The African Union under the leadership of Alpha Konare, Mali’s former president, has committed itself to moving from non-interference to non-indifference.
Security and governance dominated its third summit. South Africa’s no-nonsense Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, chaired a meeting of the 15-member Peace and Security Council focusing on Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Burundi and Côte d’Ivoire.
In a departure from the etiquette of the United Nations Security Council, representatives of countries involved in conflicts being discussed by the AU’s Council — even if they are among the 15 elected members — had to leave the room while their colleagues worked out common positions.
It was incredible to see African leaders calling on their Sudanese colleague, Omar el-Bashir, to account for the situation in Darfur: a far cry from the days of the Organisation of African Unity when such interference was taboo.
There is also another side to the common complaint that Africans do not show enough concern about their own conflicts: the international media refused to cover Alpha Konare’s visit to Darfur a week before the visits of United States Secretary of State Colin Powell and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, which enjoyed wide media coverage.
The strategic alliance between Pretoria and Abuja came through clearly during this summit as both African powers — key actors on the Peace and Security Council — carefully coordinated their efforts on the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and over the DRC conflict. Nigeria’s Olusegun Obasanjo, who was elected chairperson of the AU for one year, appears to be collecting international chieftaincy titles, as he added this accolade to his current chair of the Commonwealth and the Nepad implementation committee.
The Economic, Social and Cultural Council is the main vehicle through which the AU will engage with African civil society actors. Some African leaders remain suspicious of these mostly foreign-funded activists. One positive feature of this summit, however, was the vastly increased representation of civil society. Leaders of South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Rwanda and Senegal engaged in a rich debate with strong, female civil society activists on the empowerment of women.
An important highlight of the meeting was that an indigenous African language — Kiswahili — rang out across the halls of an AU summit for the first time, as the leaders of Mozambique, Rwanda, Comoros, Kenya and Tanzania peppered their speeches with a language widely spoken in eastern and central Africa.
The AU’s diplomatic roadshow will move from Addis Ababa to the Sudanese capital of Khartoum next year. The hope is that Africa’s leaders will continue their efforts to build an organisation that can serve the needs of a post-Cold War era in which their continent risks falling off the map of the world’s concerns.
Adekeye Adebajo is executive director of the Centre for Conflict Resolution at the University of Cape Town. He attended last week’s AU summit in Addis Ababa