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Annan urges Africans to follow EU example By Tim Butcher, Africa Correspondent (Filed: 10/07/2001)

AFRICAN leaders must depart from the "ways of the past" if they are to create a stable and prosperous continent, Kofi Annan, the United Nations Secretary-General, told them yesterday.

He compared their task to the reconstruction of Europe after two world wars. Mr Annan was addressing the opening session of the final Organisation of African Unity summit, which after 38 years is to be renamed as the African Union.

The organisation is to be revamped over the next 12 months, with ambitious plans to create a European Union-like grouping of almost 50 nations.

There are plans for a single currency, a continental parliament and a court of justice to combat human rights abuses. But at the summit in Lusaka there were no discussions of who would pay for these reforms.

Hopes in the West that the OAU was at last moving away from its days as a "trade union for dictators" were dampened when it emerged that the summit planned to give a strongly worded message of support for President Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

The OAU sees the crisis in Zimbabwe as essentially a bilateral conflict with the old colonial power, Britain, and says Britain is mostly to blame. Mr Annan, who has just won a second term as UN Secretary-General, urged more than 40 African heads of state attending the summit to grasp the opportunity to build a stable Africa.

He said: "This historic effort will require leadership, courage and a willingness to depart from the ways of the past if it is to do for Africa what the European Union has done for Europe. That should be our aim, to rebuild, as Europe did after a series of devastating wars, uniting across old divisions."

Since its foundation in 1963, the OAU has been dismissed by critics as a talking shop; and even at its grand finale it showed again how difficult it is to achieve consensus in Africa. Disagreements marred an attempt to agree a single development plan for the continent.

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa had hoped that his Millennium African Recovery Programme, which puts emphasis on the West reducing its claim for repayments from debtor nations, would be accepted.

But a less ambitious initiative, the Omega Plan proposed by President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, had to be merged with it to create a hastily arranged hybrid.

The muddle exemplifies the difficulties always faced by the OAU, which has lacked the will and the muscle to take on Africa's more brutal leaders. Indeed, at the height of Idi Amin's regime he was rewarded with the OAU chairmanship.

Africa's modern problems are perfectly exemplified by the summit's host nation, Zambia. It is the African country with the highest proportion of refugees, as it offers sanctuary to civilians fleeing the fighting in Burundi, Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Zambia, traditionally one of Africa's stable states, has recently been in political turmoil after President Frederick Chiluba tried unsuccessfully to amend the constitution so he could cling to power.

Delegates to the summit were treated to a mass protest rally in Lusaka yesterday over the murder last week of a political opponent of Mr Chiluba in an apparent assassination.

-- Anonymous, July 09, 2001