DURBAN, South Africa - Nearly 40 years after the Organization of African Unity was formed to help rid the continent of colonialism, South African President Thabo Mbeki on Tuesday launched a successor agency to tackle modern Africa's morass of problems.

The African Union, an ambitious effort modeled on the European Union, is billed as Africa's first unified and homegrown attempt to address troubling issues from economic underdevelopment to widespread warfare to human rights violations. The goal is to lay the groundwork for the crippled continent's inclusion in the new globalized economy.

"There can be no sustainable development without peace, security and stability," warned Mbeki, the organization's first president, as representatives of 53 African nations gathered Tuesday in this seaside city's stadium amid jet flyovers, a cannon-fire salute and dancing by Zulu warriors.

Unlike its now-defunct predecessor, the African Union will have the power - at least on paper - to step into the affairs of nations where war crimes, severe human rights abuses or genocide are suspected. The new agreement envisions the creation of a continent-wide peacekeeping force, under the control of a Peace and Security Council modeled on the United Nations Security Council.

The union also will require members to promote democracy, by permitting free elections, free speech and other democratic aims.

In the long run, the organization hopes to unify the fragmented continent sufficiently to create an African justice court, African Monetary Fund, African Central Bank and a unified currency; in the shorter term it plans to establish a pan-African parliament with advisory powers.

"This is a moment of hope for our continent and its people," Mbeki said Tuesday. "Africa has convened to decide what to do about itself."

Actually achieving the ambitious aims may be another matter.

The continent has made strides toward democracy and policing its own violators of human and democratic rights in recent years, with notable successes in war-torn places such as Sierra Leone. But it has not had the stomach to deal with many democratic renegades, particularly old-guard liberation heroes such as Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, accused by his political opposition and some international observer groups of stealing that country's March elections.

On a continent with a post-colonial history of fiercely guarded sovereignty, a longstanding desire for consensus before action and plenty of leaders with checkered pasts, moving against violators of the new union's rules may be a tall order.

"In the greater African context there are still a lot of dinosaurs around and closets full of skeletons," said Hermann Hanekom, a current affairs consultant to the Pretoria-based Africa Institute. African Union members "are frightened, out of their own interest, to take Mugabe by the scruff," he said.

Solving some of Africa's problems - and shoring up its international reputation - is vital, however, analysts say.

Wars rage from Sudan to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, costing lives, eating up economic resources and scaring away investment. Poverty is the norm. Millions of Africans are dying of AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases, which are fast dropping the region's life expectancy, robbing the continent of trained workers and destroying the continent's social fabric.

Economic globalization has left behind the conflict-ridden region, which while geographically enormous accounts for less than 2 percent of the world's trade. Many of the continent's underdeveloped countries have economies less than the size of a U.S. city of 60,000 people, analysts say.

To improve the situation, African leaders say, the region must unite economically and politically and face up to its problems, including the bitter reality that one despot, corrupt president or ugly war can hold back the region at large.

"We have to take ourselves seriously if we want the world to take us seriously," said Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi. He called Tuesday for "peace through action and not mere rhetoric."

While denouncing the region's wars, however, arap Moi, who has led Kenya since 1978, dodged the contentious issue of longtime African leaders clinging to power beyond their constitutionally mandated terms.

Other African leaders lacking in democratic credentials - including Moammar Gadhafi of Libya, who has not held elections in three decades - also shared the stage Tuesday with Mbeki.

In many respects, the new African Union is intended as the political counterpart of an ambitious and parallel economic effort, the New Partnership for African Development, or NEPAD. That program, led primarily by South Africa and Nigeria, the continent's economic powerhouses, seeks to win billions of dollars in new foreign aid and investment for Africa by promising strengthened democracy on the continent and financial responsibility.

At the recent meeting of G8 industrial nations in Canada, NEPAD representatives sought an ambitious $64 billion in new investment and aid for the region. They walked away with an endorsement of the NEPAD effort, but little in the way of solid cash commitments. Democratic progress under the new African Union, presumably, could support future efforts to secure financing for the continent's development.

To win donor and investor backing, Africans must "actually resolve the conflicts that disfigure our continent," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofa Annan, a Ghana native. "And I do mean resolve them. Managing them is not enough."

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(c) 2002, Chicago Tribune.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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