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Lead ers in the volatile Great Lakes region lack the political will to bring peace to the war-wracked region, a European Union envoy charged at the African Union (AU) summit in Maputo yesterday.

"There is no political will in the Great Lakes, with some deliberately promoting hostilities for personal gains," Aldo Ajello, EU envoy to the central African region told state-run Radio Mozambique in an interview.

Ajello, a former United Nations special envoy to Mozambique, is attending the African Union heads of state summit in the Mozambican capital Maputo.

He warned that the Great Lakes region - made up of Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda - would not attain lasting peace unless all parties desired it.

Africa's numerous conflicts feature high on the AU summit's agenda where the ratification of a Peace and Security Council, able to intervene in wars in which crimes against humanity are committed and to deploy an African Standby Force, is viewed as a top priority.

The aim of setting up the Peace and Security Council is to give the AU the muscle its predecessor, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), lacked.

During its 39-year existence, the OAU practised a policy of non-interference which was seen as protecting dictators, and Africa was wracked by coups d'etat and civil wars, many of horrifying brutality, with 25 presidents and prime ministers losing their lives in overthrows.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was supposed to have met with representatives from the Great Lakes region on the fringes of the AU summit, but the meeting was called off because DRC President Joseph Kabila was not in Maputo.

Annan warned at the opening day of the Maputo summit Thursday that Africa would not be able to pull itself out of its spiral of conflict and poverty if "the political will and capacity do not exist".

Bene M' Poko, DRC ambassador to Pretoria, said the presidents of the DRC, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and South Africa were to have attended the meeting with Annan.

"That meeting will now have to wait until they can meet on the fringes of the United Nations General Assembly in New York in December," said M'Poko.

"The president (Kabila) is the only working legal institution in the transitional government. Had he come here it would have delayed the progress we need to make on implementing that government," he added.

The DRC was ravaged by a war that erupted in August 1998, drawing in several countries surrounding the huge central African nation such as Burundi whose troops crossed the border to protect their own country.

As many as three or four million died in the war, many from illness and starvation.

South Africa facilitated a peace agreement between the warring parties, leading to Kabila naming a government of national unity on June 30, to prepare for the first democratic elections since those held after independence from Belgium in 1960.

However, fighting has continued between tribes in DRC's northeastern Ituri region and an international peace-keeping force has been deployed in the area.

Meanwhile, in Burundi, where South Africa has some 1 000 soldiers protecting politicians in a transitional, power-sharing government, some 50 people have been killed in a recent rebel assault on the capital, Bujumbura.

Northern Uganda has been driven by 17 years of rebel conflict. - Sapa-AFP.

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