The African Union pledged Wednesday, after a mission to war-torn north Uganda, to play a "more robust" role in ending conflicts on the continent "to guard against a repeat of incidents similar to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda."

"We feel ashamed that Africa is generating all these conflicts and wonder why the people of Africa are not committed to ending them," AU commissioner for peace and security, Said Djinnit, said in Kampala on Wednesday.

"The AU has more mandate than before. We are going to start intervening in conflicts in member states and this is prompted by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when the international community did nothing," Djinnit said after a visit to northern Uganda, where the particularly brutal Lords Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group has been waging war against the government for nearly 20 years.

He said under the AU's predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the continent had weak institutions which had no way of detecting conflicts before they occurred.

"We only learnt of the genocide in Rwanda on CNN," he noted.

Djinnit arrived in Uganda late on Sunday at the head of a four-man AU delegation, which left early Monday for the north of the country, ravaged by 18 years of civil war, to assess the situation and determine what role the pan-African body, which took over from the OAU in 2002, could play in ending the conflict.

He said that what his team witnessed in northern Uganda was of great concern to the AU, "which will play a role in finding a solution and bring it to a quick end." Djinnit said issues such as equitable distribution of wealth could be used to avoid conflicts in Africa.

He said his delegation had found that northern Ugandans "were in dire need of supplies" and called on the international community to enhance support to the displaced people in the region.

"There is a need to enhance support to internally displaced people. The international community, as well as the African community, should commit more help to the people of northern Uganda," he said.

The AU team held talks with stakeholders in the region, including religious leaders and people displaced by the war.

The visit was the first by AU officials to northern Uganda, where the LRA has been fighting to topple President Yoweri Museveni's secular regime and replace it with one supposedly based on the Ten Commandments.

But the LRA is best known for its brutality against the civilian population and for kidnapping children, forcing boys to fight in its ranks and girls to be sex slaves to its commanders.

The war has maimed or killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 1,5-million others.

Last year, a top UN official after a two-day visit to north Uganda described the rebel war there as the worst forgotten humanitarian crisis on earth.

Djinnit also said African observers would be deployed in another hot spot on the continent, Sudan's western Darfur region, where militias backing the Khartoum government have been accused of committing atrocities against civilians.

The observers will be from Ghana, Namibia, Nigeria and Senegal and will be deployed in the region under an AU mandate, he said.

The United Nations has said some 10 000 people have been killed in Darfur in just over one year of war between rebels and the pro-Khartoum militias.

The OAU was born in May 1963 as a vehicle for African states to fight the last vestiges of colonialism and to forge solidarity. But at the end of its 39-year existence, it was seen as having outlived its usefulness as it stood powerless to stop some 20 conflicts then raging in Africa.

The OAU had as one of its central tenets the principle of national sovereignity and non-interference, including in conflicts.

The AU, on the other hand, has a peace and security council, based on the UN Security Council, that could send African troops to intervene in conflicts where crimes against humanity are involved, such as the 1994 genocide in Rwanda which claimed around a million lives. - Sapa-AFP