The visit to South Africa this week of Nigeria's new leader Gen. Abdulsalam Abubakar strikingly captures the distance the country has travelled in just two short months. Only two years ago, South African President Nelson Mandela had spearheaded Nigeria's expulsion from the Commonwealth for its execution of Ken Saro Wiwa and other dissidents.
Similarly dramatic developments take place virtually daily in Nigeria and in its relations with the world as Gen. Abubakar tries to steer the country towards a more open and democratic future.
Photo: UN / Evan Schneider
Earlier, in only a slightly less remarkable development, Mr. Annan had met with the imprisoned Mr. Abiola himself, and later with the Group of 34 opposition figures campaigning for an end to military rule in Nigeria. Soon after Mr. Annan's departure, Gen. Abubakar pledged that elections would be held in early 1999 and power handed to a civilian president in May.
United Nations watchers could not recall a precedent for such public involvement of a UN Secretary-General in the inner-most political workings of a member state. As it soon became clear, Mr. Annan's unscheduled Nigeria mission was a result of Gen. Abubakar's own initiative. But the Secretary-General's role in the release of political prisoners -- a behind-the-scenes effort he initiated with the late President Sani Abacha -- in fact began soon after he became Secretary-General.
So when Gen. Abubakar took over the reins of government in June with the declared intention of ending the country's isolation from the Commonwealth and many major powers, he turned for public diplomatic support not to an influential Western government with long-standing interests in the country but to the UN.
That Gen. Abubakar involved the UN Secretary-General in the momentous transition he was planning attests to the rising international prestige of the world body. But it was also a direct consequence of Mr. Annan's efforts to quietly but emphatically involve the UN in some of the continent's most compelling challenges, debates and crises, with the goal of supporting Africa's burgeoning effort to overcome nearly two decades of deepening international marginalization.
Another UN breakthrough occurred just a few days after Mr. Annan left Nigeria. The Algerian government welcomed on 22 July a six-person information-gathering mission constituted by the UN Secretary-General to look into the violence which has wrought brutal havoc in the country and also strained its relations with some international groups.
Initiatives such as these in Nigeria and Algeria have pushed the limits to which the UN has traditionally hewed in offering multilateral diplomacy as a channel which simultaneously addresses a country's internal difficulties and its frayed international ties. These efforts can yield enormous dividends for peace, but while always carefully calibrated with key UN actors, they carry considerable risks for Mr. Annan's personal standing, as the examples of Nigeria, Algeria, the Democratic Congo and, beyond Africa, Iraq show.
In Algeria's case, the unrelenting brutality of the violence has seen a horrified world wanting to assist in halting the carnage, but the Algerian authorities had been reluctant to allow an external involvement. However, even though President Liamine Zeroual did not accept Mr. Annan's idea when they first discussed it at the OAU Summit in Harare in June 1997, the Secretary-General continued to indicate to the Algerian authorities the potential advantages of UN involvement, both internally and internationally -- and eventually the government agreed.
"Our country has decided to welcome the UN mission in full sovereignty, after consultations with the Secretary-General of the UN, the Arab League and the OAU," Algerian Minister of Communication and Culture Hamraoui Habib Chawki explained as he welcomed the United Nations panel.
The panel left the country on 4 August, after visiting a prison and two massacre sites, meeting with families of the disappeared, religious leaders, the media, opposition figures, other representatives of civil society and, of course, senior government officials, including President Zeroual. The panel was also able to receive and respond to telephone calls, faxes and letters from members of the public. It did not, however, meet with representatives of the banned Islamic party. The panel's report is expected in early September.
There is plenty of potential for such involvement to go awry and attract criticism from a number of parties, including the government itself, opposition groups, and influential non-governmental organisations. In Nigeria, for example, some groups questioned, after Mr. Abiola's sudden death from an apparent heart attack, the Secretary-General's purported involvement in the terms of Mr. Abiola's planned release.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the ultimately unsuccessful human rights investigation which Mr. Annan had proposed in a carefully worked out compromise was criticized by a number of human rights groups. And beyond Africa, Mr. Annan's February intervention in Iraq, which averted a war which had all but started, also came in for criticism from sections of US opinion.
It is too early, therefore, to say how Mr. Annan's desire to make the United Nations a more central player in support of African renewal will ultimately fare. At the moment, however, a number of African leaders -- and much more emphatically, the continent's people -- have warmed to Mr. Annan's overtures, recognizing the vital force the UN can be in not only assisting countries to peacefully settle their internal political crises, but also in providing a bridge for mediating African and international concerns.
Photo: UN / Evan Schneider
"The world needs to understand Africa better, be more sympathetic to what is the most disadvantaged region in the world, a region which alone continued to suffer external ravages even as late as the 1950s, and in some cases through the 1970s," Mr. Annan said recently. "At the same time, in a world where no country can afford to opt out from the process of globalization under way, Africa must do better. It must even more forcefully take charge of formulating its own responses to the challenges and opportunities that abound, and it must also better explain the enormous internal and external constraints it faces. The United Nations can be a useful partner in this endeavour."
That in fact was the message of Mr. Annan's April report on Africa to the Security Council which is widely regarded as one of the most candid and far-reaching official documents ever produced by a UN Secretary-General. In examining in the report the sensitive questions of governance, democratic freedoms and human rights, the Secretary-General decried authoritarian rule, ethnically-driven politics, corruption and mismanagement of resources, and the role some states play "in supporting and sometimes even instigating conflicts in neighbouring countries." Nor did he spare external policies, pressures and interventions which play an enormous role in perpetuating African crises.
This critical analysis was carefully placed in the context of the quite remarkable turn-around on the continent, with the Secretary-General hailing Africa's recent successful efforts to overcome its crippling colonial and post-colonial legacies. Having come so far, Mr. Annan asserted in his report, Africans must take a more self-critical look at their own role in perpetuating the crises that debilitate the region.
The risks inherent in such a stance were highlighted during his May visit to Rwanda, when this particular dimension of Mr. Annan's approach caused his Rwandan hosts to publicly take issue with him. In a speech to the Parliament in Kigali, the Secretary-General had condemned the 1994 genocide and spoke of the unspeakable anguish it had caused Rwandans -- but he triggered anger by asking the country to also look inward for some of the causes of the horrifying tragedy.
Photo: UN / Milton Grant
The same could be said of his 1997 speech at the OAU summit in Harare, in which he categorically challenged the notion that human rights were a foreign imposition on Africa. That speech struck a resonant chord throughout Africa, although some do remain wary of this approach to human rights and of other aspects of Mr. Annan's innovations.
That Mr. Annan can so publicly ask the continent to do better is reflective of Africa's increasing self-confidence. A new generation of leaders -- epitomized by President Nelson Mandela of South Africa -- has taken political and economic charge of their countries with an optimism and assertiveness that Africa last saw in the immediate post-independence period.
In what many refer to as an "African renaissance" -- a phrase popularized in particular by South Africa's Deputy President Thabo Mbeki -- political pluralism has become an unstoppable force, and after 15 years of a catastrophic economic decline, economic growth rates since the mid-1990s have averaged over 4 per cent a year, with 11 countries in 1997 recording GDP growth at a remarkable 6 per cent or more. And while no one can predict the future, Africans are also hoping that the brutal large-scale internal conflicts that ravaged Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and Liberia in the 1990-94 period are a thing of the past. These achievements are all the more remarkable when one considers the unprecedented levels to which aid has fallen in this post Cold War era, and the nearly $30 billion -- yes, billion -- that Africa spends every year to service its external debts.
But the "renaissance" is certainly not all-encompassing; it is frequently fitful, with serious crises cropping up even within countries considered part of the African revival. The recent outbreak of hostilities between the close allies Eritrea and Ethiopia and the renewed, indeed widened, military conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after the initial period of post-Mobutu euphoria, are tragic cases in point.
Despite these setbacks, Africans on the whole continue to be -- for the first time in two decades -- hopeful about their long-term prospects. This self-confidence has been infectious, with a renewed sense of optimism about Africa spreading abroad. President Bill Clinton's 12-day, six-country journey through the continent earlier this year -- unprecedented for a US president -- graphically illustrated this new excitement about the continent.
It is a happy coincidence that at a time when many Africans are very openly reassessing and reformulating their policies, approaches and relations with a fast-globalizing world, they have at the UN an African Secretary-General who can offer advice and guidance, as well as strengthened UN support, without creating the resentment which such counsel from a non-African could provoke.
