Good intentions and sad results

The decision of African leaders meeting in Ethiopia on Monday to block Sudan from assuming the leadership of the African Union was good news for the credibility of an organisation dedicated to promoting democratic governance on the continent. To have chosen the Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir to head an organisation tasked with stopping the crisis in Darfur, which his own troops have fomented, would have been self-defeating, to put it mildly.

A further sign of the AU's maturity was its decision to give the chairmanship to Ghana. This was not just for sentimental reasons, such as the 50th anniversary celebrations this year of Ghana's independence, or the return home of its most celebrated son, Kofi Annan. Ghana has emerged well from the process known as peer review, a scheme in which African states voluntarily assess each other's political and economic management, and pass, in the process, a sort of Africa exam. One of the founding principles of the AU when it was launched five years ago by South Africa's Thabo Mbeki, its first president, was to show the world that Africa could look after itself. It has travelled a long way since the days of the Organisation of African Unity, which earned the reputation of being a dictators' club, concerned only with policing borders and not what went on inside them.

But good intentions are a far cry from effective peacekeeping, and having performed well in their first military deployment in Burundi, the AU's 7,000 peacekeepers have not covered themselves in glory in Darfur, where 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes. If they have been following any example, it is that provided by Dutch troops at Srebrenica. Darfur has been slipping backwards, not forwards, since a peace agreement was signed last year with one section of the Sudan Liberation Army led by Minni Minnawi. What is needed now is a ceasefire. Tens of thousands of people are at risk of dying because the aid agencies cannot get through.

Somalia is another source of the AU's peacekeeping migraine, although the performance of American troops with the warlords in Mogadishu hardly provides a role model. Yesterday the AU scrambled to find 4,000 more troops for a force, as only half of the 8,000 peacekeeping troops pledged have materialised. Time is not on the AU's side, since Ethiopia, whose army crushed the forces of the Islamic Courts, wants to pull out. If an international force fails, so too will any attempt to force the Somali president Abdullahi Yusuf to talk to the Islamists, an essential precursor to stability. In both Darfur and Somalia, the AU needs to establish a military as well as a political track record.