Lloyd Austin says ‘Russia continuing to peddle cheap weapons’ in Africa
Joel Gehrke
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Russia‘s arms dealers and mercenaries have fueled a “destabilizing” wave of violence in developing African countries, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin warned an audience of African leaders and diplomats.
“We see Russia continuing to peddle cheap weapons,” Austin said Tuesday at the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington. “And also, we see Russia employing mercenaries across the continent, and that is destabilizing as well.”
Austin was one of three Cabinet-level officials to join a trio of African presidents for a discussion on “peace, security, and governance” at the first major summit of U.S. and African officials since 2014. He associated that warning about Russia with an earlier statement by “one of our senior leaders here,” in what seemed to be a reference to Nigerien President Mohamed Bazoum’s account of the transnational terrorist threats in West Africa and the Sahel region.
“Since around 2000, Algerian terrorist groups set up in northern Mali and developed a criminal economy developed another ecosystem in the area,” Bazoum said during the event. “And on that general backdrop, that there was the fall of the Qaddafi regime [in Libya], and that many weapons circulated in the Sahel and terrorist groups that used to be based in the safe havens in northern Mali spread out in the south … and those groups have become the monsters against which we now find ourselves fighting today.”
Bazoum’s survey points to the basis for multiple great power narratives in Africa. Russian officials often cite the 2011 overthrow of Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, whose regime was targeted with airstrikes from leading NATO member-states in advance of an expected massacre at Benghazi, to criticize Western foreign policy. More recently, a military coup in Mali led to the withdrawal of French counterterrorism forces and paved the way for the arrival of Russia’s Wagner Group mercenaries, which led to a surge in reports of civilian massacres.
“Wagner’s war crimes and human rights abuses in Mali are not an isolated case but rather the latest in an ongoing trend,” a pair of analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote in May. “In many of their past and ongoing deployments, Wagner has perpetrated a wide range of abuses against local civilian populations.”
China and Russia, after years of focused effort to develop advantages in Africa, cast a wary eye on the conference in Washington.
“Our partnership with African countries is always based on mutual respect, equality, and sincere cooperation,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said Tuesday in a prim comment. “With the U.S.-Africa Summit to be held soon, we welcome greater international focus on Africa. Meanwhile, we firmly oppose turning Africa into a wrestling ground for major-country rivalry or using one’s Africa strategy as a tool to curb and attack other countries’ cooperation with Africa.”
That message resonates in many African capitals. “In terms of our interaction with some of our partners in Europe and elsewhere, there has been a sense of patronizing bullying toward, ‘You choose this or else,’” South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor told Secretary of State Antony Blinken in August.
Blinken, who appeared alongside Austin at the panel, adopted a more muted tone regarding Russia. “The solutions that are made just in the United States are not likely to be sustainable. We’re focused on listening to our partners: What are their needs? What are local requirements? How do we build together on that basis?” he said. “We’re looking at making genuine investments because, again, a response to the immediate is necessary, but it is insufficient, and it’s not a long-term solution. We’re dealing now with a massive food insecurity crisis. It’s the product of a lot of things, as we all know. It’s the product of climate change. It’s the product of COVID. It’s a product, unfortunately, of conflict, including Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”
His team has downplayed the competitive salience of the U.S.-Africa summit. “The United States prioritizes our relationship with Africa for the sake of our mutual interests and our partnership in dealing with global challenges,” State Department Assistant Secretary Molly Phee, who leads the African Affairs bureau, told reporters before the summit began. “We are very conscious, again, of the Cold War history, we’re conscious, again, of the deleterious impact of colonialism on Africa, and we studiously seek to avoid repeating some of the mistakes of those earlier eras.”
Yet U.S. officials, long suspicious of China’s overseas infrastructure investment initiatives, which allowed Beijing to gain sovereignty over a port in Sri Lanka, for instance, feel uneasy about the extension of that influence in Africa.
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“We’re witnessing the PRC expand its footprint on the continent, on a daily basis,” Austin said. “And as they do that, they’re also expanding their economic influence. The troubling piece there is that they’re not always transparent in terms of what they’re doing, and that creates problems that will be, eventually, destabilizing — if they’re not already.”