A Continent wakes up to realities. The recent Euro-African meetings and certain initiatives taken by Africa are, to my mind, positive as they indicate that Africans are becoming aware of the need to take their destiny in hand. External contributions are in themselves sterile if not accompanied by effective internal actions. In the EU, we know these rules full well, with our regions lagging behind: funding for regional policy is only effective if well used. It is not those European regions that have received the most money that have advanced most, but those that have managed to best use this funding and create appropriate activities around infrastructures funded by the EU. Likewise, money that arrives can even represent a negative element, in fact financing corruption and organised crime.
The same goes for Africa. Objective analyses have established the order of factors that determine the economic, food, social and health disasters that a large part of the Black Continent has experienced. The first factor is the internal conflicts that continue to rage in Africa; the second, is the condition of women, which deprive African countries of their inestimable contribution to peaceful, better balanced and more sensitive development; the third is the corruption of the political and military classes; the fourth are prohibitions of a religious nature like, for example, against the use of preservatives or other methods that would help combat AIDS and help control the increase in the population. External causes also play an important role, but they are second fiddle. Even the question of the debt needs considering with caution. At least twice, I have felt passionately united with those demanding the total cancellation of the debt of African countries. A first time, when an NGO had calculated the number of schools an African country could build if the weight of its debt was eased; the debts was lightened but a year later no school had been built. According to some observers, the money essentially served to buy weapons and bolster secret bank accounts in Switzerland. The second calculation to have struck me was the impossibility, for another African country to set up a minimum health network due to the weight of the interests of the debt; in this case too the weight of the debt was eased. We are still waiting for indications at to this health network.
Those who dare speak. I am aware of the disagreeable nature of these remarks, and I would not have dared express them so crudely had I not observed that certain African leaders were now themselves denouncing the internal responsibilities of the current situation. For my part, I risk nothing in writing what I do; they, they risk their political futures and sometimes more. It's to them that the admiration of honest people should go and the recognition of the populations. May I recall certain phrases spoken at the beginning of the month by Amadou Toumani Toure, former Head of State of Mali, before an audience of European and African officials and experts in aid to development, and in the presence of the President of the EU Development Council: "The conflicts in Africa sap development and threaten the Continent's very survival (…), it is wrong to say that that underdevelopment is the single cause of conflicts as there are poor countries in which there is no conflict (…), poverty is one of the causes of conflict, plus corruption, plus the privilege of impunity (….), instead of letting our armies specialise in preparing coups d'Etats, it would be better to train them in peacekeeping (…), without conflict prevention, aid serves to shelter and feed refugees" (see our bulletin of 4 October, p. 10).
Mr. Toure is no isolated case. The Under Secretary of State of the ACP Group, Pa'o H. Luteru, recently declared: "we ACP countries note that to succeed in eradicating poverty, peace and political security must reign in our countries", stressing that 17 ACP countries were subjected to sanctions or were in a consultation phase with the EU for non-compliance with the Cotonou Agreement. The Kenyan member of the Africa Peace Forum noted that the seven countries of the Horn of Africa had not known a single day of peace over the past 50 years. This awareness represents a precondition to any effective action, be it under the "New African Initiative" formally presented by the EU to several ACP Heads of Government, or to implement the EU-Africa action plan approved by the Euro-African Summit of April 2000, or for the success of the African Union that is to replace the OAU.
Avoiding new red tape. The EU did not agree to create new bodies or new financial instruments for these goals, and some commentators expressed a certain amount of disappointment here. I don't agree with them. The cost of additional red tape wastes part of the resources that have to be devoted to actions on the ground, and the financial resources that the EU places at the disposal of economic co-operation with Africa (leaving the problem of the debt aside) are sufficient for now. The instrument for the promotion of investments, created under the Cotonou agreement and with a budget of 2.2 billion euro, will soon be operational; let's start using it wisely. The second Euro-African Summit is scheduled for early-2003 in Lisbon; it will then be possible to make an initial assessment, without forgetting that the priorities of the preparatory work concern conflict prevention, sound management of public affairs, human rights and democracy, regional and sub-regional integration, that is to say all areas in which the actions of the Africans is a priority. Europe may provide its support and contribution, but can do nothing without initiatives on the ground.
Terrorism is the worst enemy of development in Africa. That's not all. If they want to overcome their difficulties, African countries must also engage in a robust fight against terrorism, that is their primary external enemy. The President of the World Bank, James D. Wolfensohn wrote: "Due to terrorist attacks, growth will exhaust itself in developing countries, sending additional millions of human beings into poverty and causing the deaths of tens of thousands of children through malnutrition, disease and poverty (…). It is possibly Africa, Continent that is currently deploying much effort to improve its situation, that will suffer most from the fallout of the terrorist attacks". Yet, last week's efforts of the President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade to organise a common anti-terrorism front in Black Africa was not a great success. Several absentees (Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa), and the observation that so far only three countries have ratified the Convention Against Terrorism, signed in 1999 in Algiers under the auspices of the OAU. Mr. Wade expressed the hope that the Dakar meeting should at least have served "to raise the awareness of Africans to the question of terrorism", so that Africa no longer is "a sieve for evil-doers of all types".
Denunciation of Nadine Gordimer. At a general level, Black Africa has its specific problems and difficulties that are not necessarily those of other developing regions. Nobel Prize Winner Nadine Gordimer, South African writer who has devoted her life to the fight against apartheid, having attended a part of the UN Conference against racism (in Durban last month) stated in an article that African demands had to a great extent failed due to the attitude of the Arab delegations, which had focused their efforts on an attempt to have the UN recognise the Zionism amounted to racism and on other extreme positions against Israel. It is known that - with the United States and Israel having pulled out - the conference was saved in extremis - by Europe's efforts at a compromise, which, in particular, allowed for the approval of some fundamental principles in favour of Africans, in the form of compensation for the ravages it had suffered in the past due to slavery. The Conference declared that all forms of slavery was today to be considered as a crime against humanity, and, for the past, recognised that the Westerners owed a debt in the form of aid to development in Africa: infrastructures, communications systems, social systems in countries of the origin of slavery. Ms. Gordimer considers as inadmissible that the same obligation should not be made of Arab countries, as - according to information at her disposal - Westerners (Europe and the United States) are responsible for 11 million 863,000 black slaves, and the Arabs 11 million, 512,000, or almost identical figures. She adds: "In Mauritania and Sudan, the Arabs are still practising slavery up to the time I write these words".
The negative role of certain NGOs. The minimum compromise that the Conference reached thanks to the efforts on the ground of the Presidency of the EU Council and the European Commission was regarded by the European Parliament as "acceptable", Parliament which did, on the other hand "deplore" the conduct of the NGO Forum, whose text prior to the Conference had been rejected by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, so partisan and excessive did it seem. Parliament called for the arrangements of the organisation of these Fora to be studied so as to avoid particular groups using them for partisan purposes. Council President Louis Michel told MEPs that the conduct of NGOs in Durban had been "dubious and not at all democratic", and again expressed his concerns as to their representative nature. And European Commissioner Anna Diamantopulou deplored the "language of hate" that characterised certain texts of NGOs, which, according to her, slid towards the racism that the UN Conference had as aim to combat (see article on the EP debate in our bulletin of 5 October, p.5). Serious NGOs must be wary of other organisations that, on the contrary, only play a negative role, sowing hate and totally uninterested in developing countries, human rights, the environment and other noble goals that justify and honour the very existence of NGOs (in Durban, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights distanced themselves from the conclusions of the aforementioned Forum). (F.R.)