by Susan Rice
When the president of the United States travels abroad, the accompanying footprint is massive. When he travels to six countries in Africa, it becomes mind-boggling. First of all, six stops constitute an insanely long itinerary for any presidential trip. (When years later I was in a position to make such decisions, I would never have done that to Obama.) Then factor in the distances, security risks, and lack of adequate medical support in Africa, and it’s a whole different order of magnitude. Hospital ships with helicopters on stand-by loiter offshore. Secret Service detachments flood each country. Military transport planes leap-frog armored limousines from location to location. Experts install secure communications packages housed in soundproof containers at every stop. For each destination, there is an evacuation plan. The competency and complex orchestration are a wonder to behold.
We began in Ghana, where the most amazingly thick and raucous crowds lined the streets for miles from the airport to Accra’s Independence Square. There, a massive rally greeted President Clinton and his Ghanaian host, the frenetic, impulsive, but charming former military officer, President Jerry Rawlings. The greeting was the most extraordinary I have ever witnessed, befitting the first stop on the first-ever comprehensive presidential tour of Africa, in the first African country to achieve independence.
Next, in Uganda, the president visited a rural village and met with regional leaders in Entebbe. As I had urged, Clinton added a brief but moving stop in Kigali, Rwanda, where he met with survivors of the genocide, the president and vice president of Rwanda, and apologized on behalf of the U.S. and the international community for the failure to try to halt the genocide.
In South Africa, I joined Clinton as he visited Robben Island and toured Nelson Mandela’s cell with the former prisoner, now president, as his guide. I was deeply moved to witness firsthand the tall, aging, yet still powerful Mandela exhibit extraordinary dignity and a genuine lack of bitterness toward his captors, as he described dispassionately the harsh conditions of his twenty-seven years of imprisonment, eighteen of which he endured on Robben Island. Standing in the hot sun at the old prison quarry where he once labored, wearing a classic, colorful open-collared Madiba shirt, Mandela’s telling of his incredible story took me back to my days as an anti-apartheid activist, when I refused even to consider traveling to South Africa. Now, I was America’s senior diplomat for Africa joining my president in bilateral meetings with Nelson Mandela, president of a free South Africa.
The traveling press corps took full advantage of South Africa’s wineries and culinary treasures, enjoying the comparative luxury of Africa’s most developed country. The next stop was Botswana, where after quickly dispatching with official meetings, the Clintons decamped to the Okavango Delta in the north to enjoy some game watching. Then, in Senegal, the Clintons visited Goree Island, a last point of departure for many Africans during the slave trade.
The trip was a highly successful, fun, if exhausting journey, which sent the very clear signal that Africa was high among President Clinton’s priorities. He was confident in Africa’s potential and keen to reap the benefits of a U.S.-Africa partnership based on mutual interest and mutual respect. At the center of the agenda was his “Partnership for Economic Growth and Opportunity in Africa,” which aimed to catalyze Africa’s full integration into the global economy through increased trade, investment, debt relief, and development assistance. He championed passage of the landmark African Growth and Opportunity Act, which would open the U.S. market as never before to goods from Africa. And President Clinton sent the strong signal to his entire cabinet that each member was expected to invest his or her time and institutional resources in Africa, and he would be keeping track of their progress.
The high we all felt coming off that trip was intense and exhilarating, but it was short-lived.
Apart from President Clinton’s trip to Africa in late March, 1998 was a year from hell. Murphy’s Law prevailed. Everything went wrong.
Barely six weeks later, the shit hit the fan in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia and Eritrea came to sudden blows. Their leaders had once been close partners in the struggle to overthrow the repressive Derg regime in Ethiopia in 1991 and in achieving Eritrean independence in 1993. More recently, tensions had been building along their lengthy common border, which had never been demarcated after Eritrea’s independence. Economic frictions, exacerbated by Ethiopia’s negative reaction to Eritrea’s introduction of an independent currency in 1997, created a combustible environment. When Eritrean and Ethiopian border guards skirmished on May 6, 1998, it was clear that either the leaders would quickly defuse tensions, or things might spiral out of control.
In Washington, we were deeply concerned to see two friends of the U.S. fight each other, particularly after I and President Clinton had (prematurely) heralded them as “new African leaders.” Personally, I was sickened to see Isaias of Eritrea and Meles of Ethiopia morph from collaborators to combatants. They were also important U.S. partners in addressing regional hot spots from Somalia, to Sudan, to Congo. The situation worsened in mid-May when Eritrea rolled tanks into the Badme area, a rocky, barren, lightly populated stretch along the border, administered since independence by Ethiopia. Eritrea also seized land in two other places along the border, asserting its territorial claims through the unlawful use of force.
When the call came for help, I was in Paris meeting with my French counterparts on a range of African issues. A wider war seemed probable, and I flew directly to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, with a mandate from Secretary Albright and the White House to try to ease the tension. A strong team of experts on East Africa came from Washington to meet me. The team included Gayle Smith, then a senior USAID officer who in her previous life had been a war correspondent covering the Ethiopian and Eritrean rebel movements that now led the governments in each country. Gayle had known both leaders well for years and understood how to get into their heads. David Dunn, a jovial and capable career diplomat, ran the East Africa office at the State Department, and Lieutenant Colonel Michael Bailey was an experienced Africa hand and U.N. peacekeeper from the Pentagon. Long-haired, intensely committed, and unaccustomed to the constraints of government, John Prendergast was an Africa director at the National Security Council, whom I had hired from the NGO world before I moved to State.
We arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to find a very agitated Prime Minister Meles Zenawi nearly bouncing off the walls of his dark, spartan, yet spacious formal office. Extremely intelligent, normally cool and calculating, Meles was seething, almost shaking, with anger at Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, whom he felt had betrayed him. Their last (and final) conversation had ended badly, and Meles was resigned to war. In our meetings, Gayle and I tried to calm him down and understand his position: he insisted that Eritrea withdraw from Badme immediately and unconditionally in order to restore “the status quo ante.” He repeated reflexively, “Not one rock!” in the soil of Badme could be altered; everything must be exactly like it was before the fighting began. I could hardly believe we were facing a major war over a virtually valueless piece of barren land.
We knew Isaias would be an even tougher customer in terms of his willingness to compromise, but armed with Meles’s bottom lines, we flew across the border to Asmara, the neat and orderly Eritrean capital, to explore Isaias’s position. In normal times, Isaias was hot-tempered and mercurial, unpretentious yet canny. He was, by turns, brash and charming, engaging and infuriating, but above all unpredictable. In this moment of stress and uncertainty, he was a roiling ball of rage, egged on by his perennial sidekicks and closest advisors, two men both named Yemane.
In our initial effort at shuttle diplomacy, we were joined by a senior Rwandan delegation led by Vice President Paul Kagame, who was respected by both leaders and well-known to us. As anticipated, Isaias proved even more recalcitrant than Meles; worse, he insulted and dismissed our efforts to defuse the conflict. Isaias maintained that the land he seized belonged to Eritrea, that Ethiopia had initiated several prev
ious rounds of fighting along the border, and that it wished to topple his government. All Eritrea had done, according to Isaias, was to retake what was rightfully theirs. There was, in his view, no need for mediation.
Kagame, angered by the disrespectful attitude of Isaias and convinced of the futility of mediation, returned to Kigali but deputized his minister in the Office of the President, Patrick Mazimhaka, and other close aides to continue working with us. Undeterred by the intransigence of both Meles and Isaias—and determined not to give up on my first real attempt at personal diplomacy and conflict resolution—I continued shuttling between the two leaders, looking for a way forward. Even though my responsibilities spanned the whole African continent and this intensive sort of diplomacy could not be my full-time job for long, I was convinced that only the U.S. could possibly apply the sustained diplomatic resources and attention needed to resolve this conflict. If we quit, no one else could fill the void. Moreover, our particular team, given its composition and relationships with the players, was uniquely suited to try.
But the risks were palpable. All commercial flights between the two capitals had been halted, so we were compelled to fly the long distance back and forth between Addis and Asmara in a small U.S. military prop plane and later a little leased plane that seated four passengers. As tensions escalated, the airspace over the disputed area also became a war zone, and we were forced to fly way out over the Red Sea to avoid being shot down, adding hours and additional stress to our travels. These rides were terrifying, white-knuckle journeys buffeted by high winds over mountainous remote areas. As a new mother, I chastised myself silently for taking such risks, but I figured—what choice do I have? Still, I couldn’t help fearing that we might meet the same fate as revered former U.S. congressman Mickey Leland, who died in a 1989 plane crash over a remote part of Ethiopia as he tried to mitigate recurrent famine. Indeed, in 1999, Ethiopian forces downed a South African civilian private plane flying over the two countries.
With the help of the Rwandans, we drafted a framework of principles designed to end the conflict. Our proposal involved Eritrean withdrawal in accordance with international law, a cease-fire, monitors, and an internationally sanctioned process to delimit and demarcate the border.
Following one tense meeting in Asmara, Isaias demanded that he and I meet solo and kicked out my team. I protested but decided to stay in order to prove that I could take him one-on-one. Alone in his austere meeting room, decorated sparsely with the ugly, heavy wooden furniture typical of the ceremonial offices of some African heads of state, I heard him out. As usual, he was obnoxious, condescending, and offensive, arguing by turns that we were stupid, biased, and incompetent. Isaias insisted in effect that, “Eritrea had done no wrong. We are the victims. We are not moving an inch. Let there be war to teach the arrogant Ethiopians a lesson.”
In response, I was forceful and perhaps even profane, countering, “This is the dumbest war I can imagine. It can and must be resolved peacefully.” I told Isaias he needed to pull his forces back and work with us to address the underlying conflict. The meeting ended in an impasse, but I had demonstrated that neither I nor the USA would be cowed by him. Both buoyant and exhausted, I reported to my team that Isaias had challenged my “manhood,” but I stood my ground and gave it all back to him.
After two separate rounds of intensive diplomacy culminated in early June, Ethiopia accepted our proposal. We pressed hard in Asmara on Isaias to relent, but he stubbornly refused, insisting instead on demilitarizing the disputed areas and direct talks with Ethiopia—a nonstarter. My next move was to travel with our Rwandan partners in four hops on our rickety small plane to Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where the leaders of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), which years later became the African Union, would convene for their annual summit. Our goal was to seek the OAU’s endorsement of our framework proposal.
Shortly after we took off from Eritrea, Ethiopia launched a major air assault on the Asmara airport, sharply escalating the conflict. Eritrea responded by striking both military and civilian targets deep inside Ethiopia, including the densely populated historic city of Mekele, killing civilians on the street and hitting a school. The air war underscored the determination of the two countries to bloody each other badly and heralded the start of a sustained, deadly conflict. The U.S. drew down our embassy staff in Asmara to a bare minimum, while President Clinton personally interceded with the leaders to broker successfully an air strike moratorium after about ten days of intensive bombardment.
In parallel, we worked to mount diplomatic pressure on the parties to agree to a cease-fire and political resolution. In Ouagadougou, I became the first American ever allowed formally to address the OAU Council of Ministers. With Patrick Mazimhaka, I outlined the history of our efforts and the substance of our proposed framework, ending by asking for and receiving agreement from the OAU to endorse it and to commit to joining us in sustained diplomacy toward a resolution. We next set our sights on New York, where we obtained a U.N. Security Council resolution demanding that both sides cease hostilities, welcoming the air moratorium, and supporting the U.S. and OAU mediation efforts. At this stage, Rwanda handed off its role as our African negotiating partner to the OAU. Algeria later stepped in, proving to be a very capable partner.
Fighting died down after the air moratorium went into effect and the rainy season intensified. The parties were hardly through with hostilities; instead, they used the monsoon months to mobilize, train, and deploy large forces to the border area, dig trenches in World War I fashion, and purchase massive quantities of sophisticated weapons and aircraft from Russian, Eastern European, and Chinese arms dealers.
In September 1998, at my suggestion, President Clinton appointed my good friend and former boss, his former national security advisor Anthony Lake, as special envoy for Ethiopia and Eritrea. Tony would take over the negotiating team, assuming day-to-day responsibility for the shuttle diplomacy and liaison with the OAU, reporting to Clinton through me and Gayle Smith, now the new NSC senior director for African affairs. Gayle and I remained deeply involved in all aspects of our strategy and diplomacy, but with wide responsibilities and an African continent blowing up in multiple places simultaneously, we could not devote the necessary sustained attention to this critical conflict. Ever wise, deeply respected, and collegial, Tony was the perfect envoy to drive forward our negotiations in partnership with Algerian prime minister Ahmed Ouyahia and his team, making numerous trips to the warring capitals.
Over two and a half years, the U.S. never relented in its diplomacy, as the deadly war raged on. Whenever possible, I joined Tony on his missions to the capitals and to Algiers, where we coordinated with the Algerians and co-hosted “proximity talks,” in which the parties spoke to the U.S.-Algerian mediating team, though never to each other, even as we all stayed in the same diplomatic compound. As we continued to try to narrow the differences between the parties, political pressure mounted in each country to finish the war.
One day in the spring of 2000—with economic costs soaring for two of the world’s most impoverished countries and the rainy season fast approaching when the ground would turn into impossible mud—my office phone rang. When I picked up, there were no voices. All I could make out in the far distance was B. B. King singing “The Thrill Is Gone.” After the song ended, a deeply frustrated Tony Lake, with John Prendergast, reported from Algiers that both sides remained as dug-in as ever. They were very near throwing in the towel. My job, easy by comparison, given their claustrophobic confinement in a bland Algerian diplomatic facility, was to talk them off the ceiling. I calmly implored them, “Take a break, find something to drink, then get some sleep. And remember the stakes.” We could not give up.
As the Algiers talks reached a critical moment in early May 2000, it was not the warring parties but an American who blindsided all of us. U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Richard Holbrooke, who was leading a Security Council delegation to Africa, unilaterally diverted the U.N. mission to Erit
rea. Holbrooke was not only a talented veteran diplomat with an outsized ego but also a contemporary and rival of Tony Lake’s from the Vietnam era when they both served as young Foreign Service Officers. Over the objections of our negotiating team and without sanction from the White House, Holbrooke and seven U.N. diplomats dropped into Asmara with little knowledge of the leaders or the complex issues at play. Holbrooke, who bore a decades-long, personal animus toward Tony Lake and a strong, if more recent, disdain for me, decided to prove that he could do what we couldn’t and broker an end to the war. He fell prey to Isaias’s efforts to charm and mislead him about the history and balance of culpability in the conflict. Ignorant and emboldened, Holbrooke proceeded to Addis from Asmara, armed with Isaias’s talking points.
Meanwhile, in Ethiopia, Meles—desperate for a way to hold off his own hard-liners, who were pressing for a final offensive to vanquish Eritrea—urged the U.S. to offer him a diplomatic lifeline. Instead, Holbrooke, refusing to consult Tony or others on the U.S. negotiating team, presented Meles with an Isaias proposal that had already been considered and rejected by Ethiopia. When Meles asked if this was the best and final U.S. offer, Dick said yes, misrepresenting the American position. Furious at what he perceived to be an eleventh-hour American effort to try to dupe him, Meles angrily refused Holbrooke’s warmed-over scraps.
Holbrooke erupted, berating Meles as “the Milosevic of Africa.” By convincing Meles that the Americans were no longer willing to play a constructive role, Holbrooke virtually ensured that the war would resume with Ethiopia launching its planned offensive. When within forty-eight hours, it did, the joke throughout the State Department was that Holbrooke’s next book should be To Start a War, a sequel to his memoir entitled To End a War, which recounted his role in the Bosnia negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Peace Accords. Yet this last phase of the war was no joke. Of the up to 100,000 soldiers who died in the conflict, tens of thousands perished in this final offensive. Following his diplomatic failure, Holbrooke publicly lambasted the leaders, especially Meles, and surreptitiously spun up critical press stories and editorials blaming me and Tony for the failure of American diplomacy.