ncaREVIEW OF n -A FbliticaRilitir l Economy EDITORS: The Review of African Political Economy Chris Allen and Jan Burgess (ROAPE) is published quarterly by Carfax Publishing Company for the ROAPE BOOK REVIEWS: international editorial collective. Now 24 Ray Bush, Roy Love and Morris Szeftel years old, ROAPE is a fully refereed journal covering all aspects of African political economy. ROAPE has always involved the EDITORIAL WORKING GROUP: Chris Allen, Carolyn Baylies, Lyn Brydon, readership in shaping the journal's coverage, Janet Bujra, Jan Burgess, Ray Bush, Carolyne welcoming contributions from grass roots Dennis, Anita Franklin, Jon Knox, Roy Love, organisations, women's organisations, trade Giles Mohan, Colin Murray, Mike Powell, unions and political groups. The journal is Stephen Riley, David Seddon, David Simon, unique in the comprehensiveness of its Colin Stoneman, Morris Szeftel, Tina bibliographic referencing, information Wallace, Gavin Williams, A. B. 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Consent to copy for general distribution, Hussein Adam (Holy Cross), Prexy Nesbitt for promotion, for creating new work, or for (Chicago), Betsey Schmidt (Loyola College), resale must be specifically obtained in writing Meredeth Turshen (Rutgers), Gloria Thomas- from ROAPE Publications Ltd. Emeagwali (Central Connecticut); UK: A. M. Babu (1924-1996), Lionel Cliffe, Basil ISSN 0305-6244 Davidson, Raufu Mustafa (Zaria), Phil O'Keefe, Peter Lawrence and Kevin Watkins. ©1998 ROAPE Publications Ltd Review of African Political Economy No. 77:405-407 © ROAPE Publications Ltd., 1998 ISSN 0305-6244; RIX#7701 Britain's Africa Policy: Ethical, or Ignorant? Chris Allen In the dying months of the Conservative government in Britain, L'Afrique Politique published an article by Jonathon Styal on Britain's Africa policy, entitled 'Does Britain have an Africa policy?' With the arrival of a Labour government and a Foreign Secretary (Robin Cook) seemingly intent on pursuing an 'ethical' foreign policy, one might have expected both more policy coherence and a stress on the promotion and defence of human rights and democratic freedoms as primary elements in policy towards African issues and regimes. Both in the larger sphere of foreign policy in general and in its African microcosm, this has proved a vain hope. Trade, as before, comes first, second and third in importance, even when it is a trade in arms; and human values, and coherence, come amongst the also-rans: according to a report in June by Saferworld, Britain's new ethical government has issued over 2,000 licenses for arms exports to China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe and other countries, few of them known for their principled defence of human rights. The 'need' to promote exports is only part of the explanation for Labour's behaviour in office, however. No less significant at the level of individual states are weaknesses in political analysis and understanding, made more acute in the case of Africa by an apparent lack of concern for the continent on the part of the Foreign Office. Hugo Young, writing in The Guardian last May on the 'arms to Sierra Leone' affair (see below), refers to "the pitiful indifference to African affairs that is to be found in the party of New Labour", a charge well illustrated by attitudes to Nigeria. Equivocation over Britain's already weak stance on Nigeria, following the death of Abacha arises in part from a failure to grasp the nature of military role and rule in that state, and the essential similarity of all of its military regimes within the slow but inexorable process of terminal spoils politics. A new voice on the radio, or new face in the official portraits, is only that. It does not indicate that the regime can suddenly afford to cease to be repressive, abusive of human rights or intolerant of criticism, nor that the senior military can take the risk of relinquishing their political power and allowing a popularly and freely chosen government to take their place and their grasp on power in general. The 'arms for Sierra Leone' affair is more complex. The basic story would seem to be clear: in the period after May 1997 when the Sierra Leone Army, now allied with its former opponents in the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) seized power from the elected government of President Tejan Kabbah, a British mercenary firm, Sandline, contracted with Kabbah to provide training and subsequently thirty tons of weapons, to be used by a militia group, the Kamajors, despite a UN embargo on weapons supply. British officials were involved in this, in ways that became the subject of an enquiry under Sir Thomas Legg. 406 Review of African Political Economy Superficially, and as the Labour Government has often argued, this appears to be a case of support for the restoration of a democratic freedoms in Sierra Leone, and to be in line with the current position of both the OAU and of ECOWAS (as least where Nigeria is not concerned), that the armed overthrow of elected governments should not be tolerated. Three issues arise, however: To what extent was the supply of weapons the decision of the appropriate Ministers, and to what extent was it an action taken or encouraged by relatively junior officials in the Foreign Office without explicit consent from a Minister? Who (in this case) made Britain's Africa policy? Was the action taken in defiance on a UN embargo? What consequences flow from the supply of arms? It was the first of these that preoccupied the British press and Parliament, and thus was the focus of the Legg enquiry. Sandline had been involved in Sierra Leone before the 1997 coup, and had been approached by Rakesh Saxena, the new Indian owner of several bauxite or diamond companies in Sierra Leone, soon after the coup with a view to Saxena funding an armed attempt to remove the new military regime under Johnny Paul Koroma. Meanwhile Peter Penfold, the new British High Commissioner (Ambassador) to Sierra Leone had visited Branch Energy, a sister company to Sandline, soon after his appointment in March 1997, on Foreign Office advice. He was subsequently involved in much of what happened late in 1997 and early this year, though he denies having acted as intermediary between Sandline and Kabbah. Penfold kept officials on the Equatorial Africa desk at the Foreign Office informed, as did a Ministry of Defence adviser, and Sandline's boss, Tim Spicer; but only very late on, and after the arms had been dispatched, were ministers informed. The Legg inquiry thus argues that it was officials and not ministers who made policy in this instance. In October 1997 the UN Security Council had passed resolution 1132, forbidding the supply of weapons to any of the parties involved in Sierra Leone. Both Penfold and the Foreign Office officials discounted this, acting as if the embargo referred only to the Koroma forces. In this they were reflecting the stance of more senior officials, and of the British government, as can be seen in the memorandum issued after the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Edinburgh later that month, which describes the UN resolution as affecting only the military junta. This casual attitude to UN resolutions allowed Prime Minister Blair to dismiss criticism of Britain's role as 'bizarre', saying in May: We were restoring from a brutal military coup d'etat to a democratically elected regime. The person in charge of doing that was the Foreign Secretary, and he did it brilliantly. It was not of course 'we' who restored anything, but ECOMOG (the ECOWAS forces) which late in January began an attack on Koroma's troops that allowed Kabbah to return to Sierra Leone in March. By then the Sandline weapons (obtained from Bulgaria) were irrelevant to the removal of the Koroma junta, and Kabbah has since claimed that they were taken by ECOMOG on arrival and thus never used by the Kamajors. More seriously, Blair seemed unconcerned at the broader implications of supplying further weaponry into an area already heavily armed, and supplying them to a private militia. As Susan Willett stresses in her article in this issue, the ready availability of modern weapons in Southern Africa, and the large numbers of (former) soldiers and insurgents, helps create serious internal security problems and promote both individual and organised crime, as well as undermining political stability. Sierra Leone has been the locus of a particularly vicious internal war for most of this decade, with civilians the victims of horrifying brutality (mainly on the part of the RUF).