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.
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.
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.
Four more people died during a second day of nationwide rioting in Kenya on Tuesday, bringing the overall toll to 19, in a crisis that presented the new coalition Cabinet with its first major challenge. Police said they had killed three members of the Mungiki gang and accused its members of having hacked a Nairobi watchman to death.
Newly appointed Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Monday urged the new government, comprising former rivals, to work together to enhance reconciliation in the deeply divided nation. ”The process of reconciliation has begun and the Cabinet must speak in one voice,” Odinga told reporters.
Kenya’s most feared criminal gang paralysed transport on Monday, posing an early challenge to a power-sharing Cabinet formed to end post-election deadlock. Up to seven people were killed when the Mungiki gang shut down roads in the capital, Nairobi, and the Rift Valley town of Naivasha in a gesture of anger after the beheading of its leader’s wife.
Kenya’s president unveiled a power-sharing government on Sunday, with opposition leader Raila Odinga as Prime Minister, aimed at ending a long-running political crisis sparked by contested elections. ”Let us put politics aside and get to work,” President Mwai Kibaki said in a televised speech announcing the Cabinet line-up.
Kenya President Mwai Kibaki and would-be prime minister Raila Odinga on Saturday reached a coalition government agreement and a new Cabinet will be announced on Sunday, political and diplomatic sources said. The agreement was struck after Kibaki and Odinga held closed-door talks in Sagana State Lodge in central Kenya.
Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai said on Friday she has pulled out of the Olympic torch relay this weekend in Tanzania to protest human rights abuses. The torch has been met by major demonstrations on its relay around the world to the Beijing Games, with thousands of protesters angry at China’s human rights record.
Pressure mounted on Thursday on Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and prime minister-designate Raila Odinga to resume coalition talks amid warnings that a delay was fomenting violence. The pair met last on Sunday and failed to agree on a unity government, a key step in implementing a power-sharing deal.
The quest for a permanent political settlement in Kenya ran into trouble again this week with the opposition Orange Democratic Movement announcing that it is pulling out of talks on the formation of a coalition government. Talks on the composition of a coalition cabinet have been dragging on for a month.
Kenyan leaders were on Wednesday under pressure to resume talks on forming a coalition government in a bid to end a devastating political crisis, a day after hundreds demonstrated to demand a new Cabinet. The much-delayed unveiling of a national-unity government is a key step in implementing a power-sharing deal aimed at quelling deadly violence.
Kenya’s environment watchdog has appealed for a public-private partnership to help clean the environment choked by thousands of tonnes of dumped waste. Health experts have blamed industrial, hospital and domestic waste for the spread of diseases, among other problems.
Two staff members of the United Nations refugee agency narrowly escaped an ambush on their vehicle by armed militiamen in Somalia’s northern breakaway region of Puntland, the agency said in a statement on Tuesday. The vehicle was carrying a foreign aid worker and a local driver.
Kenya’s opposition suspended talks with President Mwai Kibaki’s party on Tuesday and police fired tear gas to scatter opposition supporters protesting at deepening deadlock over a power-sharing Cabinet. Kibaki and rival Raila Odinga delayed naming the new Cabinet on Monday after disagreeing over how to share out ministries.
Up to 70 people were killed in late March when flash floods swept mining pits in northern Tanzania, charity group Oxfam-Ireland said on Monday. ”The rains caused flooding of eight mines in the region, killing up to 70 mineworkers caught below ground,” it said in a statement.
Kenya opposition leader Raila Odinga refused to meet President Mwai Kibaki for coalition government talks on Monday, deepening a stalemate on the naming of a new Cabinet. The coalition Cabinet is a key part of a February 28 deal that curbed weeks of deadly clashes set off by Kibaki’s disputed re-election in December.
Kenya’s president and future prime minister said on Sunday they had made ”substantial progress” at talks to end an impasse over a power-sharing Cabinet and expected to clinch a deal on Monday. The two sides had planned to name the Cabinet on Sunday, but disagreement over the division of ministries scuttled that plan.