Evian, France, June 2 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - The African leaders who took part in the G-8 summit in the French Alpine spa town, Evian, criticized Monday, June 2, the summit’s performance on the back-breaking debts owed by the poor countries to the rich.

After a working dinner, African leaders said the debt relief initiative run by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank had delivered too little too late and had little impact, the BBC News Online reported.

The debt relief scheme for the poorest countries, which has been running for more than six years, is often criticized for delivering insufficient debt relief too slowly to too few countries.

"There has been little giving too late. HIPIC (short for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries' Initiative) came in little bits and pieces and the effect is that it really hasn't made a tremendous impact," the British broadcaster quoted Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo as saying.

The scheme has already been enhanced once in response to similar complaints but much of the benefit has been negated by the recent decline in the prices of commodities that many African countries' economies depend upon.

Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, Hosni Moubarak of Egypt, Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade attended the Evian summit to study the state of play of the G-8's action plan for Africa.

Leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia, who make up the G-8, agreed Monday at their summit in Evian on measures to help Africa, including backing the creation of an African peace-keeping force and making sizeable monetary donations to fight AIDS, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.

At a meeting late into Sunday evening with some African leaders, they agreed that Africa should be able, by 2010, to deploy troops in crisis zones at the request of the United Nations and the African Union.

Some G-8 leaders also pledged to donate billions of dollars to help Africa fight the AIDS pandemic ravaging the continent.

Meanwhile, the "summit of the poor" being held in the Malian village of Siby Monday dismissed as “hollow promises” proposals to help Africa put forward by leaders of the world's most industrialized nations in the G-8 summit.

"The money spent organizing the summit in France could have reduced by more than half the misery of the people of Siby region," said one local farmer.

"The great of this world have no sense of how to share and share alike," he added.

"They are just for show. The inequalities will only diminish the day that the powerful of the world include us in their plans for Africa," said Sekou Diarra, a member of Mali's Jubilee 200 grouping which organized the Siby counter-summit.

Abou Camara, a delegate from Guinea, had even stronger words, saying he was totally against the G-8's “modus operandi.”

"The first significant step for the G-8 should be to purely and simply annul the debt of poor countries," he said.

The farmers' problem was micro-credits, borrowed from banks to buy seed and fertilizer, one of the farmers told AFP.

"Last year I couldn't repay my loan because the harvest was poor," said Moussa, who grows cotton. His herd and part of his granary were seized by creditors: "It was terrible, they were so violent I hid for two days in the bush."

Others complained of lack of infrastructure. "Not far from here we've got only one well, and it's used by both people and animals," said one woman.

Another asked: "Do we really need whites? The African governments should have a more modest lifestyle."

G-8 leaders were more interested "by handshakes... between the French president and his American counterpart George Bush,” said a woman who gave her name as Mrs. Barry.

Nafoun Keita, from southeastern Mali, said people like him should have been invited to the G-8 summit in Evian, instead of African leaders.

Inviting African peasant farmers to Evian would have helped the world "to better understand our difficulties," said Keita at Siby.