Cameron Duodu
LETTER FROM THE NORTH
The speed and efficiency with which Britain has deployed forces to evacuate its beleaguered citizens from Sierra Leone has been admirable.
But to many Africans the British action raises a very worrying question: why didn’t Britain place its forces at the disposal of the United Nations, so that everyone in danger in Sierra Leone could be protected, and not just British citizens?
Britain is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, which authorised the UN to send a force to Sierra Leone. Yet, despite appeals from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, neither Britain, nor any other Security Council member, has volunteered any troops for the UN to send to Sierra Leone.
Kenya and Zambia, countries which are inexperienced in overseas military campaigns, are among the few countries that have sent troops. When they got to Sierra Leone they found that there was no “peace” to keep but rather a renewed civil war that needs to be ended with force. And what does the Security Council, which authorised the dispatch of these poor Africans into Sierra Leone, do? Absolutely nothing.
But good old Britain has a few hundred citi-zens in Sierra Leone. So, in a matter of hours, it unilaterally lands paratroopers, who quickly secure Lungi airport and begin evacuating the Brits. Whether after they have flown out British and other foreign nationals they will stay to beef up the UN force with their superior equipment and knowledge, is a moot question to which British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, refuses to give a categorical answer.
In pandering to the Conservatives’ taunts that he will “suck” Britain into a UN operation that could result in the loss of British lives, Cook has given further ammunition to those who deride his “ethical foreign policy” as a figment of his own imagination and that of the Labour Party. For how can a foreign policy be “ethical” when it indulges in selective life-saving?
How can a foreign policy be “ethical” if it defines itself, through action or inaction, as inherently racist? If the Sierra Leone citizens, who are slaughtered or who have their limbs amputated at will by the murderous ragamuffins of the Revolutionary United Front, had been white, would Britain be putting their rescue on hold while attending to the evacuation of its own citizens?
On April 5 2000, no less a person than former president Nelson Mandela was quoted in the London Guardian as accusing the United States and Britain of “riding roughshod” over the UN.
“Mandela even suggested [the paper reported] a racist motive behind America’s neglect of the UN. ‘The US did not do this when the secretary general of the UN was white.’ [Mandela said]. ‘They are doing it now, ignoring the UN under Kofi Annan. And there are many people who are whispering that it is because the secretary general is black. That perception is disturbing [Mandela added].”
I am afraid the current British action in Sierra Leone only serves to strengthen this perception by Mandela and many other Africans. It appears the US and Britain only use the UN when it suits their interests (whatever these may be) and not because they are interested, as permanent members of the Security Council, in helping to maintain peace in the world.
It is important that this attitude should change quickly, for the UN is in the process of sending a force to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which will be equally as toothless as that sent to Sierra Leone but which, given the fact that the Congo is two-thirds the size of Western Europe, could end in even more devastating tragedy than that of Sierra Leone.
What annoys me as an African is that our countries have always been ready to respond to calls from the UN Security Council – on which they have no permanent members – to send troops, whenever the Council has asked them to. Soldiers from my own country, Ghana, have been going to the Lebanon for nearly two decades. For a time the UN force commander in Cyprus was a Ghanaian, General Emmanuel Erskine.
Our soldiers never asked themselves why they were being sent to countries “populated by whites”. Nor did they worry about the fact that the mess they were putting their lives on the line to try and clear up was created by Britain and its Western allies in the first place. In one instance, when Ghanaian “blue berets” went to the Congo to clean up after the Belgians, we lost more than 30 young men at a place then called Port Franqui.
Yet we didn’t give up, and in Bosnia I saw a Ghanaian “blue beret” on CNN, chained to a lamp post and booby-trapped – he was one of a number of hostages some Bosnian warlord or other had taken, to try and get the UN to grant his demands. It never occurred to me to wonder what he was doing on cold alien soil, far away from the warm climes of home.
Britain was part of the gang of “super- powers” that brought the UN into being after World War II.
Indeed, given the isolationism that was prevalent in the US after the War, it could be argued that Britain was instrumental in persuading both the US and the Soviet Union that the UN concept was a great idea. Why then is Britain increasingly turning its back on the UN in its hour of need? And why does it want to be taken seriously when it talks about an “ethical foreign policy” at the very moment it is doing this?