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Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 10:59 PM
Subject: [mobilize-globally] African leaders launch ambitious African Union
Subject:
[theafricanobserver] African leaders launch ambitious
African
Union
Date:
Thu, 1 Mar 2001 15:44:10 EST
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African leaders launch ambitious African Union
By Lamine Ghanmi
SIRTE, Libya, March 1 (Reuters) - African heads of state on Thursday
proclaimed the birth of the African Union, a continental confederation
loosely modelled on the European Union and actively sponsored by
Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi.
Togo President Gnassingbe Eyadema told an Organisation of African
Unity (OAU)
extraordinary summit that 46 of the OAU 53 member states had signed
the
founding act of the union.
"It's an ambitious project but within our capacities," he told
delegates
assembled in Gaddafi's coastal hometown of Sirte.
Gaddafi, who has switched his unionist efforts from the Arab world to
the
African south in the past decade, has been the driving force behind
the
African Union or what he called on Thursday "the United States of
Africa."
"It's a historic day for Africans that will restore their dignity in
the eyes
of the world," he said in the opening speech of the two-day summit.
But few diplomats in the region expected any immediate impact from a
union
which envisions a continent living in democracy with respect of human
rights,
far from its current woes of war, ethnic and religious conflicts,
famine and
disease.
"The idea is good but we have to separate it from some ideas of its
promoters," a Zimbabwean delegate said.
ARAFAT AND MANDELA PRESENT
OAU officials noted that only 13 out of 21 treaties and conventions
signed by
African leaders in recent years were partially or wholly in force.
The African Economic Community, established in Abuja, Nigeria, had to
wait 13
years before obtaining the required formal signatures in May 1994.
"It took them 13 years to sign this one and now they're trying to do
something far more complex," a diplomat from a sub-Saharan country
said.
Others, including former U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
an
Egyptian, were more optimistic.
"It's a positive step, to be encouraged, but only the first one," he
told
reporters. "This is a new framework within which to map out the
unification
of Africa because union is a necessity today...If it fails with this
process
Africa will erect a wall between itself and the outside world."
While the presidents of regional powers South Africa and Nigeria,
Thabo Mbeki
and Olusegun Obasanjo, were in Sirte, diplomats noted that Egypt's
Hosni
Mubarak did not come, nor did Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben
Ali who
said he had flu.
Egypt and Tunisia were represented by Foreign Minister Amr Moussa and
Prime
Minister Mohamed Ghannouchi respectively. Palestinian President Yasser
Arafat
and former South African President Nelson Mandela were also in
attendance.
RIGHT TO INTERVENE
The union, which rejigs the OAU founding charter, falls short of
creating an
entity modelled on the United States, with a president and a Congress,
as
first advocated by Gaddafi who promoted the idea at an OAU summit in
Lome,
Togo, last year.
Instead, it sees a continent steered by a Council of Heads of State,
with a
pan-African parliament and Court of Justice.
The plan, which will need to be ratified by national parliaments,
reaffirms
the inviolability of Africa's post-colonial borders but empowers
members to
intervene in a fellow state threatened by civil war or genocide.
The dusty city of Sirte, about 500 kms (310 miles) east of Tripoli,
had
apparently been emptied of its residents and was bedecked with African
flags
and huge slogans such as "Africa is emerging stronger," in Arabic,
English
and French.
Inside the seaside convention hall, large electric boards proclaimed:
"Africa
has no alliance except itself."
14:30 03-01-01
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