Strong Words from a Statesman

Nigeria's Obasanjo lectures East and West on intervention

It would not be a splashy affair, promised the host of the 15th annual summit of the Organization of African Unity. In contrast to the gaudy 14th meeting in Libreville last year, on which the government of Gabon spent nearly $1 billion for halls, hotels and new highways to nowhere, this year's session in Khartoum would be summitry on a $12 million shoestring. A few old streets had been resurfaced, and sessions would be held in Friendship Hall, a rather proletarian-looking convention center built two years ago by the Chinese. Despite the relative austerity. Sudanese President Gaafar Numeiri, the summit host and incoming OAU president, suggested in personal letters of invitation to each of his fellow 48 African leaders that this was a meeting they would not want to miss.

When the four-day summit convened last week, there were some inevitable absentees. Mauritania's President Moktar Ould Daddah, for instance, had been overthrown by a military coup shortly before he was supposed to leave for Nouakchott Airport to catch a plane to Khartoum. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, as usual, preferred to stay home, sending in his place a quarrelsome delegation that threw the sessions into an occasional uproar by picking fights with neighboring Chad. Nonetheless, 35 leaders of the OAU's 49 member states were on hand, the largest muster in the organization's history. Among them: Angola's Agostinho Neto, attending his first African summit, and Guinea's Sekou Toure, who had not been to one since 1965. All were greeted with effusive embraces by Host Numeiri at Khartoum's airport.

Until this year, the most urgent item on the OAU agenda had customarily been what ought to be done about the white regimes that are suppressing black majorities in Rhodesia and South Africa. That issue surfaced once again last week, to be sure: the OAU decided unanimously to support all-party Rhodesian talks, backed by the U.S. and Britain, that would have to include leaders of the black nationalist Patriotic Front. But the larger issue that bothered everyone in Khartoum was the proper African response to military and political incursions by both East and West, capped by the French and Belgian effort to put down a rebellion in Zaire's mine-rich Shaba region.

At a pre-summit Foreign Ministers' meeting called to whittle down the agenda and prepare positions, the Council of Ministers had hammered out a series of resolutions on the foreign intervention that one delegate aptly described as "mush." One resolution maintained that the defense of African states was the sole responsibility of the states themselves.

A complementary--but contradictory --measure provided that the "sovereignty of every African country gives it the right to appeal to any other country for help if its security and independence are threatened." In an oblique criticism of those cross-purposes proposals, Gabonese President Albert-Bernard ("Omar") Bongo, the OAU's outgoing chairman, ruefully noted: "We have the habit of talking without saying anything [and of] making too many resolutions."

Some of the rhetoric at Khartoum justified Bongo's criticism. Restating the obvious, Liberia's President William Tolbert declared that the continent "should struggle against racism and neocolonialism." Sekou Toure celebrated his return to the summit by pummeling the West with a scathing sermon. Africa's problem, typified by the French-Belgian operation in Zaire, was Western-style imperialism, which Toure equated with "Satan, as described in the holy Koran, the Bible and the New Testament. It is not just bad, it is evil characterized by keen cruelty, an evil capable of the worst."

It was left to Nigeria's Lieut. General Olusegun Obasanjo to provide the summit with a statesmanlike sense of purpose. Wearing a flowing pink-flowered Yoruban robe and, on his head, a red and gold fula, the tall, husky Obasanjo took the rostrum to deliver an address that was at once forceful, balanced and conciliatory. As leader of the most populous African nation--and one with political clout, since it supplies 25% of U.S. petroleum imports--Obasanjo had no qualms about condemning "without reservation" intervention from any source. The Shaba operation, he agreed, was "a most naked and unashamed attempt to determine what Africa's true collective interests should be. Paratroop drops in the 20th century are no more acceptable to us than the gunboats of the last century were to our ancestors." Moreover, said the general, "convening conferences in Europe and America to decide the fate of Africa raises too many ugly specters that would be best forgotten."

Obasanjo acknowledged Western concern over Communist infiltration in Africa. But, he advised, "no African nation is about to embrace Communism wholesale any more than we are willing to embrace capitalism. To the extent that any African country can be considered by the West to have 'gone Communist,' it was as a direct result of the failure of Western policies. In every case where Cuba's intervention was established, they intervened as a consequence of the failure of Western policies."

Obasanjo was not content merely to warn the onetime colonial rulers of Africa against neocolonialism. He also blamed Africans in part for their own problems: "We African leaders must realize that we cannot be asking outside powers to leave us alone while in most cases it is our own actions which provide them with the excuse to interfere in our affairs. We can no longer hide behind real or imagined foreign machinations for our own failings."

While accepting the rationale for Soviet, Cuban and East German intervention in Ethiopia and Angola, Obasanjo argued that East-bloc aid to black Africa must have limits. "The Soviets should not overstay their welcome," he warned. "Africa is not about to throw off one colonial yoke for another. The Soviets should therefore see it to be in their interest not to seek to perpetually maintain their presence even after the purpose for which they were invited has been achieved. This way they run the risk of being dubbed a new imperial power, as indeed they already are being called even by those with whom they have had long association." That was a clear reference to Egypt, Somalia and the Sudan, all of which have expelled Russian advisers. Lest anyone miss his point, Obasanjo concluded: "We must be the prime determinants of our destiny. Let the Soviets and their collaborators heed this timely counsel."

Obasanjo's roundly applauded speech was the high point of the session. Beyond their own bright promise of stronger African leadership, his statesmanlike words contrasted with the gaffes that too often in the past have soiled the image African leaders sought to project. There were, alas, still a few of those gaucheries at the 15th summit. Items:

> Sudanese security men had to break up a wrestling match between Algerian and Moroccan delegates over a map of Africa that classified the Western Sahara as a nonindependent country. The Algerians, who support Polisario guerrillas fighting for the area's independence, were penciling in "independent" when the Moroccans chanced along and tried to ink in boundary lines indicating that Western Sahara had been partitioned between Morocco and Mauritania. A brief, fierce struggle ensued.

> In a short speech that Sudan's Numeiri generously described as "vivid and cheerful," Idi Amin Dada of Uganda offered a few of his customary impromptu bons mots. One contained a sardonic ring of truth: "I guess I should say a few words about liberation fronts and the Palestinian people, since you are not at the OAU unless you mention those things."

> For all their attacks on Western neocolonialism, the delegates for the most part addressed one another in the two major languages of colonial Africa: French and English. One embarrassing moment occurred when Angola's Neto, who was educated in Lisbon, was forced to wait until a Portuguese-speaking interpreter could be found to provide the running translation of his speech. Neto concluded by caustically requesting that Portuguese be made one of the OAU's working languages.

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