WASHINGTON: Except for a brief, mostly ceremonial trip earlier this year to some of the more peaceful parts of Africa, US President George W. Bush has shown little interest in Africa or sympathy for its many troubles - with one exception.

The lack of attention is surprising in a way, because two of his most influential foreign policy advisors, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, are both proudly African-American and frequently talk about their heritage. Indeed, Powell’s influence has been credited for Bush even taking the Africa trip in early July.

US foreign policy this year has been dominated by Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while mostly ignoring huge problems in Africa.

The single exception was Bush’s request during this year’s State of the Union address, where he asked Congress to fund a five-year, 15-billion-dollar programme for combating AIDS and hunger in Africa and the Caribbean. The request, a sharp break with his past policies, raised both support and scepticism in the US Congress, which is now considering the idea.

Some in Congress suspect Bush of courting the black vote, while others say that the measure — with its reliance on condoms to prevent transmission of AIDS — has no chance to get past Bush’s Christian- right supporters.

African organizations such as Africana wonder where the money will come from, if the administration also needs $87 billion this year to deal with the occupation of Iraq.

Neither Bush nor his predecessor, Bill Clinton, took action to rescue the country — founded by freed American slaves — as it descended into civil war, anarchy and famine. Neither president saw any profit in risking American blood and treasure in Liberia, and Bush skipped the strife-torn country on his Africa trip.

For most of its history, Liberia has been a US economic colony, as American rubber and tyre companies basically kept the country afloat, if only for their own purposes. Grimy US dollar bills are the de facto currency, favoured over the Liberian dollar.

Under international pressure last month, 200 US Marines were finally sent ashore as a symbolic presence to assist Nigerian peace- keepers. The Marines were quickly withdrawn, but as it turned out not swiftly enough; about one-quarter of them came down with a form of drug-resistant malaria, despite attempts at vaccination.

Military intervention and non-intervention have become major issues in US politics.

According to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), a respected humanitarian aid organization founded in the 1930s to aid refugees from Nazi-occupied countries, the five-year civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the former Zaire, has taken at least 3.3 million lives, “the vast majority from easily treated diseases and simple starvation”.

The IRC says the Congo war — which has drawn in forces from many of its neighbours with ethnic and commercial interests in the country at the heart of Africa — is now the world’s most lethal conflict since World War II.

Congo, like other countries in Africa, has become a battleground for warring tribal forces, including child-soldiers, in a country that was arbitrarily created by European powers negotiating over how they would carve up the map of the continent, with total disregard of the tribal rivalries on the ground.

The result, since the exile and death of strongman Mobuto Sese Seko, has been a never-ending human tragedy, with some 30,000 deaths every month in the Congo. The chief victims are children, the youngest and most vulnerable.

As IRC President George Rupp points out in an IRC publication this month, outside intervention can work to stop wars and famine.

United Kingdom troops put an end to the brutal war in Sierra Leone, another western African country. Some 4,000 French troops are keeping the peace in Ivory Coast, but the United States has stood aside in Africa, except for the brief and minimal foray into Liberia.

This indifference follows the 1993 foreign policy disaster in Somalia, where 18 US soldiers died in a firefight with Somalia gunmen. US forces were quickly withdrawn by then-president Clinton, and the episode continues to cast a shadow over the thinking of the Bush administration.

As the United Nations experience has shown in its current operations in Iraq, there can be no effective relief operations for the displaced and the needy without some rudimentary security. That security is missing in Liberia, though the country had been begging for some US military presence. The Nigerian peace-keeping force in the country is under-equipped and badly overextended.

Civilian deaths in Liberia and the even greater toll in the Congo do not make headlines in Western papers.

They are easy to ignore for a US administration more concerned with the casualty reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and the 2004 re- election campaign in the United States.—dpa