Regrets Only: An Africa Journal: U.S. Africa Command Might Be Headquartered in Southern U.S.

Sunday, October 26, 2008

U.S. Africa Command Might Be Headquartered in Southern U.S.

Over at AFRICOMWatch is a new exclusive report: AFRICOMWatch has learned defense officials are conducting what is termed a “budget-based review” of possible sites for the permanent headquarters of the Africa Command. The sites include some in the eastern United States as well as others in Europe. AFRICOM is currently headquartered on an interim basis in Stuttgart, Germany. Consideration of possible sites in Africa has generated controversy.

Pentagon sources say the review of locations is not comprehensive nor have any decisions been made. However they tell AFRICOMWatch planning for the newest U.S. military command has always assumed that a portion of the headquarters staff would not live and work in African nations, hence the study of sites in the eastern U.S. as well as Europe.

Locating the permanent headquarters in Europe offers several obvious advantages including sharing the same time zone as the United States’ main African and European military partners and betterand speedier transport connections.

On the other hand, headquartering AFRICOM in the United States has other advantages that cannot be overlooked includingsharplylower living costs and other expenses and closer proximity to the inter-governmental agency process in Washington D.C. In addition, some sources suggest there would be increased political support for the Africa Command were it located in the eastern U.S., including stronger support from African American organizations.

Pentagon sources declined to identify possible U.S. sites.

However a report in a Charleston, South Carolina newspaper last week quoted the state’s comptroller as saying the Charleston area was believed to be in the running to become the United States Africa Command headquarters.

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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

Sunday, October 26, 2008

U.S. Africa Command Might Be Headquartered in Southern U.S.

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