Published by the government of Zimbabwe
Caesar Zvayi
23 October 2009
Harare — The international community should partner the African Union in addressing the problem of refugees and internally displaced persons, United Nations Secretary-General Mr Ban Ki-moon has said.
He said this in a message delivered on his behalf by Mr Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, at the opening ceremony of the AU Special Summit on Refugees, Returnees and Internally Displaced Persons that began at the Commonwealth Speke Resort here yesterday.
Mr Ban urged African countries to come together to address the drivers of the problem of refugees and internally displaced persons.
He said the causes were not only conflict situations, but also natural disasters like floods and drought that perennially ravage different parts of the continent.
In his own remarks to the opening session, attended by President Mugabe and other Heads of State and Government and ministerial representatives, Mr Guterres drew kudos from the delegates when he linked the prevalence of refugees in Africa to external destabilisation.
He trashed the stereotype of endogenesis, saying even he -- a white Portuguese -- owed the enjoyment of his human rights to African liberation movements that helped topple the dictatorship of Marcel Caetano by running his sponsored regimes off their territory.
"I lived under a dictator (then Portuguese leader Marcel Caetano). My human rights were only safeguarded by the liberation fighters of Southern Africa who drove the Portuguese colonialists out of Southern Africa," he said.
Opening the summit, host President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni urged the rest of the continent to learn from Southern Africa, which fought just wars of liberation after properly diagnosing the problem of colonialism.
To this end, he urged African countries to build strong institutions and armies to safeguard peace and also to put an end to all externally-sponsored wars of aggression.
Mr Museveni attributed the presence of an estimated 17 million refugees and internally displaced persons in Africa to poor, dysfunctional and disorganised institutions on the continent.
He said the situation was created and perpetuated by colonisers so that they could continue plundering the continent's resources.
"When you are badly organised, you tempt others to come and colonise you. So by being disorganised you invite the greedy to come and organise you.
"Even the Bible says, in the Lord's Prayer, 'lead us not into temptation'. So by disorganisation we tempt the greedy to come and destabilise us, we are actually going against the Lord's word."
The Ugandan leader attributed the failure of mediation efforts in the continent's hotspots to externally driven initiatives, saying outsiders compounded the problem by firstly, misdiagnosing the causes of the conflicts, and secondly prescribing the wrong solutions.
To this end, he urged Western agencies to come in as helpers and not drivers of Africa's peace-building and peace-making efforts.
AU Commission chairman Dr Jean Ping hailed the summit, saying the Draft Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced People, set to be adopted today, would help address the challenges of refugees by presenting the first legally binding instrument to address their concerns.
After the opening ceremony, the leaders toured an exhibition of artifacts mounted by internally displaced people of the Great Lakes Region and Uganda, before retiring into a closed session.
The agenda covers addressing the root causes and ways of preventing forced displacement; encouraging burden sharing and dealing with protracted situations; reconciliation and post-conflict reconstruction; dealing with refugees in mixed migratory movements; and establishing effective and sustainable mechanisms to deal with natural disasters, climate change and food security.
Today the leaders are expected to adopt and sign the Draft African Convention on the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa.
This is the world's first such convention.
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