Homes ablaze. Villagers slaughtered. Women and girls raped. Survivors scattered in terror. Civilians in eastern Chad are sharing the cruel fate of their neighbours in Darfur, hostages to Sudan’s ruthless solution to rebel attacks in the region. The Janjawid militias who in recent years have laid to waste vast areas of western Sudan, form the backbone of the armed groups who are killing, tormenting and displacing civilians from targeted ethnic groups such as the Dajo and the Masalit in eastern Chad. The aim of the attacks appears to be to clear vast areas of communities primarily identified by the Janjawid as "African" rather than "Arab", and to drive them further from the border with Sudan.

There is now a political vacuum across much of southern Somalia, which the ineffectual TFG is unable to fill. Elements of the Courts, including Shabaab militants and their al-Qaeda associates, are largely intact and threaten guerrilla war. Peace requires the TFG to be reconstituted as a genuine government of national unity but the signs of its willingness are discouraging. Sustained international pressure is needed.

On 15 January 2007, IGLHRC and ILGA sent a letter to the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, asking him to reconsider plans to include of a provision that would penalize homosexuality as part of an overall revision to the Rwandan penal code currently being debated. The provision appears as Article 160 in the French version and article 158 in the English version of the draft penal code currently on the website of the Ministry of Justice.

IGLHRC and Alternatives-Cameroun are pleased to announce the release of Nicholas Njocky and Patrick Yousseu, two gay men who have been detained in the West African nation of Cameroon for one year under Article 347 of the Cameroonian penal code, which makes sex between people of the same sex illegal. IGLHRC remains concerned about the continued detention of Alexandre Demanou, held without charge or trial since 2002.

An important component of peace-building is maintenance of livelihoods during conflict and to ensure sustainable post-conflict recovery. The role of private individual support to war-torn communities is little researched and poorly understood by those who plan peace-building programmes and post-conflict assistance strategies.

On January 26 2007, a leading Zimbabwean politician warned journalists from forming an independent media council without the approval of the government, which has closed newspapers and arrested reporters. Leo Mugabe, a nephew of President Robert Mugabe and a member of his ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), told about 200 journalists at a meeting to launch the council that they should avoid confrontation with the authorities.

FIDH and its member organisations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have welcomed the decision adopted today (30 January) by the Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to confirm the charges against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo and refer the case to a Trial Chamber.

Egypt will not end militancy in its Sinai peninsula, where bombs have killed more than 100 people since 2004, until it tackles political and socio-economic grievances there, a report said on Wednesday (31 January). The International Crisis Group said that Egypt's response to bomb attacks that targeted Red Sea tourist resorts had focused almost exclusively on security, rather than on trying to resolve simmering tensions among the Sinai population.

Since fleeing his home in northern Central African Republic (CAR) on 3 December 2006, Abdoulay Douga Mandja Noel, 40, has lived rough in a border town called Am-Dafock shared by the CAR and Sudan. Abdoulay fled months of fighting between the army and a rebel coalition, the Union des forces démocratiques pour le rassemblement (UFDR), which is seeking inclusion in the government of President François Bozize, whom they accuse of sidelining them.

People in Africa are now increasingly competing to get access to arable land and pastures. Open land conflicts are becoming more and more common across the continent.

A new phenomenon is gaining currency in the country: Lesbians, gays and transsexuals are coming out openly to demand their rights. The group stole the show at the World Social Forum which ended at the Moi International Sports Centre, Kasarani, with their stand being a crowd puller.

The Shack dwellers in South Africa are one of the most marginalized communities, criminalised for being poor. Yet it is they who more often than not suffer from crime along with continued police harassment. These two factors have brought the shack dwellers of Durban together to fight the crime in their communities, says S'bu Zikode.

The poor were not born to be poor. We didn't become poor because we are lazy or stupid. In fact we have to work very hard and be very clever just to find a place for ourselves in this world that the rich have made for themselves. History made us poor and the history of our country is a history of crimes against the innocent. Because of these crimes millions of people are living in shacks and selling in the streets. The poor have the most to gain from an end to crime. More than anybody else we want a country where the human dignity of every person is respected. More than anybody else we understand that working for an end to crime is the responsibility of every one of us. It is our duty to God, to our country and to our children. We are prepared to do our part of this work.

But I feel oppressed when high profile people, including politicians, speak about crime especially since it is very unusual for anyone at their level to be a victim of crime. So few powerful people want to speak directly to communities. They prefer to make statements on the papers, radios and televisions. But when you make a statement there is no person in front of you to tell you about their lives. When you just make statements it is like you think that you already know everything. But when you humble yourself and talk to people you show that you know that you don't know everything. A proper understanding can only come from talking to everybody and for discussions to be open ended. That is why all the good leaders were humble. They were servants of the people, not masters.

Some kinds of crimes are planned in shacks. Others are planned in big conferences at the ICC. Both kinds of crimes make people suffer and must be stopped. However the truth is that with both kinds of crime, most of the time, the victims are not the powerful people but rather those with no power, the poor, the women and the children. Putting more poor people in prisons will only make them better criminals. The way to deal with crime is to invest our energy, resources and time in our communities. When human dignity is at the centre of our communities then our communities are places where crime is not accepted inside or outside.

There is a big problem with many local police stations. We will begin to deal with local crimes only when men like acting Superintendent Glen Nayager of the Sydenham Police Station can acknowledge that he and he alone can't deal with crime. If he keeps treating all the poor as if we are all criminals he will just be wasting his energy. He will just make us feel that the police are our enemies. He must acknowledge that he is too distant to understand the daily life at the grassroots level. He must understand that just because we can't address him like he can address us that doesn't mean that we are just rogues.

Prior to starting the struggle against the big crimes with Abahlali baseMjondolo I struggled against the local crimes. I joined the Police Reserve Force in February 2000 and I had been part of the Sydenham Community Service Centre. Before I entered I found an old African Mama with a baby on her back standing outside the door just helplessly waiting. When I asked her why she was just waiting there she told me that she had been chased out because she didn't speak English. None of the policemen on duty could speak isiZulu or even isiFanakalo and this hurt me. How can a police station serve the people when no one there can speak to people in their own language? I went inside with that woman to translate so that she could lay her charge and from there I decided to be a reservist. I underwent interviews, tests from the District Surgeon and trainings and worked as a Reservist at the Sydenham Police station.

Now that shack dwellers are fighting against evictions and for land and housing in the city we are all called criminals. The police think that they can arrest and beat us any time. They come when we are marching. Superintendent Glen Nayager comes when we are meeting and even when we are just living our daily lives. The Superintendent needs to understand that we are an anti-crime movement. We have a trackable record in working against all kinds of crime. He needs to think about the fact that although the police have arrested hundreds of us, the courts have dropped the charges every time. But we, the shack dwellers, have won a number of victories against the City in the courts. We work to make this a country in which there is respect for the human dignity of each person. We would be happy to work with the local police to make our communities and all the people around us safe if they recognised us as citizens. If our communities could work against crime in a partnership with police officers who treated us with respect, we could make our communities and neighbourhoods safe for everyone.

If the police continue to behave arrogantly towards the people like Nayager does, then I fear that incidents of people taking the law into their own hands, as it happened in KwaMashu recently, could happen more often. When police officers like Nayager take the law into their own hands thinking that they are above the law then communities start to do the same. We can only really condemn what happened in KwaMashu when our police force becomes a police service as Madiba instructed.

We need senior officers and politicians to make less statements and do more talking where people live and work. We need these discussions to be real discussions. We need the results of these discussions to be acted on. We need to build a country where the police serve all the people. If the police serve all the people then they will be trusted and it will be easy to marginalise the criminals in our communities and to organise not just against local criminals but also those high up who are using the country's money for themselves and making the poor poorer. Then we can make our country safe for everyone.

* S'bu Zikode is the elected president of the shack dwellers' movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. On 12 September 2005 he and the organisation's deputy president, Philani Zungu, were arrested on a charge of 'assaulting a police officer' by officers from the Sydenham Police Station while on their way to an interview with iGagasi FM. They had just been warned to cease speaking to the media by a senior official in the provincial Housing Department. They were released the next morning and all charges against them were dropped. Zikode and Zungu have laid criminal and civil charges against Nayagar who they have accused of beating and abusing them severely while they were in his custody.

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

There is now a political vacuum across much of southern Somalia, which the ineffectual Transitional Federal Government (TFG) is unable to fill, reports the International Crisis Group. Elements of the Courts, including Shabaab militants and their al-Qaeda associates, are largely intact and threaten guerrilla war. Peace requires the TFG to be reconstituted as a genuine government of national unity but the signs of its willingness are discouraging. Sustained international pressure is needed.

The UNHCR reports that the general strike paralysing Guinea over the last two weeks has limited access to camps hosting Liberian refugees. Despite this, the organization planned to go ahead with a voluntary repatriation convoy on the 27th of January which will bring to 46,000 the number of refugees it has helped to return to Liberia from Guinea since the repatriation programme started in October 2004.

South Africa will not contribute troops to an African peacekeeping force in Somalia, but will study other ways to help to stabilise the war-ravaged country, a Defence Ministry spokesman said on Friday. Defence Minister Mosiuoa Lekota made the decision after reviewing South Africa's overseas peacekeeping commitments in other parts of the continent.

Rwandan police and judicial authorities must ensure prompt and effective law enforcement to deal with recent killings of participants in the justice system for genocide known as gacaca, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. The 20-page report, “Killings in Eastern Rwanda,” documents two incidents in late November 2006 in which 13 persons were killed.

In his strongest attack since he accepted defeat in landmark elections last year, presidential contender Jean-Pierre Bemba warned President Joseph Kabila on Wednesday that abuses and corruption could undermine democracy and threatened to call opposition strikes and protests, reports Joe Bavier for Reuters.

Reliable estimates of the total number of refugees coming over the border are hard to come by. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has sent a high-level mission down to Ethiopia's remote and porous border with Somalia to gauge their number. According to UNHCR, the flow of Somali refugees to Ethiopia was less significant in 2006 than the 34,000 who went to Kenya. At the peak of the Somali influx into Ethiopia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, more than 250,000 Somalis fled to Hartisheik camp in eastern Ethiopia.

Swamped by tens of thousands of asylum-seekers, the Department of Home Affairs has challenged a landmark high court ruling declaring its pre-screening of refugees in Gauteng since November 2005 to be unlawful. In an unprecedented move in the Johannesburg High Court on December 12, Judge Pierre Rabie appointed a curator ad litem to act on behalf of an entire class of asylum-seekers.

Recent attacks on villages in the Sudanese state of West Darfur have forced up to 5,000 people to flee their homes and seek refuge in two camps around El Geneina, a nongovernmental organisation working in the volatile area said.