Former Ambassador speaks on U.S. foreign relations

Ilyse Kramer Staff Writer

Former United States Ambassador to the Republic of Sierra Leone John L. Hirsch asserted in his Wednesday, Feb. 21 lecture, entitled “New Challenges, New Possibilities: United States and Africa Relations in the Twenty-first Century,” that the challenges and possibilities of which he spoke are in fact ones facing the United States’ own foreign policy establishments.

He described Africa as being in the process of a three-part transition, undergoing dramatic political, economic, and health shifts that are fundamentally changing both the continent itself and the way that Americans need to look at it.

Like many other nations throughout the world, Hirsch said, African countries are buzzing with new political cultures, generally shifting from predominantly autocratic governance to more democratic alternatives.

Addressing the role of the United States in that process, Hirsch said that, since the Cold War ended, “we have made reasonable progress in helping Africa. There has been good as well as bad news. The United States has been instrumental in supporting peacekeeping operations in Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan.”

However, Hirsch tempered such optimism with an insistence that significant areas of concern remain, for the most part, almost entirely ignored. “The problematic areas of Sudan and Western Sudan are spreading into Chad,” he said. “In the President’s recent State of the Union Address, he only spent one sentence on Darfur. More needs to be done. It is a truism that we live in a globalizing world; the United States cannot solve these issues alone. We need to work with other countries. China’s recent aid of the Sudanese government is an instance motivated less by altruism and more by self-interest, yet it is help nonetheless.”

The ambassador also outlined some important regional economic policies currently in development, such as the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). NEPAD initially arose in 2001 when The Organization of African Unity demanded that the heads of state of Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa create an integrated socio-economic development framework for Africa; its top two goals are to eliminate poverty and encourage the development of African countries on both an individual and collective level.

“Although America tends to offer low aide and trade to Africa,” he continued, “the tariff values of agrarian exports in the European Union are seeking out a more level playing field on trade relations. Despite the mixed messages between Africa and America, there has been some positive change under George W. Bush, such as the African Opportunity Act of 2001.”

Finally, Hirsch cited pandemics as a major frontier in need of attention throughout Africa. Not only do alarming numbers of Africans suffer from HIV/AIDS, he said, but many areas are also devastated by diseases that generally command less global attention, such as tuberculosis and malaria. “More Africans are dying from these diseases than from the effects of war,” he said, explaining that this is an unnecessary tragedy since, as he sees it, health crises “can be amended by people, such as ourselves, with medical training, who are not afraid to go to a rural country in Africa and teach people how to take pills on a regular basis.”

Hirsch occupied his post in Sierra Leone under the Clinton Administration from 1995 to 1998, a tumultuous time for the small West African country, which was then in the throes of a hellish civil war that had broken out in 1991 and only recently ended in 2002. According to Human Rights Watch, the conflict resulted in tens of thousands of deaths, as well as some of the most notorious war crimes of the 1990s, including the widespread military use of child soldiers, sexual slavery, and—perhaps most infamously—the gruesome practice of severing the limbs of opponents and civilians alike.

The atrocities that Hirsch witnessed while serving in Freetown inspired him to write the book Sierra Leone: Diamonds and the Struggle for Democracy, published in 2001, which calls on both realist and idealist arguments to support a broader international framework for engagement in peace efforts in a country like Sierra Leone. Hirsch is also the author of Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping, co-authored with fellow Ambassador Robert B. Oakley and published in 1995.

A good first step to accomplishing these goals, Hirsch emphasized at the close of his lecture, would be for us to “all listen more.”

Hirsch is currently a professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and Occidental College. He joined the faculty of SIPA, Columbia and Occidental College after working for 32 years in the United States Foreign Service, and has also served as Vice President and Senior Fellow of the International Peace Academy for the last eight years. His lecture was jointly sponsored by the International Studies Program and the Political Science Department.