Barking up the Wrong Tree
After contentious debates, furious negotiations and few compromises, the African Union rejected a plea by the G4–Brazil, Germany, India and Japan–to give Africa two seats without veto power on the UN Security Council. These events unfolded at a special summit in Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa earlier this month where representatives from across Africa gathered to discuss plans on how best to forge a consensus on seats for the continent in the UN Security Council.
Well-known for its indecisiveness, the 53 member Union could not readily agree on whether to stick to its original UN veto demand for a 26-member expansion of the Council or change it in line with the G4’s proposal. The G4’s proposal envisions expanding the council to 25 members with six new permanent seats without veto power and four non-permanent seats. Of the six non-veto-wielding seats, the G4 hopes to reserve four for its members and two for Africa. At the end of the meeting, however, 46 of the 53 AU members strongly rejected this proposal calling for a more radical reform involving two permanent seats with veto power.
If anything, the August meeting showed that arrogance is a key trait of the Union. But, AU’s current chairman President Olusegun Obasanjo cautioned against such apparent obstinacy, calling instead for compromise. In his statement to senior officials of the Union, Obasanjo said, “we need to negotiate with other groups, unless our objective is to prevent any decision”.
Meanwhile, a continent away and a day prior to the Summit, the US Treasury, in a press release on August 3, announced 26 new targets for smart sanctions against Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
These two issues are inextricably linked because Mugabe’s regime, the most odious in Africa, has not been condemned by the AU. Indeed, several African nations have attempted to prevent discussion of human rights abuses in Zimbabwe.
“The Mugabe regime rules through politically motivated violence and intimidation and has triggered the collapse of the rule of law in Zimbabwe,” said Robert Wagner, director of the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). “By denying the Mugabe regime access to the US financial system and US persons, we’re cutting off the flow of support they could use to further destabilize Zimbabwe.”
The most notable target of the sanctions is the new Central Intelligence Organization (secret police) chief Didymus Mutasa, who famously said that Zimbabwe would be better off with “only six million people”. When he said this a few years ago, and with intended echoes of Pol Pot in Cambodia, the population was at least double that.
The response of African nations, the AU in particular, to the Zimbabwe crisis represents nearly everything that is wrong with Africa.
The Commission for Africa report released earlier this year by the British government, but backed by many African experts, said that “the issue of good governance and capacity-building is what we believe lies at the core of all of Africa’s problems. Until that is in place, Africa will be doomed to continue its economic stagnation”.
And by not criticizing bad governance, and there is none worse than Zimbabwe, the AU misses its opportunity to demonstrate that it deserves to be taken seriously as an organization representing the world’s poorest and most strife-torn continent–potentially worthy of permanent seats on the Security Council.
The AU seems to be oblivious of this reality–their largest concern is internal wrangling over who to give the non-existent seats to.
Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa are the leading candidates for the two seats the AU is demanding, but other states are far from happy about being relegated to the second division, says BBC’s Martin Plaut. Angola, Kenya and Algeria in particular, are apparently upset but their corruption levels and violence in the former, would make membership laughable. Having said that, the human rights records and corruption levels of Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa are not good.
The uncertainty of securing any type of seats–permanent or non-permanent–on the Council aside, it is still far from clear whether the right of veto would be granted to AU members–a power wielded at the moment only by the present permanent members: China, France, Russia, Britain and the United States. When the AU met in London with the G4, the Africans were told in no uncertain terms that no additional members would get the veto. Even more, China’s ambassador announced that his country and the United States would scupper any plans by the G4.
The argument was that if the veto was spread any further, it would only paralyze the UN still more, preventing it from acting in a crisis. The current veto powers can thankfully still block this reform, and frankly United States and Britain must block it.
But more than blocking it, they must announce that AU deliberations on access to the Security Council are meaningless until AU deals with its own countries’ human rights problems. The UN is impotent enough as it is; adding members with no stomach for intervention to protect the weak would destroy what remains of its credibility.
Roger Bate is a resident fellow at AEI.
