AU gears up for peace

2005-01-09 21:46

Abidjan - The ongoing crisis in Ivory Coast will be high on the agenda when the 15 members of the African Union's new Peace and Security Council meet for the first time in the Gabonese capital Libreville on Monday.

The gathering will provide an opportunity to assess efforts by South African President Thabo Mbeki to mediate an end to the bitter conflict which has divided the country since 2002.

"He will outline the nature of the crisis, explain where things stand, what has been done, and he will launch a debate about where the process should go from here," Mbeki's spokesperson Bheki Khumalo said on Friday.

The situation in the western Sudanese region of Darfur and the troubled Democratic Republic of Congo, where there have been clashes in the volatile eastern provinces, will also be discussed by the African leaders at the summit.

Darfur has been wracked since February 2003 by conflict between the Arabic government in Khartoum, largely represented by local Arab militias, and two rebel groups fighting for the rights of the black African peoples of the region.

The conflict has claimed at least 70 000 lives and driven 1.6 million people from their homes, according to the United Nations.

Sudan's government and southern rebels on Sunday signed a long-awaited peace accord and immediately officials urged the agreement be used as a template for a resolution to the Darfur crisis.

In Ivory Coast French and African troops currently maintain a very fragile peace between a mainly Christian south and a rebel-held Muslim majority north.

At present both sides are unwilling to budge, with the presidential camp saying that it has put in place the political reforms necessary for a return to peace. This is contested by the rebels.

Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo argues that lawmakers in the past few weeks have adopted almost all the political reforms enshrined in the inter-Ivorian peace agreements concluded at Marcoussis in France in 2003.

The measures had lain in abeyance as the simmering conflict between north and south threatened to explode into a repetition of the 2002 civil war.

However the New Forces (FN) rebel group, which controls the north of the country, says that the reforms as voted were tampered with to such a degree that they no longer "correspond to the spirit of Marcoussis."

The African Union's new Peace and Security Council, modelled on that of the United Nations, was created in 2002 and has been operating mainly at the level of ambassadors since May last year.

Official sources in host country Gabon said it was possible that the summit, which has been moved from the planned venue at AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, could be extended for a day if necessary.

- AFP