Keith Richburg: Don't heed these cries of 'colonialist'
[Keith Richburg is now the Washington Post's New York bureau chief.]
On the streets of Kinshasa years ago, during a protest against the then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, I remember someone in the crowd cornering me, an American reporter, and demanding to know why the United States had not sent troops to intervene. 'You took out Duvalier! You took out Marcos,' he said, referring to deposed dictators in Haiti and the Philippines. 'Why not here?' It was a question that I heard often over the years, in East Timor and Rangoon, in Malawi and Cameroon. It was usually posed by people who felt they had no other recourse against a repressive regime.
Intervention has been discredited in recent years, since the American and British-led invasion of Iraq. But there are still people clamouring for someone from outside - usually America or a former European colonial power - to come and rescue them.
And any hint at intervention, like any criticism, is deflected by authoritarian regimes that have proven deft at playing 'the colonial card'. Expressions of concerns for human rights and democracy are ridiculed as a modern way for the West to 'subjugate' countries of the south. We have heard it from Zimbabwe, where British criticism of Robert Mugabe is routinely denounced as a new kind of imperialism.
Coming from the likes of Mugabe and his henchmen, playing the colonial card is self-serving justification. And the silence of others in the region and the world - of South Africa, in Zimbabwe's case, of the south east Asian countries who continue to deal with Burma's military regime - sometimes makes it seem as if concern for democracy and human rights are only European and American fixations.
That doesn't mean there are not also real sensitivities involved.
I have to agree with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who observed several years ago that 'the single most under-appreciated force in international relations is humiliation'. For Africa in particular, most of which has been independent for more than four decades, colonialism remains a source of humiliation and resentment and the cause of deep-seated inferiority complexes.
The fact that outside action has been required so many times over the years only deepens the humiliation. French troops have, by one count, intervened in Africa more than 45 times between 1960 and 2005. British troops have intervened in Africa as well, in places such as Sierra Leone, when rebels besieged the capital, Freetown ... American troops have intervened, most disastrously in Somalia in the early 1990s.
If it's not a lingering colonial mentality, ask African critics of such interventions, then why does France only intervene in its former colonies? Why does Britain put so much pressure on Zimbabwe?..
Read entire article at Observer
On the streets of Kinshasa years ago, during a protest against the then-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, I remember someone in the crowd cornering me, an American reporter, and demanding to know why the United States had not sent troops to intervene. 'You took out Duvalier! You took out Marcos,' he said, referring to deposed dictators in Haiti and the Philippines. 'Why not here?' It was a question that I heard often over the years, in East Timor and Rangoon, in Malawi and Cameroon. It was usually posed by people who felt they had no other recourse against a repressive regime.
Intervention has been discredited in recent years, since the American and British-led invasion of Iraq. But there are still people clamouring for someone from outside - usually America or a former European colonial power - to come and rescue them.
And any hint at intervention, like any criticism, is deflected by authoritarian regimes that have proven deft at playing 'the colonial card'. Expressions of concerns for human rights and democracy are ridiculed as a modern way for the West to 'subjugate' countries of the south. We have heard it from Zimbabwe, where British criticism of Robert Mugabe is routinely denounced as a new kind of imperialism.
Coming from the likes of Mugabe and his henchmen, playing the colonial card is self-serving justification. And the silence of others in the region and the world - of South Africa, in Zimbabwe's case, of the south east Asian countries who continue to deal with Burma's military regime - sometimes makes it seem as if concern for democracy and human rights are only European and American fixations.
That doesn't mean there are not also real sensitivities involved.
I have to agree with New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who observed several years ago that 'the single most under-appreciated force in international relations is humiliation'. For Africa in particular, most of which has been independent for more than four decades, colonialism remains a source of humiliation and resentment and the cause of deep-seated inferiority complexes.
The fact that outside action has been required so many times over the years only deepens the humiliation. French troops have, by one count, intervened in Africa more than 45 times between 1960 and 2005. British troops have intervened in Africa as well, in places such as Sierra Leone, when rebels besieged the capital, Freetown ... American troops have intervened, most disastrously in Somalia in the early 1990s.
If it's not a lingering colonial mentality, ask African critics of such interventions, then why does France only intervene in its former colonies? Why does Britain put so much pressure on Zimbabwe?..