Calendar set for regional peace and development conference

A calendar of activities has been established leading to two summits on peace and development in the Great Lakes region - the first one scheduled for June 2004 - a UN official announced on Tuesday in Nairobi. Speaking at the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Gigiri, Nairobi, the special representative of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan for the Great Lakes region, Ibrahima Fall, said NGOs and civil society representatives would participate in the preparatory process for the summits. They would be incorporated into national preparatory committees of six "core" countries in the region, he said. Fall made the announcement at the end of a two-day meeting to launch the preparatory process for the international conference on peace, security and democracy for the Great Lakes. Participants at the meeting included UN and African Union (AU) officials dealing with the Great Lakes region, and representatives of the six countries of the region - Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Fall said that before the June 2004 summit, three regional preparatory committee meetings would be held, as well as a series of meetings at national level. The AU Special Representative to the Great Lakes, Keli Walibuta, who co-chaired the session with Fall, described the two-day meeting as the proverbial one step in the journey of a thousand miles, alluding to a Chinese proverb. The representatives of the six countries, who would be the central players in national preparatory committees, would be referred to as national coordinators, participants agreed in a report that was unanimously adopted at the end of the meeting. "The international conference is a process with three stages," Fall said. "The first stage is the one between the preparatory process between now and the first summit in June 2004; the second stage would be the holding of the first and the second summits; and the third stage will be the implementation of the process." However, Fall did not give a time frame for the second and third stages. He added that the neighbouring countries in the region and development partners were expected to participate in all the stages of the preparation of the conference, and appealed to donors and the international community to support the process "politically and financially".