EuropaWorld2 6/10/2001 Development Shaped Globalisation, the UN and the DR Congo

For Africa it has been a good week in Abuja but a bad one in Addis. In Abuja, African leaders came together to flesh on the bones of the New African Initiative, the grand plan, principally of Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, to pull the continent up by its bootstraps and set it on course to compete with the rest of the world. The plan was approved at the recent G8 Summit in Genoa and again at the Summit in Sirte which dissolved the old Organisation of African Unity in favour of an African Union - a transnational political and trading block modelled on the lines of its counterpart on the other shore of the Mediterranean.

Africa is held back in its development by past and present disasters many of which are not of its own making. If it is to develop, and we must remember that sub-Saharan Africa is the largest poor region in the world and horribly afflicted with AIDS, then it will need great encouragement and support from the rest of the world, not least in the area of trade.

This is a matter of some debate at the UN with a high level conference on the financing of development scheduled to take place next Spring in Mexico. The issue has been given added impetus by the terrorist attacks on September11th. The world now attaches greater attention to poverty issues than it did a few weeks ago.

The UN sees itself at the heart of this debate, or at least as leader of the orchestra. "There is an urgent need," writes UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in a recently released report on the UN's role in promoting development, "for a partnership encompassing the Governments of both developing and developed countries, international organisations, civil society and the private sector in order to ensure the adequate flow of resources, knowledge and technology to developing countries." Another global alliance perhaps.

In the same report he makes a plea for globalisation to somehow focused on developing countries - maybe through ensuring through tariff rules that developing countries get to process the raw materials they produce instead of exporting the materials to the developed world and then having to re-import, let's say, the high value added juice from their own pineapples.

"Development goals should shape the framework of globalisation rather than allowing the blind forces of globalisation to define the outcome of development," Annan concluded.

This is a breathtaking leap forward, or at least it will be if international society can come to a consensus for so doing. But in the aftermath of September 11th almost anything seems possible.

Even so Africa will still need to resolve its inherent conflicts before any such development shaped globalisation can begin to take effect. And this brings us to Addis Ababa and the failure at the weekend of the inter-Congolese dialogue, the talks under the chairmanship of Sir Ketumile Masire, that were supposed to have resolved the conflict at Africa's heart.

Much rested on a positive outcome. No one knows for sure how many people have died in this forgotten and overlooked conflict that some term Africa's first world war. Estimates run as high as two million. It is a war between the government and its allies who control one half of the country and the rebels and their allies who control the other. The fighting is principally over the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)'s vast mineral wealth.

Between the DRC armies supported by Angolan and Zimbabwean troops and the rebels supported by Rwanda and Uganda, there holds a tenuous cease fire broken sporadically by bouts of fighting. The UN is supposed to be operating a peace mission but the armies of the belligerents do not trust each other and refuse to withdraw to agreed positions, without which the UN forces cannot deploy effectively. The conflict has led to death, to crop failure, to human rights abuses, to environmental and conservation disasters. In addition it is bleeding the participants of their small resources of wealth. It is a conflict that nobody needs but to which no-one can see a solution.

And yet the conflict is too important, the stakes are too high, for it not to be resolved. If Africa is serious about promoting a union, and the UN is serious about globalisation being shaped by the needs of development, then a solution must be found.