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/ 26 December 2007
Two heavyweights of Kenya’s post-independence politics square off in a presidential vote on Thursday after a campaign that has overshadowed Christmas and seen the opposition holding a small lead in opinion polls. The closeness of the vote has raised fears that fraud and intimidation may be used to try to swing results.
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/ 25 December 2007
Diplomatic wrangling dashed hopes for an end to the killing and rape in Darfur this year and a new United Nations-backed peacekeeping mission scheduled to start on January 1 faces an uphill struggle. The combined effects of war and famine have killed at least 200 000 people with more than two million displaced.
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/ 24 December 2007
Two heavyweights of Kenya’s post-independence politics square off in a presidential vote on Thursday whose run-up has seen the opposition hold a small lead in opinion polls over President Mwai Kibaki. But the closeness of the vote has raised fears fraud and intimidation may be used to try to swing the result.
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/ 24 December 2007
A first contingent of 100 peacekeepers from Burundi deployed in the Somali capital Mogadishu on Sunday, hours after fighting between Islamist rebels and government forces killed at least four people. The arrival of the soldiers marked the first phase of long-delayed support for 1 600 Ugandan troops.
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/ 9 December 2007
German Chancellor Angela Merkel directly confronted Robert Mugabe over human rights abuses in front of European and African leaders in Portugal on Saturday, putting the Zimbabwean leader under the spotlight at a summit that has been overshadowed by the despot’s presence.
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/ 8 December 2007
Leaders of Europe and Africa opened a landmark summit on Saturday designed to forge a new partnership of equals, but with strains showing over trade and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe’s presence. ”We are here … to write a new page in the history of Europe and Africa,” Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said in an inaugural address.
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/ 7 December 2007
His arrival may have been low-key, but veteran Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is likely to steal the spotlight at this weekend’s European Union-Africa summit with his first trip to Europe in more than two years. Usually the subject of a travel ban from the EU, Mugabe touched down in Lisbon late on Thursday.
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/ 7 December 2007
Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf said on Friday he was in good health after recovering from a bout of pneumonia, and laughed off a flurry of reports he was near death. ”I’m fine, I am OK,” Yusuf said in an exclusive interview from his hospital bed in Nairobi. ”I had pneumonia, but the doctors have taken it out [treated it] and I am well now,” he said.
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/ 5 December 2007
The United States and Africa’s Great Lakes states agreed on Wednesday to rapidly strengthen Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) security forces in their drive against rebel and foreign forces. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave no details when she announced the agreement in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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/ 5 December 2007
Africa cannot stop the European Union (EU) if it wants to discuss the issue of Zimbabwe during the weekend’s European-African summit in Lisbon, Portugal, South African Foreign Affairs Deputy-Director General Gert Grobler said on Wednesday. He said that Zimbabwe was not part of the agreed agenda.
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/ 5 December 2007
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Ethiopia on Wednesday for talks with African leaders aimed at tackling long-running conflicts in the volatile Great Lakes region, Somalia and Sudan. On only her second trip in two years to sub-Saharan Africa, Rice said she wanted to move international efforts forward to resolve those conflicts.
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/ 5 December 2007
Zimbabwe’s former colonial master lost the stand-off over whether he or the British prime minister would attend an upcoming European-African summit, Robert Mugabe declared on Tuesday. Mugabe also said his nation, suffering chronic shortages of basic goods and worsening power and water outages, continued to defy predictions of economic collapse and social upheaval.
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/ 4 December 2007
Ethiopia has warned that the world’s disinterest in sending peacekeepers to Somalia was dampening hopes of achieving peace in the shattered African nation. Of the 8 000 peacekeepers the African Union pledged to send to bolster President Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s weak government, only 1 500 Ugandan troops are actually on the ground.
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/ 3 December 2007
The United Nations’s top aid official, John Holmes, arrived in Somalia on Monday, calling for more to be done to help the Horn of Africa country where almost 6 000 civilians have been killed in fighting this year. UN officials say Somalia’s humanitarian crisis is Africa’s worst, with one million people displaced.
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/ 30 November 2007
United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Ethiopia next week for meetings on the conflicts in the volatile African Great Lakes region and Sudan and Somalia, said the State Department on Thursday. Rice, a rare visitor to the African continent, will make her third trip to sub-Saharan Africa since becoming Secretary of State in 2005.
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/ 30 November 2007
President Thabo Mbeki will receive an African Union report into the country’s governance standards on Wednesday next week, the Ministry of Public Service and Administration said on Friday. Mbeki had to postpone a handover ceremony at his office on Thursday because of other urgent government matters.
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/ 29 November 2007
The handover of a controversial report drawn up by an African Union watchdog into standards of governance in South Africa was postponed indefinitely on Thursday, officials said. President Thabo Mbeki was expected to have received the African Peer Review Mechanism report at a ceremony in Pretoria to which journalists had been invited.
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/ 28 November 2007
The Sudanese government is putting up obstacles to the deployment of a 26 000-strong peacekeeping force for Darfur that could destroy the effectiveness of the joint United Nations-African Union mission, the United Nations peacekeeping chief warned on Tuesday.
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/ 27 November 2007
China on Tuesday voiced deep concern about the safety of its peacekeepers in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region after rebel groups boycotting the peace process declared they were not immune from attack. ”Up to now there has been no incident, but we are deeply concerned about the matter,” the Chinese ambassador to Khartoum, Li Cheng Wen, said.
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/ 27 November 2007
Soldiers and rebels have both claimed to have killed several hundred of their opponents in combat on Monday in eastern Chad. The battles at Abougouleigne left ”several hundred [rebels] dead, several injured and several prisoners of war”, according to the statement from the army’s general staff.
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/ 27 November 2007
Leaders of Côte d’Ivoire were to meet on Tuesday with President Blaise Compaore of neighbouring Burkina Faso to fine-tune details of a peace deal brokered by him. Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and his Prime Minister Guillaume Soro will travel to Burkina Faso to discuss and sign supplemetary sections to the peace accords.
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/ 25 November 2007
Two weeks from hosting the second-ever summit between Europe and Africa, Portugal is scrambling to ensure that Zimbabwe’s contentious presence does not eclipse the chance for a true partnership between the European Union and the world’s poorest continent.
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/ 24 November 2007
Insurgents fired a barrage of mortars into an Ethiopian army camp in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, on Friday, triggering heavy fighting, residents said. The clashes shattered a fortnight lull in the city after weeks of heavy fighting that had claimed dozens of lives, mainly of civilians, and displaced at least 200 000 people.
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/ 20 November 2007
The number of Somalis uprooted by fighting in their own country has hit a ”staggering” one million, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees said 600 000 people are believed to have fled Somalia’s lawless capital, Mogadishu, since February.
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/ 20 November 2007
South Africa urged rich countries on Tuesday to provide the hardware required for the deployment of a hybrid United Nations-Africa peacekeeping force in the strife-torn Darfur region of western Sudan. The Darfur conflict between rebels and a pro-government militia has claimed an estimated 200 000 lives in the past four years.
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/ 20 November 2007
Aid workers are calling it Africa’s biggest humanitarian crisis, but no one has to tell Fatima Usman how rapidly things have gone bad in Somalia. The slender 23-year-old’s son Mohamed died of hunger. So did her daughter Isha. ”I am praying to God that he will not take this baby yet,” she says, gently cradling the wizened face of Muhiadeen, her four-month-old son.
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/ 18 November 2007
Former southern rebels on Sunday accused Sudan’s president of ”threatening and calling for war” in speech he gave in honour of a government-allied militia charged with a string of atrocities. Pagan Amum, Secretary General of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, said he deplored the comments by President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
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/ 18 November 2007
Robert Mugabe’s vice-president has endorsed the veteran Zimbabwean leader’s candidature for presidential elections next year and has suggested he should even rule until he dies, a report said on Sunday. Joseph Msika said no-one was so far challenging Mugabe’s bid to seek a sixth consecutive term and urged supporters to endorse him at a ruling party congress.
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/ 17 November 2007
Africa’s insistence that Robert Mugabe be invited to a summit in Europe is a matter of principle and not a sign of support for the Zimbabwean leader or his government, the chairperson of the African Union (AU) said on Friday. The prospect that Mugabe could attend a European Union-AU summit in Lisbon next month has threatened to derail the meeting.
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/ 15 November 2007
Southern African countries face a ”very real challenge” of regime change encouraged by foreign powers, Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota said on Thursday. He was opening the ministerial session of the South Africa-Zimbabwe Joint Permanent Commission on defence and security in Vanderbijlpark.
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/ 15 November 2007
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki on Thursday lodged nomination papers with the electoral board, seeking a second and final term of office ahead of polls expected to be the country’s closest yet. Kibaki vowed to crack down on violence in the run-up to the December 27 election, the fourth since pluralism was reintroduced in 1992.
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/ 12 November 2007
Sudan on Monday blamed countries that allow Darfur rebels to operate in their territory for failing to use their influence to persuade the insurgents to attend peace talks last month. Neighbouring Chad allows Darfur rebels to remain armed on its territory, though the groups have representatives in several countries.