Why I Am Now Opposed To Western Intervention In Africa
Local Green Belt Movement members survey their work. Supported by USAID/Kenya, the Green Belt Movement reforested some 90,000 degraded hectares of the Aberdares Range. Residents say that more than 60 dried-up streams have begun to flow again since the seedlings were planted. Photo by USAID/Neil Thomas/Creative Commons
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(OPINION) I come from the continent of Africa, with about 1.3 billion people, almost half of whom live on less than $2 per day. Yet Africa, three times bigger in size than the United States, is vast and rich in natural resources. Sadly, however, the continent has suffered from mismanagement, exploitation and conflicts. Even $1.2 trillion in aid or development assistance from the developed world since 1990 — often motivated by Christian goodwill toward the poor — has had little impact on bettering the lives of Africans, as Greg Mills showed in his book “Expensive Poverty.”
I used to staunchly believe in Western intervention in Africa in one form or another. Today I have abandoned that paradigm of thinking, and I want to share why.
I need to make it clear from the outset that I am unwaveringly against anti-Western sentiment. I also strongly support partnership between the West and the rest. However, I think that Western intervention in Africa in the current form is harming Africa and concur with those who call for a fundamental review of the principle that underpins the relationship between the West and Africa.
Why I thought the West could save Africa
I used to think that the West could save Africa. This thought developed during my years as a student in Britain when New Labour was governing the country. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown were committed to “making poverty history” in Africa. Their commitment was partly driven by their Christian faith. I truly hoped that their approach could address the persistent poverty and related societal ills in Africa. I remember vividly Blair’s speech at the Labour Party conference on Oct. 2, 2001. He said the “state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don't, it will become deeper and angrier.” For me, it was like a message of salvation.
Blair and Brown were true to their words, and they put the cause of ending poverty in Africa at the top of their foreign policy agenda. They increased the U.K.’s foreign aid budget to meet the U.N.’s target of spending 0.7% of gross national income. They called for a doubling of foreign aid, a cancellation of debt, and even a Marshall Plan for the poorest countries in the world. They established a Commission for Africa made up of celebrities such as U2’s Bono and Bob Geldof and African leaders such as Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and Tabo Mbeki of South Africa. Their report called for an additional $25 billion in aid by 2010. It also called for contributions to improved governance and capacity building, peace and security, public-private partnership schemes, investments in people, and increased, fairer trade. Blair and Brown were successful in persuading the Group of Eight — made up of representatives of the major industrial nations — to adopt their poverty-ending agenda, although I am not sure how much of it was put into practice.
Blair was not only an interventionist in terms of humanitarian aid. He was also an advocate of military intervention in order to defend the values of democracy, freedom and justice in the world. Along with Brown and former U.S. President Bill Clinton, he preached globalization and was heavily influenced by Anthony Giddens’ “third-way politics,” which sought to marry globalization with the nation-state and successful business with social justice. I bought into the notion of globalization as a new world order and a means through which social justice and economic development could be achieved across the world.
I also bought into the ideology of Western intervention. This was because I did not think that globalization without interdependent nation-states would work. It was also because I thought that Judeo-Christian values of truth, love and human dignity governed the thoughts, policies and actions of Western governments and their systems. So I believed that Western policies of intervention were driven predominantly by a sense of moral responsibility, humanitarian concern and a genuine desire to spread the gospel of democracy.
I treated the widely accepted view that Western intervention was driven by narrow self-interest that centered on global political and economic domination, as cynical and unhelpful. I was, of course, aware that faceless forces, the “powers and principalities,” in major cities in the West were contributing to global economic injustice, regional instabilities and perpetual poverty of many nations — particularly in Africa — but I thought that government systems sought to uphold the basic moral principles. Hence, I argued that Western nations should intervene in the affairs of poorer nations to develop them, provide humanitarian support, protect citizens from their despotic leaders and tackle the threat of religious extremism. As I viewed the world as a global family of dynamic and interdependent nations, I argued that poorer nations should not be left to their own devices to solve their own problems. I also contended that nations under despotic leaders should not be left to suffer injustice and tyranny.
Along these lines, I supported NATO’s intervention in Serbia and Kosovo and admired Blair’s role in this. I admired Blair for sending British troops to Sierra Leone and defeating a rebel group called the Revolutionary United Front, which had caused so much suffering to Sierra Leoneans. I was also in favor of military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Bush, Blair and Iraq
While I supported Western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq by America and its allies, I despaired over Bush administration policies, such as the unilateral rejection of the Kyoto climate protocol, policies relating to trade barriers, farm subsidies that created a trade imbalance and adversely affected farmers in Africa, the rejection of the proposal to produce cheap generic copies of retroviral drugs to stem the terrible deaths caused by AIDS in Africa, and the refusal to support the establishment of the International Criminal Court. However, I firmly believed that globalization and the problems facing many nations needed a world whose order was underpinned by multilateralism under American leadership. I did not think that rejecting Bush’s policies and ideological position should be a basis for rejecting everything America stood for.
I also was skeptical of the fear that behind the Bush-Blair doctrine of intervention there was a subtle imperialism aimed at attaining a strategic dominance in the Middle East and the world. Such a view, I thought, would sustain tyrannical leaders in the world. I did not see how freedom, justice and peace could be achieved without removing Sierra Leone’s RUF, Serbia’s Slobadan Milosevich, Afghanistan’s Taliban and al-Qaida, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.
In the run up to the Iraq War in 2003, Ethiopia became part of the “coalition of the willing.” I supported Ethiopia’s position and resented France’s staunch opposition to the war. I agreed with those who mocked France as a nation that would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order. I thought the French were more interested in rivalry than partnership. I was offended by the view that Britain was shamelessly exemplifying unhealthy servanthood toward America. A reference to Blair as a poodle to Bush angered me. I wrote a letter to Blair to encourage him.
In the letter, I reminded him how history had “proved that division over political decisions, coupled with moral indifference, enable tyrants to achieve their evil goals with devastating consequences.” I referred to what happened in Ethiopia in 1936, when “the Fascist Italian forces bombed and gassed their way into Ethiopia, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and ill-equipped militiamen, while the League of Nations was watching like an elderly and vaguely disapproving nanny.” I expressed Ethiopia’s continued gratitude to the British not only for “providing refuge for our Emperor over the period of Italian invasion (1936-1941) but also for assisting us militarily in our struggle to liberate our country from Mussolini’s forces.” I concluded by saying that the Iraqi people and the world would be grateful if he continued in his resolve “to remove the threat that Saddam is posing to our world and give the Iraqis the freedom and peace they deserve in the same way as Churchill’s government did to the Ethiopians in 1941.”
Double standards and eternal interests
I would not write the same letter now because when I wrote this letter in 2003, I did not fully appreciate the kind of double standards that existed in diplomatic dealings and the extent of national interests’ role in Western intervention. While Ethiopians continue to be grateful for the role of the British in defeating the Italians, the reality was that British national interests played a bigger part in the decision. Churchill would not have made such a decision if defeating Italian forces in Ethiopia and Eritrea had not been believed to be vital to defeating Italian forces in North Africa — which would contribute to defeating fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in Europe.
National interests played a huge role in the Iraq War in 2003 as well. When one looks at the list of corporations that were awarded contracts in the U.S.-British invaded Iraq, one might justifiably wonder if the war was designed to serve interests of Western nations and corporations rather than to address the political and humanitarian problems in Iraq. Of course, the chief reason for the Iraq War was not humanitarian. Indeed, the decision was based on intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and had the capability and intention to launch them. Alas, the intelligence was wrong and no WMDs were found. Why did all intelligence agencies in the world get this wrong? We really don’t know.
But we know that visible and invisible forces are capable of achieving their unholy goals in the name of their governments through false claims, fabricated intelligence and the guise of humanitarian aid and human rights concerns — all of which are promoted by mainstream media in a coordinated manner. Many now believe that Iraq — and later, Libya — is a victim of these coordinated efforts, at the heart of which are double standards and national interests.
Western intervention in the Horn of Africa
Double standards and national interests have guided the ways in which Western powers have been treating the current situation in the Horn of Africa, particularly Ethiopia. Many in the Horn of Africa believe that a carefully coordinated proxy war has been waged against Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia by mainstream media, aid agencies, academic think tanks, religious establishments, human rights organizations, the U.N. and other international entities, diplomatic communities, and governments in the West and the Middle East. As a result, Eritrea has been impoverished over the last 20 years, and Somalia has remained a failed state for decades.
Since November 2020, there have been concerted and coordinated efforts to bring Ethiopia to its knees and eventually destroy it as a nation through manufacturing the #TigrayGenocide narrative and supporting the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, an insurrectionist group that has caused much suffering and death in Ethiopia. The background for these efforts and the kind of geopolitical and economic interests behind them merit a separate article.
I should mention here, however, that as a Canadian legal expert John Philpot said, the “war in Ethiopia is not a civil war. It’s a war on Ethiopia by the United States, the proxy partner of TPLF.” The European Union and the U.K. are participants in this. Why these powers resolved to engage in a war that has contributed to the suffering of millions and could potentially lead to a disintegration of Ethiopia has been puzzling to many Ethiopians and observers.
One might shrug their shoulders and refer to Henry Kissinger’s infamous aphorism: “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” Kissinger’s words probably are based on what a British statesman, Lord Palmerston, said in 1884: “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, those interests it is our duty to follow.”
This seems to violate the idea of our common humanity, which is based on the biblical axiom that all humans are created in the image of God and have equal worth. Alas, Western foreign policies are chiefly guided by national interests and double standards. No wonder, then, that international media, governments and humanitarian institutions do not take matters of truth, justice and democracy as seriously as they lecture others.
Indeed, this explains why Western media, governments and organizations ignored the truth that the TPLF committed a treasonous and criminal act by attacking Ethiopia’s military in order to overthrow the national government. This also explains why Western powers have treated the TPLF and the Ethiopian government as morally equivalent and often harshly judged the latter. It further explains why Western media and governments magnified stories of real or manufactured atrocities when the Ethiopian federal forces were in Tigray but went almost completely silent about the rapes, mass killings of civilians, destruction of health and educational facilities, killing of domestic animals, and widespread lootings and destruction of public and private properties carried out by TPLF forces and their allies in the Amhara and Afar regions of Ethiopia.
All this shows that there is very little or no morality behind Western intervention in Africa. National interests are not sinful, but national interests that are not enlightened and guided by moral principles are deeply damaging. Enlightened national interests center on values such as truth and justice and the principle that all humans have equal worth, tied to their being humans created in the image of God. It is hypocritical for the West to claim to be a champion of democracy and human rights without being seen to be a champion of unadulterated truth, nonpreferential treatment and nonselective justice. Africa’s multitude of problems cannot be solved by Western intervention characterized by double standards and unenlightened national interests in its political and economic dealings.
Healthy partnership, #NoMore intervention
Admittedly, Africa needs the West, and vice versa, but both the West and Africa must embrace the principle of healthy partnership, which is a reciprocal sharing of knowledge, experience, expertise and resources for mutual benefit. To be sure, the West obviously is scientifically and technologically more advanced than Africa. However, there is no region that does not possess resources, expertise, experience and knowledge to a lesser or greater degree. This is true of Africa as well. That obviously means that Africa has something to offer to the West, as the West has something to offer to Africa. This relationship is founded on the principle of what I call conditional reciprocity. Hence, Africa and the West must see each other as partners.
But partners are partners only when they treat each other as equals. Partners should neither be servants nor rivals. Nor should they be only givers or receivers. The foundation of equality between partners should not primarily be seen as wealth, intellectual tradition, scientific and technological advancement, or military capability. It should be seen as human dignity upon which moral and cultural values and national aspirations are built. Nation-states embody those values and aspirations. This is true in Africa and anywhere in the world. Then how should Africa’s political and economic problems be solved?
I do not agree with the view that African nations should be left to their own devices to solve their own problems in the way they see fit. Nor do I agree with the idea that Africa’s problems should be solved through external intervention led mainly by the U.S. and European institutions and corporations. I would argue that Africans should have a healthy partnership with those in the West and East, but African problems should be addressed through African solutions, African leadership and African resources. This thinking should not, however, be governed by either anti-Western sentiment or unhealthy Afro-centrism.
Along this line, my stance is that the current state of affairs — where a U.S. or European government, for example, operating with double standards and unenlightened national interests that instruct what a sovereign state should or should not do, intervenes in a country by using its military or proxies and economically punishes nations who refuse to assent to its order — is utterly unacceptable, imperialistic and immoral.
I also broadly concur with William Easterly (“The White Man’s Burden”), Dambiso Moyo (“Dead Aid”), Michael Maren (“The Road to Hell”), Graham Hancock (“Lords of Poverty”), Greg Mills (“Expensive Poverty”) and other critical voices who have argued that not only has aid failed to achieve its goal of ending the pandemic of poverty in Africa, but also, in Easterly’s words, “the West’s efforts to aid the Rest have done so much ill and so little good.”
If intervention in any form is to change and develop Africa, neither Europe nor America can change and develop Africa. It is Africans themselves who can change and develop Africa. Africans who have regard for values and are committed to good governance. Africans who have the courage to be self-critical and change the way they think and conduct their lives. Africans who are willing and able to engage in healthy partnerships with those in the West and the East. So, the focus must be on partnering with Africans in their efforts to deal with factors that contribute to poverty and build their capacity to properly manage external aid and loans as well as internal resources in a manner that is contextually relevant.
I therefore call on the West to abandon its assumption that it should employ Western devices to find solutions for Africa’s problems. I understand that Western nations have a policy that assumes African problems are the responsibility of Africans, but in practice, Western institutions and organizations effectively run institutions and organizations in Africa and seek to address African problems through Western solutions. In so doing, they use vast resources earmarked to aid Africa. This form of intervention is self-serving, imperialistic and wrong. We must all say #NoMore to this form of intervention. But Africa needs the West, and the West needs Africa. To address that mutual need, both Africa and the West must engage in a healthy partnership that is based on the principle of reciprocity.
Desta Heliso studied at King's College London and London School of Theology and served as lecturer and director of the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology in Addis Ababa. He currently resides in London but continues to coordinate the Center for Ancient Christianity and Ethiopian Studies at EGST. He is also a fellow of the Center for Early African Christianity in New Haven and a visiting lecturer at the London School of Theology.