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/ 24 December 2007
"A child if I want and when I want," reads the sign at the family-health centre in Niamey where dozens of Niger women come to get free contraceptives. "I was taking the pill without my husband’s knowledge," said Zahratou Amadou, a 38-year-old mother of 10. "When he found out he repudiated me."
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/ 8 December 2007
Police in Niger have released two journalists held for allegedly defaming the country’s finance minister, but they still face prosecution, a press association said on Friday. ”The prosecutor has notified them that legal procedures will follow their normal course,” said Boubacar Diallo, of the Association of Independent Press Editors.
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/ 5 December 2007
Tuareg-led rebels in Niger’s desert north attacked a military convoy carrying food and provisions to the oasis town of Iferouane, killing at least three soldiers, the government said late on Tuesday. The rebel Niger Movement for Justice said its fighters destroyed nine military vehicles.
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/ 9 November 2007
The government of Niger has launched a probe into the extent of slavery in the impoverished West African country, an official said on Friday. Unofficial estimates put the number of slaves at about 800 000. The three-month probe was launched on Thursday.
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/ 30 October 2007
Tuareg-led rebels in Niger accused French uranium miner Areva on Monday of financing a government offensive and warned of ”grave consequences” for its staff and installations. The French government-controlled company has been caught in the middle of a rebellion launched in February by nomadic tribesmen.
Tuareg-led rebels in Niger said late on Tuesday they had killed 15 government soldiers in a clash at Gougaram in the West African country’s remote Saharan north, where uranium is mined. The rebel group said a large convoy of military vehicles had advanced towards the town of Iferouane on Monday, prompting Tuesday’s clash.
Niger’s ruling party has backed growing demands for peace talks with Saharan rebels, piling pressure on President Mamadou Tandja to sit down with the authors of a bloody five-month-old uprising. The Niger Movement for Justice has attacked government and mining interests in Niger’s mineral-rich north.
Rebels attacked an army base in Niger, killing 13 soldiers and taking at least 47 prisoners on Friday, the government said. An ethnic Tuareg group claimed responsibility, just days after it said it was behind an assault on a local airport. In addition to the 13 soldiers killed, 30 others were wounded at the base, about 2 000km north-east of the capital.
Stretching over more than 4 000km, the Niger is West Africa’s longest river, and greatly threatened in the country of the same name by environmental degradation that is causing the water course to silt up. ”The lack of vegetation along the river prevents water retention during rainfall,” says Mahaman Laminou Attaou, national director for the environment in Niger’s Ministry of Water Affairs.
Several thousand people demonstrated peacefully in Niger’s capital on Thursday in a new protest called by a coalition of civic rights groups against the cost of key services in the country. After a rally outside the Parliament, the protestors marched to Nelson Mandela Square, near the presidency, where they handed a petition to two aides of President Mamadou Tandja.
Heads of state and government of eight French-speaking west African countries met in Niamey, Niger on Monday to discuss an emergency plan to combat lethal bird flu and choose a new head for the central bank of west African states. The summit opened with grim statistics on the danger that could face the region’s poultry if the H5N1 virus, which first hit the region in February, is not contained.
Two weeks after bird flu was confirmed in Niger, authorities have received only limited assistance to tackle the deadly H5N1 virus. The government of Niger launched an appeal for assistance the day after bird flu was confirmed in Niger at the end of February. First off the mark with help was neighbouring Nigeria.
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/ 20 September 2005
The United Nations said on Monday that food distribution targeting Niger’s most vulnerable populations will continue beyond the harvests hoped to return food security to the impoverished West African state. The announcement came amid bubbling controversy over further food distribution beyond harvest time.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan arrived on Tuesday in Niger to ”see for myself” the impact of a devastating famine in the largely desert West African country after the United Nations was accused of bungling aid action. He said he would discuss with Prime Minister Hama Amadou measures to deal with the massive crisis gripping one of the world’s poorest nations.
”Crisis? What crisis?” asks the leader of an African country in which children are starving. Juxtapose his words with a picture of a malnourished baby, and the story writes itself. But the story of Niger may not be quite as simple as the media script. For one thing, Niger’s President Mamadou Tanja may be right when says there is no famine in his country.
Poverty and cultural traditions in Niger lead thousands of young women to give birth without medical supervision which exposes them to often irreparable scars. ”Giving birth is women’s work, and these girls are children,” said Lucien Djangnikpo, a physician and director of a maternity centre in Zinder, a city in southeast Niger.
When aid workers start packing up after dealing with the hunger emergency, Niger’s leaders will be left struggling to find lasting solutions to a cycle of chronic lack of food that affects much of Africa. Even in ”normal” times, two-thirds of Niger’s population lives on less than a day and 40% of children show signs of malnutrition.
Niger’s president played down the food crisis ravaging his desert nation, saying that people in the impoverished West African country ”look well-fed”. TV networks have for weeks broadcast images of severely malnourished, skeletal children in Niger, many too weak to brush flies from their faces. Scores have died.
She has pipe-stem limbs and displays every rib on her narrow chest, but two-year-old Hasana is not sick enough to be treated in a hospital. Under a white plastic tent, an aid agency doctor has a few minutes to make decisions about the lives of scores of babies. Outside his tent, a sea of desperate mothers queue in the boiling sun, hoping for food for their children.
Three children played happily on Thursday in the courtyard of an orphanage in the southern Niger town of Maradi. Only a month ago, the three were at death’s door as a result of severe malnutrition. But while they appear to have fully recovered, doctors warned that many other children might be affected for the rest of their lives.
While mothers continue to bring children weak with hunger to feeding centres, market stalls are filled with food — but at prices well out of the reach of many in this desperately poor nation. ”It is the government’s job to deal with the hungry, we the traders are here for business,” said Ibrahim Baye, who sells millet, a staple in Niger, at Maradi market.
In Tahoua market, there is no sign that times are hard. Instead, there are piles of red onions, bundles of glistening spinach, and pumpkins sliced into orange shards. There are plastic bags of rice, pasta and manioc flour, and the sound of butchers’ knives whistling as they are sharpened before hacking apart joints of goat and beef.
The 300 women crammed into the courtyard of an eastern Niger clinic surged forward as cars loaded with food and medical equipment drove up at 8am. ”I heard that they are distributing food here,” said Khadija Abdourahmane, who had risen at dawn and walked nearly two hours to Madaroufa’s clinic.
Now that Niger’s most vulnerable have been mostly taken in hand, relief agencies are widening their ministrations to children who feel only a gnawing ache in their bellies — those at ”moderate” risk for severe malnutrition. Meanwhile, in neighbouring Burkina Faso, food shortages are affecting about 500 000 people.
The thatched-roof huts where grain is stored for the lean season are empty. The only meal of the day is acacia leaves boiled into a thick paste, eaten in the evening in hopes it will lull the children to sleep. International aid, slow to arrive despite repeated pleas from the United Nations, is finally getting to drought-stricken Niger.
The World Food Programme (WFP) said on Monday that thanks to the outpouring of international aid in recent days to help hungry Niger, emergency food distribution to 270 000 people could begin this week. ”Our goal is to distribute 4 000 tonnes of food this week,” WFP country director Gian Carlo Cirri said.
Thousands of children are starving to death in Niger because the international community has been too slow to respond to the country’s food crisis, UN officials and aid workers said on Wednesday. They warned that the numbers dying could rise to 150 000 without urgent aid.
Morocco has begun airlifting rice, powdered milk and other food stuffs to Niger as part of an effort to ease hunger pangs afflicting one in four of the West African state’s 12-million people, a government official said on Friday. A Moroccan-staffed rural clinic to treat malnutrition has also been erected in the hard-hit central Maradi region.
Niger’s government on Friday squashed any notion that food would be distributed free of charge to the country’s citizens teetering on the edge of a food crisis that could affect about three million people. The reaction followed Thursday’s rally by several thousand people demanding free food stocks.
Thousands of people rallied on Thursday in the Niger capital to demand the distribution of free rations to stave off a food crisis that already threatens about three million people. The vast desert state’s food supply travails have been compounded by years of drought and last year’s invasion of desert locusts.
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/ 22 December 2004
Niger police acknowledged on Wednesday that officers had toured the capital, Niamey, this week to remove all copies of the independent weekly Testimony (Le Temoin) ahead of the inauguration of re-elected President Mamadou Tandja. Tandja was inaugurated on Tuesday after his second-round victory on December 4.
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/ 19 November 2004
Incumbent Niger President Mamadou Tandja is leading in the country’s presidential elections, national radio said on Friday. ”Provisional overall results will be known today [Friday] … with the answer to the question whether there will be a second round,” the radio said.