Next week, six former African leaders who left office standing up will meet at Boston University to talk about ways to strengthen Africa's emerging democracies.
The six former African leaders are: Jerry Rawlings of Ghana; Nicephore Soglo of Benin; Ketumile Masire of Botswana; Ali Hassan Mwinyi of Tanzania; Navinchandra Ramgoolam of Mauritius; and Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia
Billed as a summit to consider ''the short-term impact of the Iraq war on African economies,'' the meeting also will focus on the terrorism threat in sub-Saharan Africa.
''I think it has become increasingly clear that the folks who would do the United States harm view Africa as a staging area for terrorism and that this nation's national security is directly related to the economic security of African countries,'' Charles Stith, director of Boston University's African Presidential Archives and Research Center, said in an interview.
Stith should know. A former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, he arrived in that country to take up his post a month after the August 1998 car-bomb attack on the U.S. Embassy that killed 11 people and wounded 85. A simultaneous assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kenya took 213 lives. Stith oversaw the early stages of the construction of a new $50 million American Embassy in Tanzania, which he said had a dramatic economic impact in an impoverished section of Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of that East African nation.
''The foot soldiers of terrorist groups tend to be on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder,'' Stith said. ''I think that over the long term, economic engagement, not special ops, will be the most effective means of ending terrorism. We simply don't have the capacity to police the planet.''
Getting the United States and other international donors to significantly increase aid to Africa will be a daunting task, especially now that President Bush is committed to spending billions of dollars on repairing the war damage in Iraq. Even so, Stith hopes that the presence of the six former African leaders will make this issue more than a small blip on the Bush administration's radarscope.
Stith hopes the summit, which also will be attended by U.S. business leaders, academics and midlevel administration officials, can focus attention on the problems that have made Africa a fertile breeding ground for terrorists.
