AU summit opens in Abuja

2005-01-30 13:09

Abuja - The fourth summit of the 53-member African Union opened Sunday in Abuja, aiming to resolve the intractable conflicts of the world's poorest continent and assess the impact of diseases such as Aids, malaria and polio.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan joined heads of state including Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo, chairperson of the AU, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak - attending his first African summit in a decade - at the two-day gathering in the Nigerian capital.

The heads of state will base their talks largely on a series of draft resolutions worked out over three days by their foreign ministers, centring on two proposals to expand Africa's representation on the powerful UN Security Council under planned reforms of the 15-member body.

The summit will also be used to hammer out African solutions to African problems, including the conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ivory Coast as well as the humanitarian crisis in the western Darfur region of Sudan.

A decision is also expected on Somalia, where a new government was provisionally installed earlier this month in a bid to fill a 14-year power vacuum in the anarchic Horn of Africa state.

Talks were under way on Sunday morning ahead of the summit between Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo and Mbeki, appointed in November as the AU's mediator in the two-year civil war in the west African state, a senior UN official told AFP.

The Ivory Coast conflict was the main focus of the AU's Peace and Security Council at a meeting January 11 in the Gabonese capital Libreville, but little headway was made in reconciling the divided country, the world's top cocoa producer.

"Other heads of state are trying to soften the ground for the mediation so that the options will be clearly presented to Gbagbo," the UN official said on condition of anonymity.

"This is really a last chance for Ivory Coast, because they have exhausted all of their options, and the heads of state are growing tired of this."

Annan, who arrived in Abuja after lobbying for African debt relief at the annual World Economic Forum of the global elite in Davos, Switzerland, was expected to meet with reporters after the opening ceremony at the International Conference Centre.

- SAPA