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A visit to Addis Ababa in October by a high-level delegation that included EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell was designed to showcase a donation of 7.5 tonnes of coronavirus test kits. Instead, it ended up sparking fears of a super-spread event at the African Union headquarters and among top Ethiopian officials.
Borrell and EU Commissioner for Crisis Management Janez Lenarčič, who was also on the trip, were forced into self-isolation after learning that a member of their delegation had tested positive for COVID-19 upon returning from Africa.
At the time, little attention was paid in Europe to the firestorm that sparked news of the infection in the Ethiopian capital, where Borrell had met with senior AU leaders, as well as Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the President Sahle-Work Zewde. Health precautions were taken throughout the trip, but a video of the meeting with Zewde shows Borrell wearing his mask the wrong way, with his nose exposed. In other meetings, Borrell was photographed without any mask.
The events surrounding the visit, and EU-Africa relations in general, came under new scrutiny after the surprise last-minute cancellation by Africa of a planned video conference summit to be held last Wednesday.
The cancellation was not directly related to Lenarčič and Borrell’s visit, but it did point to tensions in EU-Africa relations and raised questions about the status of an effort by Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President, Charles Michel, to review the EU’s foreign policy towards its southern continental neighbor.
Indeed, EU and AU officials and diplomats, as well as outside policy experts, said the EU effort has been undermined by the pandemic. In addition to disrupting planned meetings, it has intensified competition with China for influence in Africa and highlighted complaints about current and historical treatment of African countries and officials, particularly in the field of public health.
Provocative comments from two French medical experts last spring about a possible study in Africa on the effects of a tuberculosis vaccine in the fight against the coronavirus sparked widespread outrage at the suggestion that Africans could be used as guinea pigs. . This prompted Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ethiopian Director General of the World Health Organization, to declare: “The hangover of a colonial mindset has to end.”
African leaders have expressed frustration both at the fact that Europe is a leading source of coronavirus infections in Africa (index cases in many African countries can be traced back to travelers from Europe) and at not receiving credit for driving. the pandemic better than the richest countries, so far. at least.
“The response of most African countries to this unprecedented public health threat has been better organized, better informed and better implemented than many of their Western counterparts,” concluded an analysis by South Africa’s The Mail and Guardian. “Leaders have turned to scientists and public health experts to inform their decisions, and they have acted early and with considerable determination, despite the fact that most African governments are operating with only a fraction of the resources available to the largest countries. rich ”.
African leaders have been more assertive on the world stage, for example, with a group appointed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, who currently holds the rotating presidency of the AU, pressuring G20 nations to provide financial assistance, including the debt relief. “Leaders in the region have compared what they perceive to be poor handling of the pandemic by the United States and Europe with the track record of African health ministries and institutions, including the Africa CDC,” Judd Devermont, Program Director from Africa at the Center for Strategies and International Studies wrote in an article.
It was amid these tensions that some African officials said they urged Borrell not to visit in October given the resurgence of coronavirus infections in Europe. But African officials said Europeans insisted on being present for the arrival of test kits donated by Germany to the African Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“We discourage him,” said an AU official, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect diplomatic relations. “He still came.”
The shipment was part of a series of flights under the EU’s “humanitarian airlift” program. Lenarčič and the EU Commissioner for International Associations, Jutta Urpilainen, had accompanied flights to African countries, including Burkina faso, Central African Republic and Sudan, but this was Borrell’s first time doing so. EU diplomats see the show’s publicity as crucial in its competition with China for influence in Africa. China’s relations with Africa have also been put to the test by the pandemic, and Beijing has responded by stepping up and drawing attention to its own humanitarian efforts.
But the EU’s desire for a photoshoot with the plane full of donated test kits played into a historical narrative of Westerners portraying themselves as saviors rather than oppressors in Africa, said Helen Tilley, a history professor at Northwestern University who has written extensively on medicine. and health problems in relations between Europe and Africa.
“It’s the feeling of helpless, hapless victims that is always the narrative to turn to,” Tilley said. “And the usual willingness on the part of powerful diplomats in Europe or North America to ignore guilt to deny that, say, economic policies or trade policies cause some of the poverty that then people rush in and try to put on a band-aid. . “Tilley said her own research on African diplomats working with the World Health Organization found them constantly facing what she called” the arrogance of ignorance, a constant slap in the face. ”
African officials said that instead of receiving rapid official notification of the risk of contact, they only learned of the infection from the EU delegation. when Borrell tweeted about it. After seeing Borrell’s tweet, the AU official said: “We forced the EU to formally confirm … No one was happy.”
AU officials say a total of five people were infected as a result of the visit, including one case in Addis Ababa, but those figures were impossible to confirm. The EU institutions have a spotty track record in responding to potential cluster outbreaks. A European who was on the trip said that there was no official notification of the positive case to EU travelers.
EU officials roundly questioned the African version, saying they were never urged not to travel. “We did not receive any request not to show up,” said an EU official close to Lenarčič.
“Nobody discouraged us,” said a Commission official said. “Obviously we were there. We were received. ”
The Commission official said that the Ethiopian government, the AU, as well as the EU delegations in Ethiopia and the AU, were notified about the positive case of COVID in the delegation on October 13 as soon as the EU became aware. The Ethiopian government did not respond to requests for comment.
The EU side says it suspects the member of its delegation was probably infected in Africa. EU officials stressed that according to normal protocol, all members of the delegation were tested before leaving Brussels, and anyone who had tested positive would not be able to travel. Similarly, they said all travelers were retested upon return, which is when the only positive case was discovered. Borrell and Lenarčič tested negative each time, the official said.
Still, previously unreported diplomatic setbacks form part of the backdrop to the events that led to the cancellation of the EU-AU videoconference summit, and illustrate the EU’s struggle to improve the geopolitical relationship.
The summit scheduled for last Wednesday had already been lowered twice: from the initial plans to hold a full summit involving the 55 AU heads of state and government plus their entourages and the 27 from the EU side, to a smaller in-person meeting, and then to a virtual meeting.
“They wanted a great party,” said the AU official. “They wanted everyone to come to Brussels.”
Despite the fact that the health situation made a large meeting highly unlikely, Michel, who is the official host of such meetings in the EU and considers relations with Africa a personal priority, resisted postponing it and instead, lobbied for an event to be planned with strict health precautions. Other EU officials were equally reluctant to cancel, especially as China hosted its own annual summit with African leaders via video conference in June. EU officials felt they were already catching up.
But when the AU switched some of its own meetings to a virtual format, the leaders found it difficult to justify their trip to Brussels. As a solution to that dilemma, Ramaphosa, the South African president, sent a confidential letter to Michel requesting that a videoconference be held in which a select group of leaders from the AU and the EU participate.
But the night before the event, Ramaphosa canceled it altogether, saying that too many members of the AU “office” (five heads of state and government representing North, South, East, West and Central Africa) had conflict of programming. A spokesperson for the Council said only that there were “scheduling problems.”
In fact, no explanation holds. Clumsily, one complication of the newspaper appeared to be that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi was in France to receive the republic’s highest civil honor from French President Emmanuel Macron.
An EU diplomat who monitored developments said the summit likely failed as a combined result of a reluctance in Brussels to accept the cancellation of the meeting in person, and ambivalence among African leaders about participating in a virtual meeting with no concrete results expected. .
Devermont said African leaders likely perceived that the EU was simply complying with motions. “‘How can we check the box for African commitment?’ it is not the path to a successful outcome, ”he said.
The AU official said there was no lack of interest on the African side. “Of course we wanted to have the meeting,” the official said. “The commitments are there. Unfortunately, of course, COVID has upset the agendas … 2020 has been that kind of year. ”
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