15 - 21 February 2001
Issue No.521
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 February 2001 Issue No.521 |
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African unity lives?
African leaders are meeting the Sudanese capital Khartoum for the third summit of the Community of Sahel and Saharan States (COMESSA), not to be confused with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern African States (COMESA).
COMESSA, also known as Sin-Sad -- derived from its Arabic acronym -- is one of Africa's newest and most ambitious regional associations. Since its inception in 1998, COMESSA has been viewed essentially as a political body, and not exclusively as a trade or economic group. Its founders saw COMESSA as a nucleus not only for the African common market, but also as the forerunner of the African Union, a political dream that has long eluded Organisation of African unity (OAU) members.
COMESSA, with 11 member states, is one of the largest economic groups in Africa. Four new members joined officially at the closing of the Khartoum summit -- Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Nigeria. The addition of Egypt and Nigeria, Africa's most populous country with 120 million inhabitants, will make COMESSA the continental association with the largest population. Already, COMESSA covers the largest land area, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east, and including countries in eastern, northern, western and central Africa. With the addition of the four new members, COMESSA will have a population of 350 million and will cover 40 per cent of Africa's total land mass.
Topping the agenda in Khartoum was the establishment of the African union. "The [COMESSA] summit is a first step towards the creation of the United States of Africa," the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, said on his arrival in Khartoum on Sunday.
Gaddafi also wants the COMESSA summit to sound out the repercussions of the Lockerbie affair. He has called for the immediate release of Abdel-Basset Al-Magrahi, sentenced to life imprisonment last week following what the Libyans insist was a stage-managed and predetermined political trial dealing with the downing of the PAN-AM flight, which killed 270 people in 1988 over the Scottish village of Lockerbie.
The Sudanese political crisis, with the enthusiastic prodding of the host nation, featured prominently. The Congolese crisis was also discussed.
There are other more closely-knit African associations, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), with 16 member nations. However, the dogged determination of Gaddafi, COMESSA's initiator and leading advocate, and his insistence that the leaders of COMESSA keep in close touch with one another and visit the Libyan capital Tripoli frequently, has ensured that there is an unmistakable political affinity and dynamism which set COMESSA apart from other more strictly economic and trade groups in Africa.
One of the problems besetting COMESSA in the past year is that a number of member states have been cast as international pariahs. Some of the African leaders gathered in Khartoum are under international suspicion for violating a United Nations ban on illegal diamond trading. A damning report prepared by Canada's United Nations Ambassador, Robert Fowler, named several of the leaders who flew to Khartoum to attend the COMESSA summit as being involved in an illegal arms-for-diamonds trade network. The Fowler report singled out presidents Blaise Compaore of Burkina Faso and Gnassingbe Eyadema of Togo, the current OAU chairman. The two men vigorously deny the charges, countering that their image was deliberately tarnished because of their close personal friendship with the Libyan leader.
Eyadema, who has been instrumental in garnering support for Gaddafi's African union project, attended the COMESSA summit, along with OAU Secretary-General Salim Ahmed Salim. Among the other visiting African leaders were Eritrea's Issaias Afeworki, Chad's Idriss Deby and Mali's Alpha Konare. Egypt was represented by Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.
The secretary of Libya's General People's Committee for African Affairs, Dr Ali Abdel-Salaam Al-Tereiki, also attended COMESSA's third summit. Libyan officials and diplomats are lobbying hard for OAU member states who have not ratified the African Union Treaty to do so before the OAU's summit in Sirte, Libya, on African union in March. The African union project has been signed by more than 30 OAU member states, but barely 10 have ratified it. The Khartoum COMESSA summit is widely seen as a dress rehearsal for next month's OAU meeting in Sirte.
Indeed, the OAU secretary-general told reporters in Khartoum that COMESSA and the OAU would convene a joint meeting in Tripoli on 21 February to look into ways of strengthening cooperation between the two continental organisations.
The Libyans also wanted the COMESSA summit to be a forum where the pressing domestic problems of some of their neighbours to the south, such as Sudan, Chad and Congo, would be aired and resolved. The Egyptian-Libyan initiative on resolving the Sudanese crisis and Libya's efforts to broker peace between the Chadian government and the opposition Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad, led by that country's former Defence Minister Youssouf Togoimi, were among the topics for discussion.
Sudan, for its part, wanted to legitimise the election of President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir. The visiting African leaders were invited to attend Al-Bashir's swearing-in ceremony, which was timed to coincide with the COMESSA summit.
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