President Bush hanging with the homeys in his natural milieu...... Not!
It was refreshing to see that President Bush decided to visit the continent of Africa before the end of his term in office. To his credit, he has tripled direct humanitarian and development aid to the world's most impoverished continent since taking office and has vowed to double that increased amount by 2010 to $9 billion. This is indeed noble of a man who has been shunned by black voters, myself included, in the United States. Four African nations--Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Uguanda--rank among the world's top 10 recipients in aid from the United States. This begs the question of why is it that we cannot curb the atrocities occurring in the Darfur region of Sudan, for example. Beyond increasing aid to Africa, Bush has met with nearly three dozen African heads of state during his six years in office.
Even as Bush defended an emphasis on the positive, he entered into one of Africa's most disturbing recent developments. December's presidential elections in Kenya unleashed weeks of ethnic violence that left more than 1,000 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands, a worrisome sign in a country typically regarded as one of Africa's most stable. This time around he will not visit Kenya, but has endorsed a power-sharing agreement to help resolve the dispute and he decided to send Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to the region instead to deliver his view. My only question to this move is where has she been since this quagmire began? The violence from the rigged elections have been ongoing for quite a while. Oh, how could I forget--Kenya does not have black gold, oil that is. Secondly, isn't Bush slated to make a stop for three nights in Tanzania, Kenya's neighbor?
"The key is that the leaders hear from her firsthand U.S desires to see that there be no violence, that there be a power-sharing agreement that will help this nation resolve its difficulties," the president said. Convenient is all I can say to that! Media reports further stated that Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer said the purpose of Rice's trip was to support former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who is mediating the political talks. Bush does not need to go to Kenya, she said. "Right now, we don't want to supplant Kofi Annan's mediation. That is not the intention." You be the judge, but it seems to me like he did not want to go to Kenya in the first place. He doesn't want to accentuate the negatives on this trip, so to speak, is my opinion.
President Bush also talked about the worsening violence in Sudan's western Darfur region, which is now spilling over into escalating tensions with neighboring Chad, and said he "had a tough decision early on as to whether to send troops to Darfur." Once he decided not to, a decision he said was guided in part by recommendations from groups working in Darfur that he did not identify, Bush said "there's not many other avenues except for the United Nations and the peacekeeping forces." Funny, wasn't this the same thing the UN wanted to accomplish in Iraq with inspectors before military action was justified?
