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THE WORLD

THE WORLD;Africa's Nations Start to Be TheirBrothers' Keepers

THE WORLD;Africa's Nations Start to Be TheirBrothers' Keepers
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October 15, 1995, Section 4, Page 6Buy Reprints
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TWO impressions, all the more disturbing for their harshly conflicting nature, leap out at any visitor to this war-ravaged West African country, and to its two immediate neighbors, Liberia and Guinea.

All three gush with natural riches: diamonds, bauxite, gold, iron, rubber and endless stands of dense tropical forest. And yet everywhere, the average citizen barely scratches out an existence in what is, even for this poorest of continents, a brutish squalor.

For nearly a decade now, this sub-region has lived as if under a plague. Aimless and savage civil wars have rent Liberia and Sierra Leone, while Guinea, a country frozen in dictatorship, has been flooded with refugees.

Many outsiders -- notably the journalist Robert Kaplan -- have likened this rotting underbelly of West Africa to an incubator of some approaching anarchy. Chaos, Mr. Kaplan argues, will sweep the continent as populations explode and poorly managed societies fall apart in a cascade of dominoes.

But now something new and surprising seems to be happening: Liberia managed recently to cobble together a peace pact, and battlefield setbacks have forced the rebels in Sierra Leone to contemplate political negotiations.

So it is now possible to see this region's troubles in an entirely different light.

In both Liberia and Sierra Leone, the dramatically changed equations are due to a new development in the political history of the region. In each case, neighboring countries, rather than former colonial powers or international bodies, have taken a stand against anarchy and begun to turn the tide.

A War's End

In Liberia, several years of diplomatic and military efforts by other West African states, led by Nigeria and Ghana, resulted last month in an end to a war that had killed 150,000 people; the efforts also brought the formation of a new coalition Government.

In Sierra Leone, a war that began as a spillover from Liberia's chaos now seems to be inching tentatively toward a similar conclusion. As in Liberia, soldiers from Nigeria and other nearby countries have helped stabilize the Government.

Even more important, in the eyes of many foreign analysts, however, was the recent arrival of fighter-trainers from the South African firm Executive Outcomes, whose use of air power and mastery of guerrilla warfare seem to have placed the rebel Revolutionary United Front on the defensive.

"The first level of assuring peace and security lies with the people in the country themselves," said Michael Chege, a Kenyan scholar at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. "Once you fail to get consensus at the national level, you have to begin to do so at the regional, or neighborhood level. And that is what we are seeing here, the exercise of regional influence filling a vacuum left by outside powers since the end of the cold war."

African scholars say that the need to act in a concerted fashion is only one lesson of the recent West African experience. Rather than being a case of things falling apart, they say, the problems in places like Liberia and Sierra Leone demonstrate that the worst crises tend to occur in places where the colonial era failed to establish systems of modern government in the first place.

In southern Africa, with its fabulously rich but deep and costly mines, and in much of West Africa, with its extensive export-based agriculture, the English and French laid down roots in their colonies that still give the impression that they had intended to stay. Roads and schools were built throughout those countries, and administration was extended to every corner of the hinterland. In this troubled corner of West Africa, however, where mineral wealth lies virtually on the surface waiting to be plucked, and long, heavy rains favored the spread of diseases like malaria and yellow fever (the region came to be known as the "white man's grave"), colonizers made few fixed investments.

The Outsiders' Helpers

Instead, the outside world relied on local intermediaries -- populations of resettled slaves, Syrian immigrants or traditional chiefs -- to help run economies that were little more than machines of extraction.

"The state never extended its writ in Liberia in the sense that it did in other African countries," said Ellwood Dunn, a Liberian professor of political science at the University of the South in Tennessee. "The conception of the leadership and of the business people was, 'If the people outside the city are not causing trouble, why bother with them?' "

If Liberia, a country founded in 1847 by returned American slaves, was never a colony in the same sense as Guinea and Sierra Leone, all three countries experienced a similar cultural, economic and political gulf within their societies. The gulf separated small, assimilated urban elites from the bulk of the population, which lived, for the most part, without the benefits of government services or modern administration.

In each country, the first leaders to wrestle seriously with the issue of national integration, Sekou Toure in Guinea, Siaka Stevens in Sierra Leone and William Tolbert in Liberia, failed miserably. Most of those in the elites concluded that it was far easier to live on the receipts of the enclave economies they inherited than to fashion a nation.

In retrospect, African scholars say that the results of these failures, both colonial and modern, were predictable: Chaos inevitably spread into the rural vacuums left behind by generations of neglect.

But where Mr. Kaplan draws his pessimistic conclusion of an almost irreversible tide of decay, Africans more and more are cautiously drawing hope from the region's recent changes.

Needed: Patience

"Until their tragedy, Liberians used to think of their country as a nation in the Western perception of the word, but now we know better" said Alpha Bah, a Sierra Leonean professor of history at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. "I have never seen a country that was built in 50 years. There is no reason to feel defeated, because this is a process that will take time."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 4, Page 6 of the National edition with the headline: THE WORLD;Africa's Nations Start to Be TheirBrothers' Keepers. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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