Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 31, 1994                   TAG: 9408020007
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: F-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By BERNARD D. KAPLAN HEARST NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: PARIS                                LENGTH: Medium

U.S. AID IS ONLY A BANDAGE FOR CRUMBLING CONTINENT

Experts here emphasize that the massive humanitarian aid mission ordered by President Clinton to help the Rwandan refugees and the debate over whether U.S. officials should have acted sooner have drawn attention away from a far more fundamental question:

What, if anything, can the United States and other Western countries do to prevent much of sub-Saharan Africa from collapsing into total anarchy?

Some analysts say it may already be too late to keep the continent from crumbling.

At best, they add, even if Western governments were to coordinate their efforts to make profligate African governments adopt stringent political and economic reforms - and there's little sign of that happening - a real improvement wouldn't be likely in less than 15 years.

``The plain fact is that much of black Africa is in an advanced state of political and economic disintegration,'' warns Jean-Jacques Magin, an adviser on African affairs to the French government.

Large-scale humanitarian efforts like that being mounted for the Rwandans or recently carried out in Somalia are tantamount to ``giving aspirin to someone stricken by a fatal disease,'' Magin says.

He fears that ``the outside world will gradually grow weary of organizing huge and expensive rescue operations every six months or so to save the population of yet another Africa state engulfed by mass slaughter and the breakdown of all semblance of order.''

But he adds: ``Probably that is what the outside world will be called on to do.''

The ``outside world'' in this context means, first, the United States, he notes, because America alone possesses the logistical resources to put together a major relief effort on short notice under the arduous conditions existing in most of Africa.

France tried single-handedly to deal with the latest crisis by sending 2,000 soldiers last month to create a safe haven for the fleeing Rwandans. The task ultimately overwhelmed the French forces.

``Only the Americans have the planes, the troops and organizational backup on the scale necessary to conduct that kind of operation,'' Magin says.

This means the United States faces the prospect of being repeatedly drawn in as the wobbly political structures of other African states crack, giving way to genocidal tribal conflicts comparable to the mass killing in Rwanda, according to Stephen Wilcox, a former British diplomat and author of several books on Africa.

Wilcox points out that Zaire, to which hundreds of thousands of Rwandans fled, is itself teetering on the brink of disintegration with much of its army in a state of mutiny. The nightmarish possibility exists of civil war erupting there in the midst of the Rwandan relief effort, he says.

Wilcox counts Zaire as only one of several African countries - including Kenya, Nigeria, Gabon and Sierra Leone - where serious civil strife could break out anytime.

``Savage wars have already ravished Uganda, Mozambique, Angola, Sudan, Liberia, Chad, Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda's next-door neighbor, Burundi,'' he says. ``There is scarcely an African state that appears immune to large-scale tribal conflict.''

The British specialist claims that, as in Rwanda, political leaders in much of Africa are deliberately stoking tribal enmities among their people to deflect popular discontent at failed economic policies and governmental corruption.

``Nowhere in sub-Saharan Africa is economic growth currently sufficient to prevent poverty from getting worse,'' he says. ``Whatever help is received from the outside, the likelihood is that 10 years from now, the situation in most of Black Africa will be even more critical than it is now.''(STORY CAN END HERE - OPTIONAL MATERIAL FOLLOWS)

International loans from the World Bank and other agencies have made little difference. Large sums have gone into the pockets of corrupt officials. Much of the remainder has been squandered on poorly conceived economic schemes.

But even Nigeria, the one African state to share in the global boom of the 1970s and '80s because of its oil, has fared little better.

Wilcox estimates that Nigeria's rulers wasted more than $100 billion in oil revenues during that period. Now Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 90 million people, is more heavily in debt than it was before the oil money began rolling in.