While President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have taken some of the blame, critics of the Obama administration’s Africa policy have focused on the role of Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations
and a leading contender to succeed Mrs. Clinton, in the
administration’s failure to take action against the country they see as a
major cause of the Congolese crisis, Rwanda.
Specifically, these critics — who include officials of human rights
organizations and United Nations diplomats — say the administration has
not put enough pressure on Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame,
to end his support for the rebel movement whose recent capture of the
strategic city of Goma in Congo set off a national crisis in a country
that has already lost more than three million people in more than a
decade of fighting. Rwanda’s support is seen as vital to the rebel
group, known as M23.
Support for Mr. Kagame and the Rwandan government has been a matter of
American foreign policy since he led the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan
Patriotic Front to victory over the incumbent government in July 1994,
effectively ending the Rwandan genocide. But according to rights
organizations and diplomats at the United Nations, Ms. Rice has been at
the forefront of trying to shield the Rwandan government, and Mr. Kagame
in particular, from international censure, even as several United
Nations reports have laid the blame for the violence in Congo at Mr.
Kagame’s door.
A senior administration official said Saturday that Ms. Rice was not
freelancing, and that the American policy toward Rwanda and Congo was to
work with all the countries in the area for a negotiated settlement to
the conflict.
Aides to Ms. Rice acknowledge that she is close to Mr. Kagame and that
Mr. Kagame’s government was her client when she worked at Intellibridge,
a strategic analysis firm in Washington. Ms. Rice, who served as the
State Department’s top African affairs expert in the Clinton
administration, worked at the firm with several other former Clinton
administration officials, including David J. Rothkopf, who was an acting
under secretary in the Commerce Department; Anthony Lake, Mr. Clinton’s
national security adviser; and John M. Deutch, who was director of the
Central Intelligence Agency.(Continues)
1 comment:
Rice’s favorite dictators in Africa are the “Unholy Trinity” — Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and the late Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia — all former rebel leaders who seized power through the barrel of the gun and were later baptized to become the “new breed of African leaders” (a phrase of endearment coined by Bill Clinton to celebrate the “Three African Amigos” and memorialize their professed commitment to democracy and economic development). http://ecadforum.com/2012/12/09/susan-rice-and-africas-unholy-trinity/
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