Culled from clari.world Newsgroups

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (AP) -- Derided as a club for dictators and a
useless bureaucratic talk shop, the Organization of African Unity will
hardly be missed when it disbands Tuesday.
The 53-nation body is being replaced by the African Union, a
new organization modeled on the European Union that hopes to closely
bind its members together, promote human rights and good governance
and enrich the world's poorest continent.

The OAU, in its 39 years of existence, accomplished none of that.
"It appears as if its primary goal has been to maintain
despots in power," said David Coltart, a parliamentarian for
Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change. "It's
extremely difficult to identify any rem
arkable successes."
The OAU was created in 1963 as the spirit of independence  and Pan-
Africanism swept across the continent. Ghanaian leader Kwame
Nkrumah had dreamed of a strong union, akin to the United States,
binding Africa's nations.

But few leaders of the newly independent countries were willing to
surrender even a sliver of sovereignty, and many African dictators were
wary of a regional group meddling in their affairs.
Nkrumah's vision was diluted into an organization that refused to interfere
in member states' internal politics and focused instead on fighting
apartheid in South Africa and the remnants of British and Portuguese
colonialism.
But many of the continent's conflicts involved "internal"  issues.
Devastating civil wars in Angola and Mozambique were  virtually ignored.
Efforts to end the fighting in Sierra Leone were left to the regional
Economic Community of West African States
, or ECOWAS.

The OAU did nothing to stop dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko of the former
Zaire from oppressing his people and looting his central African country.
And it was silent in 1994 as at least 500,000 people were killed in
Rwanda's genocide.
An OAU team praised Zimbabwe's March presidential elections
as "transparent, credible, free and fair," even though police used
tear gas to drive thousands of voters away from the polls and ruling
party militants kidnapped hundreds of opposition poll watchers.
The OAU has "frustrated the advancement of human rights on
the continent," Coltart said. "It persistently used the principle of
noninterference to allow very grave human rights violations to go on
completely unchecked."

The OAU required consensus to take any action, which often tied its hands
and reduced it to practicing "lowest common denominator politics," said
Jakkie Cill
iers, director of the South Africa-based Institute for Security
Studies.
In recent years, the organization adopted principles regarding human rights
and denouncing military coups. However, the OAU put little political weight
behind them, Cilliers said.
"These achievements are fairly minor when you compare them  to the problems
on the continent," he said.
It occasionally has helped resolved border disputes between member states
and, in its one major success, brought peace to Comoros.

Few African nations committed strongly to the organization.
Only 16 of its members have paid their dues in full and the group is
$42 million in debt.
But that did not stop African leaders from turning their annual OAU summit
into lavish affairs, full of pomp but accomplishing little.
During the summits the leaders stayed in expensive compounds, specially
built for the meetings with money from Western governments
 or the Soviet
Union. Most of those compounds now are molding in the tropical heat.

Efforts to change the organization's charter routinely were
rejected, so the only way to truly reform the organization was to
destroy it and start again.
As envisioned, the African Union -- the continent's second  attempt to
achieve economic and political unity -- will have a parliament, a security
council and a standby peacekeeping force.
African leaders hope it will be far stronger, more principled and unwilling
to accept the abuses ignored by the OAU.
Already, it has refused to give a seat to the divided island  of Madagascar
until new elections are held to determine that nation's true president.
"The challenge of bringing peace to all parts of the  continent is a
difficult one, but is not insurmountable," said OAU Secretary-General Amara
Essy, who is ushering the organization through its transformation.

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