02 Apr 2013 | Tony Leon | Original Publication:
BDlive
Francois Bozize is one of a
dying breed of African 'big men' who treat the government purse as a private
piggy bank, writes Tony Leon
IN HIS eulogy for Richard Nixon in April 1994, his secretary of state,
Henry Kissinger, spoke of the former US president as someone "who stood on
pinnacles that dissolved into precipice". On this account, President Jacob
Zuma and his government had a very Nixonian patch this past week. Hosting the
Brics summit, on the one hand, is a high-water mark of the country’s
international clout. On the other, the return of 13 South African National
Defence Force (SANDF) soldiers in body bags symbolises a continental overreach
of tragic proportions.
Overreach is probably being too diplomatic. Bungling strategic
incoherence might be more accurate. But this at least suggests a sort of boy
scouts’ innocence, such as preserving the peace in conflict-torn central
Africa, as the purpose behind South Africa’s latest foreign misadventure. But
even this premise is at odds with "capacity building", which
apparently was the purpose of our deployment in this benighted part of the
world.
But our political masters and mistresses might wish to take a leaf from
the Nixon-Kissinger partnership. Over time, most Americans could not understand
why their conscripts were being sent to die on the foreign and inhospitable
fields of Vietnam, all in the name of preventing the "falling domino"
of South Vietnam from falling into communist hands, which it ultimately did.
However, the US’s involvement in Vietnam began as "logistical and
training support" for the South Vietnamese under president John F Kennedy.
Then, fatally (especially for the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, which was
immolated by the conflict), the involvement suffered from what military types
call "mission creep". The trainers needed protection and cover, the
local militia was found to be wanting, an excuse for ratcheting up the US involvement
was found and fabricated (the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident) and US
involvement mushroomed into full-scale war. This is something to ponder before
we decide to increase the size of our force in and around the Central African
Republic (CAR).
Of course, the CAR is very different from Vietnam, except that South
Africa has even less strategic interests there than the US had in Southeast
Asia in the 1960s. That is true unless there is some substance behind media
reports that our apparently ill-equipped troops were being deployed, in part,
to protect shadowy South African business interests in the CAR. But the idea of
SANDF soldiers being used, and in the final instance dying, as mercenaries is
so disreputable and would, if proven, snap even the endless elastic band of
credibility that South Africans generally afford their rulers.
If it is disreputable or simply wrong to suggest our troops died in
defence of unnamed local business interests in the CAR, what were we fighting
for, or was the bloody finale in Bangui simply a disastrous case of
"mission creep"?
On any explanation, and especially Zuma’s, we were fighting to maintain
the rule of a petty autocrat, Francois Bozize, a president who installed
himself in power via a military coup. Zuma, who has a distinguished pedigree in
the fight for freedom in South Africa, used the rather curious term
"bandits" to describe the Seleka rebels who ousted the unpopular
president. It was all a little too reminiscent of the description of African
National Congress guerillas by the National Party government as
"terrorists".
Before the cloud of despondency caused by our CAR imbroglio descends too
heavily upon us, consider this. Until last week, very few outside the
Department of International Relations and Co-operation had ever heard of
Bozize. He was an obscure, indifferent dictator, who legitimised his seizure of
power with an election of apparent dubious validity in 2005. But, happily, he
is also one of a dying breed of African "big men" who bestrode (and in
some corners of it, still do) the continent, treating the government purse as
their private piggy banks and looting and plundering their national resources.
To show how far, in fact, Africa has now journeyed along the democratic
pathway, think back to a CAR dictator you will certainly recall: Jean-Bedel
Bokassa, who held sway in the CAR between 1966 and 1979. Described with some
understatement as an "egotistical madman", he was proven at his
subsequent trial to have personally presided over judicial beatings, torture
and the extrajudicial killings of his victims and was convicted of massacring
100 of his own country’s schoolchildren. His crowning infamy, forgive the pun,
was to declare himself "Emperor of Central Africa" in a ceremony that
nearly bankrupted his country. He, too, was overthrown in a coup.
But his subsequent criminal convictions were expunged and overturned by
one of his successors, who went on to declare Bokassa "a son of the nation
recognised by all as a great builder". The president who rehabilitated
him, in 2010, was Bozize, our ally in the present conflict.
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