Africa, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Headlines, Human Rights

POLITICS-AFRICA: Champagne Tastes on Beer Money?

Anthony Mitchell

ADDIS ABABA, Jul 9 2004 (IPS) - It was billed as a summit where a new future for Africa would be unveiled. African Union chief Alpha Oumar Konare laid out a 1.7 billion dollar plan that would help revitalise the troubled and marginalized continent.

But as the annual summit of the Africa Union (AU) closed in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa on Thursday, Jul. 8, it was conflict, stalled peace deals, atrocities and instability that had once again dominated the agenda. In the last 40 years, conflicts have cost Africa seven million lives and 250 billion dollars, according to the AU.

Leaders agreed that as long as wars continued to plague the world’s poorest continent, development would remain a pipe dream. So when Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the current AU chairman, officially brought the summit to an end, it was the fringe meetings on conflict that he chose to focus on.

Obasanjo said the AU had taken a tough stance in addressing hotspots like Sudan, the Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“These issues demonstrate our determination to be proactive,” he told journalists, Thursday. “Without peace there is no development.”

The fringe meetings saw leaders agree to send an armed protection force into the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan to try and stabilise the area and restore confidence among civilians. “We are seriously concerned about the situation in Darfur,” Obasanjo noted.

While the main task of the 300-strong force will be to protect 60 AU officials who are monitoring a ceasefire between government and two loosely-allied rebel groups, Obasanjo indicated that it would not remain passive in the face of attacks on civilians.

“It will not be a protection force if it is there.where it should protect life and property, and it just stands and stares while life and property are being destroyed,” he said. The exact mandate of the force has still not been decided on, however, nor the date when it will be sent in.

The Darfur rebel groups took up arms against Khartoum last year, accusing it of supporting Arab militia known as the Janjaweed (or “men on horseback”) who have been accused of conducting a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa: three black tribes.

This has sparked a humanitarian crisis that the United Nations describes as the world’s worst. Up to a million people have been displaced in Darfur, while more than 120,000 have fled to neighbouring Chad. The Sudanese government has said it will disarm the militia, but violence in the region has continued, the UN said earlier this week.

Sudan faces the threat of UN sanctions if it fails to disarm the Janjaweed and prevent further attacks.

Darfur, which featured heavily at the three-day summit, is seen as a critical test for the AU, created two years ago to replace the largely toothless Organisation of African Unity.

“Clearly the responsibility for the Darfur crisis is on the AU and the government of Sudan working together,” Obasanjo said.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and Konare also brokered plans for fresh talks between government and rebel forces in the Ivory Coast at the end of the month.

“We have a clear roadmap to solving the difficulties,” Annan told journalists after he emerged from the talks, also attended by Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo.

Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer, has been split into a rebel-held north and government-controlled south since Sep. 2002.

In addition, a plan was drawn up to try and prevent further abuses in eastern DRC.

Although a peace deal was signed by government and the country’s main rebel groups in Dec. 2002, instability continues to plague various parts of the DRC. Last month saw a failed coup attempt in the capital, Kinshasa, while rebels seized control of the eastern town of Bukavu for about a week.

Heads of state also won plaudits for their first-ever debate on gender, which culminated in an 11-point action plan setting out a strategy for improving the rights of women on the continent.

An African Trust Fund for Women will be established to provide skills training for women, with a special focus on improving the lives of those in rural areas.

The leaders also pledged to ensure that new laws to protect women would come into force by the end of the year. A campaign is to be launched in 2005 that will highlight the particular abuses women suffer during conflict, while the plight of child brides and women who are sold into sexual slavery will also receive attention.

Even as leaders prepared to jet out of Addis Ababa, however, the pressing question of who was to finance the AU’s good intentions remained

The Darfur operation alone will cost 26 million dollars. AU member states have so far contributed just 13 million dollars to the pan-African body’s 43-million-dollar budget for this year.

While the 38 leaders attending the summit endorsed Konare’s ambitious and costly three-year strategic plan to launch Africa into the 21st century, they stopped short of committing themselves to deliver the financial resources that it will require.

Instead, they agreed that a special AU session should be held later this year so that members could choose which programmes to implement first. Attention would then be given to raising funds for these programmes.

Konare had proposed that the AU’s 53 members pledge 0.5 percent of their national budgets to the organisation.

Key AU institutions that will require substantial funding include a standby force to intervene in humanitarian and natural disasters, and a pan-African parliament that will sit in South Africa. The price tag for the intervention force is put at 200 million dollars, while the parliament will cost 30 million dollars. Three million dollars have been budgeted for an African court of justice.

In addition, 600 million dollars would be ploughed over three years into the much-heralded New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD): an anti-poverty blueprint that seeks to attract more investment to the continent through improved governance.

But, Obasanjo argues that part of the problem facing the continent is the “unfulfilled commitments” of rich nations to provide the resources they have already committed themselves to.

“The list of unfulfilled commitments by our development partners is growing long,” he said at a progress report on NEPAD, on Wednesday.

“Turning around the continent will not happen overnight. As we take each step, let us ensure that each brick we lay is in the right place if we are to build a strong foundation for the future,” he added.

Konare, formerly the president of Mali, also wants to double the number of staff at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa to make the commission a more effective body. This would raise the commission’s running costs to around 130 million dollars a year, the AU says.

But Desmond Orjiako, spokesman for the AU, rejected claims that a failure to secure funding would sound the death-knell for Konare’s bold agenda.

“The amount should not scare anybody,” he said. “Everybody in principle has accepted the vision, mission and strategic plan. Now our problem is how do we raise the resources?”

“Any scepticism this time, no matter who it comes from, may not work – because we are determined,” he added.