At first it appears as though the seriously ill Zimbabwean is speaking about someone else’s ordeal at the hands of the notorious Central Intelligence Organisation. Propped up in a hospital bed in South Africa two weeks after her release from Chikurubi Maximum Prison, it becomes apparent that the woman who wants to be known only as ”Itaai” is expressing her own traumatic experience.
This past weekend saw a new military operation underway in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Reports from the central African country say about 800 United Nations troops have been deployed in the north-eastern Ituri region to disarm local militias held responsible for the death of nine peacekeepers last month. The militias have also attacked local Congolese, prompting 70 000 to flee their homes.
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/ 27 January 2005
In a promising development, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army, the rebel movement that took up arms against Khartoum in 1983, appears to be giving priority to education. Schooling for girls will receive particular attention. The emphasis on educating girls reflects a larger strategy within the movement to address cultural factors that undermine the status of women.
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/ 29 October 2004
A former British army captain who claims to have worked with Winston Churchill on secret wartime operations has been found guilty of reworking a painting by another former employer, the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador DalÃ. John Peter Moore, a former private secretary to the artist, cut up a stolen 1969 Dalà painting, The Double Image of Gala, and used it to create what he claimed was a new DalÃ.
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/ 23 October 2004
Almost two decades of detective work, triggered by a Latin poem found in the Vatican archives, has led experts to conclude that a statue that had stood unnoticed for five centuries in a small southern Italian town is the work of a Renaissance master.
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/ 21 October 2004
President Fidel Castro, Cuba’s leader for more than 45 years, broke his left knee and his right arm in a fall, and urged the Caribbean country’s population of 11-million to stay calm, a government statement said on Thursday. TV cameras captured the incident on Wednesday when the leader stumbled as he was descending a flight of stairs.
The horror and trauma of being in Pollsmoor Prison, awaiting trial, has left him feeling like a ”piece of human garbage”, convicted paedophile Wiliam John Creasey told the Wynberg Regional Court on Tuesday. After his tearful outbursts on Monday brought his trial to a halt, he assured defence attorney Van Zyl Loots that he was sufficiently recomposed to proceed with his testimony in mitigation of sentence.
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/ 23 September 2004
With handpumps, latrines and the unimaginable luxury of electricity, the inhabitants of Cestos City in eastern Liberia are slowly rebuilding their ruined town under the shadow of epidemic illness. ”The war has destroyed everything we had,” said Emmet Kay, looking around him at the barren landscape that used to be a large village.
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/ 8 September 2004
Hollywood stunt pilots hired by Nasa to catch a capsule carrying samples of the sun were gearing up for a blockbuster ending to their mission on Wednesday over Utah in the western United States. When the Genesis spacecraft re-enters Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, the helicopter pilots are to intercept a capsule from the vessel in midair.
It is crucial to view current peace initiatives in the Sudan through the prism of its post-colonial history, which has been that of multiple and simultaneous political struggles and civil wars. The murder and mayhem in Darfur reveals many of the limitations of the agreement between the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army and the government of Lieutenant General Umar al-Bashir.