West has devised ways of escaping responsibility for its wrongs in Africa

Faulting African states as a way of escaping responsibility, they promoted a slogan of 'African solutions to African problems'. [Istockphoto]

In the late 1990s, an imperial logic emerged to excuse powerful states when they invade and destroy little countries. Its genesis was a sense of guilt on the part of those powers for condoning atrocities and failing to act on the Rwandan genocide. At the United Nations, Kofi Annan claimed that he did not have the mandate to help.

US President Bill Clinton, after the American debacle in Somalia, did not want to be bogged down in another African crisis that had little strategic value to American interests. French President Francois Mitterrand supported the Interahamwe's anti-Tutsi operations. Their sense of guilt spurred mea culpa activities in the United Nations, France, and the US, thereby turning that 'guilt' feeling into a weapon for attacking targeted countries.