African Union (AU) leaders said on Tuesday they intended to strengthen the group’s powers to fight a rising tide of coups and electoral fraud on the continent.
“We must say ‘never again’ to conflict and war in Africa,” Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika, the new AU chairman, said on the last day of its annual summit in Addis Ababa.
Four coups in Africa last year — in Madagascar, Mauritania, Guinea and Guinea Bissau — made some African politicians and international investors fear for a return to the days when revolts were a more regular occurrence on the continent.
The AU is expected to reveal its new measures by next week.
“We have all agreed on a new set of measures to combat unconstitutional changes of government,” AU peace and security commissioner Ramtane Lamamra said.
“It will improve our ability to protect democracy,” he said.
Lamamra did not say what the measures would be but diplomats at the summit said they would include the ability to sanction leaders who refuse to hold elections or who engage in electoral fraud.
The summit was dominated by discussion of the coups and the festering conflicts in Sudan, Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, despite a main theme of developing the continent’s information technology infrastructure.
“We must declare war on unconstitutional changes of government on African soil and resolve to take strong and necessary measures against all offenders of coups and those that provide them the means to succeed elected governments,” wa Mutharika said.
The AU in 2002 replaced the Organization for African Unity in 2002, which had been criticized for welcoming dictators and coup leaders into its ranks. The AU tried to distance itself from its predecessor by introducing sanctions against despots.
But analysts say the AU is hampered by bureaucracy, under-funding and the fact that some member states are led by presidents who took power in coups.
Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi — who came to power in a military coup in 1969 — was voted out as AU chairman this year. He frequently clashed with the AU’s top diplomat, Jean Ping, and refused to speak out against coup leaders.
The AU’s founding charter says it can impose sanctions such as travel bans in the case of coups but the proposals to be introduced will be more forceful.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS