Wednesday, Jul 10, 2002
Wednesday, Jul 10, 2002 |
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Anti-NEPAD (New Partnership for African Development) activists staging a protest in Durban, South Africa, on Monday. — AP
"We have reached a proud, but a challenging moment ... I declare the first session of the summit of the African Union open," the South African President, Thabo Mbeki, said with a slam of his gavel. The inauguration has inspired a wave of celebration, including fireworks, a commemorative stamp and a theme song. Critics, however, fear leaders are replacing the Organisation of African Unity with another bureaucracy with no real power to control some of the despots and corruption-riddled governments that plague the continent. "The mutation of the OAU into the AU does indeed raise hopes. But these hopes are measured when we realise the new union will be run by the same people who were responsible for the failure of the OAU," said Joachim Mbandza, who runs the Catholic publication The African Week in the Republic of Congo. The OAU was created 39 years ago as the wave of post-colonial liberation swept across the continent. Many have complained the toothless organisation did little more than prop up dictators. The 53-nation African Union, by contrast, is billed as a new organisation for a new era — one that links a commitment to democracy and human rights to economic development. "To achieve these objectives, and therefore give hope to the hundreds of millions of Africans who necessarily carry the deep scars of centuries of humiliation of the peoples of Africa, today's leaders of these masses will have to convince themselves that they have to exercise their stewardship in a new way," Mr. Mbeki wrote in his party's newsletter. Inspired, in part, by the European Union, it will have a security council, a legislature, and an economic development plan. The union's muscle is to be the peace and security council, whose 15 rotating members will be able to authorise a proposed peacekeeping force to intervene in cases of genocide and war crimes. The union's other key element is the New Partnership for African Development, which seeks billions of dollars of international investment in Africa in return for stable democratic governance and fiscal responsibility. The world's wealthiest nations embraced the programme at last month's G-8 meeting in Canada.— AP, Reuters
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