Africa: U.S. Secretary Flies in for Great Lakes, Horn Summit

United States Department of State
(Washington, DC) DOCUMENT
4 December 2007

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Addis Ababa on Wednesday for wide-ranging talks with leaders from the Great Lakes and Horn regions of Africa on issues of regional peace and security, including the situations in Somalia and Sudan.

Rice's assistant secretary for African affairs, Jendayi Frazer, gave this briefing on the trip in Washington, DC, last week.

ASSISTANT SECRETARY FRAZER: Thank you very much. The Secretary will travel to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, arriving Wednesday, December 5th. She is going to hold a Great Lakes summit, essentially a meeting of the Tripartite plus heads of states and ministers, 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 further develop strategies and common security mechanisms to address what are known as the negative forces in the Congo, groups like the FDLR, the former Rwandan genocidaires, the Lord's Resistance Army and other groups in the Congo.

The meeting will also 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 Konare, and the Great Lakes envoy for the EU.

She will also hold a Somali ministerial with regional countries and, again, attended by the AU Chairman Konare, the UN Special Rep for the Secretary General Ould-Abdallah. The Somalia ministerial will also have present President Yusuf and the new Prime Minister of Somalia, Nur Ade, attending the meeting. The goal is to consult and further coordinate a regional response to the crisis in Somalia. We're hoping that the consultation will focus on how to achieve a more inclusive political dialogue and reconciliation to move the country towards 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 AMISOM force.

The countries attending the meeting, the ministerial, will be the Somali president, prime minister, Uganda, Djibouti, Ethiopia. We hope Kenya will be there. Kenya is in the midst of an election campaign, a very close election campaign. But also, the AU Chairman Konare will attend and the UN Special Rep to the Secretary General Ould-Abdallah.

The Secretary will also hold a ministerial meeting on Sudan to continue the U.S. focus on the Comprehensive Peace Agreement implementation. It will be held with the regional countries, particularly those who are members of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development, IGAD. These are 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 these IGAD countries, ministers will be from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Uganda, we hope Kenya, as well as Sudan, the AU, Chairman Kanare and the UN Special Rep to the Secretary General Qazi.

In addition to the head of state summit on the Great Lakes, the Sudan ministerial and the Somalia ministerial, the Secretary of course will hold bilateral meetings with the Ethiopian Government, including a meeting and dinner with Prime Minister Meles and Foreign Minister Seyoum, 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.

The bottom line is that the Secretary has been very much focused on the Great Lakes, Sudan and Somalia, and she wants to 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. And so she 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.

And with that, I will answer any questions that you may have.

QUESTION: Can I ask you about a subject that you didn't mention, which I think is very likely to come up, and that's Ethiopia-Eritrea. As you know, today the Boundary Commission's mandate expired with no demarcation on the ground and tensions high despite what Meles and others seem to be saying, things are just as fragile as they were when perhaps when the war ended. How much is that going to be a part of the agenda? And also, how much of just plain Eritrean -- the Eritrea issue on its own, the state sponsor designation, how much is that going to play into her (inaudible)?

Source: US Department of State