Nigeria's Obasanjo lectures East and West on intervention
It would not be a splashy affair, promised the host of the 15th annual summit of the Organization of African Unity. In contrast to the gaudy 14th meeting in Libreville last year, on which the government of Gabon spent nearly $1 billion for halls, hotels and new highways to nowhere, this year's session in Khartoum would be summitry on a $12 million shoestring. A few old streets had been resurfaced, and sessions would be held in Friendship Hall, a rather proletarian-looking convention center built two years ago by the Chinese. Despite the relative austerity. Sudanese President Gaafar Numeiri, the summit host and incoming OAU president, suggested in personal letters of invitation to each of his fellow 48 African leaders that this was a meeting they would not want to miss.
When the four-day summit convened last week, there were some inevitable absentees. Mauritania's President Moktar Ould Daddah, for instance, had been overthrown by a military coup shortly before he was supposed to leave for Nouakchott Airport to catch a plane to Khartoum. Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, as usual, preferred to stay home, sending in his place a quarrelsome delegation that threw the sessions into an occasional uproar by picking fights with neighboring Chad. Nonetheless, 35 leaders of the OAU's 49 member states were on hand, the largest muster in the organization's history. Among them: Angola's Agostinho Neto, attending his first African summit, and Guinea's Sekou Toure, who had not been to one since 1965. All were greeted with effusive embraces by Host Numeiri at Khartoum's airport.
Until this year, the most urgent item on the OAU agenda had customarily been what ought to be done about the white regimes that are suppressing black majorities in Rhodesia and South Africa. That issue surfaced once again last week, to be sure: the OAU decided unanimously to support all-party Rhodesian talks, backed by the U.S. and Britain, that would have to include leaders of the black nationalist Patriotic Front. But the larger issue that bothered everyone in Khartoum was the proper African response to military and political incursions by both East and West, capped by the French and Belgian effort to put down a rebellion in Zaïre's mine-rich Shaba region.
At a pre-summit Foreign Ministers' meeting called to whittle down the agenda and prepare positions, the Council of Ministers had hammered out a series of resolutions on the foreign intervention that one delegate aptly described as "mush." One resolution maintained that the defense of African states was the sole responsibility of the states themselves.
A complementary—but contradictory —measure provided that the "sovereignty of every African country gives it the right to appeal to any other country for help if its security and independence are threatened." In an oblique criticism of those cross-purposes proposals, Gabonese President Albert-Bernard ("Omar") Bongo, the OAU's outgoing chairman, ruefully noted: "We have the habit of talking without saying anything [and of] making too many resolutions."