Cape Verde:
In April 2002 President Pedro Pires and Prime Minister Jose Maria Neves welcomed Chairman of the Timor Leste Government-in-Exile Jose Ramos Horta. Horta was on his way back home from Mozambique in New Zeland but wanted to transit in Cape Verde first. Pires and Neves would remember Horta as thanking Cape Verde for its continuing and steady support for Timor Leste but also for placing a lot of hope in Gusmao’s trip to Libya.
“We will not be by ourselves this time”, Horta declared with great optimism.
Senegal:
President Abdoulaye Wade’s disillusionment with the United States, stemming from having to sign on to IMF conditionalities in March 2001, did not mean he adopted an anti-US stance. Between 2001 and May 2002, Dakar hosted United States Secretary of State Richard Williamson, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Igor Ivanov, British Foreign Secretary Gordon Brown, and French Minister of Foreign Affairs Hubert Vedrine. Senegal continued to assert itself in the continent, with Wade advocating a poverty eradication plan known as the OMEGA Plan and then having that adopted and merged with the Millenium Partnership for the African Recovery Programme (MAP) to form the New Partnership for Africa’s Development in July 2001 by the OAU. Though not passive by any means, Wade provided a less confrontative option to President of South Africa Thabo Mbeki in the multipolar world.
Wade also sought to build relations with developing economies in other continents. In May 2001, he attended the G-15 Summit in Jakarta, Indonesia. There he found other nations that felt discontented with the IMF and how it went about things.
With the hosts Indonesia, Wade found a friend willing to support Senegal’s struggle against the Movement of Democratic Forces of Casamance (MDFC), a separatist movement seeking to break away from Senegal. Since 1999, Senegal’s worry about the MDFC had been augmented by the assumption and consolidation of power in Ansumane Mane in Guinea Bissau. Both he and the Gambia’s Yahya Jammeh were known to hold sympathies for the MDFC’s cause.
An MoU was signed with Indonesia’s Minister of Defense and Security Wismoyo Arismunandar to send Liaison Officers from ABRI to act as consultants to the Armed Forces of Senegal and to explore the possibility of selling Pindad assault rifles to Senegal's military.
The Gambia:
South of the border from Senegal was the Gambia, led by President Yahya Jammeh. Though Jammeh had instructed the Gambian delegation in the United Nations, Gambia being a Non-Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council at the time, to vote in favor of acknowledging East Timor as a Special Region of Indonesia in 1999, Jammeh soon came to view Indonesia with ill-favor. Jammeh had welcomed a delegation in 2000 led by the then-Indonesian Minister of Trade Dorodjatun Kuntjoro Jakti as part of Indonesia’s effort to return the favor of those who had supported its cause. Upon knowledge of Indonesia’s sympathy for Senegal in 2001, Jammeh, who supported the MDFC, closed the door on any Indonesian delegation that might come Gambia’s way.
The world, as Jammeh himself said, did not spin on Try as an axis. In the aftermath of 9/11, Jammeh declared his support for the United States’ War on Terror though critics pointed out that this was just a pretext for him to tighten his political control in the Gambia without incurring any reproach from the United States or the West. Whether Jammeh was truly committed to the War on Terror was another story for he was seen to be in the company of Prime Minister of Malaysia Najib Razak at the 2002 CHOGM, a leader who did not approve of the War on Terror.
Guinea-Bissau:
A civil war broke out when President Joao Bernardo Vieira tried have Commander of the Armed Forces Ansumane Mane arrested for smuggling arms to the MDFC in Senegal and the latter rebelled. A majority of the military sided with Mane prompting Vieira to call in assistance from both Senegal and Guinea. In December 1998, in Nigeria, Vieira and Mane signed an agreement. Elections would be held in March 1999, Senegal and Guinea would withdraw their troops, and the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS) would set up a monitoring group to ensure the terms are observed. In its implementation, the elections were delayed, Senegal and Guinea withdrew, and the ECOWAS set up a monitoring group. What was unexpected was when Mane, using a flimsy pretext, ousted Vieira in a coup in May 1999.
Mane now declared himself Chairman of the Supreme Command of the Junta amidst all the international condemnation. After some weeks, he bought the acceptance for his regime by allowing Vieira to leave. In the meantime he was in no rush to hold elections seeing that military regimes or military-backed regimes still held sway in parts of the world. Mane instead focused on providing his regime with economic legitimacy. Cooperative as he was with the IMF, Mane also began welcoming aid and investment from Russia and China in 2000 after visits to Moscow and Beijing and obtaining agreements from the two capital that the aid will be for the economy rather than military. On this basis, he had achieved enough to run for president in Presidential Elections held in March 2001 and emerge victorious.
The presence of Mane was of concern for Senegal. Much like the Gambia’s Jammeh, Mane sympathized with the MDFC. Indeed, most of the soldiers of Guinea-Bissau belong to the same ethnicity as that of the MDFC.
Mane also joined other Portuguese-speaking nations in Africa in its support for the Timor Leste Independence Movement though it looked for a while that Guinea-Bissau’s support would be an unreliable one. It would take news that Indonesia was sending “Liaison Officers” to Senegal to push Mane into renewing its commitment to Timor Leste.
Guinea and Liberia:
Guinea positioned itself to the benefit from the multipolar environment which was entrenching itself around the world by using its natural resources as an asset to strengthen itself strategically. It exported bauxite and alumina to the United States even as at the same time, it allowed Russia’s RUSAL, to operate an alumina refinery in the country beginning in 2001. To mark the occasion, Prime Minister of Russia Vladimir Putin visited Guinea in June 2001.
But it was in Guinea that the world was provided with an example of how it was becoming multipolar. After economic reforms stalled in 1999 when President Lansana Conte dismissed the reform-minded Prime Minister Sidya Toure, the IMF’s New Managing Director Stanley Fischer suspended assistance in June 2000 saying that Guinea had not fulfilled its performance criteria. Not long thereafter, President of the World Bank Caio Koch-Weser spoke out in Guinea’s defense saying that it had fulfilled its social spending target. Though the situation never heated up, it was known that behind closed doors, the leaders of the IMF and the World Bank had found themselves engaged in a disagreement about whether nations receiving aid should prioritize fiscal responsibility or social spending, with Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder siding with Koch-Weser who was his fellow German national and encouraging France’s Jacques Chirac and Italy’s D’Alema to join him.
In April 1999, rebel group Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), supported by the Government of Guinea, attacked Liberia from Guinea. Conte would maintain Guinea’s innocence. In September 2000, troops loyal to President of Liberia Charles Taylor from Liberia and its ally from Sierra Leone, the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), launched an attack into Guinea; prompting Conte to condemn Liberia for formenting rebellion. For his part, Taylor pointed out to the LURD’s having launched its attack on Liberia from within Guinea. In late 2000, Guinea fought off another rebellion by disgruntled ex-soldiers, also thought to be formented by Taylor.
Effort was made at mediation by the UN and the ECOWAS but skirmishes at the Guinean-Liberian border in early 2001 continued, until finally in April 2001, Conte ordered the invasion of Liberia. There was an initial round of condemnation for Guinea from the region, before geopolitics intervened. President of Sierra Leone Ahmad Tejan Kabbah appealed to the Foreign Office in the United Kingdom to ease its pressure on Guinea. Meanwhile, both the United States and Russia were not keen to lose their access to Guinean bauxite and alumina. The revenue Guinea obtained from its bauxite and alumina exports were now being used to finance its military operations in and, after June 2001, occupation of Northern Liberia as it sought to establish a buffer zone to secure itself from incursions from Liberian and RUF attacks.
Sierra Leone:
“At the time, which was in the second half of 1999, ABRI had been approved to take part in the United Nations Mission in the Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL). The UN at the time wanted to expand UNAMSIL from 260 military observers to 6000 personnel and we were going to send some personnel along. That was until October 1999 when the UNAMSIL was officially formed and I received notification from the UN that we were no longer required to send personnel to become peacekeepers. After making some enquiries, the information got back to me that this was correct and that the cancellation was made on the discretion of the UN Secretary General. I reported this to the President in written form and he scrawled “Noted”.
The consensus within ABRI Headquarters was that if not Sierra Leone then perhaps ABRI personnel would be required in the Second Congo War where the UN were also planning to send in peacekeepers. Alas, it was not to be and now there were questions about whether this was deliberate. I made enquiries once again but it was not until Mr. Juwono Sudarsono became the Indonesian Ambassador to the United Nations that I got my answer: that despite of our enthusiasm to participate in peacekeeping mission, the UN Secretary General was not “positively disposed” towards us. Some would say that Secretary General Annan just snubbed us.
But it all worked out for the best. Australia, which originally was supposed to contribute a police contingent, accepted the UN’s offer to take up the slot that had originally been ours. They sent four batches’ worth of military personnel and won plaudits for the way they conducted themselves. But they would stretch themselves thin, sending personnel to the Solomon Islands and then to Afghanistan and then to…[page ripped]”
Excerpt from
My Time as the Commander of ABRI by Gen. Wiranto
Ivory Coast:
In December 1999, President of Ivory Coast Henri Konan Bedie was overthrown in a coup and in his place, Robert Guei, a retired general took office as president. There was a lot of international reaction to this. First France considered military intervention to restore Bedie back to power; President of France Jacques Chirac’s intentions only thwarted by Prime Minister of France Lionel Jospin. Canada, first under Prime Minister Jean Chretien and then under Paul Martin, suspended aid to the Ivory Coast. The United States of America and the EU also shut down aid. From these corners, Guei quickly fell under pressure to hold elections but would not succumb to pressure, citing that the situation on the ground was still unstable. He was right for there were mutinies in the military in June 2000 for him to quell.
The situation was indeed unstable that Guei would not see how it would be resolved. In September 2000, Guei was assassinated by young soldiers who attacked his residence in the morning. The assailants would be arrested, tried, and thrown to jail but not before Minister of Security and Guei’s second-in-command Lassana Palenfo assumed power in the vacuum. Though receiving plenty of condemnation in his first few days, Palenfo was able to secure the flow of aid back into Ivory Coast by appointing Alasanne Ouattara as prime minister. Ouattara’s attraction to donors in the west was his former status as a Deputy Managing Director at the IMF. By February 2001, Guei and Ouattara signed an agreement with the IMF and committed itself to reforms to stabilize the economic crisis arising out of Guei’s coup d’etat and accompanying political uncertainty.
The unresolved question and one which Ivory Coast’s neighbors demanded to know was when elections would be held; indeed the OAU had already excluded the Ivory Coast from its meeting in July 2000 for failing to announce an election schedule. Palenfo and Ouattara had been in no rush; their emergence to power had been favorable to the United States. In the aftermath of 9/11, however, with its attention turned to Afghanistan and elsewhere, Russia’s Igor Ivanov and France’s Hubert Vedrine agreed that Ivory Coast should hold elections as soon as possible. In January 2002, Palenfo announced that new elections would be held in July 2002 whilst at the same time announcing his candidacy for presidency. France was not without horses in the race. Chirac favored Bedie, the overthrown president eager to get back his seat while Jospin favored National Assembly member Laurent Gbagbo.
Ghana:
The main achievement of President John Kufuor’s government in its first year was economic. An spike in inflation in the middle of 2001 was under control by early 2002. Ghana also received debt relief from the IMF and the World Bank, placing it firmly into the ranks of non-aligned nations seen to be pro-western after being dubbed as the IMF’s “star pupil” for some time.
Ghana was the homeland of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan who was up for re-election in 2001. It had been a term in which the ground had shifted beneath his feet. In 1997, “The End of History” was still in vogue. Now it was 2001 and no one could make up their minds if it was the New Cold War, the Second Cold War or the Multipolar Moment. Annan was happy enough with his work, the fight against AIDS being taken seriously by the member states being a particular highlight.
The only thing that stood between Annan and re-election was the Asia-Pacific Group. This grouping of UN member states had argued that Boutros-Boutros Ghali and Annan’s respective terms as secretary general constituted Africa’s two terms secretary general and that it was now Asia’s turn. Two possible candidates emerged from this bloc: Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani and Bangladesh’s Anwarul Karim Chowdhury.
Mahbubani eventually withdrew his candidacy when it became clear there was too much of an implication for ASEAN’s internal politics. Indonesia was willing to support Mahbubani’s candidacy but Singapore did not want to feel like it owed Indonesia a debt; the latter wanting acknowledgement as a regional leader in Southeast Asia. China was also willing to consider Mahbubani’s candidacy but Singapore also did not want to feel like it owed China a debt; the latter wanting to increase its influence in Southeast Asia. In time Chowdhury withdrew with the Africa Group promising that the next Secretary General would come from Asia. By January 2002 Annan began his second term.
Togo:
“Regarding our economic progress, I think what has amazed is that no matter how many toll roads or factories or dams we built, no matter how much we’ve advanced, we’re still concerned with things like food. This was made clear to me when I made my Africa trip in June 2000. In Togo, a contract was signed that would see Indonesia import raw phosphate from Togo. At the time, we were constructing a phosphoric acid factory in Gresik, East Java but we needed the phosphate and we’re still a few years away from putting our own phosphate mines to good use in Madura. Phosphoric acid is used as material to make fertilizer, fertilizers are used to increase food production, and at the time we needed to increase food production because people are not only eating more but also wanting more variety on their plates. This means we’ve graduated, or at least we are graduating, from the problem that we had in the 60s where just producing enough rice to fill the plates and the stomachs of Indonesians was something of a struggle.
Of course, little did we know it at the time but with the likes of China and India and Russia and Brazil going around the world to look for commodities for their own economic development and signing similar contracts, our respective nations were helping to bring about a commodities boom.”
-JB Sumarlin: The Vice Presidential Memoirs
Nigeria:
Nigeria was the prime beneficiary of Indonesia’s policy of wanting to export its fast-moving consumer goods to African markets. Other Indonesian FMCG companies, seeing that Indomie had set up shop in Nigeria, wanted to prioritize Nigeria first even as they were being encouraged by their government to also expand their other countries. Meanwhile, Nigerian importers and distributors, having already seen the performance of Indomie, were more knowledgeable and better-prepared than counterparts in the continent. At the G-15 Summit in Jakarta in May 2001, they attracted a lot of attention by the amount of deals they concluded.
It was not all smooth sailing. In the aftermath of 9/11 and Indonesia’s strong stance against extremism, there was an effort by some of the states which had adopted Sharia Law to boycott Indonesian FMCG products, most notably Indomie, in November 2001. The Indonesian FMCGs however, were too popular among Nigerian consumers to be properly boycotted.
In March 2002, Obasanjo attended the CHOGM in Brisbane, Australia. Various issues were discussed including 9/11 and terrorism and it was in the course of discussing such matters that mention was made by Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair that Indonesia, being the world’s largest Islamic nation, would be an important ally to have in the War on Terror.
Though the CHOGM’s official agenda did not dwell for long on Indonesia, the conversation when the meeting finished did dwell on Indonesia and its characteristics. Obasanjo would later write in his memoirs that he had a great view of the range of opinions that various nations across the world, at least in the Commonwealth, had about Indonesia. Obasanjo counted Nigeria, South Africa, Fiji, and Jamaica as those wanting to establish good relations with Indonesia. The United Kingdom, perhaps owing to its close proximity to the United States on world issues, recognized the strategic value of Indonesia rather than wanting to have good relations with it in particular. India was recorded as wanting good relations and recognizing Indonesia’s strategic value in equal parts. Malaysia, Obasanjo recorded, was hostile, with Najib Razak warning all who would listen about Indonesia’s “hegemonic aspirations” in Southeast Asia. Australia was not so much hostile, but ambivalent.
There was a lot more on Obasanjo’s plate than the nation bringing FMCG-related business in its direction. Obasanjo had declared Nigeria to be on the side of the United States in the War on Terror. This combined with President of Russia Yevgeny Primakov’s exhortations that Islamic nations should not be under any obligation to “prove themselves” that they are for or against anything led by the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan, Nigeria’s increasingly close relationship with Indonesia, the existence of states in Nigeria which had adopted Sharia Law, and Obasanjo’s own Christian faith made for an environment in which he had to tread carefully.
Within his own People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Obasanjo already had to tread carefully. Vice President Atiku Abubakar, though of the Islamic faith, shared Obasanjo’s distaste the idea of Sharia Law being enacted on the nation. But having seen Indonesia’s Try Sutrisno from up close when the latter visited in October 2001 and chatting with other members of the Indonesian delegation, Atiku concluded that though Try’s stance would make him enemies in some circles, the main reason why Try was able to have some success in taking such a stance was because he himself was Muslim. It would take a Muslim to stand up successfully to those wanting to enact Sharia Law. With the 2003 Presidential Elections appearing on the horizon, such logic made Atiku increasingly saw himself as the man who could lead the party to victory.
Benin and Cameroon:
Whatever success the boycott of Indonesian FMCGs in Nigeria in late 2001 had, it only produced a surplus to be exported across the border to Benin where the public’s interest in Indomie, Kopiko and Teh Botol meant that said products just proved themselves worthy of the interest that would be Beninese importers and distributors were showing. Not to miss an opportunity, Indonesian Minister of Trade Anthony Salim ordered the Trade Attache’s Office at the Indonesian Embassy in Nigeria to facilitate and encourage such developments.
Though the opportunity in Benin in Nigeria’s west side was not to be missed, the Indonesian FMCGs were more keen to market their products to Cameroon on Nigeria’s east side; Cameroon being more familiar to Indonesia as a result of its football exploits in the World Cup. In May 2002, as the World Cup in South Korea and Japan begun, the commercial breaks in Cameroon featured football star Roger Milla. Having played for two years in the Indonesian Football League in the past, Milla now found himself recruited by the Department of Trade to become an ambassador for Indonesian FMCGs in Cameroon but more generally in Africa. The commercial features Milla living in Indonesia enjoying various FMCGs, being sad because he had to leave for Cameroon, but cheering up upon realizing that the goods he used to enjoy are now available or are coming soon in his homeland.
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The whole “Indonesia supports nations who are fighting against rebels or separatists” is something that I never planned but just happened naturally. Who knows where this will lead.
The situation where Guinea invades Liberia is a departure from OTL.
Africa certainly has a lot of situations where it’s like country A hates country B because country B supports the rebels in country A. Then country A retaliates by supporting the rebels in country B.
One thing I’ve known for some time but which the TL has not given me the opportunity to do thus far is show that ITTL Kofi Annan is not a fan of ITTL Indonesia. In OTL, Indonesia were sent peacekeepers as part of the UNAMSIL but here, it gets snubbed. Australia picking up the slack here because in ITTL October 1999 there is no situation in East Timor to intervene into.
The alternate candidates for the secretary general’s position is based on
https://edition.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/africa/03/15/un.annan/index.html
For an example of Nigeria’s Atiku Abubakar’s view on Sharia Law and Islam in politics:
https://www.premiumtimesng.com/news...s-atiku-tells-nigerias-religious-leaders.html
