US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken will travel next month to South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, the State Department said on Friday, as Washington steps up diplomacy in Africa to counter a Russian charm offensive.
U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield will also go to Ghana and Uganda in August, and U.S. aid chief Samantha Power recently completed a trip to Washington’s longtime ally Kenya as well as Somalia, where she highlighted an increase in malnutrition exacerbated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The diplomacy came as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov embarked on his own extensive tour of Africa, where he sought to cast aspersions on spiraling global food prices as a result of Western sanctions – an idea rejected by Washington, which has pointed to Moscow’s blockade of Ukrainian ports .
Blinken will send a message that “African countries are geostrategic players and critical partners on the most pressing issues of our time, from promoting an open and stable international system to addressing the effects of climate change, food insecurity and global pandemics to shaping our technology and economic futures,” the State Department said in a statement.
South Africa, a leader in the developing world, has become a key diplomatic battleground as it has remained scrupulously neutral on the war in Ukraine, refusing to join Western calls to condemn Moscow, which still enjoys an attachment to the historic Soviet opposition to apartheid.
Blinken will visit Johannesburg and the executive capital Pretoria from August 7 to 9. He will then head to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa in a bid to show support for sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country as it tries to turn the page on decades of conflict.
He will finish his trip in Rwanda, where tensions with the DRC flared after it accused its neighbor to the east of supporting the M23 rebels, a charge Kigali has denied.
The State Department said Blinken would push for the release of Paul Rusesabagina, who is credited with saving hundreds of lives during the 1994 genocide and inspired the movie Hotel Rwanda.
US resident Rusesabagina is a critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and was sentenced to 25 years in prison for “terrorism” after a plane he thought was traveling to Burundi landed in Kigali in 2020.
Blinken will pay for his second trip to sub-Saharan Africa since taking office last year with President Joe Biden’s administration. At the end of last year, he traveled to Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal.
Before Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, US efforts in Africa had heavy undertones of competition with China, which poured money into infrastructure on the continent and defied the US by making no demands on democracy or human rights.
While the Biden administration has identified China as a major long-term competitor to the United States, it has focused in the short term on countering Russia.
Western nations expressed enormous outrage and tried to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine, but developing nations, especially in Africa and South Asia, were more hesitant.
Yoweri Museveni, the veteran leader of Uganda, where Thomas-Greenfield is headed, met Lavrov on Tuesday and said: “How can we be against someone who has never hurt us?”
Lavrov, speaking the next day in Ethiopia, urged Africa to resist a world “totally subservient to the United States” and warned that other nations risked punishment if they clashed with Western interests.
Blinken described Lavrov’s trip on Wednesday as a “desperate defense play to justify to the world the actions that Russia has taken,” including its “aggression” in Ukraine.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who has a long history in Africa, on a visit to Benin on Wednesday called Russia “one of the last imperial colonial powers”.
Power, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, during his trip to the Horn of Africa unveiled more than $1 billion in emergency aid to fight growing hunger and challenged other nations, such as China and Russia, to follow suit.
Add Comment