Gaddafi talks tough on Africa - EU affiliations

By Eric Sande

TRIPOLI---Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi on Monday opened the Africa-EU summit,  with a stern warning to the European Union that Africa would turn to other trade partners if the EU continued to impose terms for cooperation. He stated that the partnership between the two continents had failed and lashed out at bodies like the World Trade Organisation as"terrorists" calling for its ‘abolition’.

Gaddafi also took a swipe at the EU's practice of linking economic assistance to African countries' respect for human rights and good governance.

In his opening remarks to 80 nations gathered for the two-day summit in Tripoli, Gaddafi said, "We have failed in our economic partnership with Europe. Our choice now is to cooperate with our brothers in the European Union but if that cooperation fails, Africa has other choices. Let every country and every group govern itself. Every country is free to serve its own interests."

"Africa can look to any other international bloc such as Latin America, China, India or Russi," he added.

The tough talking Gaddafi in his statement said that Africa was not benefiting from the WTO and all its interests are in ‘opening our borders for industrial goods and killing national industries in the Third World’.

"We want win-win relations based on mutual interest and not on exploitation," Gaddafi said.

The summit is due to seal 2007 pledges made by the 27-nation EU and the 53 African nations to turn a page on the burden of history by joining in a partnership of equals that ends decades of donor-recipient ties.

An internal document leaked from the African Union this month showed some governments on the continent felt that trade deals being offered by the EU were one-sided.It said the bloc was asking African countries to liberalize their economies to comply with World Trade Organization(WTO) rules but was not doing enough to help them develop their own economies.