The African Union on Monday began probing an unprecedented attack on one of its bases in Sudan’s war-ravaged Darfur that left 10 peacekeepers dead and 25 missing, vowing to punish those responsible. ”The inquiry is under way and we will make its conclusions public,” AU Mission in Sudan spokesperson Noureddine Mezni said.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said on Monday he would pull his country’s troops out of Darfur if it was determined that African peacekeepers who were killed at the weekend were not equipped to defend themselves. Twenty African Union soldiers were killed or injured and 40 missing after an assault on the Haskanita base in Darfur on Saturday night.
The army chiefs of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) met on Monday for 48 hours of security talks behind closed doors. Monday’s talks in the city of Lubumbashi, in the south-east of the DRC, were also due to be attended by the United Nations mission in the DRC in an ”observer” role.
Climate change, environmental degradation and economic deprivation are among forces increasingly driving the dramatic growth in migration, the head of the United Nations refugee agency said on Monday, pointing to desertification, rising sea levels, water shortages and political conflicts.
Malawi, one of Africa’s poorest nations, said on Monday that despite recent efforts to grow the economy, it would be unable to meet the United Nations target date of halving poverty by 2015. A welfare-monitoring survey conducted by the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development indicated that poverty dropped to 45% in Malawi in 2006, from 53,9% in 1998.
The shutdown of communications in Burma has slowed information to the outside world to a trickle, with the number of reports to one exile group cut by half and websites with the .mm Burma suffix being unavailable, campaigners said on Sunday.
United Nations special envoy Ibrahim Gambari may not have met Burma junta supremo Than Shwe at the weekend, but the fact he is still in the country suggests his mission is far from failed. The schedule for Gambari’s mission was threadbare — 24 hours and one meeting with Than Shwe.
Crime is booming in sprawling cities of the developing world but fear of attack outweighs the reality and is further dividing already divided populations, a United Nations agency said on Monday. ”Perceptions are worse than reality,” UN-Habitat’s executive director Anna Tibaijuka said.
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/ 30 September 2007
Ten African Union (AU) soldiers were killed and 50 were missing after armed men launched an assault on an AU base in Darfur, the worst attack on AU troops since they deployed in Sudan’s violent west in 2004. The AU called it a ”deliberate and sustained” assault by about 30 vehicles, which overran and looted the peacekeepers’ camp on Saturday night.
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/ 30 September 2007
A government report blamed constant power failures for a drastic drop in wheat production, the official media reported Sunday. A two thirds shortfall in wheat harvests was expected to worsen chronic bread shortages. Most bakeries were closed during the past week as flour deliveries dried up.
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/ 29 September 2007
Burma or Myanmar? As the military regime has cracked down on pro-democracy protests in the Asian country this week, a war of words has flared again over what to call the troubled nation. The United States and the BBC prefer the old name, Burma, while the United Nations, Japan and other nations have adopted Myanmar.
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/ 29 September 2007
United Nations envoy Ibrahim Gambari flew to Burma on Saturday carrying worldwide hopes he can persuade its ruling generals to use negotiations instead of guns to end mass protests against 45 years of military rule. ”He’s the best hope we have. He is trusted on both sides,” Singapore Foreign Minister George Yeo said.
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/ 29 September 2007
Rwanda joined other countries on Friday in appealing for a global moratorium on executions, saying that if its government could abolish the death penalty while perpetrators of the 1994 genocide still await sentences, no country should use it. About 500 000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were massacred in 100 days of frenzied killing led by radical Hutus.
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/ 29 September 2007
The country’s chief prosecutor has been suspended, its top cop may be wanted for corruption — and South Africans are wondering whether both are casualties in a battle for leadership of the African National Congress. The South African Broadcasting Corporation, reported on Thursday that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of police National Commissioner Jackie Selebi.
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/ 28 September 2007
Eritrea, in a letter published on Friday, urged the United Nations to force its arch-foe, Ethiopia, to urgently implement a border ruling, warning it feared Addis Ababa was preparing to resume war. In the letter, Foreign Minister Osman Saleh said he believed that Ethiopian threats to scrap the Algiers peace deal that ended their bloody 1998 to 2000 border war were a precursor to an attack.
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/ 28 September 2007
United States President George Bush on Friday called for a ”strong and transparent” way for nations to measure progress on fighting climate change, but said each country should set its own approach. In a speech to a US-sponsored conference of major emitting countries, Bush also called for the creation of a global fund to promote clean technology.
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/ 28 September 2007
Israel and the Palestinians could sign a peace deal within six months of an international peace conference scheduled for November, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday. ”The meeting in November should define the principles settling the questions over the final status [of the Palestinian territories],” Abbas said.
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/ 28 September 2007
Eleven thousand people have fled Mogadishu this month because of intensified violence and the northern part of the Somali capital is becoming increasingly deserted, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday. Northern Mogadishu is a stronghold of Islamist insurgents fighting Ethiopian troops supporting the transitional government in the Horn of Africa country.
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/ 28 September 2007
United Nations human rights investigators say people are still being arbitrarily detained, tortured and often denied access to a lawyer in post-war Angola. Wrapping up a 10-day visit to the Southern African country, they also cited credible allegations that civilians are held incommunicado at military facilities in Cabinda province.
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/ 28 September 2007
Hundreds of thousands of people awaited desperately needed relief supplies and faced the threat of epidemics on Friday as the death toll climbed in Africa’s worst floods in three decades. At least 300 have died in the flooding since heavy rains began sweeping across the continent two months ago.
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/ 28 September 2007
Burmese troops pounded dissenters on Friday by swiftly breaking up street gatherings, occupying key Buddhist monasteries and cutting public internet access. The moves raised concerns that a crackdown on civilians that has killed at least 10 people was set to intensify.
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/ 28 September 2007
Ugandan troops looted truckloads of valuable trees from south Sudan when they were pursuing Lord’s Resistance Army rebels who were hiding in the region, a research group said on Friday. The Swiss-based Small Arms Survey said the Uganda People’s Defence Forces cut teak trees in southern Sudan’s Equatoria region during Operation Iron Fist.
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/ 28 September 2007
Fuelled by ”revulsion” at Burma’s violent crackdown on popular protests against military rule, South-east Asia rounded on the generals on Friday and critics planned demonstrations at embassies across the region. Burma state media said nine people were killed when soldiers fired on crowds in Yangon on Thursday.
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/ 27 September 2007
Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) hopes a new biometric identity card (ID) scheme backed by the European Union can help overhaul its undisciplined armed forces, branded by campaigners as the central African state’s worst rights abuser. After decades as a tool of repression under former leader Mobutu Sese Seko and a devastating 1998 to 2003 war, DRC’s army is bloated, unmanageable and corrupt.
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/ 27 September 2007
Troops cleared protesters from the streets of central Yangon on Thursday, giving them 10 minutes to leave or be shot as the Burma junta intensified a two-day crackdown on the largest uprising in 20 years. At least nine people were killed, state television said, on a day when far fewer protesters took to the streets after soldiers raided monasteries in the middle of the night.
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/ 27 September 2007
Developing countries are willing to do more when it comes to tackling climate change, but the ”trigger” has to come from the North, Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Marthinus van Schalkwyk said on Thursday. In a speech prepared for delivery in Washington, he said participants in such efforts had to include the United States.
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/ 27 September 2007
The United States-sponsored meeting of major emitting countries is aimed at supporting and accelerating the United Nations process on climate change, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice insisted on Thursday. Sceptics have expressed concern that the climate meeting might be an attempt to circumvent the UN process.
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/ 27 September 2007
Floods that have left hundreds of thousands of Africans homeless across vast swathes of the continent have claimed 64 lives in Nigeria and 33 in Burkina Faso, government and aid officials said on Thursday. Nigeria’s Red Cross said the death toll covered a period since mid-July, while 22 000 people have been displaced in 10 sometimes arid northern states.
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/ 27 September 2007
The Democratic Alliance (DA) on Thursday said that South Africa being ranked the third least safe place out of 48 countries on the African continent indicates that the country is critically unsafe. ”South Africa’s safety and security performance is utterly abysmal,” said the party’s spokesperson on safety and security, Dianne Kohler-Barnard.
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/ 27 September 2007
Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe accused United States President George Bush of ”rank hypocrisy” on Wednesday for lecturing him on human rights, and likened the US Guantánamo Bay prison to a concentration camp. ”His hands drip with innocent blood of many nationalities,” Mugabe said in a typically fiery speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
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/ 27 September 2007
South Africa is moving backwards in key development areas such as economics and safety and security, says the Democratic Alliance (DA). ”When considering year-by-year positions on various indices, South Africa is actually backsliding rather than improving,” says a DA survey, launched by DA parliamentary leader Sandra Botha on Thursday.
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/ 27 September 2007
Burma riot police charged a crowd of more than 1Â 000 protesters after they pelted soldiers with rocks and water bottles in central Yangon on Thursday and at least one person collapsed as shots were fired, witnesses said. One man was on the ground, unconscious, but it was not clear whether he was alive or dead.