Sub-saharan Africa and humanitarian diplomacy

 Africa has historically been exploited by Colonial empires; the great powers fought over its natural resources and the geostrategic value of some of its regions, whose ownership meant dominance of the trade routes. 

After the Second World War, it was the French and the British who shared out the spoils of war to the winners. But their decadent empires gave way to another model of colonialism: that of the transnational corporations. In this way, Africa's natural resources are being diverted to the globalised world that so badly needs them for its development and continued growth; meanwhile, the vast majority of Africans are suffering from underdevelopment and poverty.

The Western economic model has contributed little to Africa's development. The 1973 oil crisis following the Arab-Israeli war drove down the price of African countries' exports, so that in the late eighties, twenty years after independence, these countries were poorer. Furthermore, the end of the Cold War brought a reduction in aid from both blocs. 

With falling incomes and aid, increases in poverty led to social discontent, revolts, coups d'état, civil wars; which meant increasing humanitarian disaster. Some governments requested assistance from the IMF, which meant additional debt, as well as economic adjustment conditions to ensure that the loans were repaid. The consequences of these adjustments were felt by the weaker classes and the circle of poverty continued to widen.

Both the IMF and the World Bank (WB) justified the adjustments on the basis of the liberal economic ideology: wages were too high, and the state had an excessive role in subsidizing social spending and public enterprises. The basic recipes should therefore be: lowering wages, reducing social expenditure and privatizing public enterprises. 

The IMF and World Bank measures have not worked properly. The debt has increased and expenditure on education and health has been reduced. Privatisations have led to the accumulation of wealth and capital by a few, with a consequent increase in inequalities. 
 

The economic agenda of the renewed colonialist model is unsustainable if not supported by the military agenda. It is essential to guarantee the security of the exploiting companies and their personnel. The old empires have left their military bases as watchmen and shields for their properties; but so have the new ones which, like the United States, are gaining military prominence on the African continent. Investments need order, stability and the powers resort to the military security agenda to guarantee their interests. Economy and military security go hand in hand.  

Most African states are fragile, and some have technically and functionally collapsed as such. Fragile states are characterised by a corrupt and violent institutional system; an illegal economic system; and a society often fragmented into identity groups. 

The elite that dominates fragile states practices corruption, directs whatever institutions exist towards their benefit, accentuating inequality, uses the armed forces to impose its criteria and co-opts sectors of society in a patrimonialist and clientelist system. On the other hand, in fragile states the essential principle of the legitimate monopoly of the use of force is altered owing to the dispersion of actors. Administrative control of the territory by the state has also deteriorated.

The patrimonialist and corrupt policies of the elites link them to centres of world political and economic power through the export of natural resources (oil, diamonds, gold, wood...), the purchase of arms, and the recycling of the currencies they obtain into speculative economic networks. Although it is often pointed out that African states are forgotten or are not part of so-called globalisation, the reality is that they are connected to legal networks and increasingly to illegal ones. 

The elites generate policies that are suited to their interests, or are imposed by force. In these countries, a part of the citizens works in the exploitation of resources, but in general the governments hand over the exploitation and commercialisation of resources in exchange for payments and rents that allow them to operate in the global economy without the profits going back to their countries. 

Faced with this panorama, a percentage of the population is forced to work in the informal sector and in many cases fall into violent illegality. Unprotected in terms of basic needs, they have no guarantees as citizens. They distrust non-existent state structures or violent patrimonialism and live in uncertainty and fear. The options are to emigrate by overcoming great obstacles and risking their lives, to try to find political refuge.

The struggle for resources and the lack of states that guarantee plurality lead to social groups relying on their identities as a form of cohesion, survival and legitimacy. Identity is also used by the elites that control states. The result is that violence turns into ethno-nationalism with catastrophic results such as the killing of half a million people in Rwanda in 1994, and the massive human rights violations that are systematically repeated in the region. 

All in all, although the important humanitarian work that many organisations and individuals have performed in recent decades in Africa cannot be underestimated, the balance sheet of international action in Africa is by no means encouraging and therefore deserves to be subjected to a thorough review and debate that takes into account the pernicious effects of aid that responds more to Western interests than to the original humanitarian imperative of saving lives.

The " new order " humanitarianism on the African continent has also been characterised by the gradual militarisation of aid. In this connection, some countries such as Liberia, Somalia and Rwanda witnessed the arrival of troops under the umbrella of the United Nations who were the champions of "humanitarian missions" and whose main objective was the military defence of aid and protection of humanitarian personnel, but who, on the contrary, played an active military role and even engaged in direct confrontation with the actors at war. In this way, the clear divide between the humanitarian and military spheres has been blurring, especially in the eyes of the belligerents, causing serious damage to humanitarian organisations which have become the target of attacks and aggression. 

Some voices have insisted that humanitarian aid has even become part of the dynamics of the conflict, and at times has contributed to prolonging the violence as many actors involved in the conflict have manipulated aid in their interests. Thus, humanitarian action has become, almost always involuntarily, a direct or indirect economic and political support for the dominant groups that benefit from these wars, and has even become a fundamental element in the so-called political economy of war. The "neutrality" of which humanitarian organisations tend to be the flagship, is nothing more than a fetish in a context, that of the "new wars", in which NGOs and United Nations agencies have become one more actor in the contest.