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Europe seeks cure for chronic war crippling Africa

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.

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 U.N. 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.

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."-Reuters