Pubdate: Mon, 04 Mar 2002
Source: Lawrence Journal-World (KS)
Copyright: 2002 The Lawrence Journal-World
Contact: http://www.ljworld.com/site/submit_letter
Website: http://www.ljworld.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1075
Author: Jim Hoagland
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)

COMMODITIES SPUR WARS AROUND GLOBE

Washington - Oil trumps diamonds. That is the irreducible lesson of the 
misspent life of Jonas Savimbi, the guerrilla leader who was hunted down 
and riddled with bullets by Angolan troops last week. Commodities weigh 
more on history's scale in Angola today than does communism or capitalism. 
Savimbi turned out to be neither nation- builder nor neocolonial despot: He 
was in the end Africa's Willy Loman, with the wrong line of goods on hand.

The final episodes of Savimbi's long guerrilla war were financed by diamond 
traders rather than by the ideologues of Communist China (who supported him 
back when China really was communist) or by the Central Intelligence 
Agency, which was ordered to back Savimbi by Gerald Ford and later by 
Ronald Reagan. But Savimbi and his band of tribal warriors could not 
compete against the much larger resources the Luanda government gathered 
through its control of Angola's lucrative petroleum deposits.

Africa, Central Asia and other regions of the Third World exist today in a 
time of commodity wars. These hostilities are fought not for big 
ideological or political causes as in the past, but about control of 
diamond fields, petroleum concessions, coco leaves and poppies that yield 
narcotics. The trajectory from wars of liberation to wars of profiteering 
is seen clearly in Angola's Forty Years' War and in Savimbi's abruptly 
ended career as one of Africa's most skilled guerrilla commanders and 
charismatic political leaders.

Savimbi's death in a hail of gunfire may not end the struggle, however. The 
Angolans and their foreign backers may well fight on to the last diamond. 
War remains the only business open at the entry level to large numbers of 
dispossessed or merely greedy people in the Third World - including areas 
to which the Bush administration is dispatching U.S. forces and military 
aid to fight terrorism.

The war on terrorism forces Washington to re-engage with the Third World on 
issues of war and peace, largely neglected during the past decade. In this 
changed political landscape, Americans must keep their eyes open as they 
choose friends to shore up and foes to tear down. Washington must resist 
shelling out resources to unsavory characters and regimes who may be intent 
on dragging the United States into their own conflicts for their own profit.

Wars for control over minerals have been waged with brutality in Sierra 
Leone, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and elsewhere in 
Africa in recent years. Drug money is at the core of Colombia's civil war 
and played a role in the use of Afghanistan and Pakistan as platforms for 
terrorist networks. Market-driven warfare is part and parcel of 
globalization, and it seems to be at least as brutal and unrelenting as 
ideological warfare ever was.

Angola's abundant resources, strategic location in southern Africa and 
ethnic fault lines have made it a pivotal battleground in the different 
phases of warfare that have engulfed the country since 1961, when a 
peasants' rebellion quickly expanded into a war of liberation against 
Portuguese colonial rule. That war ended in 1974 when the demoralized 
Portugese army washed its hands of Africa. The Soviet- backed MPLA grabbed 
the capital and control of the oil fields and brought in Cubans to fight 
rival Angolan groups, which sought and got help from South Africa and the 
CIA. The Cold War proxy battle went to the Soviets' clients in Luanda.

Savimbi started his UNITA movement with help from Beijing after Moscow had 
turned down his requests for aid. But he had no trouble switching gears. 
And he served the purposes of U.S. ideologues intent on thwarting Moscow 
and Havana by fighting the MPLA. The manipulation was mutual on all sides.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and of white tyranny in South Africa 
stripped away external support and much of the mythology used to justify 
costly interventions that in the end seemed to change little.

Savimbi continued fighting and smuggling diamonds out of the areas UNITA 
held. But an international embargo on "conflict" diamonds helped strangle 
his forces, which then resorted to blatant acts of terrorism against 
Angolan civilians. When he was gunned down, at age 67, Savimbi had become a 
caricature of overreaching ambition.

The overwhelming sense of waste that Savimbi's death brings is not confined 
to him or to Angola. By imposing their ideological conflict onto Africa's 
own post-independence struggles, the two superpowers made a bad situation 
worse. Washington and Moscow wasted resources, lives, time and their own 
moral authority in distant struggles they never bothered to understand from 
the inside. In this respect, at least, the war on terrorism must not 
resemble the Cold War.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager