The United Nations Security Council meets the key players in the Somalia conflict on Monday to try to persuade the disparate factions to cooperate and restore order to the desperately poor and lawless Horn of Africa country. Somalia has been without a central government since the toppling of a dictator in 1991.
Most nations erect grandiose monuments to their historical triumphs. Eritrea put up a pair of sandals. The sculpted black metal shoes in Asmara’s Shida (Sandal) Square, recalling the footwear of Eritrea’s rebels, were a symbol of its remarkable 30-year independence war against its giant neighbour, Ethiopia, which ended with secession in 1991.
Kenya Airways said on Friday its 2007/08 annual profit after tax fell to 3,9-billion Kenya shillings from 4,1-billion due mainly to the impact of the East African nation’s post-election crisis. ”The events post-election had a negative impact on our revenue, especially between January to March,” said Titus Naikuni, the chief executive officer.
One of the two cargo freighters hijacked off the Somali coast this week was a German owned vessel registered in Gibraltar, a Kenyan maritime official said Friday. The MV Lehmann Timber seized on Wednesday in the Gulf of Aden, was managed by Kehdisgerland GMBH.
On a beach in Bosaso, north-east Somalia, near the tip of the Horn of Africa, dozens of Somali and Ethiopian refugees perch on rocks or squat in the sand, peering across the Gulf of Aden to the promised land. They are waiting for boats to carry them to Yemen and away from a life of miserable poverty, persecution and a war in Somalia.
Somali gunmen hijacked a Dutch-owned ship as it travelled from Kenya’s Mombasa port to Romania in the latest act of piracy off the lawless Horn of Africa nation’s coast, a maritime official said on Tuesday. The MV Amiya Scan, managed by the Dutch Reider Shipping BV, was seized on Sunday while it passed through the Gulf of Aden.
Kenya must stop forcibly returning internal refugees displaced by post-election violence that saw hundreds of thousands flee their homes, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Friday. More than 1Â 200 people were killed and 300Â 000 left their homes after ethnic clashes hit swathes of the country following a disputed election in December.
A rampaging mob in western Kenya burnt 15 women accused of witchcraft to death, a local official and villagers said on Wednesday. ”This is unacceptable. People must not take the law into their own hands simply because they suspect someone,” said Mwangi Ngunyi, the head of Nyamaiya district. ”We will hunt the suspects down,” he added.
Zimbabwe’s opposition accused the government’s military intelligence division on Monday of plotting to assassinate party leader Morgan Tsvangirai, who is due to contest an election run-off with President Robert Mugabe. Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) leader Tsvangirai postponed his return to Zimbabwe on Saturday after his party said it had discovered a plot to assassinate him.
Medical charity Médecins sans Frontières on Friday accused Kenyan police of forcing families displaced in post-election violence to return home. The group said its workers in western Kenya’s Endebess camp on Wednesday saw police move from tent to tent, threatening displaced families to make them leave.
Three African trade blocs plan to harmonise trade policies so Africa can compete more effectively on world markets. Erastus Mwencha, secretary general of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, said on Thursday his group would be meeting the East African Community and Southern African Development Community later this year.
Talks between Somalia’s interim government and the opposition in Djibouti are a waste of time and no tangible outcome can be expected, Islamist leader Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys said on Thursday. Speaking from Asmara, where he lives in exile, the former army colonel urged his allies attending the peace talks to walk out.
Muslim leaders in Kenya’s North-Eastern Province have resolved to campaign against the promotion of condoms as a means of preventing HIV.
Somali government officials and exiled Islamist opposition leaders are to hold face-to-face peace talks in Djibouti, the United Nations special envoy to the country said on Friday. Somalia has been wracked by conflict since 1991, with the capital, Mogadishu, plagued by political and civil unrest, food riots and attacks on Western aid agencies.
It is tempting to romanticise the lifestyle of nomads in Kenya’s north-east — a land peppered with vast termite mounds which burst from rust-coloured soil like fingers pointing to the cloudless sky. For centuries, Muslim pastoralist tribes have roamed the semi-arid wastelands, in perpetual pursuit of pasture and water.
Foreign investors buying Kenya’s Safaricom stock will pay a 0,5 shilling premium per share over the five Kenya shillings that domestic investors will be paying, the government announced on Wednesday. The offering generated over ,25-billion in bids from established institutional investors, Kenya’s privatisation commission said.
The Nairobi government froze the Kenyan assets of the most wanted suspect in Rwanda’s genocide on Tuesday. Felicien Kabuga, a wealthy Hutu businessman, is accused of bankrolling Rwandan militias who killed about 800 000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days of bloodshed in 1994.
All parties in Somalia’s conflict have carried out rights abuses including executions, rape and torture, Amnesty International said on Tuesday, adding there were reports Ethiopian soldiers had slit civilians’ throats. Mogadishu’s whole population is scarred from witnessing or suffering such abuses, it said in its 32-page report.
Thousands of Kenyans returned home on Monday under a government programme to resettle families displaced by the violence that followed elections at the end of last year. An initial batch of several hundred left camps in several Rift Valley towns back to the countryside under police and army escort.
Kenya’s inflation rate rose to 26,6% in April, up almost 5% from the previous month, the government announced on Friday, blaming rising food and oil prices. "Month-to-month overall inflation rate increased from 21,8% in March 2008 to 26,7% in April 2008," said a statement from the government’s Central Bureau of Statistics.
Harsh living conditions in Kenya are making it difficult for HIV-positive people displaced in the recent election violence to stay healthy.
Kenyan security forces have tortured more than 4 000 people in an indiscriminate offensive against rebels in the remote Mount Elgon area, local rights groups said on Sunday. Activists said the systematic abuses — including crawling on barbed wire — was the worst wave of torture in Kenya under the government of President Mwai Kibaki.
The 2003 All Africa Games 400 metres gold medallist Ezra Sambu has pulled out of Kenya’s squad for this year’s African Athletics Championships due to a hamstring injury. ”I got injured as we were training at the starting blocks and I opted out because there is no point of me going to the championships when I am not fully fit.
An estimated 8 000 people have fled Mogadishu since last weekend’s clashes, the heaviest this year in the Somali capital, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said on Friday. About 700 000 people have already fled the coastal capital over the past year, sparking one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Amnesty International accused Ethiopian soldiers on Wednesday of killing 21 people, including an imam and several Islamic scholars, at a Mogadishu mosque and said seven of the victims had their throats slit. The rights group said the soldiers had also captured dozens of children during the raid on the al-Hidaaya mosque.
Ethiopia broke diplomatic ties with Qatar on Monday, accusing the Gulf Arab state of supporting terrorism in Somalia and spreading instability in the Horn of Africa. Ethiopia, the biggest military power in the Horn of Africa, said it had long observed Qatar’s ”hostile behaviour” and had been patient before taking Monday’s measure.
Kenyan authorities should prosecute murderous militias implicated in the country’s devastating post-election violence, but also address any ”genuine grievances” they may have, former United Nations leader Kofi Annan said on Saturday.
Police fired tear gas at women members of a feared Kenyan gang on Friday as they tried to deliver a petition to Prime Minister Raila Odinga. About 50 women, many of them elderly or with children on their backs, assembled at Odinga’s party headquarters, asking to speak with him about alleged illegal police killings of gang members.
Kenya swore in a power-sharing government on Thursday to soothe fury over a disputed election that plunged the East African country into a bloody crisis. ”Our people are now in the process of reconciliation,” President Mwai Kibaki said at the ceremony, nearly four months after the December 27 poll that triggered extreme violence.
Former United Nations chief Kofi Annan on Wednesday urged Kenyans to support the new coalition government, saying the deeply divided country had a long way to go after a post-election crisis. Annan mediated a power-sharing accord that curbed months of violence following disputed elections.
The dispute over the division of ministerial portfolios in Kenya’s new coalition Cabinet was resolved this week when President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga each made slight concessions in the face of gathering frustration in the country. The Mail & Guardian profiles some of the key ministers.
Kenyan police on Wednesday arrested scores of members of a criminal sect whose clashes with authorities this week caused 19 deaths, officials said, as the government vowed to deal ruthlessly with the gang. Hundreds of riot police descended on Nairobi’s Eastlands slums and central Kenyan districts.