NORTH REGION NEWS

AU summit is high point of Africa policy

TRIPOLI, February 24 -- Libya is to host a special summit of the African Union this week which caps efforts by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to turn his policy sights on the world's poorest continent after his estrangement from the Arab world.

The 53 leaders of member states of the pan-African body have been invited to the seaside town of Sirte on Friday and Saturday to discuss defence and security issues, senior Libyan foreign ministry official Hassuna al-Shaush said.

Agriculture and the distribution and use of Africa's precious water resources will also be on the agenda, Shaush said.

Sirte, about 500km east of Tripoli, is in the home region of Gaddafi, who has ruled the north African country since 1969.

In 1999, the Mediterranean resort was the venue of another meeting of African heads of state which set the groundwork for the transformation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) into the African Union (AU).

Gaddafi that year decided to champion the cause of African unity, turning his back on an Arab world which had largely turned away from him.

After an international embargo was imposed on Libya in 1988 over the Lockerbie bombing, other Arab nations were silent, but the OAU in June 1998 opposed the sanctions and resolved to ignore a ban on air travel to the country.

Gaddafi was swift to express his gratitude and pump oil money into Africa, while an incessant ballet of visiting African heads of state and other dignitaries began.

In March 2001, the birth of the streamlined AU was proclaimed at a summit in Sirte, to take the place of the increasingly ineffective and moribund OAU, which was formed in 1963 as a wave of independence rolled across the continent, heavily slanted towards a newly minted African socialism.

On September 1 last year, when Gaddafi had decreed that the celebrations to mark the anniversary of Libya's revolution and his brand of Islam and Marxism would be a women's affair, African first ladies were given seats on the podium of honour.

Last October, he proclaimed that the Arab unity and nationalism he had once championed were dead and buried.

In recent years, Gaddafi has stepped up involvement in bids at conflict resolution, notably in Somalia, Sudan, Chad, Eritrea, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the rest of the central African Great Lakes region.

Transforming himself into one of the long-serving African generation of leaders ready to dispense wisdom, he has also renounced Libyan support for guerrilla movements seeking to topple regimes on the continent, according to an African affairs expert in Tripoli who asked not to be named.

Monday's Libyan press said Gaddafi told African defence ministers on Sunday in Sirte that he wanted "a single African army which would help to solve inter-African conflicts and protect the continent from all foreign aggression".

This, Gaddafi argued, would save money through the dissolution of national regular armies which he said cost $13 billion a year. Other African leaders have so far paid lip-service and otherwise politely ignored such recommendations forming part of his grandiose vision.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell recently warned Tripoli that Washington will not normalise relations with Libya until the country gives up its "detabilising" interventions in Africa.

An African diplomat based at the AU's current headquarters town in Addis Ababa said the summit on Friday and Saturday "is part of Colonel Gaddafi's plan to make his comeback on the international stage", but stressed that the Libyan leader had not achieved an ambition of making his nation the permanent base of the AU.

Libya has ploughed some $250 million into "investment projects in agriculture, manufacturing and the service industries" in Africa, an official government source here said.

A few months ago, Libya launched an African satellite television channel broadcasting in Arabic, French and English, four years after setting up an African radio station.

It has also asked for membership of the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa, which is expected to be granted this year. - AFP

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