ADDIS ABABA, July 1 (Xinhuanet) -- For years Africans had been waiting for the West to solve their conflicts, but the African Union (AU) is on the way to reverse the trend. With the AU Commission Chairman Alpha Konare to join world mediators Friday in a sit-down with parties involved in western Sudan's Darfur crisis, the fledgling African countries bloc begins to show it's solving its own problems, probably more of a boost to investment confidence than any other plans the AU has embarked on.

    AU TO RUN THE SHOW

    One senior AU official told Xinhua that Konare is to meet the Sudanese parties participating in the negotiations to be held in the Chadian capital Ndjamena, and he is to return to the AU annual meetings currently underway in Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa afterwards.

    An AU spokesman said that Konare's visit to Ndjamena is meant to meet the "opposition," consisted of indigenous ethnic minorities, which revolt against the Arab-dominated Khartoum government in February 2003.

    "We have been to Darfur, we have been to Khartoum, we have been to Chad to meet the displaced people," the spokesman said, "we are going to meet the other side, and seek their full cooperation."

    The timing of Konare's visit to Ndjamena couldn't be better. Darfur crisis, in which more than 10,000 people were reportedly have died and more than a million have been driven from their homes, has already drawn enough spotlight worldwide, with the world's mainstream media feeds into households the images and description of the world's "worst current humanitarian crisis."

    With the visit of the US Secretary of State Colin Powell to Darfur and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's visit to Khartoum, the Darfur crisis further shadows anything that comes out of Addis Ababa, where the AU is holding its annual meetings and is to adopt an ambitious plan of development and continental integration.

    Konare's presence in Ndjamena shows that African leaders are playing an important role in pulling together the meeting, and thus the resolution of the Darfur crisis is no longer a duo sung by the United States and the United Nations, a perfect warm-up for the AU summit to be held next Tuesday in Addis Ababa.

    SECURITY TOPS THE AU AGENDA

    Years of war and conflict in Africa has given the continent a sad stereotype of a land riddled with the flux of refugees and insecurity. Coupled with the current instability in several African countries, no sane people wouldn't think twice before invest in Africa.

    The result? Africans, who account for nearly 13 percent of the world's population, attracts about one percent of foreign direct investment, one percent of world gross domestic investment and about two percent of world trade, according to the AU.

    The AU, apparently aware of what their priority is, and maybe disappointed with the inaction of the West during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, started to "mind their own business."

    The AU's moves include the establishment of a peace and security council (PSC) and a proposed standby force.

    Although the standby force only exits in official documents for the time being, but the PSC has already done concrete work, despite it's only a new-born among the AU organs, especially in resolving the Congolese-Rwanda row that arose from the Democratic Republic of the Congo's (DRC) recent troops deployment to its eastern border areas with Rwanda, as fears mounted internationally about the collapse of the DRC's fragile peace process.

    One AU official said that the regional bloc "didn't wait for foreigners" and "played a major role" in resolving the row, in which Presidents of the DRC and Rwanda met in Nigerian capital Abuja last week under the auspice of the PSC chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who is also the Nigerian president.

    "After what happened in Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone ... we don't want to sit and wait until the UN deploy its peacekeeping forces before we could do something," the AU official said to Xinhua on the sidelines of the summit, referring to the recent and not-so-recent conflicts in the continent.

    The AU seems determined to consolidate what it has already achieved. Not only is Konare going to sit in the peace talks, but the AU also prioritize security in its development plan to be discussed in the annual summit.

    AU spokesman Desmond Orjiako said Thursday that peace and security operation will get its share in the AU budget. With these positive signs, Africans may one day really manage to contain conflicts in their own land, and that will eventually be the evidence that Konare's presence in Ndjamena is not mere tokenism. Enditem (by Wang Fengfeng, Zhou Shaoping )