Zimbabwean newspaper owner Trevor Ncube — publisher of the Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent in that country and the Mail & Guardian in South Africa — will contest the stripping of his citizenship in a High Court application once a date is allocated. He spoke to the M&G about the case.
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/ 7 December 2006
Nearly four months after tons of toxic chemical waste were dumped in Côte d’Ivoire’s teeming economic capital of Abidjan, poisoning hundreds, residents are haunted by fears of long-term health complications. Poisonous fumes emitted by the petroleum waste were blamed for the deaths of 10 people out of the scores sickened by the discharge from a ship chartered by a European company.
Efforts by Africans to seek a better life in Europe were brought to the fore on Wednesday as African foreign ministers started meeting ahead of a summit of heads of states. The Gambian Vice-President Isatou Njie-Saidy and African Union Commission president Alpha Konare urged the ministers to come up with a common strategy on the ”vexing” issue of international migration.
The poorly equipped African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur is set to quit the troubled western Sudanese region by end of September due to a lack of funds, the AU’s security organ said on Tuesday. ”Whatever happens, our mandate ends on September 31 unless there are new developments,” South Africa’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma said.
Post-war stringent diamond mining rules have bolstered export earnings in Sierra Leone, but the country’s nationals, rated among the poorest in the world, are yet to benefit from the boom. Diamond exports, the West African country’s major source of hard currency earnings, have increased fivefold in as many years.
Former West African warlord Charles Taylor received his first private visitors on Wednesday, exactly a week after he was arrested, as an international rights group said he must be treated humanely and given a fair trial for crimes against humanity.
Rights groups in Sierra Leone said on Tuesday they feared former Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor, on trial for crimes against humanity, could undermine — or even escape — international justice. Taylor pleaded not guilty on Monday during his first appearance at a United Nations-backed court to charges including murder, mutilation, sexual slavery and use of child soldiers.
Liberian ex-president Charles Taylor, once one of Africa’s most feared strongmen, pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges of crimes against humanity over years of atrocities in Sierra Leone. ”Most definitely, I’m not guilty,” Taylor told Judge Richard Lussick at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone.
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/ 8 December 2005
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe opens the annual congress of his ruling Zanu-PF party on Friday, buoyed by his recent big win in controversial senate elections and infighting that has left the opposition in tatters. About 5 000 delegates of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF) will converge on the small town of Esigodini in the southern Matabeland province.
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/ 25 November 2005
Elections to a new Senate in Zimbabwe this weekend appear to have sounded the death knell for a party that posed the stiffest challenge to President Robert Mugabe’s rule. The elections have exposed deep divisions in the opposition Movement for Democratic Change party and chances of two feuding factions reconciling have grown slimmer in the run-up to Saturday’s polls.