A United Nations nuclear watchdog team will visit Syria on June 22 to 24 to pursue an investigation into United States intelligence alleging that Damascus secretly built an atomic reactor, the agency’s chief said on Monday. The alleged reactor site was destroyed in an Israeli air raid last September and Washington handed over intelligence to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
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.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe flew into Rome for a global food summit on Sunday, his first official trip abroad since elections condemned by Western and opposition leaders as fraudulent. A British Foreign Office spokesperson said: ”It is a matter of concern to us and we would prefer that he did not attend.”
Insurgents fired mortars at a plane that was due to take Somalia’s president to Djibouti, but he was unharmed and travelled to a meeting with a United Nations security council delegation, officials said on Sunday. President Abdullahi Yusuf was due to meet the delegation in Djibouti, where his interim government and opposition exiles are participating in peace talks.
Burma insisted on Sunday that there must be ”no strings attached” to foreign aid destined for its hundreds of thousands of cyclone victims, triggering a sharp reaction from donor countries. Deputy Defence Minister Aye Myint told a regional security forum in Singapore that authorities were trying their best to help their people.
Twenty-nine people, mostly children, were killed and 35 wounded in weekend flash floods in the eastern Ethiopian city of Jijiga, officials said. ”We have recovered 29 bodies so far from early Friday’s floods in Cheraketo [district]. A majority of those were children,” regional president Abdullahi Hassan said.
Burned and looted huts stretch as far as the eye can see in Sudan’s oil-rich town of Abyei, now empty of civilians, the United States special envoy to Sudan, Richard Williamson, said on Saturday. Williamson, who toured Abyei on Friday, said he saw ”scorched earth” devastation in the town where heavy fighting last month sent tens of thousands of civilians fleeing.
Hundreds of women converged on a stadium on the outskirts of Harare on Saturday to pray for peace ahead of the country’s tense presidential run-off amid mounting political violence. Zimbabweans go to the polls on June 27 for a second-round presidential election between President Robert Mugabe and opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
Negotiations sponsored by the United Nations and aimed at bringing the Somali government and its main political foes into direct dialogue were due to resume on Saturday in Djibouti. The first round of discussions ended on May 16 and although the rivals did not engage in direct talks, the move was seen as a breakthrough in efforts to end conflict.
Anti-immigrant violence in South Africa has killed 62 people and wounded 670 this month, police said on Saturday, raising an earlier toll of 56 dead after several victims died in hospital. ”In total, at 6am on Thursday morning, we had 62 dead people and 670 injured,” national police spokesperson Sally de Beer said after the violence that started two weeks ago subsided.
Burma’s junta on Saturday came under renewed international pressure from rights groups and the United States defence chief, who said its slow response to the cyclone disaster had cost "tens of thousands of lives". US Defence Secretary Robert Gates criticised the delay in allowing in foreign aid, saying US ships could have swiftly brought relief.
The United Nations independent expert on racism urged South Africa on Friday to bring to justice those responsible for recent xenophobic violence that claimed more than 50 lives this month. ”I condemn these acts in the strongest terms,” special rapporteur Doudou Diene said as he called on South African authorities to bring the perpetrators to justice.
When some multinational companies dump chemicals into the sea, they call it ”ocean fertilisation”. This practice is near the top of the agenda at the United Nations conference on biological diversity in Bonn that ends on Friday. Practically all developing countries want the conference to approve a moratorium on ocean fertilisation.
The African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL) and other youth bodies on Friday launched a campaign against xenophobia following the recent attacks on foreign nationals in South Africa. Briefing the media in Johannesburg, ANCYL president Julius Malema extended his apology and assured foreigners they were welcome in the country.
It has been described as a global crisis pushing 100-million people into hunger, threatening to stoke social and political turmoil and set the fight against world poverty back by seven years. Now, the food price crisis will be tackled by world leaders, who meet in Rome next week to seek ways of reducing the suffering for the world’s poorest people.
A planned lodge development at the settlement of Molapo in Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve has become a source of controversy. Tourists who frequent the 40-room lodge’s luxury accommodation will enjoy the sights of the Kalahari. The outlook for indigenous Bushmen from the reserve is less positive, however.
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.
Urging decisive action against Sudanese war-crimes suspects, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) chief prosecutor said on Friday he would announce details of a new case next week against senior players in the Darfur conflict. "I will inform the … [United Nations] Security Council on June 5 when I will present my second case," prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo said.
Osama bin Laden has plenty on his mind but he managed to pay close attention this month to the events surrounding Israel’s 60th anniversary and the parallel commemoration of the ”nakba” — the catastrophe — that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 meant for the Palestinians.
The exiled leader of Burundi’s last rebel group returned to the capital, Bujumbura, on Friday to begin implementing a stalled deal seen as the final obstacle to peace in the tiny Central African country. Agathon Rwasa, leader of the Forces for National Liberation, arrived at Bujumbura airport for talks between his ethnic Hutu group and Burundi’s mixed but Hutu-led government.
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai launched a scathing attack on President Robert Mugabe’s rule of Zimbabwe on Friday, saying he had transformed a country rich in natural resources into a ”state of despair”. The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) chief also vowed there would be no amnesty for perpetrators of political violence if he takes power.
President Thabo Mbeki must release the letter he allegedly wrote to George Bush asking the American president to ”butt out” of Zimbabwe, the Democratic Alliance said on Thursday. Mbeki’s four-page letter to Bush apparently criticised the United States for taking sides against Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe.
Further outbreaks of violence against foreigners in South Africa could lead Fifa to move the 2010 World Cup elsewhere, the United Nations adviser on sport said on Thursday. Willi Lemke said if the scenes repeat themselves, ”Fifa will rethink its decision in favour of South Africa and, if necessary, pull the plug.”
President Thabo Mbeki has brushed off criticism that he failed to show compassion by not visiting areas affected by violent attacks against foreigners around the country, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Thursday.
Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe will never vacate his office for opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai even if he loses a run-off election next month, his wife said Thursday. Grace Mugabe told followers of her husband’s Zanu-PF party that Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change would not be allowed to take power under any circumstances.
United Nations envoy Archbishop Desmond Tutu, concluding a fact-finding mission to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip on Thursday, condemned as a ”massacre” the killing of 18 members of a Palestinian family by Israeli shelling in 2006. Tutu planned to present a report about the incident to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva at a session in September.
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.
Africa is in need of a ”green revolution” to combat a growing food crisis on the continent, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan said in a speech in London on Wednesday. The Ghanaian diplomat also said that more needed to be done to deal with the impact climate change would have on food supplies in Africa.
The border between South Africa and Zimbabwe should be ”comprehensively” abolished, Methodist Bishop Paul Verryn told academics at the University of the Witwatersrand on Wednesday. ”In exactly the same way we pulled down the fences in 1994 and found that instead of restricting, it enabled,” Verryn told a colloquium on xenophobia.
The United Nations’s top human rights official on Wednesday issued a strong condemnation of the killing of opposition political activists in Zimbabwe. ”It is hard to get a very precise picture of the full range of the violence, or the exact number of politically motivated extra-judicial killings,” said Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The government has denied deciding to set up refugee camps for foreigners displaced by xenophobic violence. Reports suggesting such a move were ”baseless and therefore not true”, it said on Wednesday. ”The government has noted with concern media reports that the Cabinet has taken a decision to establish refugee camps,” a statement said.
Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu on Wednesday plunged into the harsh reality of the conflict in Gaza, where a tearful Palestinian family recounted losing loved ones in an Israeli attack and the ruling Hamas movement expounded its hard-line stance. The South African cleric is heading a team of United Nations human rights observers.