Tony Blair is to become a Middle East envoy working on behalf of the US, Russia, the UN and the EU.

The announcement comes just hours after he stood down as UK prime minister and shortly before he is expected to quit as a Member of Parliament.

Earlier, Mr Blair said a “solution” to problems in the Middle East was possible but that this would require “huge intensity and work”.

Russia was thought to have opposed his appointment but has since agreed to it.

During his final prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, Mr Blair was asked about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

‘Absolute priority’

Mr Blair told MPs: “The absolute priority is to try to give effect to what is now the consensus across the international community – that the only way of bringing stability and peace to the Middle East is a two-state solution.”

Diplomatic sources had told the that frosty relations between Russia and Britain were behind a delay in any announcement.

However, senior UN officials describe Mr Blair as a star player who will bring energy to the Middle East peace process.

Mr Blair, who had been UK prime minister since 1997, was replaced by Gordon Brown on Wednesday.

He has proved a controversial figure in the UK and elsewhere for his decision to lead the UK into the Iraq war.

But he has also been widely praised for his efforts in bringing the peace process to fruition in Northern Ireland.

At prime minister’s questions, Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley said: “I just want to say to the prime minister this one word: He has entered into another colossal task.

“I hope that what happened in Northern Ireland will be repeated and at the end of the day he will be able to look back and say it was well worthwhile.”

BBC NEWS | UK | UK Politics | Blair becomes Middle East envoy

The handover of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown today is a carefully choreographed process which should culminate in the new Prime Minister entering Number 10 shortly after 2.30pm.

The formal events begin shortly before midday when Tony Blair leaves Downing Street for the Commons for his last-ever session of Prime Minister’s Questions.

He will then return to Number 10 to say farewell to Downing Street staff before he and his wife, Cherie, travel to Buckingham Palace at roughly 1.15pm for his formal resignation as Prime Minister.

The audience is expected to last up to 30 minutes.

Between 1.30pm and 2pm, the Chancellor is expected to get the summons to go to the Palace to be invited to become Prime Minister.

Mr Brown and his wife Sarah will then travel to Buckingham Palace.

At around 2.30pm, Mr Brown will return to Number 10 as Prime Minister, to speak by telephone with foreign leaders and begin work on his reshuffle.

Names of the key players in the new Brown Cabinet could emerge but are more likely to come on Thursday.  

Timeline: The Blair-Brown handover | Uk News | News | Telegraph

“A SCAR on the conscience of the world” is how Tony Blair, Britain’s departing prime minister, once described Africa. In an attempt, perhaps, to remind people that there is more to his legacy than Iraq, this week he returned to the continent that has given him some of his greatest foreign-policy successes. Mr Blair can certainly claim that he has done more than any other leader to make the world aware of that scar. But doing somehting about it has proved trickier. For Mr Blair’s relationship with Africa has been one of vaulting ambition, dashed hopes and modest success.

The three countries that he dropped in on before returning to Britain on Friday June 1st are richly illustrative. Sierra Leone is where his African adventure began in 2000 with a British military intervention to restore the elected president, Ahmad Kabbah, to power after a rebellion. A former British colony, Sierra Leone was a classic failed African state: years of civil war fuelled by “blood diamonds” had ripped the country apart. But Britain’s successful military strike, combined with dollops of post-conflict aid to rebuild the country, showed Mr Blair that Africa was an arena where Britain, with its strong historical ties to the continent, could make an impact.

Today Sierra Leone is visibly a better place. In the streets of its capital, Freetown, Mr Blair was greeted almost like a returning messiah; once he must have hoped for something similar in Baghdad. Sierra Leone showed Mr Blair how he could fuse his evangelising morality with practical politics. He began to argue that the rich world now had the means to cure poverty and disease, if only it could find the will.

But Mr Blair also went to South Africa, where the limits of his power have been starkly revealed. Despite his supposedly close relationship with Thabo Mbeki, its president, Mr Blair has failed to convince him to take a tougher stand against Robert Mugabe, the president of another former colony gone disastrously wrong, Zimbabwe. Appeals to human rights and democracy have fallen on deaf ears; Zimbabwe’s neighbours have preferred the solidarity of the liberation struggle against what they still tout as white imperialism.

Zimbabwe is one case where Mr Blair’s brand of easy Western morality has come up short against the realities of African big-man politics. Sudan is another, though it has not been a total failure for the West. America and Britain did force the Sudanese government to sign a peace agreement with its rebellious south in 2004. But the Sudanese have run rings around both for years over getting a UN force into the Darfur region to stop a murderous government counter-insurgency campaign that has so far cost the lives of about 300,000 people.

Mr Blair also invested too much in leaders who he hoped would lead an “African renaissance” but turned out to be more old school than Blairite. If he had left office a couple of years ago, his farewell safari might well have included Ethiopia. Meles Zenawi, the country’s president, was the most prominent African member of Mr Blair’s Commission for Africa but he repaid the compliment by allowing his police to shoot scores of protesters dead and arrest hundreds more in the wake of flawed elections in 2005. So now it is back to the old game of figuring out how to help people whose leaders are mainly interested in helping themselves.

Although African politics have proved messier than Mr Blair must have hoped, his famous charm nonetheless worked on some of its leaders. His tour began in Libya, where he led the way in persuading President Muammar Qaddafi to give up his nuclear programme in exchange for the resumption of ties with the West. And if all the “scaling up” of aid agreed at G8 summits does eventually help to reduce poverty and disease on the continent, Mr Blair’s African legacy might yet turn out to have been important.

At the least Mr Blair can be sure that Africa was good for his government. New Labour’s technocratic approach at home never satisfied the old yearning to build a New Jerusalem that lurks in the breast of every Labour activist. Africa gave them a “great cause” to rally round, and helped Mr Blair through some of his worst patches over Iraq. Furthermore, scaling up and debt relief are among the few issues on which Mr Blair and his successor, Gordon Brown, are in absolute harmony. So as Mr Blair goes, expect more of the same from the new government on Africa.

Link to The Economist

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa (Reuters) — British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Thursday urged rich nations to keep their promises of financial aid to Africa, saying failure to do so could threaten the continent’s march toward prosperity and democracy.

In a keynote speech in Johannesburg on the final leg of his farewell African tour as Britain’s leader, Blair also said that Africa’s leaders must get tough on authoritarian governments, such as those in Sudan and Zimbabwe.

“Wealthy nations and Africa both face a choice … Our challenge is to support the good. Africa’s challenge is to eliminate the bad,” Blair said in the speech.

“Next week at the G8 (Group of Eight) Summit, leaders will show whether, having put Africa at the top of the global agenda, we have the perseverance and vision to see it through. I hope we have,” the outgoing British leader said.

Blair’s visit came on the eve of the G8 summit scheduled for Germany, during which Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to press rich nations to fulfil aid pledges to Africa under a 2005 Blair initiative.

“We need each G8 to be bolder on Africa than the last,” Blair said. “If we give up, we will lose the chance in this continent, rich as it is though its people are often poor, for our values to take root.”

He said initiatives such as the new Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund, which will provide matching funds for commercially sustainable African business projects, showed that Africa and the West could be partners in development.

Mandela and Mbeki

Due to hand over power to finance minister Gordon Brown on June 27, Blair is using the trip to build momentum for the summit, which will focus on the world’s poorest continent and push for a world trade deal.

He visited Libya and Sierra Leone before traveling to South Africa, where he will bid farewell to former South African President Nelson Mandela and meet current leader Thabo Mbeki.

Pushing the United States and other Western nations to meet their pledges of financial aid, trade support and assistance on peacekeeping and conflict resolution is a key part of the Blair agenda in his final weeks in office, as is the need for a global deal to fight climate change.

But Blair is also underscoring what he says is the need to pressure Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe’s government, which has been criticized in the West for a violent crackdown on political opponents.

Mbeki is overseeing efforts to bring Mugabe and his opponents in Zimbabwe to the bargaining table ahead of elections in the southern African nation scheduled for next year, and Blair said this effort needed to bear fruit quickly.

“African governments should also hold other African governments to account,” Blair said.

“The world is waiting, wanting to re-engage with a reforming Zimbabwe government … but for the people of Zimbabwe, this is urgent, and change before the 2008 elections essential.”

Blair said Sudan, where the United States has accused President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of pursuing genocide in the war-ravaged region of Darfur, was another opportunity for Africa to show it stood on the side of peace and justice.

“We have to offer President Bashir a choice. Engage with us on a solution. Or, if you reject responsibility for the people of Darfur, then we will table and put to a vote sanctions on the regime.”

Blair acknowledged some people were growing cynical over repeated — and often only partially fulfilled — pledges of Western help for Africa, but said he was convinced the policy needed to be enhanced not questioned.

“The fact that we don’t get it all doesn’t mean that we got nothing,” he said. “We’ve got to make the case in the developed world that in the end this is in our own self-interest as well. This is not about charity.”

Link to Blair to G8: Keep African promises – CNN.com

The Prime Minister cut an uncomfortable figure this week when he donned a colourful ceremonial robe on his visit to the African country. But he is not the first VIP to enter into the spirit of a state visit. By Jerome Taylor and Kate Thomas

Tony Blair; Sierra Leone, 2007

Whatever the verdict of the wider world on Tony Blair’s legacy, to the people of Mahera village in Sierra Leone he is a hero. His decision to send UK troops to stop rebels destroying the country saved Mahera which lay on the front line. This week the village bestowed upon Mr Blair the title of paramount chief. Wearing a traditional brown robe draped over his immaculately pressed suit, Mr Blair looked somewhat uncomfortable as the village head said the Prime Minister had earned the honour by defending their settlement against aggressors. “It’s wonderful to be with you here today in Sierra Leone and it’s a particular honour to be made an honorary paramount chief,” Mr Blair responded. “Thank you very much indeed.”

George Bush and Vladimir Putin; Vietnam, 2006

When President Bush flew to the 2006 Apec summit in Hanoi, he was almost certainly not expecting to be ordered to change into a silky blue dress. The male version of the Ao Dai – the Vietnamese national dress with a revealing slit along the leg – is rarely seen on the streets of Hanoi these days, which may explain why George Bush and Vladimir Putin look so uncomfortable in their matching paintbox-blue versions. They may not have agreed on North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, but they were united in embarrassment. Fans of Mr Bush’s costume dramas await September’s Apec summit in Australia to see what the cowboy pulls out of the dressing-up box. Ugg boots and cork hats all round, then.

Boris Yeltsin; The Republic of Tuva, 1994

As Russia’s first capitalist leader for more than 70 years, Boris Yeltsin was rarely seen wearing anything but a well-cut suit. But when you want to win over the people of the remote Republic of Tuva, it helps to don the local garb and become proficient at the two most respected skills, horse riding and throat singing. Although the isolated region of Tuva remains nominally a part of Russia it is a virtual world away from Moscow and following the collapse of the Soviet Union tensions soon flared between locals and ethnic Russians. Yeltsin made a number of visits there throughout his presidency in order to persuade the people of Tuva to remain within the Russian republic and wearing local dress was often a good way to win over non-ethnic Russians. The region is predominantly Buddhist and most inhabitants follow the teachings of the Dalai Lama.

Bill Clinton; Indonesia, 1994

When Bill Clinton insisted his guests wear classic US bomber jackets at the 1993 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (Apec) meeting in Seattle, he had no way of knowing what he had started. Ever since, the arguable highlight of Apec has been the tradition of donning the host’s national costume. It was one thing to prowl Seattle coffee shops in a bomber jacket; another to squeeze into an ill-fitting brown batik shirt at the 1994 gathering in Bogor, Indonesia. Since then, leaders at Apec summits have donned jackets fashioned from pineapple skin in the Philippines and durumagis in South Korea. But the prize for the biggest sartorial mistake in Apec’s history must go to George Bush, who in 2004 wore a poncho to match the colour of his cheeks in Santiago.

Prince Charles; South Africa, 1997

People in the Zulu village of Dukuduku were delighted to see Prince Charles wield their traditional spear and shield so enthusiastically during a trip to South Africa in 1997. There he met another member of royalty, a Zulu chief known as Prince Phillip who, when not meeting international dignitaries, drove a taxi. Accompanying Charles was a young Prince Harry. On his return Prince Charles quipped: “We have collected so many Zulu shields, spears and sticks that we may easily now be able to start a small Zulu war of our own.”

Jack Straw; India, 2005

As a politician with a large Asian constituency and as foreign secretary, Jack Straw made six visits to India in as little as four years. During this particular trip to Sikhism’s holiest shrine, Amritsar’s Golden Temple, in 2005, Mr Straw showed just how much of an old India hand he had become, adapting easily to the local customs and mucking in when asked to. Those entering any Sikh temple have to cover their heads and remove their shoes but the foreign secretary had removed his shoes and placed a handkerchief on his head without even having to be asked. All Sikh temples, known as gurudwaras, have a kitchen where food is prepared for pilgrims and the needy. After helping the temple kitchen staff roll chapatis and rotis, Mr Straw then tucked into a meal with senior leaders from the Sikh community.

Dennis Thatcher; India, 1981

The picture may show Dennis Thatcher looking more than happy to don local headgear during a visit to Delhi in 1981 but, according to some, the Iron Lady’s husband was in fact less than amused. Struggling to keep the giant pink turban on his head, Mr Thatcher was caught muttering under his breath: “These blighters are trying to make me look like a bloody fool.” Not that Mr Thatcher’s further trips to India improved his attitude to the sub-continent. During a Commonwealth summit in Goa, an electrical blackout caught him out halfway through shaving with an electric razor. In a typically subtle reaction he was reportedly heard roaring: “The buggeration factor is high and growing in this part of the world!”

The Queen; New Zealand, 1995

Her sartorial mistakes have been relatively few and far between, but the exception was in 1995, when Her Majesty visited a Maori woodcarving school in Rotorua while on an official visit in New Zealand. As the Queen left, dressed in a korowai shawl fashioned from bird feathers, she was met by a crowd of 60 representatives from the Maori community, who proceeded to suggest she return to England and remove herself from the New Zealand governmental process. The Queen, a figure of decorum, simply wrapped the shawl more tightly around her shoulders and smiled meekly. Unsurprisingly, she did not join in when the group began to perform a haka and the shawl was never been seen since.

Link to Suits you, sir! When in Sierra Leone (or Vietnam, or India, or Indonesia, or Tuva…) – Independent Online Edition > World Politics

Under the boughs of a baobab tree, Tony Blair sat on a wooden throne as five men bowed at his feet and made him a Paramount Chief of Sierra Leone yesterday.

Tony Blair is now the Paramount Chief of Kuffa Bulam chieftain

A ceremonial robe was draped over his shoulders and the Prime Minister, visibly moved, assumed the title of “Chief of Peace”.

In theory, this makes Mr Blair entitled to sit in Sierra Leone’s parliament. The ceremony confirmed his standing as national hero in the formerly war-torn country.

Seven years ago, Mr Blair sent 1,500 British troops to secure Sierra Leone’s capital, Freetown, against an advancing rebel army styling itself the Revolutionary United Front.

The British deployment eventually ended Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2002 and allowed democracy to return.

Yesterday, before hundreds of onlookers, Mr Blair walked past a row of white clad women singing his praises in Mahera village.

He greeted Sierra Leone’s other Paramount Chiefs, all of them clad in flowing robes and seated upon plastic garden chairs.

Mr Blair, looking a little bemused, sat on his throne as five men bowed before him and five women sang: “It is over, it is finished. The chief is crowned.”

The robe was draped over Mr Blair’s shoulders – although he quickly allowed it to fall back on to his throne – and he entered Sierra Leone’s immortal pantheon of heroes.

Mr Blair is now the Paramount Chief of Kuffa Bulam chieftain, with formal power to resolve local land disputes – but not raise taxes. Cherie Blair, who watched the ceremony from the sidelines, is now Ya-bonbosseh, or First Lady of the Chieftain.

President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah welcomed Mr Blair to the chieftaincy. Mohammed Hassan Gangara, the son of a former chief, hailed Mr Blair as a “great leader” and said: “Traditionally [he] who successfully defended a settlement from aggression became a chief.

“The role that Mr Blair played in helping us repel and defeat the rebels entitles him to the chieftaincy.”

Mr Blair, with a catch in his voice, replied that he was grateful for an “extraordinary honour” and said Sierra Leone was “an important symbol for the future of our world. Only people who are free, free to choose their government and free to choose their leaders can make the best of their lives.”

Earlier, Mr Blair gave a rare insight into the origins of his passion for Sierra Leone. His father, Leo, taught law at a university there in the 1960s.

“I remember my father talking about Freetown and Sierra Leone. I do remember that and it’s always lodged in my mind,” he said.

As for the consequences of Britain’s intervention, Mr Blair said: “Whatever the challenges that remain, the fact is there has been enormous and beneficial change in this country and we are proud to have played our part in this.”

The end of Sierra Leone’s civil war in 2002 also brought peace to neighbouring Liberia.

Asked about criticism of his visit as a “vanity expedition”, Mr Blair replied: “What I would say to cynics about Africa is, just get across the balanced picture. Five years ago this country was being taken over by a gang of gangsters who were killing innocent people, raping women, despoiling the country.

“But today we have a situation where in three months time we will have an election.

‘I don’t say that is perfection, but I say it’s a darned sight better than it was before.

During Mr Blair’s Premiership British aid to Africa has trebled.

He described this as an “investment in the future of Africa which, if we are sensible, will repay not just you in Africa but us in the developed world many times over”.

Link to Sierra Leone makes Blair ‘Chief of Peace’ | Uk News | News | Telegraph

Prime Minister Tony Blair flew into Sierra Leone today on his farewell African tour – to be made a Paramount Chief.

His wife Cherie will look on as the villagers of Mahera garland him in honour of Britain’s role in helping free the country from years of bloody civil war.

The 6,000-strong villagers elect their own Paramount Chief and are also allowed to choose honorary chiefs who deserve special recognition. As well as his garland Mr Blair will be presented during the colourful ceremony with a big stick, denoting his status.

Mr Blair’s official spokesman joked: “But what he can’t do is raise taxes or make people labour unpaid in the fields.”

Blair arrives in Sierra Leone, where he will be ‘crowned’

Mr Blair touched down at Lungi airport near the capital Freetown for talks with Sierra Leone President Ahmad Kabbah and President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of neighbouring Liberia to discuss how to boost African peacekeeping capacity, and deliver on aid and trade promises for the continent.

Sierra Leone is officially the second poorest country in the world, according to United Nations’ figures.

During his visit Mr Blair will announce he is keen to push for an international fund to support the rapid deployment of African Union peacekeepers within their region, the aim being they should reach troubled spots within the first 60 days of trouble erupting.

After his trip to Libya where he and Cherie met Colonel Gadaffi, Blair plans to fly to Sierra Leone, where he will be hailed a “hero”.

The wartorn country’s rulers plan to make the British Prime Minister a ‘paramount ruler’ – the highest honour that can be bestowed – for sending troops for sending troops to help end civil war in May 2000.

A grateful British public – who are paying for the trip – will doubtless be pleased to hear that no detail of the Premier’s style and grooming is apparently to be lost to posterity.

For it emerged that among his entourage are a writer and two photographers from the glossy American fashion magazine Men’s Vogue.

And if they aren’t enough to capture every fascinating moment of the Blair progress, there are also documentary television crews from Bob Geldof’s Ten Alps TV and production company Jupiter.

Two weeks ago, the novelist Martin Amis was invited to accompany the Prime Minister on his final trip to Washington as Premier.

He is understood to be writing an essay on the handover of power to Gordon Brown for the Guardian newspaper.

The Tories said it was increasingly clear that Mr Blair’s last few weeks in power are being used to boost his profile on the world stage in preparation for his retirement career – which is expected to be rather lucrative.

Shadow Transport Secretary Chris Grayling said: “Tony Blair seems to have abandoned being Prime Minister and the hard-pressed taxpayer is having to fund his vanity tour of the world, which is aimed at the next stage of his career.

“He seems more concerned about how he looks in Vogue than tackling real issues at home. It’s time we brought an end to this farce.”

Tory leader David Cameron has accused Mr Blair of behaving like a “pop star” on a farewell tour and demanded he quits immediately in favour of Gordon Brown.

Mr Cameron says Mr Brown has been left “wandering the country with nothing to do” while Mr Blair is jetting around the world “indulging his vanity”.

The attacks are designed to maximise Labour’s increasing discomfort over Mr Blair’s protracted farewell from Downing Street.

He landed in Libya yesterday on the first leg of a whirlwind five-day tour of Africa which will also take in Sierra Leone and South Africa.

His valedictory wanderings have already taken him to the United States, France and Iraq, as well as a number of visits around Britain by helicopter.

In Libya, the Premier met the country’s bloodstained dictator Colonel Muammar

Gaddafi in a Bedouin tent at a military compound in the desert at Sirte, about 150 miles south east of Tripoli.

The PM travelled there aboard Gaddafi’s luxurious private plane. As he descended the steps of the aircraft on to a red carpet, he was mobbed by photographers and a military band played an out-of-tune rendition of God Save the Queen.

Mr Blair’s 20-car convoy then snaked across scrubland to the site of the makeshift rendezvous, where the two men sat on ornate gilded chairs and chatted on first-name terms.

Mr Blair praised Gaddafi for becoming a crucial ally in the fight against terrorism – and urged Iran to follow his lead and come in from the cold.

He said Libya, a former pariah state, has provided “extremely valuable” information to help track down extremists plotting carnage in the UK.

Mr Blair also applauded Gaddafi – who gave the order that condemned 270 innocent people to death in the 1988 Lockerbie bombing – for dismantling his weapons of mass destruction.

It is the first time he has met the dictator since a meeting in 2004, arranged after the former godfather of world terrorism had finally accepted blame for the airline bombing and paid £2.7billion compensation to victims.

Mr Blair said: “The relationship with Libya has been completely transformed.”

Representatives of Sierra Leone’s 149 paramount chiefs, local traditional rulers in the former British colony, will name Blair one of their own at a ceremony in the township of Mahera.

“We have nothing, no money to give him but it is a way of recognising him as a chief of our nation,” said Ibrahim Kamara, a local official in the village of tin-roofed shacks, spread among mango and coconut trees across the river from Freetown.

“All the paramount chiefs together with the head of state agreed on the gesture. It’s the highest traditional honour,” he said, as schoolchildren practised a welcome dance behind him.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair waves as he arrives at Lungi Airport in Sierra Leone, May 30, 2007.

FREETOWN (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Western countries on Wednesday to finance, train and equip African peacekeeping troops so they could intervene to end conflicts on the continent like the one in Sudan’s Darfur.

Blair made the call a day after U.S. President George W. Bush imposed new sanctions on Sudan and sought support for an international arms embargo against the government in Khartoum to try to halt what he called the genocide in Darfur.

Visiting Sierra Leone on a farewell tour of Africa before he stands down next month, Blair was welcomed as a hero for sending troops to the former British colony in May 2000 as rebels advanced on the capital Freetown during a civil war.

In a special ceremony, he was made a paramount chief of the small West African state, gaining the title “Bai Shebora N’Torfla,” which means “chief of peace.”

At a news conference at Lungi international airport with the presidents of Sierra Leone and Liberia, Blair said he believed Africa had a responsibility to intervene in conflicts and humanitarian crises taking place on African soil.

“The African Union does have to have a stronger peacekeeping capability. We in the West and the wealthy countries have a responsibility to finance it, to train it, to make sure it is properly equipped,” said Blair.

He said rich nations should reinforce this commitment to back African peacekeepers at the G8 summit in Germany next week.

Britain wanted the European Union to establish a $50 million draw-down fund to finance an African Union rapid reaction force, according to a note distributed by British officials. London was ready to commit $10 million to prime the fund, said the note.

CHANGE IN AFRICA

Blair said there was a reluctance to see non-African troops going into Sudan’s western Darfur region, where more than 200,000 people have died and 2 million been driven from their homes by a political and ethnic conflict raging since 2003.

He said that had the African Union previously had the capacity to intervene effectively in Darfur, the crisis could have been resolved “some years ago.” The conflict pits Sudanese troops and allied militias against Darfuri rebels.

Sudan has been resisting international pressure to allow a proposed large U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, though more recently Khartoum has appeared to give ground on allowing the U.N. to bolster a struggling African Union mission.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf said African governments now accepted they had to act in cases of war or humanitarian crisis.

“Look at the sea change in Africa: 20 years ago there would have been absolutely no intervention, military or otherwise because there was a standing African policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries,” she said.

Blair, Johnson-Sirleaf and Sierra Leonean President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah later inspected a parade of local troops.

While Blair’s critics say history will judge him harshly for Britain’s involvement in Iraq, Sierra Leone is popularly seen as a high point of his foreign policy: his government cites it as a model of what can be done to save a failing state.

His popularity among Sierra Leoneans is high.

“Tony Blair is a hero,” said journalist Augustus Kamara, who has named his son Tony Blair Kamara.

In the ceremony making him a paramount chief, Blair was seated on a wooden throne before some 20 traditional rulers gathered under two cotton trees at Mahera township, near Lungi.

A traditional brown robe was briefly placed on his shoulders. He slipped it off later, telling his hosts: “I think it looks better on you guys than on me.”

Link to Blair urges West to back African peacekeeping force | Reuters.ca

LONDON (Reuters) – Prime Minister Tony Blair makes a farewell trip to Africa this week, after using his decade in power to try to rally the world’s richest countries to help ease the plight of the world’s poorest.

The governments of Sierra Leone and South Africa have announced Blair will visit this week on one of his last overseas trips before he resigns on June 27 and hands over power to Chancellor Gordon Brown.

In Sierra Leone he is expected to be praised for sending British troops to the country in 2000 to help shore up the United Nations peacekeeping operation there and hasten the end of a civil war marked by atrocities against civilians.

The South African government said Blair would hold talks with President Thabo Mbeki and deliver a major policy speech on Africa during a visit on Thursday and Friday.

The visit is significant because it takes place on the eve of the Group of Eight Summit scheduled for Germany during which Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to press rich nations to fulfil aid pledges to Africa under a 2005 Blair initiative.

The British-hosted G8 summit in July of that year produced Blair’s most vaunted achievements on Africa. Under Britain’s presidency, the leading industrialised countries promised to double aid to Africa by 2010 and wipe out more than $40 billion (20.2 billion pounds) of poor nations’ debt.

“By setting up the Africa Commission and using his presidency of the European Union and G8 in 2005 as leverage, Tony Blair helped to create an unprecedented global focus on Africa and poverty,” Barbara Stocking, director of aid agency Oxfam, said in a statement this month.

CRITICS QUESTION FOCUS

Blair famously declared in October 2001: “The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it.”

He raised Britain’s spending on international aid and in 2004 set up an international commission to propose solutions to Africa’s problems such as poverty, a falling share of world trade and a high death toll from conflict, famine and disease.

He also tried to reach out to African nations with a history of strained relations with the West.

In 2004, Blair became the first British leader in 60 years to visit Libya, sealing Tripoli’s return to the international fold after it abandoned efforts to acquire banned weapons and agreed to pay damages for a 1988 airliner bombing over Scotland.

But critics questioned the focus and his success record.

Ishbel Matheson, of Minority Rights Group International, which works for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, said Blair had focused too much on “Western charity, rather than tackling corruption and supporting African democracy.”

“From Zimbabwe to Eritrea, from Sudan to Somalia, the West’s disingenuous approach to Africa’s governance issues is bearing a bitter fruit,” she wrote in The Times newspaper on Monday.

Aid organisations say some G8 nations are lagging far behind on their commitments.

Blair tried to use Britain’s diplomatic muscle in Africa, pushing for tough action against Sudan over the Darfur crisis and urging African leaders to pressure Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

Despite the pressure, the conflict and humanitarian crisis in Darfur has not eased and Zimbabwe’s economic freefall has worsened with inflation now at more than 3,7000 percent.

British newspapers say he may make another attempt to press Mbeki on Zimbabwe this week. His efforts so far have earned him the wrath of Mugabe who said in April he had beaten off an attempt by Blair to “get Zimbabwe to collapse”.

Link to Scotsman.com News – Latest News – Blair makes farewell trip to Africa

To say Tony Blair is popular in Sierra Leone scarcely does justice to the intensity of feeling towards him in this small tropical corner of west Africa.
His decision seven years ago to send in British troops at the height of a brutal civil war is widely seen by Sierra Leoneans themselves as the critical moment in their country’s salvation. It turned the tide in the conflict and helped bring an end to an 11-year nightmare.
The village of Mahera, for example, would almost certainly have been overrun in 2000 by rebels with a well-earned reputation for chopping off the limbs of children had British paratroopers not stood in their way.
The settlement is a dusty cluster of tin-roofed, cinder-block houses next to the airport. When the prime minister dropped by in 2002 he was mobbed, and it is clear that, though his star has long since spluttered and died back home, it still burns brightly over Mahera.
“He is our saviour! Tony Blair is our redeemer!” Kalie Bangura was moved to cry out at an impromptu rehearsal of praise songs the villagers have been practicing since the country’s president, Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, promised this month that their hero would be returning.
“We would assure you and the British people that Tony Blair will get a massive welcome, a heroic welcome, when he gets to Sierra Leone,” Mr Bangura, the revenue collector for the Mahera chiefdom, said. “If Tony Blair is not popular in Britain, we would assure you he is popular here. He did all in his power to see the war ended in Sierra Leone.”
Mr Bangura was sitting on a low bench at the little village square that Mr Blair visited five years ago, and it has changed little in the intervening years. Hopes that peace would bring development in its wake have long since wilted.
A set of metal taps in the square that provided water for the whole village ran dry about two years ago, after a storage tank sprang leaks and was not replaced. Since then villagers have had to rely on a stream, even though there have been repeated outbreaks of cholera.
On the other side of the square is a forlorn half-built mosque, abandoned for lack of funds, sprouting grass from its foundations.
Travel dangers
At night the main source of light comes from nearby Lungi airport, but even that glow of modernity is deceptive. The road from the rundown terminal around the bay to the capital, Freetown, is so rough that the journey takes five or six hours. In the rainy season it is impassable. There is a ferry that takes even longer, and has few lifeboats or lifejackets.
The only other alternative is taking a seven-minute helicopter ride for US$50 (£25), in the knowledge that the Soviet-era choppers have been known to drop out of the sky. The British historian Simon Schama narrowly escaped death this year when the helicopter he was on caught fire and crash-landed.
That explains why VIP visitors such as Mr Blair prefer the president to meet them at the airport, and why the country is having such a hard job attracting tourists and foreign investors.
Visitors who do risk the short ride can peer down from the helicopter’s open windows on to a city that – from a distance – looks largely unchanged from the 60s, when Mr Blair’s father taught law there. The corrugated steel roofs descend in a cascade from the green mountains to palm boulevards along the beach.
Closer up, the reality is less inviting. Beneath their roofs the old colonial buildings are falling apart, starved of water, electricity or capital. The overcrowded streets are deeply potholed and traffic stands at a halt for much of the day. The city shoreline is choked by shanty towns and years of accumulated rubbish. Sierra Leone remains crippled by the same chronic ailments, poverty and corruption, that drove it to the brink of national suicide in the first place.
Britain has spent an average of £40m a year on Sierra Leone since the conflict, and remains by far the biggest bilateral donor. The country rests at the bottom of the global economic pile. It has the world’s worst child mortality rate (a Sierra Leonean has a one in three chance of not surviving until the age of five) and ranks above only Niger in the UN human development index.
Traumatized
After the horrors of the 1991-2002 civil war, however, most Sierra Leoneans feel blessed just to be alive with their limbs intact. Freetown is still traumatized from the day, January 6 1999, when the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) – led by a former corporal, Foday Sankoh, and funded by blood diamonds looted from the gem fields in the east – took over half the city. The ensuing bloodbath left hundreds dead and a generation of amputees.
Moses Kamara was a 15-year-old schoolboy, when a gang of rebels grabbed him at random, and gave him a choice. “They asked: “What did I want to keep: my eye or my leg?” he recalled. “What could I say? I said: my eye. They cut off my leg.”
He haunts the streets of Freetown begging with his fellow amputees. It is not uncommon to see young men missing both hands or legs. The only apparent motive for this orgy of mutilation was the desire to inspire terror.
The RUF was eventually driven out by a West African regional force, but a year later it was back on Freetown’s doorstep and the city panicked. It was at that moment that Mr Blair sent in British paratroopers.
Augustus Kamara, a news editor for the state news agency, spent much of the conflict in hiding. Even today, he sobs when he relives the stress of trying to keep his family alive. “I would not be here speaking to you [if not for] all these risks Tony Blair took, because it was a political risk intervening where you know some of your troops will die,” he said.
When his wife gave birth to a boy in 2001, Mr Kamara named him after his hero. Tony-Blair Kamara is six years old. He is quieter and more sombre than his namesake, perhaps a little weary of life as an embodiment of Sierra Leonean gratitude. But his dad insists the sad-eyed boy remains fiercely proud of his name.
When the Parachute Regiment was deployed in 2000, its primary mission was to evacuate British, EU and Commonwealth citizens and to patrol Freetown. But the operation’s commander, Brigadier David Richards, was given wide latitude and found that the RUF melted away when it met a determined show of force.
Later in the year, a rebel gang calling itself the West Side Boys, who had been terrorizing the road into Freetown, seized a detachment of British soldiers and held six hostage at their camp deep in the tropical forest. On September 10, the paratroopers and SAS were sent in to rescue them.
The operation destroyed the West Side Boys as a fighting force, with the loss of one British soldier, and quickly became the stuff of legend in Sierra Leone. The mock-up of the rebel camp used to rehearse the assault is now a village in its own right – home to dozens of families. More importantly, the incident had a dramatic psychological impact. British troops were seen as virtually invincible, and the rebels melted away. Peace was formally declared in January 2002, but in real terms the war had ended months earlier.
Coming a year after the zero-casualty invasion of Kosovo, the Sierra Leone experience reinforced the belief in Downing Street that Britain could save entire populations at minimal cost to British forces – an assumption that clearly played a role in the decision to join the invasion of Iraq.
In Sierra Leone, the premise still holds. A small force of British soldiers has stayed on to train a new national army, and they are perceived in much of the country as a totemic guarantee of enduring peace.
“We have peace in Sierra Leone now, and Tony Blair made a huge contribution to that,” said Warrant Officer Abu Bakerr Kamara. He pointed out that the new force he is training with includes former government soldiers and rebels. “We are all Sierra Leoneans,” he said. “All these people are one army now.”
With elections due in August, however, Sierra Leone is nervous. Most political observers are optimistic that any clashes between rival party supporters can be contained by the UN-trained police, with the army on hand as a last resort. But in a country with an unemployment rate of nearly 70%, including many former child soldiers, there are no certainties.

Link to I Would Not Be Speaking to You If It Weren’t for the Risks Blair Took