- Title: [SW News] (REUTERS) Europe seeks cure for chronic war crippling
Africa
- From:[]
- Date :[ Sun, 2 Apr 2000 12:22:36 ]
*** A typical snapshot of Africa taken any time over the past 30 years would
show a bloody splattering of wars over a chequered background of poverty,
chronic underdevelopment and halting progress. ***
Europe seeks cure for chronic war crippling Africa
By Douglas Hamilton
Cairo - A typical snapshot of Africa taken any time over the past 30 years
would show a bloody splattering of wars over a chequered background of
poverty, chronic underdevelopment and halting progress.
As European Union and African leaders gather in Cairo for their first summit
this week, the picture seen by potential but risk-conscious foreign
investors is scarcely any brighter.
Revenue from the export of basic commodities has shrunk, along with global
market share, and debt is cripplingly high.
But war's impact as a multiplier of misery is nowhere more evident than on
this sprawling continent, the world's poorest. Today, armed conflict still
bedevils a dozen African states and political instability stalks a dozen
more.
The World Food Programme is warning that 12 million people in the Horn of
Africa face famine as a result of drought, crop failure and population
upheaval aggravated by endless fighting.
The EU-Africa summit participants can agree that there is no better time for
a fresh start on collaborative efforts to break the cycle than the dawn of a
new century.
The EU advocates remedies of good governance, respect for human rights and
active conflict prevention. But African leaders say economic unfairness and
other lingering hangovers of colonialism are the evils that must first be
cured.
Bright spots out-numbered
European Commissioner for External Relations Chris Patten said on Saturday
in Cairo that European public opinion was too often presented with Africa as
"a source for disaster stories".
"Some things have gone extraordinarily well in the last few years," Patten
said, citing as one example Mozambique's heroic efforts to "pull itself up
by its own sandal straps".
The peaceful transition of South Africa from whites-only rule is Africa's
brightest success story, but hardly typical.
Of the world's 48 poorest countries, where people survive on less than $1 a
day, 33 are in Africa, and nearly all are racked by civil war, according to
the United Nations.
A comprehensive report for UN Secretary General Kofi Annan says: "Africa as
a whole has begun to make significant economic and political progress in
recent years, but in many parts of the continent progress remains threatened
or impeded by conflict.
"Since 1970 more than 30 wars have been fought in Africa, the vast majority
of them intra-state in origin," it says.
Today there is armed conflict of varying intensity in Algeria, Angola,
Eritrea and Ethiopia, both Congos, Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi, and Somalia.
Zimbabwe, Uganda and Namibia are involved in Congo's convoluted civil war;
violent civil disturbances afflict Nigeria, and power struggles threaten
stability in the Comoros, Guinea-Bissau and a half dozen other African
states.
Bloody clashes in Harare on Saturday raised the spectre of serious unrest
over the continuing autocratic rule of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's only
president since independence in 1980.
The colonial heritage left by French, British, Italian, German and
Portuguese governors, who once ruled from Cairo to the Cape, is scarcely at
the root of all of this.
Which man's burden?
EU leaders are expected to stress to their African counterparts at the Cairo
conference that such a pattern of instability cannot attract global
investment to the continent in the volumes that its true human and resource
potential merits.
It is no accident that the EU has already created relations with Asia and
Latin America at levels Africa has yet to acquire.
"More than three decades after African countries gained their independence,
there is growing recognition among Africans themselves that the continent
must look beyond its colonial past for the causes of current conflicts," the
Annan report said.
"Africa must look at itself."
But some Europeans still feel a special responsibility to help African
states adapt and survive in the new global economy.
At a conference of European bishops in Brussels on Friday, Bishop of
Rotterdam Adrianus van Luyn recalled a 50-year-old pledge made by Europe as
it set out to create today's Union.
"The Schuman Declaration of 9 May, 1950 says: 'Europe, with growing
prosperity, will be able to fulfil one of its most essential
responsibilities: the development of the African continent'," the bishop
said.
"It is time to make good on an old promise."
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