By DPA,
Nairobi: US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived in Kenya Tuesday on the first leg of her Africa tour.
Clinton’s visit demonstrates the continent is a foreign policy priority for the administration of President Barack Obama, say US officials.
The top US diplomat made no comment as she arrived at Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, but she is expected to have plenty to say over the next 11 days as she visits seven nations.
Clinton’s tour comes just three weeks after Obama visited Ghana, his first trip to Africa as president.
According to Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Johnnie Carson, Clinton will reinforce Obama’s themes, which include supporting democratic governments, promoting economic development and resolving conflicts.
She is due to open the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) Forum in Nairobi Wednesday. AGOA provides sub-Saharan African nations liberalised access to US markets.
She is then expected to address more thorny issues.
The secretary will visit several countries with major human rights problems, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, and she is under pressure to bring the governments to task.
“The US rightly wants to promote Africa as a place of great opportunity, but Africans will be unable to realise their potential if their human rights are denied,” said Georgette Gagnon, Africa director at New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Secretary Clinton should make this connection clear.”
Clinton’s first delicate task is expected to come when she presses Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga to create a new constitution.
Obama’s decision to ignore Kenya, the birthplace of his father, on his first trip to Africa was seen as a coded message to the Kenyan government to bring to justice those responsible for early 2008’s bloody post-election violence.
Around 1,500 people died in tribal clashes that followed Odinga’s claims that Kibaki stole the December 2007 presidential elections, yet Kenya has failed to create a special tribunal to try those responsible for orchestrating the violence.
Just hours before Clinton touched down, the US embassy in Kenya issued a statement condemning the government for deciding to rely on the existing judiciary system, which is struggling under the weight of a huge backlog, to try suspects.
“Merely … establishing a mechanism within the existing judicial structure is not a credible approach in the eyes of the Kenyan people and the international community,” the statement read.
While still in Kenya, Clinton is also due to meet Somali President Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, whose government is wobbling under a fierce onslaught from Islamist insurgents believed to have close links with Al Qaeda.
The US has already provided military supplies to the Somali government, but Carson said no further assistance was expected to be pledged at the meeting.
However, Sheikh Sharif on Tuesday called the meeting a “great opportunity” for Somalia.
“The meeting shows … how the international community is ready to support the government,” he told reporters in Mogadishu.
Clinton is then expected to fly to South Africa to pressure new President Jacob Zuma into forcing Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe to respect the country’s power-sharing deal.
She is also expected to discuss the reactivation of a bilateral US-South Africa commission to govern relations.
Clinton then travels to Angola. The southern African nation exports most of its oil to China, but also delivers hundreds of thousands of barrels per day to the US.
Chinese influence in Africa has been growing in recent years as the Asian giant grabs a slice of Africa’s mineral wealth, but Carson denied that Clinton’s visit was in any way aimed at combating China’s growing influence.
The next planned stop is the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Clinton is expected to highlight US commitment to ending gender-based violence by meeting victims of rape.
Energy is then expected to be back on the agenda during a planned visit to Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil-producer and most-populous nation.
The country of around 150 million people is largely poverty stricken despite massive oil reserves, around eight percent of which are exported to the US.
The final two stops are expected to be Liberia, which is still recovering from a long civil war, and the stable Cape Verde.