Susan Rice

One of the highest-ranking women in Madeleine K. Albright’s State Department and one of the youngest assistant secretaries of state in U.S. history, Susan E. Rice presides over the Clinton administration’s Africa policy, giving it a high profile after decades in which the continent was a backwater of U.S. diplomacy, important only as a Cold War pawn.

Rice, who celebrated her 35th birthday two weeks ago, assumed her current job as chief of the State Department’s Africa bureau on Oct. 22, 1997, moving from the National Security Council staff where she worked from the start of the Clinton administration, first as director for international organizations and peacekeeping and later as director of African affairs.

Born and brought up in a stately neighborhood of Washington, Rice has been a lifelong winner: basketball point guard and valedictorian at Washington’s elite National Cathedral prep school; Phi Beta Kappa at Stanford; Rhodes scholar and Oxford PhD. Although her Oxford dissertation was on conflict resolution during the transition from white-ruled Rhodesia to black-governed Zimbabwe, she did not set out to become an expert on Africa policy. Before she was picked for the White House staff, she worked as a management consultant for a Toronto firm.

Rice has settled easily into the administration’s top Africa job even though most of the African leaders she deals with are men old enough to be her grandfather. Unlike some diplomats, she does not hesitate to identify the bad guys in a variety of African conflicts.

It is not true, as State Department rumors have it, that Albright is Rice’s godmother. But the secretary of state has been a friend of the Rice family throughout Susan’s lifetime. During Rice’s childhood, her father, Emmett J. Rice, a former economics professor at Cornell and onetime governor on the Federal Reserve Board, played tennis with Joseph Albright, then the secretary’s husband. Rice is married to Ian Cameron, whom she met at Stanford. They have a son, John David, nicknamed Jake, 2 years old.

Seated in her office on the seventh floor, where the State Department houses its top officials, Rice answered questions easily, alternating between economic statistics and unvarnished assessments of African governments, both good and bad. Though she was unblinking in her condemnation of brutal dictatorships like the one in Sudan, Rice said there are now more representative governments on the continent than repressive ones.

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Question: This administration has devoted more time and energy to Africa than any of its recent predecessors, yet the continent is wracked with war, atrocity, poverty and other problems. What impact does this U.S. effort have for Africans, and what impact has it had for Americans?

Answer: The administration under President Clinton has tried to act in recognition of our own national interests in Africa. We have important economic interests and important security interests. The economic interests range from the fact that some 16% of our imported oil now comes from Africa, and it will go up to 20%, probably within the next decade. We export more to Africa than to all of the former Soviet Union combined, twice as much as we export to India.

At the same time, we’ve got serious security concerns. We face fewer threats now from Cold War nuclear weapons than we do from terrorism and narcotics and weapons proliferation and disease and environmental degradation. In Africa, we need strong partners to cooperate with us to deal with those threats to our mutual security.

So it’s against that backdrop that President Clinton has tried to change fundamentally the way we engage with Africa. That means that virtually every agency of the U.S. government now is involved one way or the other in Africa.

We’ve done that in our own interest. We’ve played an important role in conflict resolution, trying to do much more in terms of debt relief through trade and investment and continued assistance. We’ve been instrumental in promoting democracy and supporting democratic transition throughout Africa, and we’re trying to do a great deal to resolve the conflicts there, from Sierra Leone to Congo to Ethiopia and Eritrea. But we can’t wave a magic wand and fix Africa’s problems.

Q: Africa is rich in natural resources, including some pretty valuable ones like oil and diamonds. But in places like Angola and Sierra Leone, to name just two of several, resources have been exploited to finance brutal wars. What can be done to channel this wealth to the benefit of the people?

A: The most important thing is for there to be responsible, accountable governments in those countries that aren’t corrupt and that are there to serve rather than steal. In most African countries, that is increasingly the case.

Angola and Sierra Leone are still in conflict, which leaves the countries essentially ungovernable, or at least in part ungovernable. In both cases, it’s been rebel organizations that have had access to the diamonds and the diamond revenues.

We are trying to clamp down on the illicit diamond trade while obviously allowing legitimate, legal producers to continue to sell their wares.

On the oil side, you could argue perhaps that oil is benefiting the government in Angola and therefore fueling the conflict, but that’s missing a primary point, which is that the government did not start this latest round of the conflict. It’s defending itself against a rebel organization that’s broken three successive peace deals.

Q: The U.S. government gave a great deal of support to Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi for a long time. Do we bear any particular responsibility for what he’s doing now?

A: I don’t think so. The United States played an integral role back in 1994 in brokering the Lusaka Protocol, which was the latest attempt to end this horrific conflict. The government largely fulfilled its obligations under the protocol, and Jonas Savimbi and [the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, or UNITA] violated it.

We have joined the international community in sanctioning UNITA. The United States has, since the end of the Cold War, been on the side of peace in Angola. And now it’s trying to be on the side of justice through an effort to isolate those that want to continue the war--that means primarily UNITA--and work with the government of Angola, which is by no means without its flaws, to encourage it to adopt a policy and strategy that will benefit its people directly.

Q: Several of the world’s poorest and least developed countries such as Equatorial Guinea and Chad have recently found significant deposits of oil. Can these governments hold their own in dealing with international oil companies? Do they have the institutional resources to benefit from an oil boom?

A: The question is not whether they can hold their own against international oil companies. I think particularly American oil companies have been a force for good. The question in these two countries is whether the resources that will come to the government will be used responsibly and in a fashion that benefits the people of those countries. It’s an open question in both cases.

I am hopeful that if the Chad-Cameroon pipeline comes on line, if the concerns of human-rights activists and environmental organizations can be adequately addressed, that the revenues in Chad will be applied in a socially responsible fashion.

Equatorial Guinea is, perhaps, a more difficult case. The government has a long way to go on human rights.

Q: Sudan, a country on the State Department’s list of states that promote terrorism and one that’s fighting a long and very nasty war, has recently discovered significant quantities of oil. Will the increased wealth moderate the government’s behavior, or will it make the government even more repressive?

A: I think the real danger is that the oil revenues of Sudan will enable the government to prosecute a brutal civil war that’s killed an estimated 2 million people with greater impunity. It has said that it is tempted to use the oil revenue to enhance its military capabilities. It’s already probably one of the greatest abusers of human rights anywhere in the world. We all ought to be very concerned that the increased oil revenue will simply fuel the worst practices of the government.

The United States has taken a very tough line. We’ve imposed comprehensive unilateral sanctions on Sudan. And we’ve sought to take a tough line in international human-rights organizations, like the [United Nations] Human Rights Commission, against Sudan.

At the same time, as we try to deal with the worst excesses of the government, we have also worked very hard to make a contribution to enhancing the regional peace process, which is necessary to end the conflict there. But I think part of the difficulty is that other countries around the world have allowed their economic interests to override their common sense and their sense of human decency, and are trading and investing with a government that has the record I described.

Q: Nigeria now has an elected civilian government. In the past, civilian governments haven’t lasted very long there. What are the prospects of this one, and how can the United States support it?

A: Nigeria is a very, very important country to the United States and to the world. It’s the most populous country in Africa, 120 million people. We get 8% of our imported oil from Nigeria. We’ve got $7 billion of investment on the ground in Nigeria; 6,000 Americans work there. It matters a lot to us whether Nigeria’s democratic transition succeeds, and it matters a lot to the rest of Africa.

I think Nigeria’s got its best shot in memory, but it is by no means for sure. President [Olusegun] Obasanjo said during his recent trip here that he needs to be able to show his people a democracy dividend. He needs to be able to show the military that its appropriate place is in the barracks. That means he’s got to turn around the economy, which is a very tall order; he’s got to eradicate corruption, or at least diminish corruption; he’s got to reconcile disparate political and ethnic groups.

He’s got a better shot than anybody in recent memory to do that, and we want to do everything we possibly can within the limits of our resources to support him. That’s why the president and Secretary Albright have said they want to work with Congress to try to triple or quadruple our aid to Nigeria and help Nigeria deal with its debt burden so that it has some breathing room in which to try to make this democratic transition stick.

Q: How do you assess the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Do you expect the July Lusaka cease-fire to hold?

A: The Lusaka agreement was a rather remarkable one because it took a conflict which had eight or nine external states involved and found a formula for dealing with the substantive issues, including the internal situation inside Congo, the violation of Congo’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by its neighbors and the fact that Congo has been a base for rebel groups that destabilize all of the region. And it put in place at least theoretical solutions to all those issues.

It’s a good agreement. It’s one we strongly support. It’s the only way forward. But I think there is reason to question whether all of the signatories to the agreement are and will remain committed to its successful implementation. Whether the thing succeeds or fails will be a consequence of whether the parties themselves want it to succeed or fail, and whether all of them want it to succeed or fail.

Q: Finally, by the criteria outlined by President Clinton at the time of the NATO intervention in Kosovo, there are several conflicts in Africa that seem to meet the standard for U.S. armed intervention to prevent humanitarian disasters. How do you respond to critics who say the administration is more concerned about atrocities in Europe than in Africa?

A: That is an unfortunate critique that has gained some currency falsely. The United States has done a great deal in various parts of Africa to try to prevent and resolve conflicts. It has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in various ways toward that end; and at times it has participated on the ground with U.S. forces, such as in Somalia [in 1992-94], or our readiness to be part of the humanitarian intervention into eastern Congo in 1996, which never materialized.

The real question is, What is it that the African states and people themselves would most like the United States to do? There’s nobody in Africa that said, “Send U.S. troops to Sierra Leone or Congo or Eritrea.” What they sought and what we’ve tried to provide is our diplomatic and material support and the weight of our influence to try to resolve these conflicts--then, once the conflicts have been resolved, to provide the international resources to back them up. That means having a viable, functioning and funded United Nations that can come in and backstop these peace agreements.

It is imperative that the United States respond not only in helping solve the crisis or the conflict, but then be there to provide the funds and the resources to back up the peace through peacekeepers, through post-conflict peace building, through development. That is why it is so important for Congress to fund aid programs.