By Jim Hoagland
Thursday, May 11, 2000; Page A35
Sierra Leone's monstrous rebel leader, Foday Sankoh, has widened his slaughter and hostage-taking to include United Nations peacekeepers. Sankoh is now a global outlaw who exploits with impunity the weak points of an international order that offers only token help for Africa's multiple, deepening catastrophes.
Sierra Leone has become the world's heart of horror, put on the news map by Sankoh's use of amputations, gang rape and forcing children to massacre their own families. Not even the Nazis refined mass terror tactics so thoroughly and indiscriminately as has this disgruntled ex-corporal.
His trademark savagery is not the only reason Sankoh's impact suddenly extends beyond his tiny West African nation. If it succeeds, his grab for power could be the death blow for U.N. peacekeeping, already seriously weakened by failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda.
It will certainly weaken U.S.-led efforts to deploy new blue-helmeted units into Congo. And U.N. failure in Sierra Leone will make it more difficult to achieve international consensus on responding to Robert Mugabe's incitement of murder and dispossession of white farmers and their African workers in Zimbabwe.
That is the broader dilemma now defined by Sankoh, Congo's Laurent Kabila and Mugabe--or rather, by their victims, whom the community of nations is incapable of helping or of ignoring. This is the Catch-22 of globalization in its cruelest human form.
Globalization does bring the death of distance, through the consolidation of markets and the use of modern communications and transportation. But these trends have actually left the developed world less involved economically and politically with Africa, while simultaneously making the American and European publics more aware of the suffering and deprivation of Africa's people.
Economically, the developed world has long abandoned Africa to a fate outside the new global era. In a world of fiber optics and computers, the continent's copper, base metals and other commodities no longer justify the kind of deep involvement that Britain, France and the United States once practiced.
France made this apparent by refusing to intervene to stop a military coup in the Ivory Coast last year or to influence a democratic election in Senegal that deposed one of France's favorite rulers in March.
This reflects reality. The affluent democracies of the Northern Hemisphere have amply demonstrated--from the self-interested, frequently brutal colonial era to the more benign involvement of peacekeeping, famine relief and development of bureaucracies after independence--that they lack the wisdom, patience and altruism needed to deal successfully with Africa's vast problems.
In security terms, the United States and Europe have limited capacity to rescue Africa from itself. That is reality too.
Washington has ruled out providing any U.S. combat troops, aircraft or commanding generals as part of whatever new forces may be assembled for Sierra Leone or Congo. The doctrine of humanitarian intervention that saved Kosovars from marauding Serb forces last year stops at Africa's edge.
Those who identify racism as the only or predominant factor in U.S. and European caution on Sierra Leone and the other African crises go too far. The lack of an effective regional military organization like NATO is a more important factor in what is essentially a national security decision.
But Washington, Paris and London cannot ignore the effect of their all-out involvement in the Balkans and of their all-out avoidance in Sierra Leone and Congo, a dichotomy that is likely to heighten racial tensions nationally and globally over the long run. This is an added indirect cost of Sankoh's crimes, of Kabila's ineffectiveness, of Mugabe's determination to stay in power at all costs.
It is easy to saddle the blame entirely on these leaders, who deserve it, or to pretend that the fault lies with indolent or venal U.N. staffers. But the current weakness of the United Nations cannot be separated from the lack of direction and support the world body has received from Washington for nearly a decade, and from the current failure by all capitals to offer clear thinking on meeting Africa's dire needs.
A harder truth is emerging: Most of the world is too involved with the razzle-dazzle side of globalization to pay sustained, meaningful attention to those whom change leaves behind but who do not disappear.
In the gold-rush mentality of Clintonian America, the inward, navel-gazing self-absorption of the European Union, the fragmentation of Russia and the relentless acquisitiveness of Asian nations, there has been little room for the compassion, attention and help that the continent of Africa and most urgently Sierra Leone need today. This has left the field open to monsters like Sankoh.