LAURENT BARTHELEMY, Brussels | Wednesday
LEADERS of the European Union are due to meet here on Wednesday with African heads of state speaking for some 50 nations, to take stock of a radical new development partnership for Africa.
On Wednesday, the current Belgian EU presidency will meet with presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria, Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the “four fathers” of the New Africa Initiative (NAI).
This global development strategy for the continent is being promoted and supported by the West.
Also at the summit will be Zambian President Frederick Chiluba, the current head of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
The NAI is an economic program adopted last July by a summit of the OAU, the 53-member pan-African body that in the course of a year is to be transformed into the re-named African Union.
The NAI combines schemes drawn up by Wade, Mbeki, Obasanjo and Bouteflika aimed at boosting African economies and laying the groundwork for sustainable development in a free-market world where the continent has long been marginalised in terms of trade and growth.
Participants will also “examine how it can fit in with existing arrangements”, said a statement issued in Dakar on Monday, referring to the Cotonou Accord governing trade between the EU and its African, Pacific and Caribbean (ACP) partners and EU-Mediterranean deals.
Wade’s office recalled that African leaders had on September 18 gone to Britain for talks with Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has made development in Africa a policy platform.
“Other members of the G8 (the seven wealthiest industrialised nations and Russia) have expressed their desire to meet those promoting the new initiative,” the statement said.
“Intellectually, this (NAI) is a highly developed text that offers a new approach to the African problem,” a Belgian foreign ministry source said.
“It treats Africa not only in a north-south mode … but also in terms of a political system of governance,” said the source. “We are no longer speaking only of debt and aid, but also of Africa taking its own problems in hand.”
The problem defined by the designers of the new initiative, keen to expand the project to other African countries “on the basis of precise criteria, harks back a bit to that of the European Union itself,” he added.
The EU will be represented at Wednesday’s meeting of the five African presidents by Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and Foreign Minister Louis Michel, European Commission President Romano Prodi and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
On Thursday, OAU foreign ministers meet with their EU counterparts to take stock of implementation of decisions taken in Cairo.
This week’s meetings are taking place midway between Cairo and the next EU-African summit in Lisbon in 2003.
The Cairo summit set out eight priorities for action. Since then, progress has been made on regional integration, the fight against Aids, food safety, human rights, conflict prevention and environmental protection, said a European source.
Divergences remain, however, on questions relating to debt and protection against pillaging of cultural treasures.
Discussions are also expected to touch on terrorism. Days after the September 11 attacks on the US, Wade said he would propose to his OAU counterparts the creation of an “African Pact Against Terrorism.” – AFP