South Africa moots regional summit meeting

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa on Monday expressed optimism about getting the Lusaka peace process back on track, and said he hoped for an agreement within the next week on the convening of a regional summit meeting on the DRC, the BBC reported. “Everybody wants to move the process forward as quickly as possible, and I’m quite sure that in a period of perhaps the next seven days, everybody will have agreed as to where and when to meet,” Mbeki said at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The urgency South Africa attached to a resolution of the Congo crisis reflected the importance it attached to a wider recovery plan for Africa - one that would “move beyond this concept of the African continent as a hopeless continent”, the report quoted him as saying. Mbeki said he had discussed the idea of a DRC summit with Kofi Annan, and that the UN Secretary-General was keen to participate, the BBC added.