ADDIS ABABA, May 14– African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Mahmoud Ali Youssouf and United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres have warned that external interferences are fueling the security crisis in Africa.
The two leaders made the allegation during a joint press conference on Wednesday at the AU headquarters in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, after signing a new declaration to enhance the AU-UN partnership.
“Most of the security crises on the continent are fueled from abroad. Financial resources, ammunition, sometimes even fighters come to fight another war from other continents,” Youssouf told the press conference.
He said the interference goes to the extent of disrupting mediation and resolution processes, causing a serious challenge for AU and UN to address the security crisis on the continent, including in the Sahel, Sudan, the Horn of Africa and the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Youssouf said the interferences are requiring the AU, UN and other partners to deploy more efforts to contain the crises. “The AU must lead any peace negotiations on the continent, based on the principle of African solutions to African conflicts.”
Guterres, for his part, said it is absolutely intolerable that countries that are external to Africa interfere in African conflicts, providing weapons and political support with the objective of serving their strategic or economic interests.
“We need naturally to go on developing our common diplomacy, to make sure that we create the conditions for this kind of interference to cease and for other actors to be able to come to political agreements, able to end these conflicts,” he said.
According to Guterres, the world is witnessing a new kind of war where the military does not fight each other but launches drones against civilians.
“We also raise our voices, denouncing those countries that are providing drones that are not manufactured in Africa, as they are causing terrible sacrifice for the African people,” he added. (Namibia Daily News / Xinhua)
