Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: Guess Who’s Not Being Invited to the White House? (And No, It’s Not Savimbi)

Monday, February 18, 2008

Guess Who’s Not Being Invited to the White House? (And No, It’s Not Savimbi)

President Bush has sent a message to Angola's leader. But as I reported in late April 2001, the message did not contain the one thing Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos wanted most.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos hoped to be visiting the United States now, accepting honorary degrees, meeting oil executives and more.

But authorities in Luanda held off formally announcing the trip in hopes of winning an invitation for Mr. Dos Santos to the White House.

President Bush finally wrote the Angolan leader two weeks ago (April 16th). Mr. Bush said in the document he looked forward to working with the Angolan leader to bring peace and freedom to Angola, an oil and diamond-rich country, torn for more than two decades by civil war.

But there was no invitation to Washington.

The letter was largely just a thank-you note, replying to the congratulatory message Mr. Dos Santos sent Mr. Bush on the occasion of his inauguration as US president in January.

White House officials were not immediately available to discuss the lack of an invitation, or the letter.

But sources close to the Angolan president suggest he is disappointed. Sources say Mr. Dos Santos has now abandoned plans for a US trip.

In the meantime, the Pentagon has disclosed its top official on African affairs visited the Angolan Embassy in Washington last week. A defense spokesman says Bernd McConnell met Angola's ambassador for what was termed an informal discussion of bilateral relations. No details are available.

Mr. McConnell created a controversy earlier this year by admitting he held unofficial meetings with the UNITA rebel movement's representative in Washington. UNITA has been fighting Angolan government forces since the breakdown of the country's peace process two years ago. As a result of the breakdown, blamed on UNITA, the United States suspended formal contacts with the rebels.

The Pentagon says Mr. McConnell also met Portuguese Embassy officials last week, and has since flown to Lisbon. He is meeting officials of the community of Portuguese-speaking countries to discuss US cooperation in the group's activities. The trip is expected to last one week. Portugal is the former colonial power in Angola.

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Why?

It is October, 1997. I am standing in a rubble-strewn Brazzaville street as the city returns cautiously to life after a bloody civil war. Armed men are all around me, most of them looting, occasionally firing off bursts of bullets in celebration. But I am not concentrating on this anymore. Instead, with the hand holding my microphone limp by my side, my tape running senselessly. I am looking at another corpse -- this one of a man, perhaps in his 20's, his legs charred. I know there will be no voice to record. But his lips are apart, his arms outstretched, fingers together, as if in prayer. It seems another one of Africa's dead is trying to speak to me. And I feel I owe him this one last consideration. I think maybe he wants to share his anguish, his despair, his pain. Or maybe a last word to a parent or a wife or a child. I feel badly -- because I do not know for sure. I do know though that I have seen corpses like this before -- victims of war, or of genocide, or of famine, or of sickness. A symbolic path of the dead now runs through my mind -- a personal collection reflecting the real path their corpses have left across much of Africa: from arid Somalia in the northeast, across Sudan and into northern Uganda, down through steamy Rwanda, Burundi and Congo in the center of the continent. Some have been young men in uniform, their bodies shattered by a bullet or a shell. Some have been old men, thin beyond belief, weakened by hunger or disease. Some have been women, their dresses in tatters, their faces etched with silent agony. Some have been children, too young to die, their skulls cleaved in half. Some I have met in battle-scarred streets, some in burned-out buildings. Some I have seen sprawled amidst flowers in an open field, some floating, limbs bound, in muddy water. Some I have found in groups thrown into a dirt pit, some alone in the aisles of a gutted church. I have, at times, had imaginary conversations with these dead of mine -- their unrecorded voices playing on endlessly inside my head, sometimes loud, sometimes just a whisper. I tell them I am sorry and if it were in my power, I would restore them to life. But I can't. It's not in my power. Perhaps the only help I can give is to try to tell their story.

The Reporter

Alex Belida has been in international broadcasting since 1971. He spent nearly eight years in sub-Saharan Africa as a correspondent for the Voice of America, based first in Nairobi (1993-1996) and then in Johannesburg (1996-2000). He covered conflicts and humanitarian crises in Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Congo-Kinshasa and Congo-Brazzaville, northern Uganda, Angola and Lesotho as well as political unrest in Zimbabwe and catastrophic flooding in Mozambique. He suffered gunshot wounds while reporting in Somalia.
While in Africa, he was elected Chairman of the East Africa Foreign Correspondents Association in Nairobi and served as Treasurer of the Foreign Correspondents Association of Southern Africa during his Johannesburg assignment.
Before going to Africa, he served as VOA's Senior White House reporter for four years following stints as coordinator of the 1988 Presidential Election coverage and as National News Editor. Before those Washington assignments, he was based in Germany, where he served as Soviet affairs, East-West security and German affairs correspondent (1982-1985).
Following Africa, he served as Pentagon correspondent. In 2004 he was named Managing Editor and in 2007 became Senior Advisor for News at VOA. He retired in 2011.
Before joining VOA, he worked for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in both New York and Munich, rising from reporter to Assistant News Director. He has a BA from Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., and a MS in Journalism from Columbia University in New York. In 2006, he received the prestigious Alumni Achievement Award from Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. He also has an honorary doctorate in communications from the Somali National University.

The views expressed here are his own.

Regrets Only: An Africa Journal

Monday, February 18, 2008

Guess Who’s Not Being Invited to the White House? (And No, It’s Not Savimbi)

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