by GEORGES NZONGOLA-NTALAJA
Billboards selling dreams overshadow a population forced to loiter in anticipation of the election results. PHOTO/Aljazeera
In his excellent contribution to this blog on 15 February 2012, Joshua Marks writes that: “It is difficult to make sense of the reaction of many Western governments and international actors to the disastrous elections in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) on November 28, 2011.”
To those of us who have followed the actions of Western governments and international actors since their complicity in the illegal removal of Patrice Lumumba from his position as the democratically elected prime minister of the Congo in September 1960 and his assassination on orders of the US and Belgian governments in January 1961, their total contempt for the democratic right of the Congolese people to choose their own leaders is perfectly understandable. It is symptomatic of the hypocrisy and double standards governing the foreign policies of these self-appointed promoters of democracy and human rights.
In a presentation to the 2009 annual meeting of the African Studies Association in New Orleans, I made the following critique of President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, based on his 4 June 2009 speech in Cairo:
‘The hope in Africa is that governments claiming to have the interests of the African people at heart, as Obama’s administration does, will support the continent’s popular struggles for democracy. That implies holding the same yardstick for all regimes, and not employing double standards or playing favorites with strategic allies. For example, the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is notorious in its violation of human rights and its conduct of fraudulent elections, and yet Washington is extremely timid in pressuring its ally on this matter. In his Cairo address to the Muslim world, President Obama had little to say about democracy in Egypt.’ [1]
The double standard in Obama’s approach was evident one month later, in his 11 July address to the Ghanaian Parliament, where he took a patronizing attitude in lecturing Africans on the virtues of strong institutions instead of autocratic leaders. In Cairo, on the other hand, he had no courage to remind his audience that Egypt, like so many other countries on the African continent, was being governed by an autocrat. As long as the autocrat was in full control of the country and its people, there was no need to call this strategic ally to order. The same applies to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia today, countries whose democracy and human rights record is despicable, but whose regimes remain among Washington’s best allies in the Middle East.
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