The pan-continental African Union on Tuesday launched a new Peace and Security Council (PSC), which it hopes will become a robust guarantor of stability in Africa, much like the United Nations Security Council.
Mozambique’s President Joaquim Chissano, the current chairperson of the 53-member African Union, inaugurated the council at a ceremony at the organisation’s headquarters in Addis Ababa attended by the heads of state and government from at least eight countries.
”It is with joy, pride and great honour that I solemnly declare the Peace and Security Council of the African Union formally launched,” Chissano said in Portuguese.
”Peace and security are the indispensible conditions for Africa’s socio-economic development,” he said.
Chissano went on to express his hope that the continent’s ”crises and conflicts will be substantially reduced, if not eliminated, thanks to the PSC”.
The AU chairperson described the official launch, held on Africa Day, as a ”symbolic ceremony during which the African Union writes a new golden page in its glorious history… another step in its efforts to change the destiny of Africans”.
Also at the ceremony were representatives of the United Nations, the European Union, the Arab league and several western states.
Officials have vowed that the new council will act to intervene in African conflicts, setting the two-year-old AU apart from its largely toothless predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU).
”In the past, the OAU was accused of complicity. We are replacing the principle of non-interference with the principle of non-indifference,” AU Peace and Security Commission Said Djinnit told journalists in Addis Ababa.
”That doesn’t mean we will solve [all] the problems, but that we won’t remain indifferent,” he added.
”The object is not to replace the blue helmets [UN peacekeepers] with AU missions. We maintain that the UN has a primary role to play in peacekeeping,” he said, while promising that the AU would not hang around while the UN decided whether or not to act.
The 15-member PSC — which has been meeting regularly since March — is empowered to mandate peacekeeping missions in conflict areas where ceasefire accords have been signed and to recommend to the assembly of AU heads of state that troops be deployed uninvited in cases of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The council has already met on the issue of Darfur, a war-ravaged region in western Sudan where forces allied to the Khartoum government stand widely accused of targeting civilians.
Some 10 000 people have died and a million been displaced there since April 2003.
In all, about 10 countries in Africa are in the throes of conflict and there are currently six different UN peacekeeping missions deployed on the continent.
By 2010, the African Union hopes to have its own rapid reaction force of 15 000 people.
The leaders at Tuesday’s official inauguration — which coincides with Africa Day — were expected to sign a ”declaration of commitment” to take their responsibilities with regard to peace and security seriously and not to ignore any of the continent’s
conflicts.
They were also due to meet behind closed doors to discuss the situations in Darfur, Côte d’Ivoire and Somalia.
Other African leaders at the event included Alpha Oumar Konare, the chairperson of the AU Commission and a former president of Mali; presidents Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Omar al-Beshir of Sudan, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe; South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia and his counterparts from Lesotho and Togo. – Sapa-AFP