Interventions (23 page)

“Yes, we must have African solutions to African problems,” I said at the summit, “but the test of those solutions must be in their results, not in their origins. What matters is not who provides the solutions, but whether they provide lasting peace and equitable prosperity.” We had to realize the danger of an anachronistic resentment, and focus solely on the purpose of the whole endeavor that we all professed to share. The point was that it was high time for us all—Africans and non-Africans alike—to grow up.

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W
hen I delivered the speech at Harare, Africa's heads of state felt deeply uneasy even just to hear my mention of criticism of military regimes. Salim A. Salim, the secretary-general of the Organization of African Unity, commented: “You're the only one who could have said that and gotten away without being lynched! No other African would dare, and we wouldn't have taken it from anyone else.”

“Someone had to,” I replied.

But Salim was right. There was a power in the role of the secretary-general that was invaluable, that gave you an ability to speak—and be heard—when others were too constrained, whether by convention or coercion. When I spoke in Harare, I knew where my best allies were. I was speaking as much to the gallery as I was to the audience of African heads of state. It was among the former, where representatives of African civil society sat, that the most applause rang out; this was a stark contrast to the deafening silence emanating from many of the African leaders sitting below. By presenting the idea in the words of the secretary-general of the United Nations, I was giving like-minded leaders in civil society a rallying point to gather around, giving encouragement and weight to their own voices.

A year later I heard Frederick Chiluba, the president of Zambia, give a speech to the OAU. He spoke of every game having rules, such as in football, where those who misbehave are given red cards. A red card system should be applied to leaders who came to power through coups d'état, he argued. It would not seem striking today, but at the time it was really quite something to hear an African head of state suddenly criticizing the phenomenon so openly. The genie of open debate was out of the bottle, and things then changed quickly: In 1999 and 2000 the OAU agreed on a series of important declarations rejecting nonconstitutional changes of government. These were then incorporated into the new constitution of the African Union (AU), which officially came into being in 2002. Thus, within the AU was enshrined the principle that no member state could hold membership of the organization following any military seizure of government or unconstitutional transfer of power. A coup meant you would be immediately kicked out as a matter of course. I hoped and expected the UN to follow the AU's lead but that has yet to happen.

We were still going to have coups in Africa, of course. And we did—several. But now there were consequences. The coups in Togo, Mauritania, Comoros, Madagascar, Niger, Mali, and Guinea all resulted in immediate suspension from the AU for these countries, and diplomatic isolation and other sanctions were brought to bear against them. The AU exists to promote regional integration so that the continent's countries can jointly step forward to overcome the challenges ahead. It is an important collective organization for all members, and exclusion from its benefits means something. The impact of this exclusion measure became writ into the calculations of even the most recalcitrant rulers with only the narrowest of interests in staying in power. It was suddenly harder for new juntas to perpetuate their rule.

The impact on the military junta of Mauritania—which seized power in August 2005—was immediately evident. Following this putsch, Mauritania was suspended from the AU, and the regional organization began negotiating sanctions. The junta declared the current government was a transitional measure. Its purpose, they said, was to pave the way for a new democratic system of government for the first time in Mauritania's history. It would be formed as soon as possible in elections in which no one in the military would be permitted to run. We had heard this kind of thing before, so I remained skeptical regarding Mauritania. But in 2007, the junta did, indeed, fulfill this promise and stepped aside to allow elections and a democratically elected civilian government.

Rather than a military regime bent on holding power for all time, the Mauritanian junta seemed to genuinely believe that they had to pass the mantle of power to civilian rule as quickly as possible. African putchists in the old days had always hung on as long as they could, in expectation of little sanction or forfeit. Idi Amin in Uganda, Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, Sani Abacha in Nigeria, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya: they seized power with an empty slate on which to scrawl the timeline of their future rule. The promise of the Mauritanian junta and their follow-through was a stark change, and one we can credit to the new international arrangement crafted by the AU.

In Mauritania, the impact of this progress was spoiled, however. In 2008, there was another coup. It was launched by the same perpetrators of the 2005 putsch, unhappy with the policies of the new president who had dismissed them from the leadership of the military. But to me, this only proved the deeply rooted, malign attitude of the coup-plot leaders, favoring their own position over the political health of the country—making it even more remarkable that they so cooperatively brought in elections in 2007. The effort of African leaders to implement a system that imposed some sanction on military rulers was making it harder for them to consider perpetuating their rule.

If it was having a serious effect in deterring military rule in Mauritania, which had suffered over ten coups and coup attempts since independence in 1960, then it was having an untold deterrent effect across Africa. In the microcosm of even the flawed developments of the Mauritania case, we were watching the beginnings of a continentwide transformation, improving the chances for a better-governed Africa.

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ENYA

“Mr. President, over one thousand people are dead. It's time to make a deal,” I said.

I was meeting privately with Mwai Kibaki, the president of Kenya. My body was exhausted, fatigued by an interrupted recovery from a microbial infection and a fever that had bowled me over a few weeks before. This was almost my last play. The game now had to end. We needed an agreement on the transformation of the Kenyan political system. Otherwise, the country would be unable to bear what seemed sure to come.

It was early 2008, over a year since I had completed my second and final term as head of the UN—a time when I thought my days of hammering out bargains between presidents and prime ministers would surely be over. But I had now been in Kenya for a costly and bloody thirty-nine days in an attempt to mediate a peace deal.

It had all begun with the presidential elections in December 2007, the fourth since the establishment of multiparty politics in the country in 1992. These were held simultaneously alongside parliamentary and local elections—and the stakes were high. But the voting was carried out in a remarkably peaceful fashion. Voting on December 27 contrasted brightly with previous elections marred by bloody fits of local violence. In this peaceful election, many saw Kenya taking another stride forward with an increasingly functioning democracy underpinned by a growing economy. Kenya was sustaining its reputation as one of the more successful of African states.

But when the election result was announced and foul play was called, a dark side of Kenyan society erupted. Beneath the vision of a peaceful Kenya there was a different reality buried deep in its economic and political structures. Twin blades of inequality and crony-capitalist politics had long combined to shear deep grievances, resentment, and desperate competition along Kenya's ethnic contours. Corruption among politicians and the civil service had become a monster in Kenya. Since independence, Kenya was ruled by interchanging ethnic cliques who, copying the self-enrichment of the white settlers before them, used public office to accumulate wealth for themselves, their kin, and their tribe. At a changeover of power, such unfairness seemed to justify a redirection of resources in equal measure to the tribe of the new rulers. Corruption grossly pretended to be righteous, and swelled with every passing government.

That was the situation for the elites at the top. The view from the bottom was of a system built on an immense pile of corruption that crushed the opportunities of ordinary people. By 2007, this corrupt consumption of state and business resources meant little trickled down. The typical Kenyan senior civil servant or CEO, for example, used his position to pay the school fees and hospital bills of around fifty of his kinsmen. This was in contrast to the 55 percent of Kenya's population who now lived on less than a dollar a day. So deep were most people in the pool of poverty that it would take just a ripple in the economy for them to succumb. Only the corrupt distribution of wealth via bloodline and ethnic kinship could provide the guaranteed, sustained means for survival. But in the winner-takes-all dynamic of Kenyan politics, until your tribe had power, you had to wait.

In so moribund a system, corruption was essential to livelihoods across the board. For most Kenyans, life was a bitter struggle through the narrow, fixed avenues cast by the silhouette of tribe. But this was usually a hidden struggle. It was so ingrained in Kenyan life that to most outsiders it was invisible; indeed, Kenyans themselves barely mentioned tribe or tribal affiliation in day-to-day interactions.

This was why, despite the warning signs, few saw what was coming. The long-held preeminence of Kikuyu elites in Kenyan politics meant that, in the run-up to the 2007 election, the opposition campaign positioned itself as geared to overthrowing this inequality. At the local level, particularly among the many poor communities, this political framing of the campaign increasingly developed into a sense of a coming reckoning, of “41 against 1”—referring to the forty-one Kenyan tribes other than the dominant group, the Kikuyu.

The polls put the opposition Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), led by Raila Odinga, of the Luo tribe, far ahead of the Party of National Unity (PNU), led by President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu. This expectation of change, it emerged later, was accompanied not only by a sense of entitlement for the disadvantaged tribes but also a sense of imminent justice on the ground, where the entitled, in their view, would soon have their resources rightfully taken from them. This was particularly so for the Luo, one of the three largest tribes, who had repeatedly been left out of the rotating ethnic hegemony of Kenyan politics that had most benefited the Kikuyu and the Kalenjin.

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B
ut on December 30, President Kibaki was pronounced the unexpected victor, and now the thunder struck.

The result flew in the face of the polls and the results of the parliamentary elections, which had put ODM well in the lead. Most were sure the vote had been rigged. The ODM and their supporters declared the election a sham, demanding redress, while the president was hurriedly sworn in at night, at a ceremony attended by a handful of people on December 30. Denying any wrongdoing, he demanded the opposition acquiesce in defeat.

A vast number of Kenyans were in desperate poverty, and their fate was being won or lost in what seemed a cheater's game of tribal musical chairs. The ultimate governor of life in Kenya was not any rule by law but the rule of bloodline—and it was along these same tribal veins that blood now poured.

It started with looting by Luo of Kikuyu businesses and homes—as if in recompense for what they had been denied—and then grew, in an escalating cycle of insecurity and tribe-on-tribe violence that dragged in all of Kenya's ethnic communities. Fear of being disallowed a turn at the feeding station of state resources was met with the equal fear of falling into the deprivation of those barred from it. Anger turned to looting. Looting created insecurity. And insecurity then drove violence, brutality, and, very soon, systematic mass murder. Among other atrocities, there were reports of buses being stopped by gangs armed with machetes, forcing passengers to show their identification cards. These revealed family name and paternal birthplace, thus indicating tribe. If your card gave the wrong answer, you were then beaten or killed.

Before this all started I was in Accra, Ghana. No longer subject to the grueling calendar of a secretary-general, I was visiting my home country for the Christmas period. Like most, I was entirely unaware of the storm brewing in Kenya. Nane reminded me that the Kenyan elections were being held that day. We switched on the television to catch the results. In a short space of time, we then watched the spread of violence across the country, accumulating in intensity all the way. Thirty people were trapped and murdered in a church on New Year's Day; schools were set on fire and whole villages attacked. Murder and rape were wrought on Kikuyu by Luo or Kalenjin, and vice versa. Tribe-on-tribe conflict that ran too deep, some had started to say, for there to be any hope of stopping it. Planes flying into Nairobi were almost completely empty, while vehicles leaving the country were heaving with passengers.

In the images of civilians butchered on the streets and in churches I saw Rwanda and Bosnia. In a country with a majority in extreme poverty but divided across forty-two ethnic groups, the potential for a disintegration into civil war was exposed, and across divides of a complexity akin to Somalia.

Outsiders sensed this, particularly other African leaders. Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu flew in from South Africa on January 2 to attempt to mediate between Odinga and Kibaki. But despite the bloody chaos unfolding around them, they weren't ready to talk. The Kibaki camp was too obstinate in its victory, and Odinga's ODM angered that the ascent to power had been denied them. Jendayi Frazer, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, was sent by President Bush to visit Kenya on January 4 with similar intentions, but she, too, met with the same brick wall.