Consensus reached on regional security organ

A compromise has been reached after three-years of deadlock on the future of the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) controversial politics, defence and security organ. A two-day meeting of the SADC Inter-State Defence and Security Committee (ISDSC) and ministers of foreign affairs ended on Wednesday in Swaziland with the recommendation that the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security should be subordinate to the SADC summit structure. The organ, the ministers proposed, would be led by a troika of heads-of-state, answering directly to the chairman of the SADC summit. According to the meeting’s communiqué, a committee of ministers of foreign affairs would also join the existing ISDSC, draft protocols covering the operation of the organ would be refined, and the crucial issue of a permanent secretariat for the organ would be put to a feasibility study. “It’s great progress,” Cedric de Coning of the African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes (ACCORD) told IRIN this week. “Coming from the context of the past impasse, this demonstrates the political will to make compromises and reach consensus.” However, according to one government official present at the Swaziland meeting, problems could remain. “The meeting was controversial,” the official said. “We must have at the back of our minds that this is a proposal which has to be endorsed by SADC heads-of-state and government.” The dispute over the status of the SADC organ has prevented its effective operationalisation since it was launched in 1996. Controversy has surrounded its legal status, its relationship with the SADC summit, the lack of a professional secretariat, and its “over-militarised” view of conflict resolution. The difference of opinion was popularly characterised as a battle between Zimbabwe - which favoured an organ separate from the SADC summit with its own chairmanship - and South Africa that argued there was no legal basis for an autonomous security body. The Swaziland communiqué is “a way forward, but the devil is in the detail,” Mark Malan of the Institute of Security Studies, told IRIN.