"Africa Faces Challenge of Keeping the Peace"

Herb Howe is professor of African studies at Georgetown University in Washington and has written extensively about conflict in Africa.

"My worry is that the underlying problems, causes of African conflict, are not yet really being resolved. Until those problems - for example, corruption, kleptocracy, ethnic and religious opportunistic appeals - have been addressed, we're going to have problems, " he says.

Howard Wolpe is Africa program director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He says that some foreign assistance programs have unintentionally reinforced the inequities that helped lead to conflicts.

"In Burundi, for example, in the past, foreign assistance dollars largely reinforced the efforts of a state that was dominated by a small sub-group of the Tutsi minority. So the foreign assistance dollars had the effect of further entrenching the minority and paid little attention to the exclusion of the vast majority of the population and various kinds of discriminatory and exclusionary policies that were in place," he says.

Full Article : politinfo.com