28 September 2001

Kansteiner Reviews U.S. Policy Toward Africa After Terrorist Attacks

Washington -- Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Walter Kansteiner gave journalists an overview of U.S. policy toward the continent September 28, including an optimistic assessment of the long-term effect of the recent terrorist attacks in New York City, aimed at the economic heart of the nation.

Speaking at a Freedom Forum luncheon co-sponsored by the African Correspondents Association, Kansteiner said, "My guess is that trade flows will not be heavily affected" between the United States and Africa because of the September 11 attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, symbols of America's global commercial and financial power.

Kansteiner told an audience that included the ambassadors of Algeria, Malawi, Mauritius, and South Africa, "All of our lives changed on September 11 and a lot of our policies have changed in the foreign policy realm, and Africa is included in that.

"Twenty-five Africans died in the World Trade Center, and they came from 13 different African countries," Kansteiner said. "It demonstrates this was truly a global attack and an attack on all civilized countries.

"Times have changed in the last two and a half weeks, and the Africa Bureau at the State Department is changing with them," the official told his audience. "I and the entire Africa Bureau are spending a lot of time, as you can imagine, working on issues of counter-terrorism, issues that deal particularly with the Horn and eastern Africa. Sudan, Kenya, and Somalia have become very much our focus over the last two weeks. But that's not to say that we've lost focus on our other priorities, our other issues that we are keen to work on in Africa -- and those are economic development, HIV/AIDS, environmental preservation of the ecosystems of Africa, and, of course, also conflict resolution."

Asked about African cooperation with the U.S. war on terrorism, Kansteiner said, "The way we are working the coalition with Africans is in the areas of intelligence sharing, monitoring and watching financial flows [called forensic accounting], monitoring and watching people flows -- immigration and migration -- and also, in specific cases, the coalition is asking for overflight and [cooperation in other] military-related issues.

"In all of those areas, the African governments have been tremendously responsive and very supportive, and we expect in the weeks ahead that some of that cooperation will be very, very fruitful," Kansteiner said. And he pointed to Sudan as a prime example where "some very good first steps have been made."

After predicting the U.S. travel ban for Sudanese diplomats would soon be lifted because of anti-terrorist cooperation in the intelligence field, the official added, however, that "that does not impinge at all on our policy goal of seeking peace in that country."

On the economic front, Kansteiner was asked if the Trade and Economic Cooperation Forum, a meeting of African officials from 35 nations invited to the United States in October to discuss implementation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), would be cancelled. He replied: "It's not cancelled, just postponed. It's a very important event in the sense that it gives a forum for trade, finance, and foreign ministers to come to this country to meet with the highest levels of our government and talk about economic issues, and we look forward to hosting it."

Emphasizing his belief that trade flows with Africa would not suffer greatly from the attacks, Kansteiner said: "We've had tremendous trade increases because of AGOA. Some countries like Madagascar, for instance, are up 126 percent" in exports to the United States -- "terrific success on that, and we want to keep that going."

South African Ambassador Sheila Sisulu pointed out that all her countrymen grieved with Americans over the great terrorist tragedy and she said she hoped that the U.S. government would also take into consideration "the terror of poverty, hunger, disease, famine, and war" that plagues the world.

Kansteiner touched on possible motives for the attacks, saying: "We're not convinced that at the heart of bin Laden's eagerness to inflict damage on us is poverty, quite frankly." (Usama bin Laden is the Saudi-born tycoon and religious extremist who has been named by the U.S. government as the chief suspect behind the planning of the terrorist attacks.) "The root of it [the attacks] is that he has a number of issues with the American political positions and policies and he is trying to inflict as much damage as he can on us."

Asked how religion played into the terrorist equation, Kansteiner said: "We want to make it very clear to all those in the coalition that, in fact, this [ours] is a war against those who use terrorist activities and has nothing to do with Islam. In fact, we look to our brother Muslim nations as part of the coalition, and that is extremely important.

"President Bush and President Obasanjo of Nigeria had a long, very good conversation about this earlier this week, and that's an important message to get out."

Finally, Kansteiner pledged that with all the attention being paid to the war on terrorism, Africa would not fall off "the radar screen" of government officials in Washington. The goal of getting at the terrorists who wreaked havoc on Americans on September 11, he stressed, is "not divergent from the goals of alleviating poverty in Africa, raising the standard of living of all Africans, and increasing economic flows between our continent and Africa."