Open Letter to Ambassador Donald Y. Yamamoto

[Elisabeth Janaina]

Home | Comment & Analysis Saturday 23 September 2017
Open Letter to Ambassador Donald Y. Yamamoto

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To The Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Bureau of African Affairs,
U.S. Department of State, Washington, D.C.

September 21 , 2016

By Stephen Par Kuol

Your Excellency Ambassador Yamamoto:

It gives me a profound pleasure to register to Your Excellency that
you have made my day with your presentation at US Peace Institute on
September 13, 2017.The document entitled, Partnership with Africa:
Advancing the Common Interest is timely, diplomatically strong and
extremely encouraging. Among other critical issues, my take home
delicacy was the official pronouncement that the US partnership with
Africa is now mandatorily geared toward working with “strong
institutions, and not with dictators or strong men in the continent”.
Being a policy statement by the top diplomat and expert on African
affairs in the State Department, it is expressly inferred as a
historical point of departure from the existing unwritten policy,
which is inherently fraught with consistent lack of statesmanship,
double standards and a gross disposition to shun the very core values
of American freedom and democracy.

That disastrous policy has been implemented in South Sudan where
Kiir’s ethnocentric fascist regime has been using American taxpayer’s
money to build sectarian institutions committing heinous atrocities
against both South Sudanese and the US citizens working in South
Sudan. The Terrain Hotel savagery of July 2016 where American aid
workers were gang-raped, the barbaric attack on the US diplomatic
vehicle (CD) carrying American diplomats by none other than Kiir’s own
bodyguard and the recent murder of Christopher Allen, the American
journalist they derogatorily profiled as a white rebel are just a few
examples of those humiliating provocations in this treacherous
bilateral relation between Juba and Washington D.C. In betrayal of
those American souls, the US diplomats still dine and waltz with those
cheeky diplomats of Kiir’s regime without any qualm in Juba, New York,
D.C and all other world capitals. That does not sound like the United
States of America I have known so far!!

As exposed by Secretary Kerry’s recent haste to bless that
systematically rigged elections in Kenya, the ordinary Africans have
concluded that the U.S love affair with dictatorship in the continent
is matched only by its hate for the very democratic principles it
claims to promote. I was stunned to see John Kery scrupulously
apologizing to Honorable Riala Odinga for endorsing election results
that robbed him of his rightful victory. I think John Kery needs to do
the same to Dr Riek Machar, the champion of ARCISS whom they have
arbitrarily exiled in South Africa and the people of South Sudan he
condemned to famine, displacement and mass-murder by the junta he
legitimized in violation of the Agreement on Resolution of the
Conflict in South Sudan (ARCISS) which cost US taxpayers millions of
US dollars to sponsor in Addis-Ababa.

Ambassador Yamamoto, as a practised diplomat in the continent, you
know better that the United States of America has been and is still
putting its biggest bet on the strong men of Africa. In pursuit of
such a decayed policy, the United States is still doing business with
murderous police state that have reduced civic and democratic forces
to endangered species. From the Horn to the Great Lakes, the former
heads of rebel movements turned heads of states are running their
fragile states with iron fists. With the diplomatic weight of the
United States behind them, they have cowed all the democratic
political force in their countries either to servitude or pushed them
to armed uprising like in the case of South Sudan.

Ambassador Yamamoto, as you articulated in the sub-title of your
eloquent presentation, (Advancing the Common Interest), diplomatic
relations are naturally driven by mutual interests of the states in
question. In your case, it is obvious that the most vital strategic
interest of the US in the Horn of Africa at the moment is the
counterterrorism and that is what the US love affair with some
dictators in the region is based on. Their opportunistic vow to fight
Al-shabab in Somalia gives a false sense of security for the US
strategic interest in the region. Well, experiences in the continent
have proven that African dictators can give the false appearance of
order and stability while in reality sowing the seeds of present and
future destabilisation. In truth, those despots are responsible for
all those armed conflicts in the continent. One good example is the
Somalia itself that was wrecked to pieces by dictator Mom Siad Barre.
Another example is the nascent Republic of South Sudan, which is now
being pushed to the precipice of disintegration by a dictator, Salva
Kiir.

In any case, the new strings attached to partnership with Africa are
encouraging. Unfortunately, dictators naturally loathe
institutionalism and the rule of law to provide a conducive
geopolitical environment for the underlined four pillars of your new
policy: counterterrorism, conflict resolution, economic development,
and good governance. Hence, the US foreign policy makers and
implementers must always invoke this new US Foreign Policy by
empowering the forces of democratic change and the institutions of
good governance in the continent. The mutually beneficial result for
the world and humanity will be politically stable and economically
strong democratic African states fighting alongside the United States
against global terrorism.

The author is a political activist and freelance writer on African
diplomatic and political affairs. He can be reached by Electronic at:
kuo...@yahoo.com.