The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) would like to announce the start of admissions to the West Africa Peacebuilding Institute (WAPI) for 2008. This year’s Institute will be held from September 1 – 19, 2008 at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre (KAIPTC) in Accra, Ghana. WAPI is a three-week intensive training program that aims to strengthen the capacity of civil society-based peacebuilding practitioners and institutions across the West Africa sub-region and beyond in order to promote the development of indigenous responses to conflict.

Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly - Refugee Advocacy and Support Program (hCa - RASP) released a recent report entitled "Unwelcome Guests: The Detention of Refugees in Turkey’s Foreigners Guesthouses." The report is based on interviews held between October 2006 and September 2007 with 40 refugees from 17 different countries - most of them African - who had been detained in ten “foreigners’ guesthouses” in Turkey.

At least 6,000 people have been affected by flooding following heavy rains in the southern coastal district of Taveta, the Kenya Red Cross Society (KRCS) said. Three primary schools have also been closed temporarily after being submerged," Anthony Mwangi, the KRCS Public Relations Manager said on 1 April. "The water levels in some areas are up to chest level."

It is going to take more than a regime change back home to get the several million-strong Zimbabwean diaspora to return, according to analysts. "It's both the economy and politics," said Mlamuli Nkomo, an expert in Forced Migration at the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

With preparations for new local elections under way, following a succesful military venture by the Comoros Union government and African Union (AU) troops to restore order to the renegade island by force, deeper humanitarian concerns have emerged. Last week a combined military force toppled Mohamed Bacar, a rebel leader who had defied demands to re-run local elections, deemed illegal by the AU and Union government. Bacar has fled and is believed to be on the French isalnd of Reunion.

Supreme Court in Burundi has sentenced the former Chairman of President Pierre Nkurunziza's ruling Forces for the Defence of Democracy [FDD] to 13 years behind bars. Hussein Radjabu had been found guilty of attempting to “recruit former rebels with the aim of destabilising the state" and insulting President Nkurunziza, referring to him as an "empty bottle."

Sudan has accused Chad of bombing a village in Darfur, vowing to respond to the "aggressive and serious" violations of a fledgling peace agreement. Ali al-Sadiq, the Sudanese foreign ministry spokesman, said that a Chadian military helicopter "bombed a place called Um Tamjoob" on Wednesday.

Rescuers are continuing their search in a flooded Tanzanian mine but hopes of finding survivors are fading. Thirteen bodies were retrieved on Monday, bringing the confirmed toll to 19, according to police. Officials say 75 were feared killed when heavy rains flooded narrow mine shafts in the tanzanite mine early on Saturday.

Liberian refugees in Ghana, mostly women, protested in hopes the U.N. would help them find new homes in Western countries. Now they are in a makeshift camp, fearing mass deportation to a homeland with an 85 percent jobless rate.

After months of sporadic xenophobic attacks elsewhere in South Africa, a series of brutal assaults on foreigners in makeshift settlements on the outskirts of the capital has galvanized government and private organizations into action. The mob attacks last month on foreigners in Atteridgeville – everyone from refugees and asylum seekers to South Africans born overseas – left several people dead and large numbers of houses looted and burned.

The number of Burundians that have returned to their homeland from neighbouring Tanzania with the help of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reached the 300,000 mark last month, the agency has reported. In addition, tens of thousands of Burundian refugees have also returned home on their own – mainly from villages in the north-western Tanzania – bringing the total number of returnees to 389,000.

Two human rights activists have been released from prison in Ethiopia having been detained since November 2005. Daniel Bekele and Netsanet Demissie were released on Friday after receiving a presidential pardon. The two signed a letter acknowledging mistakes" committed in relation to the 2005 elections. It is not yet clear if the pardon is unconditional.

Chronic gang warfare will return to Nigeria's oil-producing south unless President Umaru Yar'Adua brings to justice local politicians who have fuelled the unrest, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday. Gangs behind kidnappings, oil theft and other violent crime in the Niger Delta were going unpunished partly because of their connections to local politicians who first hired them to intimidate opponents or rig elections, it said in a report.

A final peace agreement to end two decades of conflict in northern Uganda is expected to be signed on 5 April, but the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) said it would only disarm if indictments issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against its top leadership were deferred.

Two towns in western Cote d’Ivoire have been shut off by two days of riots by disgruntled Ivorian soldiers. Troops started rampaging through the town of Duékoué, 400 km north west of the commercial capital Abidjan, on the morning of 24 March, protesting the murder of a low-ranking soldier by robbers the night before, Commandant Vazoumana, a gendarme in Duékoué told IRIN.

The Prime Minister of the Central African Republic (CAR) said his government was poised to beef up security forces to counter insecurity in the country. Faustin-Archange Touadera told parliament that the best way to reduce insecurity in the provinces was to reinforce the capacities of "our defence and security forces."

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is assisting the government of South Sudan to in its prison reform. Bankrolled by Canada, the project is carried out in collaboration with the International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy and the UN Mission in Sudan.

Egyptian security men shot dead two African migrants on Thursday as they tried to slip across the frontier into Israel, bringing to 10 the number of migrants killed at the border this year, security sources said. The sources said security forces opened fire on the two men, both in their 30s and believed to be from Ivory Coast, after they refused orders to stop at the border.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has set up a new chicken-rearing and egg producing project to improve the nutrition of some of the neediest internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the volatile North Kivu province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The project, in partnership with Veterinaires sans Frontieres (VSR), seeks to raise the self-sufficiency of the displaced though the consumption and sale of poultry products.

The Argentinean Center of International studies invite researchers and specialists to collaborate with a new quarterly publication of the Sub-Saharan African Program, “Africa: The fifth continent and the emergency of a new reality”.