The coming year puts peace deals to the test in Africa’s longest and deadliest wars — as entrenched enemies from Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) face tension-raising deadlines to put recently made peace pledges into practice.
As 2004 ended, two African nations stepped forward to show laggards the way: Ghana and Niger, two nations ruled by military strongmen and the AK-47 for decades, held elections with vigorous turnouts and credible results.
In the West African nation of Ghana, jubilant citizens closed the year dancing in the streets to celebrate a bloodless presidential vote with a spectacular 83,2% turnout — with no strongman commanding them to do so.
The war, peace and politicking showed sub-Saharan Africa’s fortysomething republics still shaking off the outside influences — colonial and Cold War — that had blocked peaceful democracy on much of the continent for decades.
Perversely, the peace accords of 2004, 2003 and 2002 make 2005 a year of enhanced risk as well as enhanced hope for much of Africa.
With the world’s largest United Nations peace deployments on the ground to quell major fighting, peace accords mandate 2005 elections in several countries: the DRC, Africa’s third-largest nation, where a 1998 to 2002 civil war killed millions; neighbouring Burundi, scene of a linked conflict; Côte d’Ivoire; and Liberia, finally freed of a Cold War-created charismatic who fuelled West Africa’s wars for nearly 15 years.
The risk is that combatants, faced with making good on their grudging promises to share or yield power in elections, will opt to return to full-scale fighting instead.
A 2004 peace accord mandates a different deadline for Sudan, Africa’s largest nation.
Under one north-south accord, Arab-dominated Khartoum must open posts in its central government for rebels of the heavily Christian south. The power-sharing was one object in a 21-year civil war.
The past year also saw separate, partial accords, in a newer and now graver Sudanese civil war, in the western region of Darfur.
But there was no tension about whether the two sides in Darfur would break the deals in 2005: they already did in 2004, repeatedly violating ceasefire pledges with new attacks days or weeks within signing pledges.
The year saw Darfur emerge as one of the biggest blights on the world conscience, with Sudan accused of unleashing warplanes and camel- and horse-mounted Arab tribal fighters against hundreds of villages of non-Arab farmers.
The raids killed countless villagers and drove 1,8-million from their homes. The UN was moved to call it the world’s greatest humanitarian disaster. The United States called it genocide.
The last weeks of 2004 saw Sudan’s government and Darfur rebels in talks that were slated to hammer out a final peace deal, despite heavy scepticism that either side planned to carry out their pledges if international attention turned away.
UN investigators, meanwhile, closed 2004 probing whether the genocide accusation was warranted, with a pronouncement expected in the first weeks of 2005.
In Southern Africa, parliamentary races in March mark Zimbabwe’s first major elections since 2002, when President Robert Mugabe won re-election in a deeply flawed, widely disputed race.
Efforts continue in South Africa to get as many people as possible on anti-retroviral drugs.
Africa’s offshore oil boom, part of a worldwide scramble for options to Middle East oil, stands to boom on in 2005 — at a rate that in 2004 catapulted people of one tiny, newly oil-rich African backwater, Equatorial Guinea, to a per capita economic rank just two spots behind prosperous Americans.
But again, only on paper. In practice, the majority of Africa’s oil-laden nations showed little sign of making good on promises to share the wealth with their people. — Sapa-AP