Security organ reborn

After years of controversy, southern Africa's reconstituted regional security organ is to meet in Angola next week, a South African foreign ministry statement said on Thursday.

The 17-18 December meeting will be the first fully fledged meeting of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Organ on Politics, Defence and Security Cooperation since the SADC protocol that formally established the organ was signed in August in Blantyre, Malawi.

During that summit, Mozambique was chosen as the chair of the organ with Tanzania and Zimbabwe making up the rest of a rotating troika that would head the organisation.

The Blantyre meeting followed an extraordinary summit in Namibia earlier in the year where it was agreed to restructure the organ and end its independence from the main SADC body. The move was seen as a diplomatic defeat for Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe who led the organ from inception in 1996, and controversially used it to justify the deployment of Zimbabwean, Angolan and Namibian forces into the Congo in 1998.

Since the Congo intervention, the organ has been effectively moribund. SADC was split between countries supporting Zimbabwe's position, and those in favour of a negotiated settlement and diluted powers for the chair of the organ.

South African foreign affairs spokesman Ronnie Mamoepa told IRIN the Luanda meeting was significant as it was the first meeting since SADC subordinated the organ "to the political will of the collective leadership".

He said the Luanda ministerial meeting was expected to discuss the development of a strategy to operationalise the organ. In addition, the meeting would review the political situation in the region including the issue of international terrorism.