All in a day's work

If last week's Middle East talks in Annapolis proved anything, it was that complicated, age-old conflicts cannot be solved, or even credibly set on the road to solution, in a single day.

Undeterred by this obvious truth, Condoleezza Rice arrives in Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa on Wednesday intent on putting Africa to rights. For this ambitious task, the US secretary of state is allowing 24 hours out of her busy schedule.

Officials say Rice's packed day out will include a "Great Lakes summit", involving Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and Burundi; a heads of state-level meeting on Somalia, including Djibouti, Kenya and the African Union; and a full-dress ministerial on Sudan, with possible special reference to Darfur. As if that was not enough, Ms Rice will also tackle Ethiopia's explosive border dispute with Eritrea and bilateral relations with the Addis government of Meles Zenawi.

Given a recent dramatic and dangerous deterioration in many of the problems featured on Rice's to-do list, the rushed nature of her visit is likely to elicit some surprise - and yield few concrete results.

Hundreds of thousands of people are currently being displaced in eastern Congo by fighting and human rights abuses involving militias, foreign rebels such as Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, and government troops, the International Crisis Group reported recently. But the UN mission was struggling and western governments were failing to link aid to security and good governance, it said.

In the circumstances, Rice's excursion plan to "foster dialogue" looks optimistic in the extreme.

Efforts to deploy a UN and African Union hybrid force in Darfur by the end of the year are in trouble, with fewer than half the promised soldiers available for deployment. The reluctance of Nato governments to supply helicopters and other aircraft also threatens to undermine an EU peacekeeping force intended for Chad, where linked violence is increasing. But Rice will not be talking directly to the Sudanese.

A similar sorry tale of escalating, urgent need and international inaction or ineffectiveness is unfolding in Somalia and the Somali state region of neighbouring Ethiopia.

The UN is now calling Somalia Africa's worst humanitarian crisis. An estimated 6,000 civilians have died this year and 1 million people are internally displaced.

During a visit today, John Holmes, the chief UN envoy, said it was increasingly difficult for aid agencies to function, and called for greater international assistance.

"The depth and scale of the crisis in Somalia is extremely alarming. In some parts, acute malnutrition levels surpass emergency thresholds," the UN World Food Programme said.

Efforts to halt a spillover conflict in the eastern Ogaden region of Ethiopia's Somali state are also in trouble, hampered by the spectre, in western eyes, of expanding hardline Islamist influence.

Human Rights Watch said today that atrocities by Ogaden rebels and Ethiopian troops opposing them amounted to "serious international crimes" and warned that the conflict in Somalia, where Ethiopian forces are assisting the transitional government, was steadily intensifying. Addis Ababa flatly rejects such claims as propaganda. "It's just not true. The Ethiopian army is very disciplined," an official said.

But even if she had more time, Rice would be unlikely to press the Ethiopians too hard on Ogaden, or on their border dispute with Eritrea, despite Friday's collapse of the international commission charged with settling it. The reason comes in the symbolic form of Robert Gates, the US defence secretary.

The Bush administration views Ethiopia as an important ally in a shared struggle. Visiting the US base at Camp Lemonier in Djibouti yesterday, Gates's focus was less human rights and more "war on terror". Camp Lemonier, a former French Foreign Legion base, is the first toehold of Washington's new Africa Command. Seen from that hard-nosed perspective, Ms Rice's visit looks like a hasty bit of pre-Christmas window-dressing.

Simon Tisdall

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