United Press International - June 10, 2004
Krishnadev Calamur

G8 leaders met with leaders from six African nations -- Algeria, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda -- and also announced plans to train up to 50,000 peacekeepers, mainly in Africa, to resolve regional conflicts. Initiatives were also announced to set up a global partnership to find a vaccine for HIV, a disease that threatens millions on the continent.

The extension of the debt-relief plan pertains to the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, a World Bank-International Monetary Fund program that provides debt relief to those of the world's poorest countries that agree to follow programs prescribed the two institutions. G8 leaders said they asked their finance ministers to extend the sunset date of the HIPC initiative to Dec. 31, 2006. The plan was set to expire this year. They also called on their ministers to consider steps that can help the poorest countries address the sustainability of their debt.

Debt relief was a key British demand before the summit. Gordon Brown, the country's chancellor of the exchequer, wrote an editorial in the Independent newspaper saying the world needed to do more for Africa, pointing out that global goals to reduce poverty by half on the continent by 2020 were off by more than a century.

"The richest countries cannot continue setting targets, failing to meet them and then expecting the poorest countries to trust our word," he said, adding Britain would urge the G8 to help remove the "burden of unpayable debts."

Advocacy groups that had expected major debt-relief announcements at the summit said the announced measures were inadequate.

"At this critical moment, when every minute another African child dies of AIDS, the global community needs 100 percent cancellation of multilateral debt without harmful conditions," Marie Clarke, national coordinator of the Jubilee USA Network, said in a statement. "By failing to seize the opportunity, the G8 has once again chosen baby steps over bold action."

African leaders who met with the G8 for lunch said they were not privy to discussions among the group, but added they raised the issue of debt relief for the continent.

"We made the point that the proposal or the idea of 100 percent of consolidation of debt for HIPIC countries without any differentiation would help Africa," Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said. "We also made the point that all African debt needs to have relief. Otherwise, whatever we do in other areas will amount to eroding from what we need to have in terms of flow of resources to be able to move Africa forward."

The G8 -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- also worked with African leaders under the Africa Action Plan adopted at the G8 Kananaskis summit in 2002 and announced plans for a regional peacekeeping outfit that would be trained by G8 nations.

They agreed to "provide technical and financial assistance so that, by 2010, African countries and regional and sub-regional organizations are able to engage more effectively to prevent and resolve violent conflict on the continent and undertake peace support operations in accordance with the United Nations Charter," the G8 said.

The plan foresees the training of more than 50,000 peacekeepers over the next five years.

"It's not for a lack of willingness that African nations and other nations are unable to sometimes deal with the peace support operations that they find themselves charged with," a senior official, who asked not to be named, said Tuesday. "It's because they don't have the training, they don't have the airlift, they don't have the equipment. And that's what this initiative is meant to get at."

The plan envisages a clearinghouse arrangement that will serve as a coordinating mechanism among the G8. Italy is offering a training center to train gendarmes. The official said the exercise would cost $660 million over five years. The forces would be used in the initial stages of a conflict, before the United Nations gets involved.

Obasanjo said training would help the region settle its own disputes.

"And we say to our G8 partners, yes we have the will, we have the means, we have the will, we have the troops," he said. "But we will need certain amount of capacity building if we will have to send troops out, what we call Standby Force For Africa, which we are establishing. We need to adequately equip them, we need to be able to airlift them, we need to adequately train them. And these are the areas where we need assistance from our development partners."

The G8 nations also endorsed U.S. President Bush's plan for a global HIV vaccine enterprise.

"When G8 and other nations decide they want to align their own resources or put new resources into vaccine development, there will be a strategic plan framework with which they can synergize with the other nations," said Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

The plan is based on a proposal made last year to bring together scientists and governments who would collaborate on a vaccine for HIV. It backs the development of HIV vaccine-development centers, increased vaccine-manufacturing capacity, standardization of laboratory and clinical parameters, integrated clinical trials systems, agreement so a trial done in one part of the world can be approved in another and the inclusion of scientists from developing countries.

Bush has proposed spending $15 million in 2005 on a virtual center.

Obasanjo welcomed the plan but said he hoped it would not work against regional initiatives to combat the disease.

"Since we all have national programs to deal with these issues, let the bilateral program or the bilateral support or the multilateral support be supplementary or if you like complementary to our programs, so we are not caught in the cross purpose, we are not pretending that we are trying to reinvent the wheel," he said.

Other Africa-related measures:

-- Improve the region's economy through private-sector initiatives.

-- The G8 agreed to eradicate polio by 2005.

-- The group agreed to end famine in the Horn of Africa, raise agricultural productivity through a new green revolution for Africa and promote rural development.
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