THE WAY WE LIVE NOW
The Tug of Paternalism
By JAMES TRAUB
When Liberian citizens late last month deposited the corpses of their friends and loved ones, killed by rebel shells, at the gate of the American Embassy compound in the capital of Monrovia, they were not only issuing a desperate plea for salvation but also making a statement of responsibility: it is you, the United States, who must answer our prayers. But why? Because freed American slaves settled in Liberia 180 years ago? Do these ties of history impose a special obligation? Can the dim colonial past exert a tug even on the hardheaded policy makers in the Bush administration?
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This administration came into office vowing to avoid what one of its officials described to me at the time as ''profligate intervention.'' We would intervene to protect our interests, not to save woebegone people in far-off lands. During the presidential campaign, George Bush took this position to its logical conclusion when he said that he would not have intervened in Rwanda in 1994 had he been president, even though close to a million people died in the ensuing genocide. If anything, the war against terrorism provides an ever-more-powerful rationale for preserving the U.S. military for serious wars against people who want to do us harm.
And yet the Bush administration is planning to station troops off the coast of Liberia. (Whether those troops will come ashore remains unclear at this writing.) Why Liberia if not Rwanda, an infinitely more desperate situation? Perhaps President Bush needs to prove that his promises of engagement on his recent trip to Africa were not empty ones. But it is also true that Rwanda wasn't ours; only common humanity bade us act, and common humanity, for George Bush (or Bill Clinton, for that matter), was not enough. History has made Liberia ours. Paternalism, if not colonialism, remains a real force, especially in Africa.
Look at the example of Sierra Leone and Great Britain, its former colonial master. The British have no meaningful ''interests'' to protect in Sierra Leone. The expatriate community is long gone, and the country is almost irrelevant commercially. The only thing that remains is ephemeral -- a historic relationship. But for the British, that was enough. In the spring of 2000, when a precarious peace entrusted to a U.N. force collapsed, Prime Minister Tony Blair sent troops into Sierra Leone. A contingent of 800 soldiers deterred an attack on Freetown, the capital, and most of them quickly returned home, demonstrating that such interventions can achieve a great deal with minimal effort.
Liberia was never an official American colony, and yet since 1821, when the American Colonization Society bought land there from local chiefs to resettle slaves, it has been deeply entangled with the United States. Its capital was named after President James Monroe. Liberia calls its currency the dollar; it has a constitution, a flag and a government modeled on ours; and it is still largely controlled by the descendants of the original settlers, known as Americo-Liberians.
Liberia once did matter to the United States. There was rubber. Later there were C.I.A. posts and satellite-tracking installations. But all that came to an abrupt end with the conclusion of the cold war. When the country's strongman, Samuel Doe, was about to be toppled from power in 1990, the U.S. sent warships with more than 2,000 marines -- to evacuate Americans. Doe, our former client, we left to be butchered. Over the next decade, as warlords fought to dominate the clandestine trade in diamonds and timber, Liberia descended into a state of terrifying chaos. It now has nothing but trouble to offer a potential savior.
And yet it was to our embassy gate that those bodies were dragged, because it is as natural for Liberians to look to us for protection as it is for Leoneans to look to Great Britain and Ivoirians to France (which sent troops to the Ivory Coast to quell an uprising there last fall). We may object that Liberia is not our problem. But whose is it, then? Only the terminally naive still expect U.N. peacekeeping to work in situations of rampant violence. The U.N. peacekeeping force sent to Sierra Leone in 1999 inspired so little respect, much less fear, that about 500 of them were taken hostage by rebels -- an act that provoked the British intervention. A West African force known as Ecomog, which entered Liberia in 1990, did ultimately provide a measure of stability; and troops from Nigeria are now preparing to return. But a local army will not have the deterrent value of a well-armed and well-trained Western one.
For all the talk of global integration, the fate of the very poorest countries has become, if anything, a matter of even greater indifference to the rich ones than it used to be. Virtually the entirety of West Africa, and for that matter the equally beleaguered nations of central Africa, like Burundi, offer little strategic and only potential economic value to the West and do not really figure in the war on terrorism. And the fate of Rwanda proves all too clearly that, in the absence of self-interest, appeals to common humanity will not bring rescue.
And so these countries are left with no claims save the utterly unexpected one: paternalism. What could be more archaic in this globalized age? And isn't there something here of the former servant throwing himself on the mercy of his master? Well, yes. And that is a terrible affirmation of failure. But is paternalism so very bad? It's an acknowledgment of obligations incurred by shared history. It's an expression of kinship. After all, Liberia looks to the United States because the United States is in its blood. It is not simply pro-American but, in some odd but meaningful way, American. Would it be better for us to renounce paternalism and its obligations -- and abandon Liberia to its dismal fate?
James Traub is a contributing writer for the magazine. |
