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Secretary Rice Traveling to Africa for Regional Talks

December 3, 2007

By Charles W. Corey
USINFO Staff Writer

Washington -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has been focusing on Africa’s Great Lakes region, Sudan and Somalia, is traveling December 5 to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia -- the headquarters of the African Union (AU) -- for consultations on major regional issues.

Briefing reporters November 30 on Rice’s trip, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer said, “The bottom line is that the secretary has been very much focused on the Great Lakes, Sudan and Somalia, and she wants now to go Africa, go to Addis Ababa, in order to have the regional consultations because in all of these cases we've found that the key to the conflict prevention and promotion is to work with the regional countries themselves and their leadership.”

Rice, Frazer said, “has been involved on all of these issues, doing phone calls, meeting with these leaders here in Washington, and now she's going to go to the region to have an opportunity to bring them together once again so that we can try to promote conflict resolution.”

Frazer said Rice will hold a Great Lakes summit, which is essentially a meeting of the Tripartite Plus heads of state, foreign ministers and defense ministers from Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Congo. The Tripartite Plus group was established by the United States to facilitate dialogue and build confidence among the four countries in the Great Lakes region.  This meeting is expected to develop strategies and common security mechanisms to address what are known as the negative forces in the Congo, groups like the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR), perpetrators of the 1990s Rwandan genocide, the Lord's Resistance Army and other groups in the Congo.

The meeting, Frazer added, also will foster dialogue between the governments and seek common efforts to eliminate gender-based violence.  “We expect it to be attended, at the head-of-state level, from the officials of the four countries as well as observers being invited from the United Nations, AU Chairman [Alpha Oumar] Konare and the Great Lakes envoy for the [European Union].”

Additionally, Frazer said that while Rice is in the Ethiopian capital, she also will hold a ministerial consultation with regional countries on the situation in Somalia. That session, Frazer said, will be attended by AU Chairman Konare and U.N. Special Representative for the Secretary-General Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah.

“The Somalia ministerial will also have present President [Abdullahi] Yusuf and the new prime minister of Somalia, Nur Ade. … The goal is to consult and further coordinate a regional response to the crisis in Somalia,” Frazer said.

“We're hoping that the consultation will focus on how to achieve a more inclusive political dialogue and reconciliation to move the country toward 2009 elections, how to mitigate the impact of the current violence, especially in Mogadishu, on the civilian population and address the humanitarian emergency, working together to further isolate extremists and spoilers who continue to use violence, and then to push for quicker deployment of the African Union force into Somalia, the African Mission in Somalia [AMISOM] force.”

Attending the ministerial, Frazer said, “will be the Somali president, prime minister, Uganda, Djibouti and Ethiopia.” She expressed the hope that Kenya would attend as well.

Frazer said Rice also will hold a ministerial meeting on Sudan to continue the U.S. focus on implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA), a 2005 pact designed to end Sudan’s 21-year civil war. That session, Frazer added, “will be held with the regional countries, particularly those who are members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD … the countries that were, in a sense, semi-guarantors of the CPA, having helped to negotiate it under Kenya's leadership.  And so we want to consult on how to move the process forward or to get the CPA back on track.”

The expected participants from the IGAD countries are government ministers from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya, as well as Sudan, the AU and the U.N. special representative, Ashraf Qazi, she added.

In addition to the heads-of-state summit on the Great Lakes, the Sudan ministerial and the Somalia ministerial, Rice also will hold bilateral meetings with the Ethiopian government, Frazer said, including a meeting with Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin, in which “we would expect a discussion to focus on regional stability, fighting terrorism, democracy promotion, economic development and food security in Ethiopia, including issues of the Ogaden and, of course, the robust program that the United States and Ethiopia are partnering on dealing with HIV and AIDS, TB and malaria.”

Frazer was asked on the eve of World AIDS Day if she was discouraged by what has happened over the past year in Africa with regard to HIV/AIDS.

“To the contrary, I am encouraged by what's happened in Africa,” she responded. “I think that through the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR] and its role helping to mobilize international attention and funding to this issue, that we've kept millions of lives -- millions of people alive who would have died previously. So I'm extremely excited.”

Moreover, she praised African PEPFAR countries that have responded by trying to build their own health infrastructure and developing their own national plans to address HIV and AIDS.

“So I think that the picture, which was quite hopeless in 2000 when we were spending $300 million a year globally on HIV/AIDS, to today with the president's commitment and pushing for reauthorization of another $15 billion for HIV and AIDS, is an incredible change in the response, the international response and the African response, to this.”

Rice travels from Addis Ababa to Brussels, Belgium, December 6 to prepare for a NATO foreign ministerial session the following day.

A transcript of Frazer’s briefing is available on the State Department Web site.