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Obama: Failing the African Spring?
Helen Epstein
President Barack Obama preparing to address Ghana's parliament, Accra, Ghana, July 11, 2009
America’s new drone base in the West African city of Niamey, Niger, announced by
the White House on Friday, further expands our counter-terrorism activity in Africa.
It’s also consistent with the militaristic emphasis of the Obama administration’s
engagement with the continent. This may help contain the spread of jihadist violence in
specific cases, but by failing to address persistent abuses of human rights by our African
military allies, America is also undermining its own development investments that are
intended to lift millions of people out of poverty and ensure the continent’s peace,
stability, and economic growth.
The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since
the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In
July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a
powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of
African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end
the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong
institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to

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extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he
called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence
and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of
Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a
great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.
After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the
idealistic goals of his Ghana speech. The US finally suspended military aid to Rwanda
last year, after it was forced to accept evidence of Rwandan support for the brutal
Congolese rebel group M23, but has otherwise ignored the highly problematic human
rights situation in that country. In Uganda, the US looked on for years as President
Yoweri Museveni’s cabinet ministers gorged themselves on American and other foreign
aid intended for impoverished farmers, war victims, roads, and health care. US
diplomats have recently begun expressing support for Uganda’s many oppressed civil
society groups, but one wonders what took them so long. Perhaps it has something to
do with the fact that Uganda is a vital US military ally in Somalia, where Ugandan
troops helped oust the Islamic militant group al-Shabbab from Mogadishu last year.
Meanwhile, Kenya, another important US ally in Somalia that is soon to be receiving
drones from the Pentagon, is preparing for national elections on March 4. But some
observers say the country is more violent now than it was in 2007, when post-election
ethnic clashes left 1000 people dead and caused economic chaos across East Africa.
Presidential candidate Uhuru Kenyatta and his running mate William Ruto have both
been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes connected with those
events. It’s not clear what the US will do if Kenyatta wins, but it often seems as if
Obama will work with any African leader who furthers America’s military aims,
regardless of how that leader treats his own people.

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Ethiopian Muslims protesting in Addis Ababa, October, 2012
And then there is Ethiopia. Today, Western nations give $3.5 billion a year in aid to
Ethiopia, most of it for health care projects, food aid, and other development programs.
Of this, the US alone provides roughly $700 million—an amount that has quintupled in
the past decade, even as the nation’s human rights record has deteriorated to the point
that Freedom House now designates it one of the least free countries in the world. The
Ethiopian government has rigged elections, taken control of the economy, and outlawed
virtually all independent media and human rights activity in the country—including
work related to women and children’s rights, good governance, and conflict resolution.
Thousands of political prisoners languish behind bars and dozens of editors, journalists,
judges, lawyers, and academics have been forced into exile.
But when Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi died last summer, then-US
Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice praised him as a personal friend and a
“talented and vital leader.” When she remarked that “he had little patience for fools, or
‘idiots,’ as he liked to call them,” some in the opposition believed she was referring to
them—and approving Meles’s sentiments. Rice’s support for authoritarian leaders in
Africa was highlighted by critics who opposed—and ultimately derailed—her

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nomination to be secretary of state.
Perhaps most worrying of all is the unwillingness of Obama and other Western leaders
to say or do anything to support the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Ethiopians who
have been demonstrating peacefully against government interference in their religious
affairs for more than a year. (The Ethiopian government claims the country has a
Christian majority, but Muslims may account for up to one half of the population.)
You’d think a nonviolent Islamic movement would be just the kind of thing the Obama
administration would want to showcase to the world. It has no hint of terrorist
influence, and its leaders are calling for a secular government under the slogan “We
have a cause worth dying for, but not worth killing for.” Indeed, the Ethiopian
protesters may be leading Africa’s most promising and important nonviolent human
rights campaign since the anti-apartheid struggle.
Yet the United States, along with other major donors to Ethiopia’s government,
including Britain, has stood by as women and men have been hideously beaten by
police, hundreds have been arrested, eight people have been killed, mosques have been
raided by security forces, and twenty-nine Muslim leaders, including lawyers,
professors, and businessmen, remain in jail, charged with trying to use violent means to
create an Islamic state.
The demonstrations started in late 2011, after the government began forcing Imams to
adopt an imported version of Islam. The Ethiopian government has a long history of
trying to control civil society groups, including religious orders, by taking over their
leadership. In 1992, Meles replaced the Patriarch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian
Church with a party insider. Many Christians still resent this. In 1995, he replaced the
leader of the Ethiopian Islamic Affairs Supreme Council, also known as the “Majlis,”
again with someone from his party. Muslims grumbled about this, but did little more.
Then in 2011, on the pretext that the Islamic community was being radicalized by
fundamentalist groups, Meles invited a Lebanese Islamic sect known as “Ahbash” to
Ethiopia. The group, which was founded in Beirut by an Ethiopian exile in 1983,
preaches obedience to government and opposes politicization of religion. All of
Ethiopia’s Imams were required to go to meetings to listen to these newcomers, and
were threatened with imprisonment if they refused. In the meetings, government
officials were invariably present, and would lecture the imams about “Revolutionary
Democracy,” the ruling party’s particularly rigid political doctrine. Most Ethiopian
imams are volunteers, who work mainly as farmers, teachers, or in other trades to
support themselves. But those who resisted taking part in the meetings and refused to
preach the “Ahbash” version of Islam soon found themselves replaced by government-
appointed, salaried adherents of the new official religion. The imams and their
defenders began organizing nonviolent demonstrations that have since spread across the

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country.
In response, the Ethiopian government has attempted to portray the protesters as
jihadists, most recently claiming in a government TV documentary that they are under
the influence of Salafist extremists from Saudi Arabia. When a lawyer for the jailed
movement leaders told a Voice of America journalist that the documentary undermined
the presumption of innocence of his clients, he too was threatened with arrest. If this
fear-mongering has been intended to send a message to the US, which supports
Ethiopia’s anti-terrorism activities along the border with Somalia, it seems to have
worked. Last year, former US Ambassador to Ethiopia David Shinn praised the
Ethiopian reaction to the demonstrations, telling Reuters, “The government has done a
pretty good job over the years in ameliorating religious differences where there are
potentially serious conflicts.”
Ethiopian Muslims and Christians have long coexisted more or less in peace, as they do
in Tanzania, Uganda, and other countries in the region. But since the demonstrations
started, government officials have tried to infiltrate them and provoke violence among
Muslim groups and between Muslims and Christians. It hasn’t worked. In recent
months, Christians and secular human rights defenders have even joined in support of
the Muslims, and the demonstrations have grown. The demonstrators use Facebook
and secure Internet sites to outsmart government censors, and warn people to stay
home when they learn that the government intends to plant violent hecklers among
them to discredit the movement. When the movement’s leader, Abubakar Ahmed, who
had been detained with other protesters (he is one of the twenty-nine awaiting trial),
was paraded in chains before TV cameras, protesters showed up at the next
demonstration with his picture on their T-shirts, and stood in a phalanx before the
police with their wrists crossed, as if they too were in chains.
The Ethiopian protests began around the time of the Arab Spring, when it seemed the
Obama administration might finally begin taking human rights in Africa seriously. In late
2011, for example, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined British Prime Minister
David Cameron in declaring that their governments would consider penalizing foreign
aid recipients, including several African countries, that cracked down on the rights of
homosexuals. This rallying to the cause of gay rights would be heartening, if it weren’t
for the fact that Cameron and Clinton have done so little to protect everyone else’s
rights. Such official statements could even undermine sympathy for the gay rights cause
in Africa.
For years, observers have wondered what the US administration’s policy toward Africa
really is. Then, three years into Obama’s first term, the White House finally released its
first Africa strategy document. It states that the US will “promote strong democratic
norms” and “support civil society actors who are creating vibrant democratic

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February 25, 2013, 5:53 p.m.
models….” But as the situations in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda make clear, little has
been done to further these aims. While continuing most of the development and public
health initiatives of the Bush Administration, the Obama administration has given
priority to US military aims.
Failing to challenge government corruption and repression undermines economic growth
and social development throughout East Africa and beyond, as well the prospects for
long term peace and stability. Even our direct military interventions have had dubious
results. Experts continue to debate the wisdom of intervening in Libya, but there is no
arguing with the fact that it helped rally—and arm—al-Qaeda supporters, who have
spread terror to Mali and Algeria and perhaps other West African countries;
impoverished Niger agreed to host the new US drone base in part out of growing fear of
the jihadism that has spread from Libya.
More than half a century of post-independence African history has shown that focusing
on stability, security and development while ignoring democracy and human rights is
self-defeating, because it undermines those very goals. The US and other Western
donors to Africa must do more to use the many instruments at their disposal to promote
the reforms necessary to protect basic freedoms and uphold the rule of law. This will
pose diplomatic challenges, but they could start by not turning their backs on peaceful
protesters, just when our moral support—at the very least—is most urgently needed. As
Czech playwright, dissident, and former president Vaclav Havel put it during the depths
of Cold War, “The ‘dissident’ movements do not shy away from the idea of violent
political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it
does not seem radical enough.” At the time, Western leaders rushed to support Havel
and other non-violent activists throughout Europe. Now that Africans are calling for the
same thing, why don’t today’s leaders do the same for them?
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