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DURBAN, South Africa, July 7 (AFP) - African heads of state will on Monday bury the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), set up to combat colonialism and promote unity, but which has outlived its usefulness and will be replaced by the more powerful African Union (AU).

"For most of its history, the OAU leaders actively closed ranks to keep democracy and human rights at bay," veteran OAU observer Peter Fabricius wrote in Johannesburg's Saturday Star last weekend, noting that Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had once termed it, in characteristically blunt fashion, a trade union of criminals.

"The AU, by contrast, has democracy, human rights and other good values written right into its founding charter," Fabricius commented.

The OAU, which now represents 800 million people, was established in 1963 as the European powers ceded independence to their colonies, leaving an impoverished but hopeful continent.

Its guiding principle, on a land mass where the Europeans had drawn up boundaries which took little account of traditional demarcations between tribes, was a decision that these frontiers -- however unjust -- should be maintained to prevent turf wars exploding across the continent.

That principle accompanied a declaration that no interference would be made in the internal affairs of any state.

Since then, Africa has been wracked by coups d'etat and civil wars, many of horrifying brutality, with 25 presidents and prime ministers losing their lives in revolutions in the past 40 years or so.

"Sovereignty and solidarity have been misused as an excuse to look the other way when member states abused their own peoples," commented Kathryn Sturman of South Africa's Institute for Security Studies in a recent analysis.

Under the AU, to be launched Tuesday at a summit in the South African city of Durban, that principle of non-interference has been abandoned -- a Peace and Security Council will be able to call on a stand-by peacekeeping force from African armies to intervene if crimes against humanity are being committed, and democracy will be subject to peer review.

On other fronts, where again the AU plans to be more active, the OAU's efforts to promote economic and social integration were supplanted by regional economic and developmental blocs.

The OAU had 30 members when it was founded on May 25, 1963 in Addis Ababa, where it still has its headquarters.

It now has 53, including the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Its inclusion in 1984 caused Morocco, which claims the territory, to withdraw from the OAU, making it the only African state outside the organisation.

The OAU -- and the same will be true of the AU -- differs from the United Nations in that no nation has any veto power.

Its secretariat, dismissed by many African analysts as ineffectual, will be replaced by a commission along European Union lines, with 10 commissioners holding specific portfolios.

Funding of the AU has yet to be determined, but the target budget is around 80 million dollars (euros) a year, with one proposal that part of this come from a levy on all air flights.

The OAU, which has a 32-million-dollar annual budget, is owed 36 million dollars in arrears.

Morale at the OAU secretariat, according to Jakkie Cilliers and Sturman of the Institute for Security Studies, is "extremely low" due to an impossible work load, public accusations by secretary general Amara Essy that the secretariat is undermining him, and job insecurity, as all must resign and reapply for their jobs.

Essy, from Ivory Coast, was elected in July last year to replace Salim Ahmed Salim of Tanzania, who held the post for 12 years.

Despite "widespread criticism" of Essy, wrote Cilliers and Sturman, "he is expected to continue as interim chairperson of the African Union. - Nampa-AFP

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