Gathering of leaders may signal new regional approach

Heads of state from countries in and around the Great Lakes region are set to take part in a two-day conference starting on Friday in Dar es Salaam that has been 20 years on the making.

With top international officials expected, including UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and the current chairman of the African Union, Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the conference aims to consolidate the current post-conflict transitional peace processes taking place in various countries in the region.

"The challenge is to focus on the few all-encompassing principles that reflect a shared understanding of how the region can ensure its collective security and development," Anne Leahy, Canada’s newly appointed ambassador for the Great Lakes, told IRIN.

Canada, along with Netherlands, is co-chairing a group of 28 member-states and 10 international organisations known as The Friends of the Great Lakes, which provide political, technical and financial support to the conference.

Donors have, so far, pledged US $6.5 million, Leahy said; the conference process is expected to cost $10 million. UNDP is administering the money through a trust fund.

In each country in the region a series of consultative meetings started in June 2003 with civil society and government. These paved the way to regional preliminary meetings to draft an all-encompassing Declaration of Principles on the Consolidation of Security, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes region.

The region’s heads of state are expected to sign the declaration at the November summit, then other regional meetings will devise mechanisms by which to implement the declaration and a final second summit is planned for the second half of 2005.

Years in the making

"Bringing together the leaders in this region has been no small undertaking," said George Ola-Davies, spokesman for the Office of the Special Representative of UN Secretary-General for the Great Lakes, which is the key to its organisation.

Violence continues within and across borders and governments in the region frequently accuse each other. "Yet I think that now there is a more favourable climate in the region, at least more than there has been in the last couple of years," Ola-Davies said.

Moreover, he added: "The international community is more aware than ever that the problems in countries in the region are not going to go away unless the countries and donors take a more coordinated regional approach."

Leahy recalled that 20 years ago French President François Mitterrand was pushing for a regional summit. "But the idea only got traction following the genocide in Rwanda," she said.

Ola-Davies recalled the Organisation of African Unity's (OAU) support for such a conference in June 1995. In January 1997, Annan nominated Mohamed Sahnoun as joint UN-OAU Special Representative for the Great Lakes.

Since then the UN Security Council has passed resolutions concerning conflicts in the region that mention the need for a regional conference.

"The need became particularly clear after 1998 when the conflict in the DRC become internationalised," Ola-Davies said.

In January 2000, Annan appointed another Special Representative for the Great Lakes, Berhanu Dinka. The aim, according to a UN statement at the time, was to "raise the profile of the UN within the international community's efforts to address the deteriorating situation in Burundi".

In 2000, Dinka became the UN's special representative solely responsible for Burundi. The position of the UN's regional special representative fell to Ibrahima Fall, who had been Assistant Secretary General for the UN Department of Political Affairs.

"Fall then focused on trying to pull off this conference," Ola-Davies said. "He views it not just as a means of ending the region's conflicts but as the start of more meaningful cooperation in the region."

Ola-Davies said: "To people who ask the question, why don't you settle for just peace and security? We put it back to them. How do you get peace and security without economic stability, without regional integration and without effective humanitarian and social policies?"

On the agenda of the conference are regional cooperation projects on energy and creating new links by rail, road and waterways as well as pipelines and fibre optic cables.

"Most of all, the conference aims at foster interdependence," Ola-Davies said. "The more nations in the region see that their own advancement as dependent on the advancement of those around them, the more they will seek ways to avoid violent conflict."

Who is taking part?

Countries of the Great Lakes include Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Uganda. Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia are core members while Angola, the Central African Republic (CAR), Sudan and the Republic of Congo (ROC) joined in September.

"Bringing these countries in was important for ensuring the logic and coherence of the conference," Fall recently told the Security Council. "The goal was to involve everyone involved in the Great Lakes region."

Ola-Davies added: "Everything that happens in the region, especially in the DRC, has repercussions in these countries. There is the spill over of refugees to the ROC. When war broke out in the DRC, Angola came in and it has been hosting refugees just as the DRC has been hosting millions of Angolan refugees."

Also in the conference process are so-called "coopted countries" of the region, namely Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

"But we have had to find a balance," Ola-Davies said. "The conference could involve almost all African countries but if it gets too big it will not be able to achieve anything."

Starting with the grassroots

The conference process began with "national consultations", which included local civil society. Religious groups, parliamentarians, trade unions, and other civil society groups need to give their input to the national preparatory committees. This buy in, Leahy said, was a "key to the process".

The head of each national committee has been drawn from government as well as civil society.

Civil society representatives have also met regionally. Youth groups from countries in the region met in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, in September; women’s groups met in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, and NGOs met in Arusha, Tanzania, at the end of September.

In October 78 civil society actors and academics from all core and co-opted countries, as well as Eritrea and Somalia, gathered in Nairobi to coordinate a set of recommendations for the regional conference.

Meanwhile, three preliminary regional meetings were held. The first, in Bujumbura in September, was essentially a brainstorming session for declaration, Ola-Davies said. At the second, in Kinshasa in October, participants discussed the first draft of the declaration as well as a welcomed new core members states Angola, CAR, ROC and Sudan.

The final preliminary meeting in Kampala in early November, was a "polishing" Ola-Davies said, in which differences between states on key issues were discussed.

Foreign ministers meet in Dar es Salaam on Tuesday and Wednesday to finalise the draft declaration that will then be handed to heads of state for signing.

Seeking a common vision

Leahy said already the preliminary meetings had achieved a lot simply by getting representatives of warring countries to sit down and talk about their difference.

"They have argued for 48 hours but the point is that they are talking," she said.

One of the hottest has been the nationality of Tutsis born in the DRC, many of whom have become refugees in neighbouring Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania.

Many of the DRC's non-Tutsis population see Tutsis as foreigners from Rwanda and Burundi who have no place in their country. Tutsis born in the DRC, and elsewhere, disagree.

Memories of the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda were recently revived with the massacre on 13 August of Congolese Tutsis in Gatumba, a transit camp on the Burundi side of the Burundi-DRC border.

Thousands of Hutus from Rwandan’s former army who led the genocide have been held up in eastern DRC and Rwandan President Paul Kagame has said that Rwanda could again intervene in the DRC if they are not disarmed. The Hutu forces implicated in the 1994 genocide "are armed to the teeth in the DRC", he said earlier in November as reported in the Kigali newspaper, The New Times.

Representatives at the preliminary conferences have also been using the conference process to seek an agreement among states in the region to respect national borders.

The agreement is designed to stop states ever again using the territory of third party states to stage wars, a reference to the war in eastern DRC in which the armies of the Uganda and Rwanda fought each other.

Kinshasa is seeking further agreement regarding one country looting the raw materials of another. The representatives of Rwanda and Uganda countries are displeased about this, according to sources attending the preliminary conference, particularly as the DRC is seeking reparations.

Yet, despite what Fall has called these "delicate issues", the tendency has been towards consensus, he told the Security Council recently.

"The focus has been on the common vision," Leahy said

Governments in the region are aware of the need for coordination in the management of common borders, in combating crime, disengagement, disarmament, reconstruction and reintegration.

Representatives in the preliminary meetings have also been looking further to, for example, creating a regional economic body along the lines, for example, of the Southern Africa Development Community to simplify and encourage cross border trade.

Such an instrument already exists in the Great Lakes. The Economic Community of the Great Lakes Countries (CEPGL) was formed in 1976 with Burundi, Rwanda and the former Zaire to promote regional economic cooperation and integration, but it is now inactive.

President Kabila was recently reported as saying that the CEPGL should be subsumed into a new Great Lakes organisation that is expected to be created as a consequence of the conference.

Conference representatives are also discussing regional approaches to improving the rule of law, women's rights and health issues, particularly in combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other pandemic diseases.

Also the promotion and protection of human rights is one of the priority areas, as well as developing a regional policy on education that deals with issues of peace, tolerance and multiculturalism.

"States in the region each have very different ways of operating," Ola-Davies said. "But it is now clear to all of them that if they want real stability many of their policies and institution must be regionalised."