For five years, this has been and remains the bedrock of our Africa policy. Currently, we support programs in 46 African countries to help educate citizens from all walks of life to make their electoral processes work and establish vibrant civil societies.
Our role in supporting the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 is well known. Not only did we provide political and moral support in opposition to the apartheid regime, we provided substantial assistance — $600 million in the first three years — to the newly elected democratic government.
We have supported the creation of independent election commissions in 11 African countries and given $20 million in electoral assistance to Mozambique and Malawi alone. In the former, we spent $14 million and funded seven agencies to support democratic elections bringing to an end 16 years of civil year. We trained 52,400 elections officers and 32,000 political party poll watchers, deploying them to over 7,000 voting locations. The stability democratic governance has brought to Mozambique has resulted in a 6% annual economic growth rate for 1996 and 8% for 1997, one of the highest rates of growth on the continent.
In Malawi in 1994, we supported the first free and fair elections in its history, but we did not stop there. Recognizing the fragile state of the emerging democracy, we have been providing training and program assistance to strengthen parliament, modernize the judiciary, and enhance the electoral commission. Since then, Malawi's Parliament has amended executive legislation, passed constitutional safeguards on human rights, and enacted anti-corruption legislation.
We continue to plow new ground. In Eritrea, we are supporting human rights training seminars in a newly constituted nation with few human rights organizations. In Liberia, we funded the establishment of the new Liberian Human Rights Center in 1997. And this year it, in turn, will fund the Center's outreach programs across all of Liberia. In Ethiopia, we have supported decentralization, multi-party elections, civic service reform, democratic union practices, and constitution drafting.
In Mali, we are continuing to fund civic and voter education programs throughout the country. This year, we will help expand activities raising civic consciousness of women's rights from the capital to all of Mali's eight regions. Tangible results are being registered. A women's group has already identified 132 potential female candidates for legislative and municipal elections.
In Ghana, we trained 4,500 electoral observers, assisted in a comprehensive voter registration effort, and contributed $10 million to ensure that its 1996 elections would be free, fair, and transparent. In Senegal, we have worked with grassroots organizations to encourage democratic and transparent management of local resources and accountable government. This May, in conjunction with France, Great Britain, and the Global Coalition for Africa, we will sponsor a workshop in Mali to promote democracy and good governance for the benefit of African governments, donor groups, and NGOs.
But, let me stress, our support for democracy entails active diplomacy as well as development assistance. We have put the promotion of democracy and respect for human rights at the very top of our public and private agendas with our African counterparts. We constantly engage African leaders on issues of political reform and good governance, on the need for effective anti-corruption efforts, and on the critical importance of the rule of law and a predictable regulatory environment. In Uganda, we have urged genuine political pluralism and systems that incorporate a wider spectrum of political beliefs. In Kenya, we have worked with international financial institutions and other donors to make assistance contingent upon stronger anti-corruption measures. We also have pressed repeatedly for an inclusive process of constitutional reform to correct shortcomings in Kenya's democratic framework. In Zambia, the U.S. has made plain that political detainees, including Kenneth Kaunda, must be swiftly tried in a fair and open process or released. We have pressed repeatedly for the lifting of the state of emergency.
I could cite many more examples of our efforts to strengthen democracy in Africa. Nevertheless, it needs to be acknowledged that our success in helping advance and sustain democracy in Africa has been uneven. U.S. and international efforts have failed thus far to restore democracy and respect for human rights in Nigeria. Coups have toppled fragile democracies in Congo-Brazzaville and Niger, and free political activity has been stifled in many countries.
But the successes clearly outnumber the failures. Unfortunately, Americans hear more about the failures than the successes. Just two days ago, we saw the restoration of the democratically elected government in Sierra Leone through the intervention of ECOWAS peacekeeping troops. We commend the Sierra Leonean public for their commitment to the principles of democracy. They are a testimony to the universal desire of people everywhere for freedom.
Democracies can only flourish if they are rooted in the fertile soil of civic society in which human rights are respected. Our commitment to supporting democracy in Africa, therefore, goes hand in hand with our support for human rights. We will continue to support actively the International War Crimes Tribunal in Rwanda to bring to justice the perpetrators of the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda even as we condemn the resurgent wave of killings there now. We are working with the tribunal to streamline its operations and establish a witness protection program as well as helping the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights to bolster its field operations in the region.
We are working with the governments of the Great Lakes region to craft and implement the Administration's new Great Lakes Justice Initiative, which Secretary Albright announced during her trip to Africa last year. The region is at a historical crossroads, and the direction it takes will greatly influence how successful Africa is in joining the global economy, upholding humanitarian values, and promoting democracy. Drawing on African support and expertise, this initiative will help the public and private sectors develop justice systems that are impartial, credible, and effective in combating the culture of impunity and violence that has ravaged the region.
We will also continue to support vigorously the work of the UN team investigating massacres in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And we will continue to maintain our sanctions against the military dictatorship in Nigeria, one of the worst abusers of human rights on the continent. We intend to hold General Abacha to his three-year-old promise to undertake a genuine transition to civilian rule this year and to establish a level playing field by allowing free political activity, providing for an open press, and ending political detention. Let me state clearly and unequivocally to you today that an electoral victory by any military candidate in the forthcoming presidential elections would be unacceptable. Nigeria needs and deserves a real transition to democracy and civilian rule, not another military regime dressed up in civilian clothes.
Peace and stability are essential to the nurturing of a civil society that safeguards human rights and creates the enabling environment for economic growth and investment. Hence, promoting conflict resolution remains a critical component of U.S. Africa policy.
U.S. leadership and resources were instrumental in bringing to an end protracted conflicts in Mozambique and now, we hope, in Angola. The U.S. has provided more than $90 million to the West African peacekeeping force, ECOMOG, in order to bring peace to Liberia. And we are the largest investor in developing the Organization of African Unity's Conflict Management Center.
U.S. diplomats are actively engaged in Burundi to help forge a peaceful solution to the conflict that persists there. We are working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo not only to facilitate a full accounting of human rights violations but to encourage the people of Congo — working with or despite their government — to usher in a period of reconciliation and cooperation in the complex task of reconstructing their ravaged society.
The Clinton Administration has also launched the African Crisis Response Initiative (ACRI) to enhance the capacity of African nations to respond to humanitarian crises and peacekeeping challenges in a timely and effective manner. Its emphasis is on the provision of training and non-lethal equipment, primarily communications gear, to create interoperability among units from different countries. The ACRI is part of a larger international effort which involves several other donor partners.
We are committed to working with Africa for the long-term in achieving progress in all these crucial areas of conflict resolution, democracy, human rights, and economic growth.
Another important goal of the President's trip next week will be to promote his Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity, an initiative designed to accelerate growth by promoting economic reform and boosting trade and investment in Africa. Already the least-developed African countries are able to export nearly 50% more products to the United States duty-free under the GSP program. But under this partnership, those African countries that undertake bold, growth-oriented reforms would have substantially greater market access.
This sweeping, new presidential initiative would fundamentally alter the nature of America's economic relationship with Africa. Not surprisingly, the responses from African governments have been overwhelmingly positive. The implementing legislation — the African Growth and Opportunity Act — just passed the House yesterday and is now on its way to go to the Senate. Its progress has been the product of visionary leadership on both sides of the aisle and in both Houses of Congress. I hope that the Senate will be able to move swiftly to pass this landmark legislation.
The second of the Administration's two overarching policy goals in Africa is protecting the U.S. and our citizens from threats to our national security that emanate from Africa as they do from the rest of the world. In addition to weapons proliferation, we must guard against state-sponsored terrorism, narcotics flows, the growing influence of rogue states such as Libya and Iran, international crime, environmental degradation, and disease.
We are committed to working with Africa to meet these threats. In 1996, we signed the African Nuclear Weapons Free Zone Treaty, eliminating nuclear weapons now and forever in Africa.
The U.S. has also cleared thousands of miles and acres of landmines in Africa. We provide anti-terrorism training to African countries and information on the activities of terrorist groups. We have worked to isolate and contain the threat that Sudan poses to the United States and its neighbors through its continued sponsorship of international terror. In November of last year, we imposed comprehensive economic sanctions on Sudan to increase pressure on the Sudanese regime to change fundamentally its behavior.
In addition, we are working with law enforcement authorities throughout the continent to interdict illicit drugs before they hit the American streets, and we are sharing our medical expertise through the Center for Disease Control to combat dangerous diseases, like malaria and AIDS, on the continent.
Finally to combat environmental degradation, we support biodiversity and reforestation programs to help save the flora unique to the continent and preserve the rain forests of West and Central Africa, and we support early ratification by the Senate of the 1994 Convention to Combat Desertification.
The Administration is committed not only to continuing with these efforts but to intensifying them in the years to come. We will craft and implement a concerted, continent-wide counter-narcotics strategy. We will clear millions more mines. And we will enhance our efforts to arrest environmental degradation and population growth and to combat disease.
The programs and activities I have outlined represent only a sampling of our diverse efforts to build a long-term partnership with the African people to help them realize their vast potential. Ultimately, Africans themselves will be the ones who determine if their dreams for a better life will become reality. But we can and we must support their efforts in the spirit of partnership. There is too much to gain to be idle and too much to lose from indifference. We must not allow the failures and seemingly intractable problems of this vast continent obscure its great promise and the progress Africans are making every day in realizing that potential.
The Clinton Administration believes that we must be energetic and ambitious in working together with African partners to build democracy, foster economic growth, improve respect for universal human rights, and reduce remaining conflicts. We cannot sit idly by waiting for Africa to achieve perfection before we engage actively in helping to shape its future. We will at times have to work with flawed governments whose record on democracy and human rights is not up to our standards. But it does not mean that we will compromise those standards. As Secretary of State Albright has stated, we will never retreat from our support for democratic principles and universal standards of human rights.
We see human rights and democracy not only as the expression of universal values but as the only means of achieving the goals of long-term political stability and sustainable economic development on the African continent. Given the fragility of the national identities and institutions of many African states, coercive regimes which trample on human rights are inherently unstable. But when ethnically diverse populations are empowered with political and economic rights, they secure a sense of ownership of their own national institutions. They are then motivated to create the enabling conditions for stability and growth.
We believe the best approach leading to the empowerment of the diverse peoples of Africa takes into account the unique characteristics and circumstances of different states. It is an approach that recognizes the broad variety of institutional expressions of democracy. We can discern and respect differences in the democratic approaches taken by Canada, Switzerland, and France. We do not devalue the legitimacy of democratic diversity in Western societies, nor should we in Africa.
Nevertheless, we must be absolutely clear that our standards are uniform and that true transformation is our goal. Full, sustained, and universal democracy and respect for human rights are our guideposts. On these we do not compromise.
Yet we will not be ambivalent bystanders as some African countries work through growing pains. We have too much to gain from the new partnership we are building into the 21st century — a partnership that will benefit Africans and Americans alike.
When President Clinton travels to Africa next week, he will extend the hand of partnership to a new generation of Africans — his own generation and my generation — sharing the same desire for freedom, peace, and prosperity. He believes, and I believe with him, that it is a vision that Americans and Africans can and must pursue together.
We can and must break through the walls of misunderstanding and ignorance that continue to separate so many Americans from Africa. To quote the great American poet, Langston Hughes, we can "shatter this darkness, to smash this night, to break this shadow, into a thousand whirling dreams of sun."
Let us then reach out to the next generation of Africans from all walks and stations of life. Let us be resourceful in finding ways to meet with them, talk with them, and work with them. If Africa achieves lift-off, then we all — Africans and Americans — will benefit. Thank you.