President Robert Mugabe has signed the Interception of Communications Bill into law. The Chief Secretary to the President and Cabinet Misheck Sibanda announced this in a general notice issued in the Government Gazette of 3 August 2007. The Act will make lawful the interception and monitoring of communications in the course of their transmission through a telecommunications, postal or any other related service or system in Zimbabwe. The Act also provides for the establishment of a monitoring centre.

Military officials in Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda say they will work together to ease tensions along their shared border, where two people were killed in clashes last week. Army officers from the two sides met on Monday on an island in Lake Albert, which straddles the border.

Morocco and the Polisario Front are meeting for a second round of UN-brokered talks in New York to try to resolve their 32-year dispute over Western Sahara. The Polisario, or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Rio de Oro, is a political and military group fighting for the separation of Western Sahara from Morocco.

The UN refugee agency has announced it is coordinating an operation to bring help to some 26,000 refugees who fled insecurity in the Central African Republic and are now living in precarious conditions scattered along the eastern border of Cameroon.

Repression continues with no end in sight as pro-democrats continue to be arrested and brutalized with impunity, by state security agents. Just this week alone a torture victim from the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) is missing in Mutare; another victim of police brutality, a student leader, has been seriously injured and is in custody in Bulawayo and more than a dozen members of Women/Men of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA/MOZA) were arrested when they were playing sport in Masvingo.

A joint report by the United Nations refugee agency and its Sudanese Government counterpart has recommended that the estimated 30,000 Chadians who have fled to neighbouring Darfur to escape a worsening security situation in their homeland be classified as refugees. But the report also warned that anyone in that group who is an active or former combatant in the clashes in Chad should not be granted refugee status, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis has said.

Some 7,292 refugees from Sierra Leone and Liberia resident in Nigeria are to be integrated into the country under the terms of a multi-party agreement signed by ECOWAS, UN refugee agency UNHCR and the three countries, an ECOWAS statement said here Tuesday.

REDRESS and African Rights are initiating a fact- finding and advocacy initiative aimed at eliminating European safe havens for Rwandese genocide suspects and ensuring that perpetrators are brought to justice. We are currently seeking a full- time project intern to assist with the implementation of the Project in Rwanda. Salary: Living expenses will be covered.Closing Date: 10/8/2007

At the beginning of August the AU and UN special envoys for the Darfur peace process, Salim Ahmed Salim and Jan Eliasson, will convene a meeting of Darfur rebel leaders in Arusha. The meeting is one of the components of the Joint AU-UN Roadmap for the Darfur Political Process, which aims to revive negotiations between the Sudanese government and the Darfur rebels. Is the Roadmap more likely to bear fruit than the Abuja talks that preceded it? Have any lessons been learnt or might the same mistakes be made?

In 2006 the AU-led peace talks in Abuja culminated in the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) that was signed by the government and one of the rebel groups but rejected by the other groups. The agreement was divisive and unpopular in Darfur, exacerbating a protracted conflict that has left over two hundred thousand people dead and roughly two million displaced.

The glaring problem with the Roadmap is its unrealistic timeframe: in May and June there will be consultations with the Sudanese parties and Darfurian civil society, the development of a negotiation strategy and efforts to unify the divided rebel movements; June and July will be devoted to finalising the consultations and preparations for negotiations; and the final phase in August will entail a “brief and intensive negotiation session”.

This four-month timeframe has already slipped because it is completely out of sync with the dynamics of the conflict. Many formidable hurdles have to be overcome before substantive negotiations can begin, let alone be concluded with a settlement that enjoys popular support in Darfur.

For example, there is no consensus among the Sudanese government and the rebels on the agenda for negotiations and on who should participate in the talks. Nor is there consensus on whether the DPA should be revised in part, renegotiated entirely or thrown out the window. There is little common ground on the causes of the rebellion and the most appropriate remedies, and the parties’ mutual hatred and mistrust make the search for common ground a tortuous endeavour.

Complicating matters further, the rebels are even more fragmented than they were in 2006. The Abuja talks were wracked by antagonism between the three participating rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the two factions of the Sudan Liberation Movement. Today there are at least twelve groups, many of which claim to represent the same constituencies and few of which have proven support in Darfur. The leader with the most support, Abdul Wahid al Nur, is an erratic and indecisive negotiator. Regrettably, he has refused to attend the forthcoming AU-UN meeting in Arusha.

The violence in western Sudan poses another serious impediment. The Roadmap correctly highlights the need to consult Darfurian civil society, tribal leaders, internally displaced people, refugees and women’s groups, but this will be extremely difficult in conditions of chronic insecurity.

To add to the envoys’ woes, the AU and UN are not viewed favourably by all the parties to the conflict. The government in Khartoum is hostile to the UN while some of the rebel groups resent the AU because of its association with the DPA and because its peacekeeping force has failed to protect civilians in Darfur.

The AU and UN are painfully aware of all these obstacles. The logic of their tight timeframe is that it conveys the seriousness of the international community and the need for the Sudanese parties to move rapidly to a negotiated settlement. Given the dire situation in Darfur, the message is one of impatience and urgency.

The logic is appealing but the Abuja talks showed that it is ill-conceived and counter-productive. These talks were characterised by a steady stream of unrealistic deadlines emanating from the AU, the UN and foreign donors. Intended to put pressure on Khartoum and the rebels, the deadlines were ignored by them and succeeded only in pressurising the mediators who were obliged to heed the stipulations of their funders and masters.

This had several negative effects. First, the ever looming short-term deadlines inhibited a programmatic effort by the mediators to build momentum gradually over time and led instead to an ad hoc approach that proceeded in fits and starts. The deadline diplomacy was too simplistic to constitute a viable strategy and too rigid to allow the mediators to develop a smart strategy.

Second, the tight deadlines made it impossible for the mediators and negotiators to communicate with the people of Darfur and with important groups that were not represented at the talks. Darfurian civil society had no opportunity to shape the draft DPA and could not conceivably have acquired a sense of ownership of it.

Third, the haste induced by the deadlines precluded effective mediation. A mediator’s job is to help adversaries overcome their enmity, build their confidence in negotiations and facilitate dialogue, bargaining and collaborative problem-solving. The deadline diplomacy caused the AU mediators to neglect these tasks in favour of writing an accord that sought to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable positions of the parties. The result was that the DPA was owned by the mediators and not the parties.

In all civil wars the humanitarian need for a quick accord is indisputable. But there is never a quick fix. These conflicts have multiple, complex and intractable causes, and the difficulty of resolution is heightened immeasurably by the protagonists’ mutual hatred and suspicion. There is no point in rushing negotiations and forcing the parties to sign an agreement to which they are not committed. As happened in Abuja, they will simply leave the signing ceremony and continue fighting.

Sustainable peace requires a negotiated settlement that sufficiently meets the interests and needs of parties and citizens, sufficiently addresses the causes of the conflict, and rests on the parties’ willingness to implement agreements in a co-operative fashion. This will not be obtained through a “brief and intensive negotiation session”. A rushed process will only reproduce the errors of Abuja.

This is not to say that the international community and special envoys should stand by idly while people are being slaughtered in Darfur. If a conflict is not ripe for resolution, then the challenge is precisely to find ways to ripen it. In addition, it is absolutely imperative that African countries and foreign powers boost the AU peacekeeping force in Darfur until UN military support finally arrives.

The special envoys should not be driven by spurious deadlines, which are meant to signal seriousness but convey the opposite when they are missed and then reset without any repercussions. Instead, the envoys should be guided by a comprehensive mediation plan that reflects the realities of the conflict. They should be based in Sudan and should engage constantly in dialogue with the government and the rebels. These discussions can themselves be a useful form of indirect negotiations, preferable to big conferences where the delegates lambaste their opponents and make pious speeches about peace.

For peacemakers working on intractable conflicts, the greatest challenge is persistence and the greatest bravery, as Eliasson himself put it many years ago, is patience.

* Laurie Nathan, research fellow at the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town, was a member of the AU mediation team for Darfur in 2006. An earlier version of this article appeared in The Sunday Times (South Africa) on 8 July.

* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The United Nations (UN) Security Council yesterday passed resolution 1769. It establishes another peacekeeping mission in Sudan, UNAMID, for Sudan’s war-torn western province of Darfur. With a total authorised strength of 26,000, UNAMID is expected to be the largest UN peacekeeping operation in the world by next year. What’s more, UNAMID peacekeepers will deploy under the terms of ‘Chapter VII’ of the UN Charter, which legally entitles them to use force beyond self-defence. In other words, this will not be a neutral, monitoring contingent, but a militarised force and de facto protagonist in Darfur’s conflict.

Thousands of people who fled their homes in northwestern Central African Republic are reluctant to return despite improved security conditions, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said. The 18-month conflict between government forces and the rebel Army for the Restoration of the Republic and Democracy (French acronym APRD) has displaced tens of thousands of people, especially around the towns of Kaga Bandoro and Paoua, according to aid workers.

Janet Furaha fled the violence in her home area of Kaniola in the Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) South Kivu province in May to live with relatives in Walungu, but she has often returned to tend her farm. "I have not been there in the past few weeks because attackers have intensified their activities, but if I hear the situation is calmer, I will go and see if I can get any food," she said.

Kenyan lawmakers yesterday disapproved a motion that sought to repeal the death penalty, fearing the abolition could be a catalyst to more capital offences in the country. The motion is tabled at a time when Kenyan security is trying to contain insecurity posed by armed bandits and secret cult societies. A cult group calling itself Mungiki, whose followers have been bent on beheading people for not obeying their orders, has been the biggest threat to Kenyan security.

Effective adaptation strategies will require reliable scientific data both on the nature of climate change and on its potential impact. It is now widely accepted that despite developing countries' lack of responsibility for human-induced global warming, they are likely to be hardest hit, and that the hardest hit of all will be African countries.

This document presents the trainers manual which accompanies the participants pack for a youth peace building training session. The long term objective of the training is to bring about changes in attitudes, behaviours, systems and structures that build peace as a result of processes and linkages initiated in the workshops.

News last month that researchers at Boston University had discovered a huge underground aquifer in western Sudan’s Darfur region has set off feverish speculations. This article by World Watch Institute discusses whther development of this vast water resource will help quell the vicious conflict raging in one of the world’s most arid regions.

As preparations for construction of the Bujagali dam on the Nile River in Uganda gain momentum, a local civil society coalition is calling on the World Bank and the African Development Bank (AfDB) to reconsider their decision to release funds for this hydro-electric project -- which the World Bank estimates will cost 799 million dollars. While the World Bank and AfDB are the main financiers of the dam, the German Bank for Development and the European Investment bank are also helping to fund the initiative.

Over 1,000 Mozambicans, including children, are trafficked to South Africa every year where they are forced into prostitution or to provide free or cheap labour. In response, Mozambique’s government last week approved a new law which will make human trafficking a crime punishable with long prison sentences. It will probably be cold comfort to Sonia to know that Mozambique’s council of ministers approved a law against human trafficking last week. She was rescued just over a year ago after having been trafficked to South Africa to provide domestic work free of charge.

Muslah Ahmed, a Somali asylum seeker, had been in South Africa's KwaNobuhle Township barely a week when he became the victim of an attack that left him burnt, disfigured and severely traumatized. On 1 July 2007, he and three of his countrymen were set alight for making a citizen's arrest on a thief in their store. KwaNobuhle Township, situated some 30 kilometres outside the coastal city of Port Elizabeth, received notoriety in 2001 for looting and expelling Somali refugee traders.

Reconciliation efforts in countries where children have been press-ganged into fighting wars need to pay more attention to the severe trauma suffered by many of these combatants, German researchers said on Tuesday. The United Nations estimates about 250 000 children worldwide are currently fighting in wars -- mostly in Africa -- but very little research has gone into the effects of such violence on the mental health of young combatants, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.