Battered and bloodied Africa

Democratic Republic of Congo

The Holy Roman Empire wasn't particularly holy, and it wasn't particularly Roman. Similarly, the Democratic Republic of Congo hasn't been particularly democratic and hasn't been much of a republic. Certainly not when Mobutu Sese Seko ruled the roost. Violence has marred the reigns of the Kabilas as well. With elections coming this summer, there is a glimmer of hope for the DRC. However, the country continues to experience convulsions and humanitarian disasters.

The humanitarian crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo is being neglected by rich countries, warned aid agency Oxfam International today.

Donors have committed only $94m (14%) of the $682m needed for the Humanitarian Action Plan (HAP) developed by the UN, Red Cross and aid agencies, since the appeal was launched 13th February. In that three-month period, an estimated 100,000 people have died from conflicted related causes.
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The Democratic Republic of Congo remains one of the world's forgotten disaster zones with an estimated 3.9m people that have died as a result of the conflict in the past 8 years.

100,000 dead in the past several months? 3.9 million dead in 8 years? Incredible.

Somalia

Eight days of fighting in Mogadishu have left around 150 dead. Today, though, a shaky ceasefire is in place. Fighting erupted between an alliance of warlords called the "Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism", and the Islamic Courts' militia, which want to set up an Islamic rule of sharia law in Somalia.

Even in Somalia, where heaven only knows what there is to fight over, militant Islam wants to enslave people.

East Africa is experiencing a severe drought, and tens of thousands are at risk.

Rainfall has come too late to reverse the devastation from a six-month drought in East Africa, where thousands of weakened children could die without immediate assistance, the United Nations said on Monday.

The U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) said 8 million people in the Horn of Africa, a region spanning Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eriteria and Djibouti, were in urgent need after the drought that killed livestock and crops.

They include 1.6 million children under the age of 5, UNICEF said in an appeal for money, water, sanitation, vaccines, protection, education and feeding programmes for drought-affected children.

Keith McKenzie, UNICEF's special advisor for the Horn of Africa, said about 40,000 children in the region were already acutely malnourished.

"These children are at great risk if we do not get at them with adequate programmes to meet their needs," he told a news conference at Geneva's U.N. headquarters.

UNICEF is short of about $54 million of the $81 million it asked for in 2006 for programmes across the Horn of Africa, which is reeling from its most severe drought in five years.

If only these militias would spend their energy building a better life for their people.

Darfur

A peace deal was signed on May 5, but since it did not include all the main players, the future of the deal is cloudy. Already there have been violent protests over the deal.

Six people were killed when demonstrators opposed to a peace deal the Sudanese government signed with Darfur rebels clashed with police in the war-torn region.

An African Union peacekeeper patrols Argo refugee camp in Sudan’s northern Darfur province, May 14, 2006. (Reuters)The deadliest clashes occurred in and around camps for internally displaced persons in South Darfur state, where three civilians reportedly died in an exchange of gunfire between demonstrators and the police on Saturday.

The unrest began when protesters denouncing the peace agreement beat to death a military intelligence agent inside the Kass camp, the Al Rai al-Aam daily said Sunday.

A key SLM leader refuses to sign the peace deal.

A rebel leader from Sudan’s Darfur region will not bow to intense international pressure to sign a peace agreement by Monday’s deadline because the government has rejected his conditions, a close adviser said.

However, Abdelwahid Mohamed al-Nur of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) wanted to keep trying to make a deal with Khartoum and talks looked set to continue beyond the deadline because diplomats were desperate to gain wider support for the accord.

Nur rejected the peace settlement signed on May 5 by the Sudanese government and rival SLA factional leader Minni Arcua Minnawi to end a conflict that has killed tens of thousands.

Uganda

In an editorial at the Seattle Times, Reneé Stearns writes about the war-torn region of northern Uganda.

Reading those words, I was immediately drawn back to what I had just seen during my time in Gulu on the northern border of Uganda, a place where for 20 years a brutal band of rebels called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), under the control of cultic military leader Joseph Kony, has abducted children and terrorized, tortured and killed civilians it originally claimed to protect.

It's a place where a marauding band of child soldiers was forced to mutilate a pregnant mother of three while she worked in her garden. The mother, Margaret, and her baby managed to survive.

It's a place where young boys like Thomas are snatched away from their homes and forced to murder their friends and family. Knowing these children are too ashamed and afraid to return to their villages after their terrible deeds, Kony uses his boy army (most are between the ages of 8 and 14) to perpetuate his reign of terror.

It's a place where girls like Angela are kidnapped from their classrooms and taken to be used as sex slaves for army commanders. Gone from her mother for almost nine years before she escaped, she has returned to her home infected with AIDS, both her health and her childhood forever taken away.

And it's a place where Lilly, a beautiful 16-year-old girl, and her sisters Harriet, 10, and Nancy, 8, spend only an hour each day at home between school and a long walk from their village to the Noah's Ark Children's Center, in the center of the city of Gulu, where they can sleep in relative safety from abduction.

Most people have been forced to abandon their villages altogether. Burned out or forced to flee by the rebels, they now live in squalid displacement camps. These are farm families with no place to farm. They endure long days in cramped conditions, with poor sanitation, living on rations from the United Nations World Food Program. They are raising a generation of children who have never known anything but war.

Guinea Bissau

Famine is threatening in Guinea Bissau.

The government of tiny Guinea-Bissau this week appealed for US $2 million to stop tens of thousands of people from going hungry in its southern rice-bowl region, where both food and cash are running low.

The West African nation needed funds to buy seed vital for the next harvest as well as rice and cooking oil and sugar, Agriculture Minister Sola Inquilin na Bitchita told reporters.

But the aid would also be used to rebuild protective barriers around the region's rice-fields, washed away by unusually heavy rains last year. The flooding allowed saltwater to leak into irrigation channels, meaning that rice crops failed for a second year running.

A team of experts from the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) are currently in the area to assess the situation, officials said.

The food shortage due to last year's poor rice harvest is being compounded by problems on the cashew nut market. Cashews are Guinea-Bissau's top export, with four out of five farmers producing more than 80,000 tons a year, making it the world's fifth top producer.

But as cashew farmers sweat to complete the annual April-June harvest, traders are refusing to buy the nut on the grounds that the price set by the government - 350 CFA francs (US $0.70) a kilo - is too high. This year's price was raised by the government in line with promises made at elections last year aimed at giving farmers a better deal.
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Meanwhile in the north of the country near the border with Senegal, fighting between Bissau troops and Senegalese separatists has displaced around 10,000 people and disrupted harvesting.