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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.
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/ 27 September 2007
Mozambique’s Roman Catholic archbishop has accused European condom manufacturers of deliberately infecting their products with HIV ”in order to finish quickly the African people”. The archbishop of Maputo, Francisco Chimoio, told the BBC that he had specific information about a plot to kill off Africans.
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/ 27 September 2007
President Thabo Mbeki has responded for the first time on his decision to suspend the National Director of Public Prosecutions, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Thursday. Mbeki was speaking to the broadcaster on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
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/ 27 September 2007
Militants are exploiting weak law enforcement in West Africa to raise funds from rackets ranging from people smuggling to drug trafficking and even fake Viagra, experts said. In the past two years, South American cartels have switched their trafficking routes into Europe to funnel drugs via lawless swathes of war-scarred West Africa.
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/ 27 September 2007
Mozambique will not attend the forthcoming European Union-African Union summit if Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe is excluded, Radio Mozambique reported on Wednesday. Mugabe is barred from travelling to most European countries in terms of sanctions imposed on the Southern African country.
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/ 27 September 2007
Burma’s generals launched pre-dawn raids on rebellious monasteries on Thursday in their crackdown on the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years, defying desperate international calls for restraint. It was unusually quiet on the streets of Yangon, where troops killed an estimated 3Â 000 people in the ruthless suppression of a 1988 uprising.
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/ 26 September 2007
Zimbabwe has ordered 120 000 tonnes of wheat from South Africa to ease food shortages, the country’s state security minister said on Wednesday. The Southern African country, once a regional bread basket, is experiencing acute shortages blamed on President Robert Mugabe’s policies.
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/ 26 September 2007
World governments vowed on Wednesday to hold Burma’s military rulers to account for a bloody crackdown on mass street protests, as the United Nations Security Council prepared to meet in emergency session and European Union officials began drawing up new sanctions.
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/ 26 September 2007
A two-year bridge-building project in Angola has reopened a vital road to a large area of the country’s isolated eastern Moxico province, destroyed during a 27-year civil war, the United Nations said on Wednesday. The main road leading to Lumbula N’guimbo was heavily mined during the war, which ended in 2002.
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/ 26 September 2007
The leaders of Zimbabwe and Iran are looking to form a ”coalition for peace” after receiving a tongue-lashing from United States President George Bush. ”The United States and its allies are so bloodthirsty they don’t want to see peace anywhere in the world,” said Zimbabwe Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga.
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/ 26 September 2007
Troops fired shots over the heads of a large crowd in central Yangon on Wednesday, sending people scurrying for cover as a crackdown intensified against the biggest anti-junta protests in 20 years. Security forces also fired tear gas at columns of monks trying to push their way past barricades sealing off the Shwedagon Pagoda, Burma’s holiest shrine.