The United States military presents its new Africa Command as a helping hand offering aid and training to the world’s poorest continent, but many Africans fear it could bring double trouble to a conflict-racked region. US officials dress the new regional command to be launched on Monday in a shiny altruistic uniform, saying it is designed to help Africa improve its own stability.
Africa is suffering a crisis of leadership and its heads of state must show more mutual confidence and solidarity if they want to advance continental integration, the African Union’s top diplomat said on Monday. Alpha Oumar Konare, who chairs the AU Commission, was giving his analysis of an inconclusive AU summit in Ghana last week.
An African summit overran on Tuesday as the leaders struggled to avoid a damaging public split over moves to unite the continent under one federal government. The three-day meeting was one day longer than other recent summits and had only one agenda item, the campaign for a United States of Africa.
African leaders argued fiercely on Monday over whether to rapidly create a single state stretching from the Cape to Cairo, with one small group threatening to break away. Delegates said the atmosphere in an African Union summit was charged as a group of states led by Libya’s Moammar Gadaffi and Senegal’s Abdoulaye Wade argued with a more gradualist majority led by South Africa’s Thabo Mbeki.
African public and private investors plan to finance highways, hydro-power dams and other infrastructure through a continent-wide fund that puts hard cash behind the goal of a more united Africa. ”This is a fund by Africans for the benefit of Africans,” South African Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said.
Carried in the stomachs of human ”mules”, hidden in ship containers or packed by traffickers into planes, boats or jeeps, Colombian cocaine is criss-crossing the remote coasts and deserts of West Africa on its way to Europe. Latin-American drug cartels are setting up air and sea supply routes and drugs stockpiles in the region.
Mauritanians voted on Sunday in a presidential run-off between a former technocrat and a veteran opposition leader, the last stage of returning civilian rule to the Islamic state bordering the Sahara. The vote follows an inconclusive first round poll two weeks ago and seals a democratic handover by the army junta.
Mauritanians vote on Sunday to choose a civilian president, completing a handover of power by a military junta that took control of the Islamic state on the western edge of the Sahara in a 2005 coup. Voters and international observers hope the poll can establish a multi-party democracy in the largely desert former French colony.
No image available
/ 30 January 2007
Chad President Idriss Déby Itno accused Sudan on Tuesday of waging a genocidal ”racial war” in Darfur and complained that African and international leaders were shying away from confronting Khartoum squarely on the issue. In an interview, Déby criticised what he called the world’s ”head in the sand” attitude over Sudan’s actions in its Darfur region.
No image available
/ 3 November 2006
With its red-tiled roof and pink facade holed by rockets and bullets, Guinea-Bissau’s ruined presidential palace is a monument to the fratricidal conflict that has kept this tiny West African state crushed by poverty. The palace, built under Portuguese colonial rule, was attacked and looted during a 1998-1999 civil war which killed more than 2 000 people.