Johannesburg/Nairobi - The African Union's attempts to keep peace on the continent were again sorely put to the test in 2008 as new conflicts flared up and under-resourced African peacekeepers found themselves outmatched by well-armed rebels.

As the year closed, a contingent of around 3,000 AU peacekeepers from Uganda and Burundi looked set to quit Somalia, where they have achieved little except being shot and bombed by Islamist insurgents.

Ethiopian forces, which have been propping up the regime since early 2007, are leaving before the end of the year.

The AU force, 5,000 short of the planned contingent, has said it will only stay if the UN sends in 8,000 troops. The UN is not prepared to oblige.

In Sudan's restive Darfur province, where an ethnic-based conflict has claimed 300,000 lives over five years, troops serving in a hybrid United Nations-African Union UNAMID force were also coming under fire.

The UNAMID force comprises 11,415 uniformed personnel deployed to secure Darfur, an area the size of France.

The peacekeepers, under attack by both rebels and government- backed Janjaweed militia, fell into numerous ambushes over the year that killed at least 9 troops and injured dozens.

In a particularly embarrassing incident, 60 armed men on horses and camels relieved a convoy of Nigerian peacekeepers of their weapons and cash. Not a single shot was fired.

In April, former South African president Thabo Mbeki, whose country leads peacekeeping efforts on the continent, went to the UN to ask for help in building up the AU's peacekeeping capacity.

Mbeki complained that the several lack of logistical and financial resources was hampering the AU's ability to keep law and order.

He came away with little more than a plan from UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon for an AU-UN panel of eminent persons to examine funding options.

Instead, the discussion focused on Africa's weak democratic credentials, as evidenced by the continent's continued cosseting of authoritarian Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

The African Union did redeem itself partly on Zimbabwe, after Mugabe smashed his way to a sham victory in a one-man presidential election run-off vote.

At a summit in Egypt, African Union heads of state called on him to share power with Morgan Tsvangirai's Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

But by leaving the mediation on the formation of the unity government in the hands of Mbeki, who had discredited himself by openly supporting Mugabe, the African Union undermined its own efforts.

Mbeki rammed through a flimsy power-sharing agreement in September that has yet to be implemented.

On Sudan too, the AU's record was spotty. While attacks on civilians by the Janjaweed militia continued in Darfur, the AU leadership was opposing a move in the International Criminal Court to have Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir indicted for war crimes.

The AU denounced the threatened indictment as likely to deepen tensions in Darfur.

While the AU was involved in sorting out the post-election violence that blighted Kenya in January and February, it took former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to force a deal that ended the fighting.

The AU has also been largely ineffective in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where 250,000 civilians fled fighting between August and November.

Peace talks between Tutsi rebels and the government are underway, but it was UN special envoy Olusegun Obasanjo who brokered them.

While the AU pussyfooted around its biggest rights transgressors it decided to get tough with one little island in the Indian Ocean - the Comoros island of Anjouan.

In March, nearly 1,000 AU troops invaded the island to oust renegade Colonel Mohamed Bacar and return the island to the control of the federal Comoros government. The operation was over within hours.

Despite the show of force, the AU is still reluctant to defend African citizens against rapacious political elites, says Professor Hussein Solomon, director of the Centre for International Political Studies at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

"Whether Congo or Darfur, Zimbabwe or Somalia, it is a case of too little too late," says Solomon.

On the rise of "illiberal democracy" - democracies that hold generally flawed elections and are characterized by intolerance - like Nigeria, the AU was also remarkably silent, he noted.

Meanwhile, Libyan leader Moamer Gaddafi got no further in 2008 with his vision for a United States of Africa.

The proposal for an AU government was discarded at the Egypt summit and put back for discussion to the next summit, to be held in January in Addis Ababa.