Kenya’s government and opposition struck an agreement on Friday to take immediate steps to try to end tribal bloodshed in a five-week-old political stand-off in which about 850 people have been killed. Meanwhile, 27 people have been killed in fresh violence in western Kenya, police said on Saturday.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon flew into Kenya on Friday to provide heavyweight diplomatic clout for efforts to end a month of post-election turmoil in which more than 850 people have been killed. African leaders at a summit in neighbouring Ethiopia attended by the UN head have called for urgent action to stop the bloodletting
African Union heads of state were set on Thursday to begin a three-day summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, focused on the deadly crisis in Kenya and the challenges facing the body’s peacekeeping missions. United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was expected to address the organisation and call for a peaceful resolution of the post-poll dispute in Kenya.
The African Union starts a heads-of-state summit in Addis Ababa on Thursday seeking to bolster the body’s capacity to solve conflicts such as the crises in Darfur and Somalia. Since its inception in 2002, the pan-African body has lacked the funds and political drive to take effective action on the continent’s flashpoints.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon kicked off a landmark trip to Rwanda on Tuesday with a visit to the genocide memorial, amid simmering resentment over the world body’s failure to prevent the 1994 massacres. Ban paid homage to the victims of the massacres, which left about 800 000 people dead, mainly from the Tutsi minority of President Paul Kagame.
United Nations peacekeepers monitoring the disputed border between Ethiopia and Eritrea may have to halt operations within weeks because Eritrea has cut diesel fuel supplies, said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The fuel stoppage is linked to the border dispute that brought the two impoverished Horn of Africa countries.
Taliban militants stormed Kabul’s leading luxury hotel on Monday night, killing seven people in a significant escalation of insurgent tactics against foreign civilians in Afghanistan. The Norwegian Foreign Minister, Jonas Gahr Stoere, and other guests fled into the basement of the five-star Serena hotel.
Nordic ceasefire monitors began wrapping up their six-year mission to Sri Lanka on Friday after the government scrapped a truce with the Tamil Tigers, and their mandate, amid a chorus of international concern. The government formally notified mediator Norway late on Thursday it was giving a stipulated 14-day notice period to end the truce.
Police raids, arson and tribal attacks over the last 24 hours have claimed more than 100 lives in Kenya, police and officials said on Tuesday, bringing the toll for five days of post-election bloodshed to 299. ”At least 30 have burned to death inside a church in the Kiamba area,” a police commander said.
World leaders voiced outrage at the assassination on Thursday of Pakistan’s opposition leader Benazir Bhutto and expressed fears for the fate of the nuclear-armed state. United States President George Bush condemned the killing as a ”cowardly act”.
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.
The Security Council voted unanimously on Friday to extend the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for a year and demanded that all militias and armed groups in the volatile east lay down their weapons and start disarming. The council asked the UN force ”to attach the highest priority to addressing the crisis”.
The United Nations General Assembly passed a non-binding resolution on Tuesday calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, overcoming protests from a bloc of states that said it undermined their sovereignty. The resolution, which calls for ”a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty,” was passed by a 104 to 54 vote, with 29 abstentions.
Nearly 200 nations agreed at United Nations-led talks in Bali on Saturday to launch negotiations on a new pact to fight global warming after a reversal by the United States allowed a breakthrough. Washington said the agreement marked a new chapter in climate diplomacy after six years of disputes with major allies since President George Bush pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol
India and China objected on Saturday to a draft deal at United Nations talks meant to launch negotiations to fight climate change, saying rich nations should do more to lead the way. ”The need of the hour is for enhanced commitments and instead we see a huge watering down,” said Indian delegate Chandrasekhar Dasgupta.
Two convicted terrorists who had been freed in an amnesty carried out this week’s suicide bombings at United Nations and government buildings that killed 37 people, an Algerian security official said. One of the bombers was a 64-year-old man in the advanced stages of cancer, while the other was a 32-year-old from a poor suburb.
Negotiators at climate talks in Bali on Friday struggled to break a deadlock over United States objections to goals for cutting emissions by dropping a reference to a non-binding 2020 target in draft text. But the European Union insisted the two-week talks, due to end on Friday, should set stiff 2020 guidelines for rich nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
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.
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.
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.
Activists and global leaders used World Aids Day on Saturday to warn against complacency in fighting the disease and called on governments to fill a multibillion-dollar funding gap. ”We have made tangible and remarkable progress on all these fronts. But we must do more,” United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said.
A deadline for Ethiopia and Eritrea to agree on the physical demarcation of their border expired on Saturday amid escalating tension between the two nations, leaving the frontier only delineated on maps. For now, analysts expect no military movement in the ground, although rival troops are eyeballing each other near their 1 000kmf border.
Activists on Saturday sought to keep the battle against HIV in the public eye on World Aids Day in the face of growing complacency amid progress in treating and slowing the spread of the disease. The December 1 event is traditionally a time of grim stocktaking as Aids campaigners sound the alarm over the disease’s rampage through Africa.
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.
Internationally sponsored talks over the future status of the Serbian province of Kosovo were deadlocked on Tuesday, after Kosovo Albanian leaders rejected Serbia’s proposal for self-governance. Kosovo’s majority ethnic Albanian population wants to break all ties with Serbia.
Ethiopia has boosted its defence budget by more than -million to gird for a possible resumption of hostilities with Eritrea over their disputed border, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi told Parliament on Tuesday. ”Our military budget has been raised proportionally from three billion to 3,5-billion birr [a rise of 16,7%, equivalent to ,3-million],” Meles said.
Serbia will not give up ”an inch” of Kosovo, Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica said on Monday as talks on the breakaway province’s future entered a critical phase before a United Nations deadline next month. ”Serbia will not let an inch of its territory be taken away,” a defiant Kostunica told reporters.
Lebanon edged closer to chaos on Friday when President Emile Lahoud ordered the army to take charge of security after political rivalries blocked the election of his successor hours before his term expired. The pro-Syrian head of state said the country risked descending into a state of emergency.
Holding up a grubby, worn banknote, the ex-rebel fighter points proudly to an image famous across Eritrea — defiant liberation soldiers raising a flag on a mountain peak. It’s 10 years this month since Africa’s youngest nation enthusiastically launched its own currency in November 1997, the nakfa.
Eritrea said on Wednesday arch-foe Ethiopia had ”long since declared war” on Asmara by refusing to implement a five-year-old border ruling marking their shared frontier. Analysts and diplomats fear heightened tensions on the Horn of Africa rivals’ frontier could erupt into a new conflict seven years after they fought a war.
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.
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.