The AU Executive Council of ministers from 53 members put the conflict resolution at the top of the ongoing second AU summit starting from July 4 to 12 in Maputo.

African leaders are expected to gather here on July 10 to review and adopt the conflict resolution at the end of the summit, thus heaping tremendous pressure on African countries at war and conflicts.

As AU chairman, South African President Thabo Mbeki pledged that one of the AU's principal and urgent responsibilities is to ensure peace, stability and democracy for the entire continent.

"This is important both to save the lives of our mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters, and to create the conditions for the development we need to end African poverty and underdevelopment," he said.

Mbeki urged African countries to accelerate ratification process to establish the AU Peace and Security Council so as to activize its peace prevention mechanism and effectively address the matters of peace, stability and conflict resolution for the continent.

When the council comes into effect, it will constitute forces in all five African regions trained in peace enforcement. This is expected to lead to an African standby force by 2010. It will also have an early-warning system for conflict prevention.

Addressing delegates from 53 member states at the ongoing AU summit, Mozambique Prime Minister Manuel Mocumbi said, "Peace, stability and democracy are essential pre-conditions for Africa's economic development and social progress."

"It therefore behooves us all to use the intelligence, wisdom, spirit of unity and companionship that have always characterized us to raise up an African society of peace, harmony and social justice," he added.

Despite the progress made by many African initiatives in the peace processes, the continent still faces the formidable challenges posed by conflicts. Most of African countries are poor and lack of financial resources to deploy peacekeeping forces.

Manuel Lubisse, spokesman for the current AU summit, said at a press conference in Maputo on Monday that African countries are trying all their means to stop wars and conflicts in the region.

However, he said, the African Union will leave its door open to logistic and financial assistance from foreign countries since African countries could not afford.

But South African Defense Minister Mosiuoa Lekota argued that African countries should reduce their reliance on foreign military assistance by forming partnerships among themselves, adding Africaat times had no choice but to seek help from foreign powers whose military involvement was often the very cause of the problem.

In his report to the meeting, Amara Essy singled out Liberia, where much of the emphasis needed to be placed because of the recent deterioration in the situation in the west African country and the grave humanitarian crisis there despite the signing of a ceasefire agreement and the rest of the international community.

There has been much speculation over whether Liberian President Charles Taylor will attend the summit as government forces battle rebels in the interior of the country and a United Nations indictment for war crimes looms over his head.

Situated in West Africa, Liberia is Africa's oldest republic. However, since the 1990s it has become better known for its long civil war and its role in the war in Sierra Leone.

Taylor launched a rebellion that eventually got him elected president in 1997. He fomented unrest in Sierra Leone, looting the country's diamonds as he supported some of the world's most notoriously vicious rebels, known for gang raping women, hacking off the limbs of civilians, and forcing drugged children into battle.

Military chiefs of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) pledged last Friday to raise 3,000 troops from member countries for an intervention force to restore peace in Liberia.

Cote d'Ivoire, once hailed as a model of stability, is in danger of slipping into the kind of internal strife that has plagued so many African countries.

In 1999, a coup led by Robert Guei toppled president Henri Konan Bedie. Bedie fled, but not before planting the seeds of ethnic discord by attempting to stir up xenophobia against Muslim northerners, including his main rival, Alassane Ouattara.

This theme was also adopted by Guei, who had Ouattara banned from the presidential election in 2000 on the grounds of his foreign parentage, and by the only serious contender allowed to run against Guei, Laurent Gbagbo.

But when Gbagbo replaced Guei after he was deposed in a popular uprising for trying to rig the election result, violence replaced xenophobia.

Although civilian rule has returned to Cote d'Ivoire, the division of the country into rebel and government-held areas after a troop mutiny in September 2002 poses a threat to peace and stability.

Ten months after an armed rebellion split Cote d'Ivoire in two, military chiefs from the national army and former rebel forces have announced that the war is over.

Somalia was without an effective central government for much of the 1990s, after late president Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991.

Fighting between rival warlords and inability to deal with famine and disease led to the death of up to 1 million people. A transitional government set up in 2000 only controls parts of the capital Mogadishu and pockets of the country.

By August 2000, a solution seemed in sight after clan elders and other senior figures appointed Abdiqasin Salad Hassan president at a conference in Djibouti. A new government was announced in October. However, these have yet to overcome resistance from some warlords and from the breakaway Somaliland.

The Sudan is the largest and one of the most diverse countries in Africa, home to deserts, mountain ranges, swamps and rain forests.

Apart from an 11-year period of peace, it has been torn by civil war between the mainly Muslim north and the Animist and Christian south since independence in 1956.

As well as involving several of Sudan's neighbors - including Uganda, Libya and Egypt - the civil war has proved costly, with the result that many Sudanese have seen a fall in living standards.

A power struggle between President Omar Hassan Ahmed Al-Bashir and ousted parliament speaker Hasan al-Turabi, the main ideologue of the Sudan's Islamic government, led to the arrest of Turabi andsome of his colleagues in 2001 on charges of undermining the state.

Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir told a rally in the southern town of Juba that the country's 20-year civil war is nearing an end.

"There will be no wars, there will no more death, there will be no more rifles," President Al-Bashir told the crowd, gathered to mark the 14th anniversary of the military coup that brought him topower.

Delegates to the Somali peace talks, taking place in Kenya, signed what was termed an "historic" agreement on July 5 to set upa federal government, but confusion was created when some political groups denounced the agreement the following day.

(Xinhua News Agency July 9, 2003)