Another Fine Mess. Helen Epstein
Joseph Conrad himself suspected? What if Western leaders’ naïve dealings with African strongmen short circuits the power Africans might otherwise have over their own destiny? What if the aid we give sometimes entrenches corruption, impunity, brutality, and terror? What if our policymakers’ singleminded focus on Africa’s natural resources and other strategic interests is itself at the root of the continent’s lawlessness? What if the condescending assumption that poor people of color are incapable of self-government and are more tolerant of oppression is wrong? What if the belief that Africa’s politics are naturally more emotional and its wars more spontaneous and primitive than ours blinds us to the damaging effects of our own foreign policy? I didn’t set out to ask these questions, but after many years working in various African countries, I couldn’t get them out of my head.
How Your Taxes Support Corruption and Dictatorship in Uganda
U.S. foreign aid to Uganda comes from three main sources:
The U.S. Agency for International Development—or USAID—supports NGOs. This money is closely audited and relatively difficult to steal.
The U.S. Department of Defense supplies the Ugandan military with cash, training, equipment and weapons. Information about DOD projects is classified. U.S. taxpayers are not entitled to know how much money is spent on what.
The World Bank and other multilateral organizations like the Global Fund for AIDS, TB, and Malaria directly fund Uganda’s general and/or sectoral budgets such as health, transport, education and so on. This money is intended to pay teachers, doctors and nurses; build roads and run ministries. It is seldom audited, is relatively easy to steal and has been the subject of numerous multi-million dollar scandals involving high-level Ugandan officials.
A Note on Sources
Political repression and the destruction of records and archives make covering recent African history particularly challenging. The inspiration for this book came from reading old copies of The Citizen and other Ugandan publications, whose reporting, in retrospect, has turned out to be remarkably accurate. Reporting these stories at the time took enormous courage.
In much of Africa, local scholars and journalists are often dismissed as politicized and untrustworthy, especially if their views are at odds with U.S. policy. This is not only unfair; it is also dangerous, because while local sources may have interests, the well-groomed spokespersons for the West’s autocratic allies do too. Even journalists in the supposedly free world are subject to subtle government influence. In 2010, Yale economist Nancy Qian found that during the Cold War, major U.S. news outlets including The New York Times and the Washington Post were significantly less likely to report on human rights abuses committed by developing country governments that were U.S. allies than those considered Soviet-leaning. In some cases, the State Department’s Human Rights Bureau downplayed our allies’ abuses; in others, editors and journalists knew they risked being denied access to government briefings and insider tips if they didn’t toe the U.S. government’s line. There’s no reason to think such mechanisms stopped operating after the Berlin Wall fell.
The failure to consult and take seriously local dissident sources like The Citizen has led many Western diplomats, journalists and academics to deny the existence of Museveni’s torture chambers; to assert that Museveni’s election victories are uncontroversial, to claim that Ugandan rebel groups have no legitimate grievances against Museveni’s government, to maintain that the atrocities in northern Uganda were the fault of the deranged warlord Joseph Kony alone, and to commit other deadly blunders described in this book.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.