Ten southern African leaders opened an annual summit here Sunday to discuss AIDS, poverty and the conflicts plaguing the region, but leaders of the group's two war-torn nations did not show.
Presidents Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola and Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are not attending the summit, although the wars in their nations figure highly in the meeting's agenda.
The 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) wants to build closer integration to boost regional development, but leaders addressing the opening said that could not happen until the AIDS pandemic and the two wars are resolved.
"Southern Africa must stand out as the one part of the continent where wars have become unfashionable. Our people are fed up with these endless wars. They want their leaders to be all peacemakers rather than war-mongerers," Malawian President Bakili Muluzi said in opening the summit.
"The conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of Angola are certainly retrogressive," he said.
Malawian officials here could not say why Dos Santos and Kabila failed to attend the summit. Kabila had been expected until the last minute, they said. The president of the national assembly is representing Angola, while the DRC sent its justice minister.
President France Albert Rene of Seychelles and Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth of Mauritius also stayed away from the summit.
In Blantyre, member states are hammering out details on how to streamline SADC and to build a permament staff of professionals -- instead of ad hoc teams of diplomats -- to run the organization.
The hope is that the institutional reforms will give SADC the teeth to resolve regional problems, including AIDS, poverty, wars and natural disasters.
At a special summit in March in Windhoek, the grouping agreed to replace its 19 sectors with four main directorates, with a more professional management that could act on behalf of all the member countries.
Reforms to the defense organ will remove some of its autonomy by pulling it closer to the secretariat and replacing Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe as its head.
Mugabe, who had held an open-ended tenure as head of the body, used his position to invoke SADC's name for his military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), irking then-SADC chief Nelson Mandela who had called for negotiations.
Three SADC members -- Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe -- have been embroiled in the DRC's conflict for three years. Namibia recently announced that it would withdraw, but Mugabe has shown no signs of intending to bring his estimated 12,000 troops home.
Angola is fighting a 26-year civil war against the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), and has deployed troops into the DRC and its southern neighbor Namibia in a bid to strangle the rebellion of its bases on foreign territory.
Salim Ahmed Salim, secretary general of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), said UNITA's ongoing attacks remained a source of "great concern."
He also praised Kabila for pushing forward a peace process in the DRC that his late father, Laurent Kabila, had left moribund before his assassination in January.
The wars and the AIDS pandemic -- which has hit southern Africa harder than any other region of the world -- complicate efforts to lower poverty in the region and to boost development.
SADC executive secretary Prega Ramsamy said that 40 percent of the more than 190 million people living in the region are in abject poverty, and he urged the leaders to come up with a concrete proposal for reducing poverty.
SADC groups Angola, Botswana, the DRC, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, the Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. |
