To coordinate and cooperate or not to, that is where the rub is, and that is the key issue when it comes to answering the question whether there will be peace in the Great Lakes region. 

Armed conflicts and wars have been harassing the region in central and eastern Africa, ever since immigrants and later colonizers forced their way into it to cause irrational boundaries, land and resources shortage, ethnically-differentiated access to wealth and power, and mistrust among ethnic groups and national governments, which in turn have been causing one bloodshed after another.

Researchers and scholars, be they indigenous or alien, have been sorting out historical and contemporary facts only to pinpoint the root causes of long-running conflicts and wars in the region to these factors.

With international boundaries still fixed no matter how irrational they may be, redistribution of land, resources, wealth and power cannot be done without lopsided sacrifice or multilateral orchestration.

The entanglement of ethnicity, culture, religion and language has kept brewing crises as small as ethnic hatred within one community and as big as what is known as the World War in Africa that sucked in seven countries to last five years.

The pursuit for a feasible solution to the Great Lakes region dilemma of spiraling from disputes to conflicts and then back to disputes again seemed to have met a dead end until Canadians floated in the early 1980s an idea of pooling all the key actors of the region around one common table, to see what comes out of it.

Thanks to the United Nations, the then Organization of African Unity and now the African Union (AU), the concept gradually materialized into the inaugural summit of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region, with the participation of Angola, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

Facilitated by the UN, the AU, the European Union, and a batch of 28 countries known as the Friends of the Great Lakes Region, the heads of state of these 11 countries finally approved and signed on Saturday the Dar es Salaam Declaration.

The document showed more than enough willingness of these countries to find a common way out of their conflict- and war-stricken plight.

The method they have chosen to break away from their past is coordination and cooperation, as clearly stated in their declaration known rather as the peace declaration.

The heads of state declared on Nov. 20, 2004 in Dar es Salaam, a place known in Kiswahili as the Haven of Peace, their collective determination to transform their region into one of sustainable peace, of shared development, of cooperation based on policies of convergence within the framework of a common destiny.

Signing the peace declaration in the presence of the chiefs from both the UN and the AU as well as hundreds of international summiteers, these heads of state have finally placed not only their face but their credibility as well on the line for challenge.

Facing either complete doom or further alienation from the international community, these signatories will have to make due efforts to usher in peace to the region their respective countries combine to form.

Willingly or otherwise, the Dar es Salaam Declaration has actually reined these heads of state to a desperate strife for peace for at least until next year when they meet one another again. 

(Xinhua News Agency November 21, 2004)