"Africa's descent into nightmare"

AS the world debates how to respond to the humanitarian disaster in Sudan's Darfur region, a larger shadow is creeping across the dark continent.

From the Ivory Coast in the west to Somalia in the east and Zimbabwe in the south, sub-Saharan Africa is in a crisis unprecedented even by the flimsy standards of its own troubled history.

In a continent increasingly racked by war, economic stagnation, an AIDS pandemic, corruption and intractable ethnic and tribal divides, Africans are struggling to secure their future more than a generation after the end of colonialism.

This bitter truth was been spelt out in unusually blunt fashion by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, himself a Ghanaian, following his recent visit to Darfur.

He warned that the Sudan crisis, while shocking, was only one of a host of new problems in the region that were placing African nations at risk.

Full Article : theaustralian.news.com.au