SUNS4501 Wednesday 2 September 1999

Development: Global Governance Fails Africa



Mexico City, Aug (IPS/Gumisai Mutume) -- Most of reconstruction aid from donor nations continues to go to
Kosovo and Bosnia-Hercegovina while in Africa, Somalia is falling apart no longer politically viable and
attracting barely a second look, note political observers in developing nations.

The sorry situation in Somalia, once a promising east African country, is another indication of the failure of
global governance to serve the countries of the south and underlines Africa's need to redefine its position in
the new global era, observers say.

A recent UN document describes Somalia as a "black hole" of anarchy with no national government and a
pervasive lawlessness that attracts criminals and subversives.

Some 300,000 Somalis face starvation and one million other people in the country on the Horn of Africa are
in a rapidly deteriorating condition, says the United Nations.

When the world pulled out of Somalia in the mid-1990s it signalled a withdrawal by the international community from the affairs of the poorest continent.

Earlier in the decade Somalia - and indeed most of Africa - had been the focus of world attention when famine, civil war, structural adjustment and democratisation resulted in substantial media attention. But international TV cameras have since turned the other way - as has the flow of aid money. %w

"In the face of Africa's natural disasters and long-running wars, people talk of donor fatigue but, how can we
be that insensitive when we see the pain?" asks UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan. "Is it that we are not telling the story effectively?"

Annan has managed to gather less than half of the 800 million dollars for which the United Nations appealed
to urgently assist 12 million people in Africa.

Of the 100 million dollar appeal for Angola only 40 percent has been pledged and the UN says of the 65 million dollars it requested for Somalia, only 20 million dollars has materialised.

At the same time the world's richest countries are demanding that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) should put nearly half of its projected expenditure - $475 million - to assist Kosovo's 3.4 million
refugees. Donors have supplied $350 million of this amount and the shortfall is expected to be met soon.

The European Union, one of the main contributors of development assistance to Africa already has indicated
it is cutting its aid to developing countries by 10 percent in order to divert it to Kosovo. Denmark has
announced that it will clip its contributions to the UN Development Programme for the coming year by 25
percent because of similar commitments.

The age of globalisation has become synonymous with an increasing uniformity of systems of government and expectations regarding human rights and democracy, says Greg Mills, the director of South Africa's Institute of International Affairs.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) intervention in Kosovo illustrated that sovereignty is no longer a facade behind which corrupt or unjust regimes can hide, he says.

"Yet the response of this community is selective, ranging from massive force (in the case of Kosovo) to massive indifference (in the case of Africa)," Mills says. "The Clinton doctrine states boldly the imperative for the United States to oppose ethnic cleansing and the slaughter of innocent people.

"While being self-satisfying, this policy lurch is simply delusionary and empty in its impossible universality."

The administration of US President Bill Clinton looked on as more than 500,000 Rwandans perished in the 1994 genocide, notes Mills.

The same man "led the bombing of Serbia to protect Kosovo from Slobodan Milosevic's thugs, (yet) his
administration has barely lifted a finger to help resolve the arc of crisis developing across Africa from Sierra
Leone to Sudan through Angola and the Congo," adds Mills.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, signalling the end of the Cold War, was greeted with
expectations of a world promising greater justice and equality.

Yet a decade later, President George Bush's 'new world order' has replaced totalitarianism in many states with
economic instability and decline, joblessness, and the collapse of the ideal of democracy says Mills.

Jonas Savimbi's Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA) - which the international community has
failed to tame in its war against the Angolan government - is now intensifying efforts to capture the country's
Central Highlands. Some 600,000 people in Angola face starvation and the state of another 3 million people
is unknown because they are beyond the reach of UN aid workers.

Humanitarian crises also threaten Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Congo (Brazzaville), the Democratic Republic of
Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda, according to the United Nations.

Not one cent has been contributed toward the UN humanitarian appeal for Congo-Brazzaville!

In Somalia the value of its currency, fell from about 7.5 shillings to the dollar to more than 10,000 shillings
to the dollar. "There are now four different Somali shillings in circulation in Somalia," says the UN report.

Somalia even lacks the basic national institutions capable of receiving economic aid, the 25-page report says.
"As a country without a national government, Somalia remains unique."