http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030201/1/3709r.html

Agence France-Presse
February 1, 2003
South Africa urges Africa to back anti-war stance on Iraq

South Africa's Foreign Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma urged her
continental counterparts to back UN efforts to avoid a US-led war on Iraq,
warning conflict could bring disaster.

Military attacks on oil-rich Iraq would have "very serious repercussions
for all of us," Dlamini-Zuma told fellow foreign ministers gathered in the
Ethiopian capital to prepare for next week's summit of the new African
Union.

"We must continue to support the efforts of the UN Security Council to try
to avoid a war and at the same time disarm Iraq of any mass destruction
weapons, if they have any, and urge them to cooperate," she said.

South African President Thabo Mbeki was Saturday taking a similar message
to Britain, where he was due to meet Prime Minister Tony Blair, US
President George
Bush's strongest ally in potential military action against Iraq.

Dlamini-Zuma said a war against President Saddam Hussein's regime would
undermine global security, "complicate the situation and the peace process
in the
Middle East (and have) a very big economic impact for most countries".

A number of top South African officials, from Mbeki to Trade and Industry
Minister Alec Erwin, have in the past week voiced concern not only about
the blow they say unilateral US action against Iraq would deal to world
peace, but also badly harm a pan-African economic recovery plan.

"Most countries will be in serious difficulties," Dlamini-Zuma said,
warning that spiralling oil prices could rise even further. "We need peace, not war."

South Africa current holds the presidency of the 53-member AU, which took
shape at a summit in Durban last year replacing the post-colonial
Organisation of African Unity (OAU). The first full summit of the
continental body will be held in Addis Ababa on Monday and Tuesday.

Former South African president Nelson Mandela on Thursday added his voice
to criticism of "arrogant behaviour" by the United States, saying that
"all Bush wants is Iraqi oil" and suggesting that this would be the
motivation for possible action against Baghdad without full UN backing.

"Bush is acting outside the United Nations and both he and Tony Blair are
undermining the United Nations, an organisation which was an idea
sponsored by their predecessors," Mandela said.

Blair met Bush on Friday to discuss the next steps in the campaign,, after
which Bush said he would welcome a new UN resolution on the crisis "if it
is yet another signal that we're intent upon disarming (Iraqi President)
Saddam Hussein".

A potential Gulf War and its impact on Africa were far from the only items
facing foreign ministers as they went Saturday into a closed-door
pre-summit session after the opening remarks.

The interim chairman of the AU Commission, Amara Essy, told ministers that
"you are called upon to study the architecture of the African Union.
Building the Union is an ongoing process which will be pursued from
generation to generation."

The summit participants will next week consider amendments to the AU's
constituent acts, to strengthen the body and give it more clout than the
old OAU.

Dlamini-Zuma also told ministers that they should be looking at the "major
challenges" in the continent presented by crises such as the risk of
all-out war in Essy's Ivory Coast, where a French-brokered deal to end
four months of rebellion at the weekend teetered on the verge of collapse.

She also seized on the occasion to "congratulate the great socialist
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya on its election as chair of the current session of
the UN Commission on Human Rights".

Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi was a moving force behind the transformation
of the OAU into the AU, though his African peers would not go as far as
taking up his grandiose dream of creating a "United States of Africa".