EAST AFRICA-POLITICS: Preparing a More Peaceful Future

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 22 1996 (IPS) - Imagine Somalia without clan warfare, Sudan’s Islamic fundamentalists sipping tea in Khartoum with former Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) rebels and Uganda free of its insurgents.

Take your imagination a bit further and picture Sudanese President Omar al Bashir and his Eritrean vis-a-vis Esaias Affewerki or Ethiopia’s Meles Zenawi sitting together to discuss economic cooperation agreements.

Given the present state of affairs, the above seems far- fetched, but it could all happen if the organisation known until Thursday as the Inter-Governmental Authority on Drought and Development (IGADD) achieves the aims it has now set itself.

IGADD heads of state agreed here Thursday to transform the seven-nation organisation, which is headquartered in Djibouti, into an economic body which will also deal with conflict resolution.

Otherwise, they did little more than drop ‘drought’ from IGADD’s name, making it the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and rehash the usual mouthings about peace being necessary in the sub-region.

IGAD, which comprises Eritrea, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Somalia, Sudan, Kenya and Uganda, was created in 1986. According to its secretary-general, David Muduli, it “spent the first ten years establishing and improving early warning systems to monitor drought and disasters (and) improve food security in the region”.

IGAD sources said the name change reflected the authority’s intention to focus more on economy and the development, along with conflict resolution, which the presidents agreed Thursday to include in IGAD’s official mandate.

It has already been trying its hand at resolving conflicts. About two years ago it set up a Committee on Sudan to broker a settlement of the 13-year conflict between Khartoum and the mainly Christian SPLA. So far the mediation effort has achieved nothing tangible. The contrary would have been surprising given the hostility between Sudan and three of the four countries that make up the mediation committee.

Over the past year, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda cut diplomatic relations with al Bashir’s Muslim fundamentalist government. The first two accuse Khartoum of exporting its brand of Islam to the region, while Uganda charges that Sudan backs Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels against President Yoweri Museveni.

In turn, Khartoum alleges that Uganda supports the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), accuses Ethiopia and Eritrea of backing exiled Sudanese opposition groups, and wants all three countries dropped from the mediation committee, which also includes Kenya.

Undaunted by these setbacks, IGAD has decided to become yet another African conflict-resolution body, alongside the Organisation of African Unity (OAU)’s embryonic conflict- resolution mechanism. How it will set about transforming the Committee on Sudan’s failure into success and resolving other sub- regional conflicts was not immediately clear.

What is more certain is that the organisation has been under pressure from the ‘Friends of IGADD’ — a group of Western nations that support the seven-nation body — to improve its effectiveness, as IGAD’s Chairman, President Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya, admitted Thursday. “Our region is facing an ever increasing threat of marginalisation,” Moi warned.

Reflecting the new emphasis IGAD aims to place on the economy and development, he said: “We are facing the twin challenges of enhancing the welfare and expectations of our rapidly increasing populations against the backdrop of an uphill task in our efforts to build a viable capacity to compete effectively in the global economy.”

“The effort to expand and revitalise cooperation between IGAD countries is receiving world-wide attention,” he told Thursday’s one-day summit, also attended by Museveni, al Bashir, Affewerki Zenawi and Djibouti’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Mussa Chehen.

The summit was to have taken place before the end of last year, but was delayed. “Due to heavy commitments on some of us,” Moi said. Because of the disputes between member states, other sources charged.

However, there was little evidence of any ill feeling on Thursday: Bashir called for a stronger and united IGAD, pointing out that “the international community is looking with interest to the outcome of this conference”; and Museveni urged IGAD to resolve the sub-region’s security problems since “without peace, we cannot achieve any development”.

In addition to the LRA insurgency in northern Uganda, and Sudan’s civil war, which has graduated from a straight fight between Khartoum and the SPLA to a free-for-all between the government army and SPLA splinter groups bitterly opposed to one another, the IGAD region’s security problems include Somalia, wracked by a vicious clan war since 1991.

The seven-member grouping also has to contend with another, more mundane problem: some of its members have not been paying up their dues, according to a report by the Ernst and Young audit firm, which noted that this “has resulted in serious liquidity problems and has affected the various activities of IGAD”.

The main culprits are Sudan and Somalia, which together owe the organisation one million dollars.

During the past five years, the report said, IGADD operated on deficits, with that of 1994 amounting to 539,792 dollars.

Much of the shortfall appears to have been covered by grants originally meant to finance specific projects. “This has a negative impact on donors authorising and funding the various projects of IGAD and may lead to suspension of disbursements or cancellation of grants,” the report said.

IGAD receives support from its ‘friends’ — the Netherlands, Canada, Germany, the United States, France, the European Union — and from multilateral agencies such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation, the U.N. Environmental Programme and U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.