For the second time, I share the satisfaction of most Africans that a person of African descent was elected to the White House, and one whose domestic agenda is generally progressive. Compared to my feelings in 2008, this satisfaction is all the more plentiful in view of the great maturity shown by the American people in reelecting Barack Obama in the face of a barrage of vicious and racist attacks of which he was a victim during the electoral campaign, and even before. His opponents alleged, inter alia, that he was not a natural-born citizen of the United States, in what became known as “birthism,” a definitely racist phenomenon; that he was a “Kenyan anticolonialist”; and that he did not “understand America” or share “American values.”

In short, these attacks were clearly racist and beyond the bounds of propriety, as many of the statements made against the President would never be leveled against a white incumbent of the White House. And I can say this without fear of contradiction, since I have lived in this country since 1962, and have seen how the nine white presidents who came before Obama were treated by both the news media and political opponents. The usual deference to the head of state and commander-in-chief of the armed forces was cast aside.

At the same time, as shown in my contribution to the ASR Forum on “Africa in the Age of Obama” (Nzongola-Ntalaja Reference Nzongola-Ntalaja2010), I do not agree with President Obama’s Africa policy in general, and his policy in the Great Lakes region in particular. For like his predecessors, this first U.S. president of African descent has perfected the political discourse of doublespeak, and the political practice of hypocrisy and double standards, when dealing with Africa.

In his widely acclaimed speech to the African continent on July 11, 2009, in Accra, Ghana, Obama lectured black Africans on the evils of autocracy and the virtues of democracy and strong institutions. One month earlier, in his June 4th speech to the Muslim world in Cairo, Egypt, he could not summon the courage to give the same message to one of Africa’s dinosaurs and leading autocrats, Hosni Mubarak, whose regime was notorious for its violation of human rights and the conduct of fraudulent elections. Moreover, given the nasty business of the U.S.-led “war against terror,” President Obama inherited the internationally illegal practice of using foreign countries as rendition sites for U.S. torture victims. Twelve of the known twenty-eight countries to serve Washington in this regard were African: Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, South Africa, and Zambia (Ross Reference Ross2010). While most of these countries were led by dictators, democratic Zambia and South Africa were reported by the U.K. Guardian newspaper on January 23, 2009, as having, respectively, one and two CIA secret prisons or “black sites” (Ross Reference Ross2010). As partners in human rights violations, Obama and his new African allies could hardly make the establishment of strong institutions based on democratic accountability a priority.

With respect to the Great Lakes region, which is the main focus of this article, the record of the Obama Administration is even worse, and it is not likely to change during his second term of office. Since the genocide of 1994 in Rwanda, more than six million people have died in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) as a consequence of several interrelated factors. These include the importation into the DRC of the Hutu‒Tutsi conflict from Rwanda; the plunder of Congolese natural resources by both Rwanda and Uganda, either directly or through proxy groups; and the multiplicity of militia groups involved in the resource war, destroying the environment, undermining state authority, and using sexual violence against women and girls as a weapon of war (Meger Reference Meger2010). As a senator, Obama had introduced a bill that was then supported by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and eventually signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2006 as PL 109-456, the “Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act.” As president and secretary of state, Obama and Clinton did little with respect to relief and security in the DRC, and absolutely nothing for democracy promotion.

More importantly, President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton did not implement the key provisions of “Obama’s Law,” as the act is known in Congo advocacy circles. For the Congolese and the friends of the Congo, one of the key provisions of the law requires the U.S. government to impose sanctions on countries interfering in the internal affairs of the DRC and/or engaged in plundering its natural resources. In the face of recurrent U.N. reports on interference in Congolese affairs and in the plunder of its natural resources by Rwanda and Uganda, Obama and Clinton responded by treating Kigali and Kampala with kid gloves. The reason that President Obama has failed to implement his own law vis-à-vis these two countries is crystal clear: Rwanda and Uganda are major U.S. allies in the fight against international terrorism, the number-one threat to U.S. national interests in the postcommunist era. Rwanda has provided troops and the commanding officer for the joint U.N.‒African Union peacekeeping force in the Darfur region of Sudan, and Uganda leads the AU peacemaking mission in Somalia, where it is engaged in a fierce war against the Somali militia Al Shabaab, which is affiliated with the Al Qaeda network.

In addition to waging war and carrying out plunder in the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda have been accused in numerous U.N. and international NGO reports for repeated violations of international humanitarian and human rights laws. The most damning report in this regard is the 2010 Mapping Report of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights on crimes against humanity, war crimes, and possibly crimes of genocide committed within the territory of the DRC by the current Rwandan regime between 1994 and 2003. This includes the wanton killing of at least two hundred thousand unarmed Hutu refugees in the DRC, including old men, women, and children by soldiers of the Rwandan army in 1996 and 1997, and the heavy collateral damage resulting from the war between Rwanda and Uganda over the control of the gold and diamond trading city of Kisangani in August 1999, May 2000, and June 2000. Although the U.S. vigorously condemns human rights violations in places like Cuba, North Korea, and Russia, only a mild statement of concern was issued about the violations documented by the OHCHR, and the U.S. sought no further international action to obtain justice for the victims of these heinous crimes. The silence of President Obama and his counterparts in the major Western capitals is a clear illustration of their hypocrisy and double standards when it comes to defending fundamental human rights in Africa.

With regard to democracy, the Obama administration has disappointed all those who had expected a return to the principled policies of democracy and human rights promotion of the Carter administration. The role of President Jimmy Carter in the democratization process in the Congo is all the more important because it took place before the end of the Cold War. In the wake of the First Shaba War in 1977, Carter sent Ambassador Donald McHenry to Kinshasa on a mission designed to read the riot act to then Zaïrian President Mobutu Sese Seko.^{Footnote 1} The gist of McHenry’s brief was that the system had to be liberalized; Mobutu responded positively by appointing a prime minister to take care of the day-to-day running of the government and holding the freest parliamentary elections ever experienced under a one-party regime. Individuals were free to stand for Parliament on their own instead of being handpicked by the politburo of the ruling party, the Mouvement Populaire de la Révolution (MPR). The result was a Parliament full of independent voices, and one that had the courage to stage fairly brutal interpellations, or question-and-answer sessions, during which cabinet ministers had to explain their policies and justify their expenditures.

It was out of this Parliament that Etienne Tshisekedi and twelve of his colleagues emerged in December 1980 with a fifty-two-page letter to Mobutu demanding multiparty democracy. Repeatedly arrested, jailed, and tortured, Tshisekedi and a diminishing number of his comrades persisted in their defiance of Mobutu’s externally backed kleptocracy and its reign of terror. Despite the ban on opposition parties, they founded the Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social (UDPS) in February 1982, making the latter the oldest prodemocracy political party in the DRC today. Tshisekedi’s exemplary courage in the face of adversity and his commitment to the ideals of democracy and social progress are qualities that ordinary Congolese find admirable in a person who has come to incarnate their deepest aspirations for freedom and material prosperity.

Given Tshisekedi’s democratic credentials, one would expect him to have earned the support of those in the international community who espouse democratic governance through free and fair elections. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In fact, leaders in countries with strategic or economic interests in the DRC have usually been very hostile to him. In view of the strategic importance of the DRC as a land of considerable natural wealth located in the center of Africa, with world-class resources in fresh water, tropical rainforest, hydroelectricity, arable land, and numerous minerals, the major world powers prefer to deal with leaders who have no national constituency and are easy to manipulate like Joseph Kabila, the current Congolese president, rather than those like Tshisekedi, who are unapologetically nationalist and committed to serving their peoples. By recognizing Kabila as DRC President in spite of the November 2011 presidential election whose results were deemed fraudulent by most observers, the United States and other major world powers have sent a clear message to the people of the Congo and the Great Lakes region that democracy is the least of their concerns.

That message has been reinforced by the signing on February 24, 2013, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, of a “Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Region” by eleven countries: the DRC, the nine countries bordering it (Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia), plus South Africa. Drafted by Ban Ki Moon, the U.N. Secretary-General, and endorsed by the African Union, the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), this agreement sets up yet another structure of international tutelage over the DRC, an eleven-plus-four mechanism (the eleven countries plus the U.N., AU, ICGLR, and SADC) “to address the root causes of conflict and put an end to recurring cycles of violence” (par. 4). With the coordination of a U.N. special envoy, this mechanism will work with the Congolese government to implement security sector reform, consolidate state authority over the national territory, make progress on decentralization, promote economic development, reform government institutions, and push “the agenda of reconciliation, tolerance and democratization” (par. 5).

There are many unanswered questions about this framework agreement. Why is the international community creating this new mechanism, after it failed to bring democratic governance, peace, and stability to the DRC through an earlier oversight mechanism, the International Committee to Accompany the Transition (CIAT) in 2003‒6, and since 1999 through MONUC and MONUSCO, now the largest U.N. peacekeeping force in the world with over twenty thousand people, including seventeen thousand troops? ^{Footnote 2} Since the issues addressed by this mechanism are so important to the people of the Congo, why were they not consulted before the agreement was drafted and signed by regional leaders? It is incredible, and even insulting to the Congolese people, that Rwanda and Uganda, the two countries behind the March 23 Movement (M23) whose rebellion led to the U.N. initiative, should be included in the oversight mechanism, as though arsonists can also become good firefighters!

Kenya is the only member of the ICGLR absent from the mechanism, for reasons that are not clear, while South Africa from so far away (but a member of SADC like Angola, the DRC, Tanzania, and Zambia) is included. South Africa’s inclusion is very instructive, as is that of five other external actors that have been singled out as a supporting cast for the principals: the European Union, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States (par. 8). Why are these five entities specifically mentioned in the document, when there are so many other external actors with “ongoing efforts” in the Great Lakes region? The only plausible explanation for a structure supposedly established by the United Nations and yet one from which China and Russia, two permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, are absent, is that the U.N.’s role is a smokescreen. Indeed, ever since the Congo crisis of 1960, part of U.S. diplomatic practice has been the advancing of American and Western interests under the umbrella of the United Nations (see Williams Reference Williams1965; Weissman Reference Weissman1974; Minter Reference Minter1986).

The framework agreement is basically a Western initiative under U.N. diplomatic cover, and one in which South Africa is playing its historically collaborative role under Washington’s hegemony as a key partner in imperialist expansion in Africa. The strategic and access interests of the West vis-à-vis the enormous natural wealth of the Great Lakes region are so central to this initiative that its main preoccupation with respect to regional economic integration is to give “special consideration for the exploitation of natural resources” (par. 5). As Patrick Bond has shown in his numerous writings on the subject (2006, 2013), South Africa, in facilitating access to Africa’s raw materials for itself as well as its external partners, is a regional gendarme whose role includes serving as coordinator for the looting of the natural resources of central and southern Africa. With Rwanda and Uganda already playing the role of “sheriff’s deputies” for Washington, South Africa could not stay far behind, particularly in countries as rich in natural resources as the Central African Republic (CAR)—where fourteen South African soldiers died in March 2013 in a mission that President Jacob Zuma has failed to clearly explain to his nation—and the DRC.

In conclusion, it is evident that during Obama’s second term, we will see the continuation of U.S. support for Rwanda and Uganda as allies in the “war against terror” in Africa, in spite of the crimes being committed by Kigali, Kampala, and their proxies in Eastern Congo; and U.S. collaboration with South Africa and the former colonial powers to maintain access to those Congolese resources essential for the smooth running of the world economy. I can therefore conclude, as I did in 2010, that Africans should have no illusions as to what President Obama can do for them. For his priorities as leader of the world’s only remaining superpower and guardian of the strategic interests of the U.S. are not necessarily compatible with the aspirations and interests of the people of Africa. We Africans have to put our own house in order, and take charge of our countries to enhance our capacity to satisfy the deepest aspirations of our people for democracy, peace, and prosperity.