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Copyright (C) Reuters Limited 2000.
Reuters English News Service
July 9, 2000
HEADLINE: African leaders in Togo, summit boycott takes toll.
BYLINE: Nicholas Phythian
LOME, July 9 (Reuters) - African leaders arrived in Togo on Sunday for
their annual summit but a boycott led by Angola and other likely
absences put a question mark over any meaningful discussions on the
conflicts plaguing the continent.
By nightfall, more than 20 of the OAU's 53 heads of state or government
had arrived, including Sierra Leone's Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and Uganda's
Yoweri Museveni, who with Rwanda has troops in the Democratic Republic
of Congo backing rebels.
Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, keen to persuade the more than 30 presidents
expected to attend Monday's 36th Organisation of African Unity summit to
embrace his dream of a fully fledged African federation, had set up his
tent at a beachfront hotel where bodyguards frisked everyone entering or
leaving.
South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, who was expected along with Nigeria's
Olusegun Obasanjo, had said Africa must tackle the twin evils of
conflict and the killer disease AIDS.
The continent has just lived through one of its worst years for conflict
since independence in the 1960s with peace deals struck in the Congo and
Sierra Leone and then flouted.
The absence of Angola, which helped prop up Congolese President Laurent
Kabila after the rebels took up arms against him in 1998, appeared to
damage any attempt at the summit to halt the complex conflict at the
heart of the continent.
ANGOLA ACCUSING TOGO
Kabila was boycotting the summit out of solidarity with Angola, which
accuses host Togo of helping rebels fighting the Angolan government by
trading in diamonds they have mined.
Namibia's Sam Nujoma, another Kabila ally, was also staying away and
there was a question mark over the attendance of Kabila's main backer,
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
The likely absence of Liberia's Charles Taylor, who is close to Sierra
Leone's rebels and has been mandated by its West African neighbours to
end their defiance of a 1999 peace deal, was likely to scupper any
fruitful discussion of that conflict.
Ethiopia and Eritrea halted their bloody two-year border war in June
after outgoing OAU chairman Abdelaziz Bouteflika brokered a truce. While
Ethiopian premier Meles Zenawi was expected to attend, Eritrean
President Isayias Afewerke was not.
With so many absences, the spotlight was set to be on Gaddafi, who wants
to push the continent beyond the long-term goal of a loosely knit
African Union that won broad approval in his home town of Sirte in
September 1999.
Gaddafi, who has helped tiny Togo foot the bill for the summit, arrived
on Saturday after a symbolic overland trek from Libya that took him
through Niger, Burkina Faso and Ghana. Huge portraits of him, supplied
by Libya, adorned the border.
"The African Union will be discussed here," Gaddafi's Africa pointman,
Ali Tureiki, told Reuters at the border with Ghana, adding with a
twinkle that the overland trek and the debate to come were not
unconnected.
Delegates said on Sunday that ministers who have spent three days trying
to finalise a draft legal framework for the proposed Union, which
follows the European model rather than the federal U.S. model Libya
wanted, had yet to find a workable compromise.
NEW INSTITUTIONS
"We agree on the need to set up an African Union but there are
differences over the powers of certain of its institutions," Chadian
delegate Moundoum Golngar told Reuters. He singled out the heads-of-
state conference and a proposed executive council.
Angola's president, Jose Eduardo dos Santos, had called for the summit
to be moved after a U.N.-sponsored report linked Togo's veteran
president, Gnassingbe Eyadema, to trade in the diamonds that feed the
war effort of Angola's UNITA rebels.
Kabila's information minister, Didier Mumengi, said on Saturday his
country supported Angola and would not go to Lome.
Eyadema, who seized power in 1967 and is Africa's longest-serving
leader, takes over from Bouteflika on Monday as the new chairman of the
OAU. The summit ends on Wednesday.
Like Ivory Coast's late founding president, Felix Houphouet-Boigny,
Eyadema was a Cold War ally of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi when he was
fighting dos Santos and his then-Marxist government in Luanda.
But times have changed and now Savimbi is the villain, blamed for the
collapse of a 1994 peace deal and ostracised by the international
community.
The reason for Taylor's absence was not immediately clear. On July 5,
the U.N. Security Council banned diamond exports from Sierra Leone and
named Liberia as a conduit in a thriving trade that, as in Angola,
sustains the rebels there.
Another reason may be insecurity at home. His government accused exiled
opponents at the weekend of staging a cross-border raid from Guinea.
(with additional reporting by John Zodzi and Anne Boher)
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Copyright (C) Reuters Limited 2000.
Reuters English News Service
July 8, 2000
HEADLINE: Annan urges trial for S.Leone rebel Sankoh.
BYLINE: Kwaku Sakyi-Addo
ACCRA, July 8, (Reuters) - Foday Sankoh, the rebel leader being held by
Sierra Leone authorities, should face trial for war crimes despite an
amnesty enshrined in a 1999 peace accord, United Nations Secretary-
General Kofi Annan said.
"I don't think we should allow impunity to stand," Annan told Reuters in
an interview late on Friday, a year to the day after Sankoh signed a
peace accord with Sierra Leone's government.
Speaking in Accra, capital of his native Ghana, en route to next week's
Organisation of African Unity summit in Lome, the capital of
neighbouring Togo, Annan said the possibility of trying Sankoh was under
serious discussion.
"I think it's going to happen," he said.
Annan said Sankoh's trial could go ahead despite an amnesty granted in
the peace accord signed last year by Sankoh and the Sierra Leone
government in Lome. He said crimes against humanity and genocide should
not go unpunished.
"We reserved our right at a future date to deal with those who had
committed such crimes," Annan said. "We should not get the impression
out - not in this region, not in any part of the world - that impunity
is allowed to stand and people can get away with these sorts of
atrocities."
The United Nations officially objected to the scope of the amnesty at
the time the deal was signed.
Others have said that even if the amnesty is respected, Sankoh could
face charges on crimes committed since the signing of the agreement on
July 7, 1999.
MIXED LOCAL-INTERNATIONAL COURT
Sierra Leone's president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, wrote to Annan in June to
propose a court with a mix of local and foreign prosecutors and judges.
It would sit in Sierra Leone if the security situation permitted.
Civil war in Sierra Leone flared up again in May when Sankoh's RUF took
hostage hundreds of United Nations peacekeepers and tried to advance on
the capital Freetown.
Former colonial power Britain sent crack troops to secure Freetown,
support the loyalist army and help put the U.N. mission back on track.
The RUF released the peacekeepers after the intervention of Liberian
President Charles Taylor, who has close connections with the group going
back to his own days as a rebel leader in Liberia's civil war.
Sankoh himself was captured in May by pro-government forces days after
gunmen protecting him at his Freetown home fired into a crowd of
demonstrators, killing at least 19 people.
Diamonds mined in the rebel-held east of Sierra Leone are blamed for
fuelling a nine-year war characterised by widespread rape, civilian
killings, violent amputations of limbs and the forcible recruitment of
child fighters.
Annan said the United Nations would work with the government to extend
its administration to diamond mining areas "so that this natural gift
that has been given to the people of Sierra Leone will be exploited for
their benefit."
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Copyright 2000 Concord Times.
Distributed via Africa News Online by Africa News Service.
July 8, 2000
HEADLINE: One year of Lome: forward or backward?
BYLINE: Abu Bakarr Talib Jalloh Concord Times
Freetown - Today, we are commemorating, rather than celebrating, the
first anniversary of the signing of the Lome Peace Agreement. The
document is still regarded as the lifeline of the country's survival or
like Kabbah would say, "it is still viable". Where do we start to
evaluate this one-year old peace deal? Is the deal still respectable?
The Western diplomatic notion of getting adversaries on a round table,
have them bargain, and put pen to paper and sign so that all will be
well may have now evaporated, at least in the Sierra Leonean situation.
This initiative is failing here, or so it seems.
Exhibitions: there certainly has been an increase in violence and
hostilities, the level of banditry is mounting, rape and murder have
resumed like they had never been eased for a moment, displacement and
forceful separation of family members are assuming a renewed
acceleration, and..and..and.
Nobody expected that such unpleasantaries and oddities of life would
have ceased immediately just by the grace of the Lome Agreement,
although the peace brokers agreed that the crucial aspect of the
process, disarmament, should be completed 90 days after July 7, 1999. No
one had anticipated too that one year after the ink had dried on the
accord, one of its principal signatories, Foday Sankoh, would remain
incommunicado and in detention in a "secret location" for failing to
come to terms with the demands and calling of constitutionality and
humanity. Serves him right, you might agree, if you care to put into
perspective his ordering and supervision of the cold blooded murder in
daylight of some 21 peace demonstrators (may their souls rest in peace).
One year on, UNSAMSIL could still not understand that diplomacy is not
the language of the outfit of machete carriers parading as
"revolutionaries". The rebels thus continue to conceive the timidity (or
is it?) of UNAMSIL as stupidity, and to a certain degree, inability. The
message has been weighing heavily; only a robust force that trades
bullets for bullets would persuade the RUF to comply and disarm, yet
here we have some 233 peacekeepers, all but 11, armed in a standoff in
Kailahun.
General Vijay Kumah Jetley of UNAMSIL says the trust and confidence that
made Lome possible have suffered considerably. I add, Sierra Leoneans'
confidence that the UN would not fail here, like they did in Somalia and
Rwanda, is waning with the rapidity of the mythical White Horse flying
for dear life.
What may also appear as the beginning of the end to unify the "un-
unifiables", is the on-going fighting between the Westside Boys and the
SLRs. The attempt to bring together the SLAs (both AFRC and SLRs) and
the civil defence force into a formidable pro-government unit in a
desperate bid to strangulate the RUF is, in hindsight, a failed
experiment to reconcile the irreconcilables.
Then, who is to be trusted? Who do we turn to for protection? Who upon
receiving arms and ammunition from government would not put aside his
protector amour and put on his predator gown? I really do not mean to be
cynical, although cynicisms often flow in naturally, spontaneously in
this kind of situations. On the other end of the score-board is the thus
far irrevocable commitment of the international community to help us out
materially and financially, UNAMSIL is still in the country in spite of
reverses it has suffered, the tested resolve of the AFRC leadership to
work for peace is illuminating, parliament is gradually taking its place
in articulating the people's aspirations (but for the Income Tax Act),
Kabbah is still president, a few child soldiers have been reunited with
their families, and press freedom is largely in place.
Above all, the concept which was the clarion call prior to the accord,
that of, "Peace at all Cost," has handed over the baton to "Peace with
Justice". This is something to celebrate. Bringing justice to bear on
the defaulters of the accord would not only seal the ugly pale of
impunity but would also provide the dose of deterrent needed to end the
circle of violence in the country. One may add that it has the
therapeutic effect of enabling the war victims purging off the feeling
of "the uncared for" by witnessing their tormentor being dealt with.
Such are the high and the low of the one-year old peace accord. Bottom
line is, there is yet no peace to keep. What's to be done then? First
and foremost, the international dimension to the conflict, the much-
vaunted role of rogue sub regional states, begs for more attention and
redressing. This will also be an attempt to deal with the economic
underpinnings of the conflict; the arms for diamond affair for which
Liberia and Burkina Faso come in the fray. Until the question of which
country particularly Liberia gets what percent of Sierra Leone's
diamond, from which source and by what arrangement, peace will keep
lurking in space.
Liberia's Taylor should also be pressured to extradite fugitives like
Sam 'Maskita' Bockarie, former RUF Field Commander. Bockarie had
accepted via international media that he is training some 2,000 men in
Liberia to launch an attack on Sierra Leone. What else would question
Taylor's insincerity to restoring peace in Sierra Leone more than
abetting, witting or unwitily, directly or indirectly, someone planning
to launch a fresh assault on Sierra Leone? If Taylor is to continue to
claim credibility as part of the solution to the problem in Sierra
Leone, he should cease compounding the problem and one sure way of doing
this is to first hand over to the Sierra Leone government people like
Bockarie and, second, desist from playing host to any of his sort.
Then cease-fire? This is certainly a logical prerequisite for peace. It
is not a matter of whether we need it; it's a question of when and on
which conditions. For this to be, we need first to identify a leader for
the RUF, one that government can business with, (this is endorsing that
Sankoh is out completely). Then UNAMSIL should deploy everywhere
especially the strategic areas of Kono and Makeni- a robust force with
mandate to answer force to force is highly recommended in this regard.
Significantly, the Kabbah administration, hitherto perceived as the
grand signature of indecision, ineptitude and prevarication, must cease,
as it is often said, playing the victim and strive to be the victor-
designate. There is no point, for instance, for the governor to tell the
governed "I knew of this", say a military coup plot, after it has failed
to do something to prevent it. It is a show of weakness and
incapability. Kabbah should, like any president, be more assertive in
dealing with law breakers and this include both ceasefire violators and
corrupt public service officials, he can demonstrate his no- nonsense
mood by giving the RUF a deadline to nominate other people to fill in
Ministerial positions (this pre- supposes that those in detention now
are stripped of their jobs), or simply appoint other people rather than
doubling port folios for people who are yet to perform in the initial
ministries they have, he can initiate practicable policies especially
with regards economic revival and the extermination of corruption.
Until this is done, I'm afraid, we shall also commemorate this symbolic
day of peace next year. Our appetite to celebrate it is deep, very deep
indeed; so let the people's will have its way. Happy one-year peace
anniversary. Or is it?
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