Africa saw a reduction in conflicts last year but gross human rights violations including killings and rape continued in volatile areas, Amnesty International said its annual report.
”The signing of several peace agreements in 2005 resulted in a decline in armed conflict across the region,” the London-based body’s 2006 International Report said.
”There was encouraging progress in peacemaking in some conflicts,” it added, including in Senegal where a 2004 peace agreement in the southern Casamance region ended two decades of fighting.
But the rights watchdog said conflict continued in Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Côte d’Ivoire and Sudan while ”many places [in Africa] faced political instability and serious risk of further conflict and violence”.
”Grave human rights violations including killings, rape and other forms of sexual violence characterised continuing conflicts,” it said.
The report slammed African governments as well as opposition groups in Sudan, northern Uganda, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire and the DRC for human rights abuses.
In Sudan’s Darfur region, ”civilians were killed and injured by government troops, which sometimes bombed villages from the air, as well as the government-aligned nomadic Janjaweed militias”.
War broke out in 2003 when rebel groups revolted against what they said was the political and economic marginalisation of the region’s black African ethnic groups by the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum.
The government responded by unleashing the Janjaweed militia, a force of horse-mounted gunmen blamed for atrocities including rape and the burning of villages.
The main rebel group known as the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) signed a peace accord on May 5 with the Khartoum government.
Two other groups have resisted signing but have come under intense international pressure.
Three years of conflict have claimed about 300 000 lives and left 2,4-million homeless.
In northern Uganda, civilians continued to be victims of the 19-year-old fight between the government and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, leaving more than three million internally displaced and half a million refugees moving to the south, the report said.
In neighbouring Burundi, armed conflict continued between the government and one last rebel group, the National Liberation Forces (FNL), said a foreign ministry statement.
The FNL is the last of Burundi’s seven Hutu rebel groups to join the peace process in the Central African nation where fighting since 1993 has claimed 300 000 lives.
Across in West Africa, there had been no progress in demobilising around 50 000 fighters under the Côte d’Ivoire’s ‘s peace process, while child soldiers continued to be used there and in the DRC.
Apart from conflict, the report said many governments continued to deny rights to food, shelter, health and education.
It singled out Zimbabwe’s controversial clean-up campaign called Operation Murambatsvina last year, which the United Nations said left about 700 000 people homeless and destitute.
Amnesty said the African Union continued to make efforts to address human rights problems. ‒ Sapa-AFP