Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) renegade general Laurent Nkunda on Monday abandoned a month-old ceasefire and blamed government army attacks for fresh fighting in an eastern border province. His announcement heralded more conflict and humanitarian suffering in DRC’s North Kivu province, which has long been a tinderbox of ethnic tensions.
At least 58 people have died in Vietnam since a typhoon slammed into the country, bringing the worst floods in decades to northern and central areas, rescue officials said on Monday. Emergency workers were taking water, food and medical supplies by boat and helicopter to stranded villagers cut off after rivers burst through dykes.
A Darfur town has been burned to the ground and its residents forced to flee, days after 10 African Union (AU) troops were killed there in an attack, a joint United Nations/African Union mission said on Sunday. The report confirmed rebel statements on Friday that the remote settlement of Haskanita had been all but destroyed.
The United Nations’s nuclear watchdog head begins a long scheduled trip to India on Monday that has turned into a political flashpoint as a nuclear energy deal with the United States threatens to spark snap elections. The trip comes as India faces an informal end-October deadline to begin securing clearances to clinch the nuclear energy deal.
The Burma junta reduced security in Yangon sharply on Sunday, apparently confident it would face no further mass protests against military rule, but the streets remained unusually quiet and arrests continued. The few people on the streets said they were still fearful and the internet remained cut off.
A key Darfur rebel leader warned on Saturday his movement will not attend peace talks this month in Libya unless the United Nations and the African Union can convince a rival group to unite its splinter factions.Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the Justice and Equality Movement, had said he would attend talks set to begin October 27 in Tripoli, Libya.
Protests against Burma’s bloody crackdown on dissenters took place in cities around the world on Saturday, with thousands demonstrating in London and smaller gatherings held in Sydney, Stockholm, Bangkok, Paris and elsewhere. The coordinated displays of public condemnation followed the violent crackdown by Burma’s junta on thousands of activists in late September.
Key United Nations powers stepped up calls for Burma to release political prisoners after an envoy to the repressive state warned of ”serious international repercussions” from the bloody turmoil there. The United States signalled on Friday it may push for UN sanctions if the ruling junta kept up a crackdown on pro-democracy protesters.
Detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s party dismissed the Burma junta’s offer of talks as surreal on Friday as a United Nations envoy warned of ”serious international consequences” from the junta’s brutal suppression of pro-democracy protesters.
Grenades hurled by insurgents killed at least five Somalis around the capital’s main market, a witness said on Friday. Mohamed Abdulle Matan, one of the main traders at the Bakara market, said two soldiers were also wounded in the attack, a day after the government announced a major security crackdown on Islamic insurgents.
Sudanese government forces and militia groups razed a town in central Darfur where African Union soldiers were attacked, rebel leaders said on Friday, adding the troops were also threatening to raid a nearby town. Sudan’s army and Darfur rebel movements blame each other for last week’s assault on the AU base in Haskanita in which 10 African Union soldiers were killed.
The Zimbabwe government said it is pressing ahead with legislation to seize a controlling share of foreign-owned mining interests in the country, the official media reported on Friday. Police also said a total of 23 585 corporate executives, store managers, traders, street vendors and bus drivers were arrested for overcharging since a prize freeze was ordered.
Iran’s president accused Israel on Friday of using the Holocaust as a pretext for ”genocide” against Palestinians. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who outraged the West in 2005 by calling Israel a ”tumour” to be wiped off the map, said the truth should be told about World War II and the Holocaust.
A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world this year amount to a climate change ”mega disaster”, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, John Holmes, has warned. Holmes said dire predictions about the impact of global warming on humanity were already coming true.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on her first visit to sub-Saharan Africa, called on Thursday for more democratic opening in Ethiopia, a key ally of the West now under scrutiny over rights issues. On the first leg of a five-day tour, the German leader urged Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to provide greater space in Ethiopia for both political opposition and the media.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the world could not stop the Islamic state’s nuclear programme, which the West fears is a cover to build nuclear bomb, the official IRNA news agency said on Thursday. Ahmadinejad was speaking the day after French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner called on the European Union to take the lead in widening financial sanctions on Iran.
Ethiopia on Thursday pledged 5 000 troops to a United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur region. The 26 000-strong joint mission is to replace a hard-pressed AU force that lacks experience, equipment and cash and has been unable to stop the conflict.
A Soviet-era Antonov 26 cargo plane crashed in Kinshasa on Thursday, smashing through a dozen houses and killing 25 people on board as well as a number of people on the ground, officials and the United Nations mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo said. Witnesses said it exploded in a fireball on impact.
International elder statesmen, including two Nobel Peace Prize winners, said on Thursday that Darfur was rife with violence and deeply divided after returning from the Sudanese region. They warned rape was widespread and being ignored by the Sudanese authorities and also urged Khartoum to hand over war-crimes suspects for trial at the International Criminal Court.
Despite gradually easing its iron grip on Burma’s main city on Thursday, the junta continued to round up scores of people and grill hundreds more arrested during last week’s bloody crackdown on pro-democracy marches. One freed monk said some had been beaten when they refused to answer questions about their identity.
The Mo Ibrahim Foundation was launched in October 2006 to promote good governance in Africa with the support of world leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Alpha Konaré, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. On October 22 2007, the foundation will announce the winner of the world’s biggest prize, the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership, to be awarded to a former African executive head of state.
Burma’s military regime kept up the pressure on its people on Wednesday after last week’s bloody crackdown on protesters as the European Union agreed in principle to punish the junta with sanctions. Troops who last week killed at least 13 and arrested over 1 000 people continued overnight arrests and mounted patrols to strike terror into the population.
Sudan’s president has promised to pay -million in compensation to the country’s war-torn Darfur region, tripling a previous pledge, former United States president Jimmy Carter said on Wednesday. Carter also publicly clashed with a Sudanese security chief who had objected to the visit to a Darfur tribal chief.
Burma’s junta arrested more people under the cover of darkness on Wednesday despite a crescendo of international outrage during a keenly watched United Nations mission to bring an end to a bloody crackdown on protests. At least eight truckloads of prisoners were hauled out of downtown Rangoon.
African Union (AU) peacekeepers are outgunned and outnumbered by rebels and militias in Darfur, the AU force commander Martin Luther Agwai said on Tuesday. He said this was one reason an AU base in Haskanita, south-east Darfur, was overwhelmed so quickly during a recent attack on the peacekeepers.
The Canadian general who headed the United Nations peacekeeping force during the 1994 Rwandan genocide gave a chilling account on Tuesday of how roadblocks popped up like mushrooms and served only to pick out and murder Tutsis. Romeo Dallaire testified at the Canadian war crimes trial of Desire Munyaneza, who is accused of leading the attacks.
President Robert Mugabe renewed threats to seize foreign mining interests and businesses accused of profiteering, state radio reported on Tuesday. But the head of the central bank, Gideon Gono, warned against hasty and disruptive seizures in a country in economic crisis.
A group of elder statesmen, including former US president Jimmy Carter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Desmond Tutu, urged all sides in Darfur’s bloodshed to reach a peace deal as they began a tour on Tuesday of the war-torn region. The visit comes days after rebels overran an African Union peacekeeping base in northern Darfur.
The African Union denied on Tuesday that troop-contributing nations had threatened to pull their forces from a mission to Darfur after a rebel attack on an AU peacekeeping base. The AU says 10 soldiers were killed and 10 others wounded after the weekend raid — the worst assault on AU forces since 2004 when the 7 000-strong mission was deployed.
Global warming will produce stay-at-home tourists over the next few decades, radically altering travel patterns and threatening jobs and businesses in tourism-dependent countries, according to a stark assessment by United Nations experts. They said concerns about weather extremes and calls to reduce emissions-heavy air travel would make long-haul flights less attractive.
United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari met Burma junta chief Than Shwe and detained opposition Aung San Suu Kyi on Tuesday at the end of four-day mission to halt a bloody crackdown on the biggest democracy protests in 20 years. There was no word on whether Gambari’s single meeting with Than Shwe had persuaded him to relax his iron grip.
The 1 000 Darfur rebels waited until sunset, the end of the Ramadan fast, to begin their assault. Some of the outgunned African peacekeepers, caught by surprise, fought back. Others fled into the scrublands, and at the end 10 of them were dead.