Rare peace talks between Somalia’s interim government and opposition exiles have made a slow start in Djibouti, but a senior United Nations official said he was encouraged both sides had turned up. ”I am more than hopeful. The Somalis who I met today are committed to peace and reconciliation,” the UN envoy to Somalia told reporters in Djibouti late on Saturday.
Lying on a sagging mattress and wincing slightly, Anna Lado laughs at the idea that she should have been afraid of giving birth to her first child, now lying in a crib near her in a hospital in south Sudan. ”It’s natural,” she smiles. But in fact, she received a life-saving caesarean in the capital’s teaching hospital.
Zimbabwe’s opposition leader looked set on Sunday to return home from South Africa to face Robert Mugabe in a presidential run-off poll despite a risk of "more violence, more gloom, more betrayal". Morgan Tsvangirai had previously refused to say whether he would take part in the run-off, even though failure to do so would have handed victory to Mugabe.
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.
The military rulers of Burma went ahead with a constitutional referendum on Saturday despite calls from the outside world to postpone it after the devastation of Cyclone Nargis.The plebiscite was postponed by two weeks in the hardest-hit Irrawaddy Delta and the city of Rangoon, but voting went ahead in other parts of the country.
The United Nations World Food Programme on Friday said two relief flights will be sent to Burma on Saturday, just hours after suspending flights due to ”unacceptable restrictions” by the government. Burma has maintained strict limits on foreign involvement in the relief effort, despite calls for it to allow unfettered access to experts.
The United Nations food agency suspended aid flights to cyclone-struck Burma on Friday after the military government seized two deliveries at Rangoon airport, apparently determined to distribute supplies on its own. Governments around the world have been pressing Burma’s ruling generals to open the country’s borders to desperately needed assistance.
The five major nuclear-armed powers said on Friday the Non-Proliferation Treaty was under threat and cited Iran’s uranium enrichment campaign in a rare joint call for action to shore up the NPT. Iran says it wants only electricity from enrichment, which can also produce atom bomb fuel if the process is adjusted.
Regional mediator and South African President Thabo Mbeki arrived in Zimbabwe on Friday for talks on the country’s disputed elections ahead of a possible run-off that has raised concerns of further violence. The South African leader’s ”quiet diplomacy” approach towards the crisis in Zimbabwe has triggered criticism at home and abroad.
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.
Burma will accept foreign aid but distribute relief itself, an official newspaper said on Friday, after a disaster rescue team from Qatar that arrived in Rangoon on an aid flight was turned back. Outside frustration is mounting at delays by the generals in giving visas to aid workers and landing rights for flights.
The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold a special session on May 23 to examine how the world’s food crisis is undermining the right to food for millions of people, officials said on Friday. The rights to adequate food and freedom from hunger are enshrined in international law as basic, universal human rights.
Prosecutors for Sierra Leone’s war crimes court are trying to track down -million they say vanished from two United States bank accounts held by former Liberian President Charles Taylor when he was forced from power in 2003. But lawyers defending the former warlord challenged prosecutors to produce evidence that Taylor had salted away state funds for his personal use.
Pressure mounted on the Zimbabwe government on Thursday to admit foreign observers to oversee a presidential election run-off amid fresh claims that pro-government militias were instilling terror in communities in the countryside. Meanwhile, there was still no word on when a second round should take place.
A few aid shipments had arrived in Burma’s main city by Thursday, but the planeloads of supplies and heavy equipment needed to help millions of cyclone victims remain largely stranded outside the country. In a dramatic development, the ruling junta agreed to accept United States emergency aid after last weekend’s cyclone.
A presidential election run-off in Zimbabwe cannot take place given the current levels of violence, the head of a South African contingent of regional election observers said on Wednesday. ”We have seen it, there are people in hospital who said they have been tortured, you have seen pictures,” Kingsley Mamabolo told reporters.
The international community pleaded with Burma’s military rulers on Wednesday to let foreign aid workers and desperately needed relief supplies into the cyclone-crushed country. The United Nations, the United States and France stepped up pressure on the junta to open their doors to foreign aid.
Donor nations pledged a preliminary ,8-billion in assistance to Sudan on Wednesday, aiming to help bolster a 2005 north-south peace deal in the African country still torn by violence in its western Darfur region. Sudan had said it needed ,1-billion up to 2011, on top of -billion in humanitarian aid.
Aid was trickling in on Wednesday for an estimated one million victims of Cyclone Nargis in military-ruled Burma, with the death toll of more than 22 500 expected to mount. France has suggested invoking a United Nations ”responsibility to protect” clause and delivering aid directly to Burma without waiting for approval from the military in Rangoon.
Climate change is harder on women in poor countries, where mothers stay in areas hit by drought, deforestation or crop failure as men move to literally greener pastures, a Nobel Peace laureate said on Tuesday. ”Women are very immediately affected, and usually women and children can’t run away,” said Wangari Maathai.
Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF party and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change have contested half the results of the March 29 parliamentary election, state media said on Wednesday, extending a stalemate that has triggered widespread violence.
Soldiers, insurgents and bandits are routinely attacking Somalian civilians, carrying out murder, rape, and robbery on villagers, and destroying entire districts, Amnesty International said on Tuesday. Gang rape and throat cutting — referred to locally as ”killing like goats” — is prevalent.
Disease, hunger and thirst pose a major threat to hundreds of thousands of survivors of Cyclone Nargis, aid agencies said on Wednesday, urging Burma’s military rulers to open the doors to international humanitarian relief. Aid officials estimate hundreds of thousands are homeless in the swamplands of the delta south-west of the biggest city Rangoon.
Lawmakers on Tuesday debated legislation to remove former South African president Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) from an apartheid-era United States terrorist blacklist. Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, recalled that ANC members could travel to United Nations headquarters in New York but not to Washington DC or other parts of the United States.
Russia’s deployment of extra troops in the breakaway Georgian region of Abkhazia has brought the prospect of war ”very close”, a minister of ex-Soviet Georgia said on Tuesday. Separately, the ”foreign minister” of the breakaway Black Sea region was quoted as saying it was ready to hand over military control to Russia.
Like the state of Israel, Akram al-Shamali and Moshe Feist both turn 60 this year. But that’s about where the similarities end. For Feist, an Israeli, the anniversary is a chance to celebrate the Jewish state’s hard-fought achievements and swap stories of survival and patriotism over a glass of local wine.
A powerful cyclone that slammed into Burma’s Irrawaddy Delta triggered a massive wave that gave people nowhere to run, killing at least 15Â 000 and leaving 30Â 000 others missing, officials said on Tuesday. ”More deaths were caused by the tidal wave than the storm itself,” Minister for Relief and Resettlement Maung Maung Swe told a news conference.
In politics, as in life, chickens usually come home to roost. Fourteen years of failure in leadership and management at the Department of Home Affairs. Nine years of self-indulgent denialism in the Presidency. Six months of Umshini Wami and the violence and human rights promiscuity it implies — not to mention the failure in intelligence.
Security forces on Monday killed at least five people in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, as they cracked down on riots sparked by rising food prices and record inflation, witnesses said. At least 20 000 people were out on the streets to demonstrate as anger grew at printers of fake money and unscrupulous traders.
United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon on Monday expressed alarm at reports of rising violence and intimidation in Zimbabwe and said he was consulting with African leaders on how to help resolve the country’s election crisis. "I am deeply concerned at reports of rising levels of violence and intimidation" in Zimbabwe, he told reporters.
Burma’s military junta believes at least 10 000 people died in a cyclone that ripped through the Irrawaddy Delta, triggering a massive international aid response for the pariah nation. ”The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10 000, with 3 000 missing,” a Rangoon-based diplomat said in Bangkok.
Sudanese government bombs have hit a primary school and a busy market place in Darfur, killing at least 13 people, including seven children, two aid organisations said on Monday. The Sudanese army has repeatedly denied bombing in the area, which would be a violation of a United Nations Security Council resolution banning all offensive flying.