Internal displacement in Kenya is a complex and multi-faceted social problem that revolves around and reflects unresolved issues of land and property, as well as the struggle for the control of political and economic resources. These intricate and sensitive issues, manifested in ethnic conflict, violent cattle raids, and government evictions characterised by human rights abuses have displaced people throughout the country.

At least 800 Congolese who fled recent fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have been moved from the DRC-Uganda border to a camp further inland in southwestern Uganda, the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, has said. 300 of the refugees left Nyakabanda transit site in Kisoso, also in the southwest of Uganda, for the Nakivale Refugee Settlement camp in Isingiro District, 330 km away.

Night-time is scarcely discussed when it comes to the analysis of life in refugee camps. Around the world, humanitarian aid agencies´ access to camp sites is often limited to traditional office hours. Aid officials’ presence may be limited by offical curfews. Aid workers may retreat from camps for socializing and rest.

Presidents from several Great Lakes countries signed a pact at the end of a two-day summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on Friday (15 December 2006) to address security, stability and development across the region. The pact contains a protocol on protection and assistance for the displaced – the first legally binding regional instrument specifically dealing with internally displaced persons (IDPs).

Up to 40 people have been killed in clashes between Chad's government security forces and men who attacked two villages in the east of the country, a government official said. Moussa Doumgor Hourmadji, the communications minister, said the attacks had been carried out by the Janjawid - Arab fighters who operate from Sudan's Darfur region.

Around Dikba Elisi’s oldest child’s neck is a plastic whistle, so that if the family is forced to flee into maize fields and the children get lost, the adults have a better chance of finding them. Elisi, her three young children and sister, are living under two pieces of tin they salvaged, sleeping on a single bed, hidden in swaying fields three kilometres behind their old village.

Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivory Coast president, has announced a plan to reunite his war-divided country, in an apparent snub to a UN-backed plan announced last month. The five-point plan followed a series of consultations with civil society groups after the UN-backed plan was presented last month.

More than 150 people, including woman and children, have been killed and hundreds of others displaced in northeastern Uganda after clashes between government soldiers and armed cattle herders in the past two months, the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF) said on Tuesday (19 December 2006).

Somali government troops and fighters of the Islamic Courts Council have been skirmishing as a senior European Union envoy flew to the country to press for peace talks to resume. The rivals for control of the nation in the Horn of Africa have been at an impasse since talks broke down early last month.

After a hard-fought court battle - billed as the longest and most expensive in Botswana's legal history - on Wednesday (13 December 2006) the San won their right to return to their ancestral home in the Central Kgalagadi Game Reserve (CKGR), in the Kalahari Desert.

European Union leaders should support tough new action against top Sudanese leaders for their failure to end abuses in Darfur, the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch said today (13 December 2006) in advance of the EU summit on 14-15 December. “Millions of civilians are paying the price for nearly four years of unkept promises and empty commitments,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch.

In simultaneous predawn raids, Egyptian police on Thursday (14 December 2006) arrested 17 senior members of the Muslim Brotherhood and rounded up at least 140 students on suspicion of being linked to this banned nonviolent organization following a protest at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, Human Rights Watch said today (18 December 2006). The Egyptian authorities have arrested at least 1,000 members of the Muslim Brotherhood in a crackdown that began in March.

The recently concluded United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya adopted a wide range of decisions designed to mitigate climate change and help countries adapt to the effects of global warming. The conference that was attended by more than 100 ministers, the Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan, two heads of state and a host of participants delivered on its promise to support the needs of developing countries as revealed by the conference president and Kenyan minister for Natural Resources and Environment Kivutha Kibwana.

Anti-government protests in Cote d’Ivoire have intensified in recent days and the most recent left two people dead with no apparent end in sight to a political impasse that has pitted the president against his prime minister. The country was calm on Wednesday (6 December 2006) but police maintained street patrols.

A military tribunal has been appointed to probe allegations of abuses by Ugandan soldiers during a forced disarmament programme in which 55 people, including women and children, were killed, a senior official said on Friday (1 December 2006).

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has expressed concern over reports of imminent war in Somalia, as increased insecurity could worsen the humanitarian crisis in the war-scarred country.

The last edition of Pambazuka News carried an interesting and challenging article (entitled ‘HIV/AIDS in Northern Uganda: A New War’, about efforts to address HIV/AIDS in Uganda in the context of war.

The experience of 'resource-poor' settings in turning around desperation and hopelessness into a prospect of life fulfilled is inspiring indeed. While acknowledging the very serious challenges, these 'rooted' accounts are important to counter the disillusionment and despair generated by images of "Darkness on the Continent" type of claims.

However, in closing the narrative, Odoi Charles of TASO is cited as saying: “We are now going to begin another war: the HIV/AIDS war.” In fact, this provides the title to the article.

So, this got me thinking. War metaphors are very, very common when people talk about addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic. But do we need a 'war' to address HIV? Is a 'war-like' approach the best way to conceive of responses to HIV? What does a 'war' imply? And, ultimately, do the words used to describe our efforts matter?

If you think about 'war', it is really a signal of the failure of peoples and states to manage conflict. We resort to violence because other options are either not available or are perceived to be ineffective. It is the ultimate expression of power in unequal societies.

And, furthermore, what happens in war is the complete suspension of the rights we consider protected outside of war. The consequences for health and well-being are huge, such that the international community has fashioned humanitarian law to serve as 'rules of war' to protect innocent and vulnerable people. In practice, we know that these rules are abused, misused, ignored, or sometime, simply don't work for certain kinds of conflicts. Only non-derogable human rights are protected from a state of emergency declared during a war but many, many rights are suspended when national security is threatened.

So, should we want a 'war' on HIV/AIDS? And, if we have a 'war' on HIV/AIDS, does the notion of making 'war' constrain or shape our efforts in ways that we may not really want?

Well, let's think about HIV/AIDS as a social dilemma/conflict. Have we exhausted all the 'peaceful' non-warlike methods to address HIV/AIDS? Why are our efforts not effective? In principle, I think it's the lack of political leadership and willingness to tackle serious economic and social injustice that underlies our failures in regard to HIV/AIDS. So, whom should we wage 'war' on? Do we wage war on the political leadership who have not provided the will to do what is needed? I suspect that is not what is being marshalled when activists and governments lay claim to making 'war' on AIDS.

Do we wage war on a virus? Or on the people whose (wanton) behaviour is judged to spread the epidemic? The former is not a form of war that makes any social sense and the latter would be deeply counter to our commitments to human rights and respect for human dignity. So, what does waging 'war' on HIV/AIDS potentially do? It provides us with a sense that there is an enemy and we can join in fighting that (unspecified) enemy, but it doesn't really speak to the underlying power inequalities that drive the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In fact, a government or elite whose policies are fuelling the epidemic can invoke the rhetoric of 'war' to harness a range of social forces to a seemingly benign project (often a national project), when, in fact, the war does not address the real power imbalance that drives the epidemic.

Secondly, in wars, we suspend human rights because of the extreme measures we are forced to take for survival. If we are waging a 'war' on HIV/AIDS, do we suspend rights to privacy, to confidentiality, to freedom from discrimination in the interests of this greater good? The language of 'war' and 'fight' and 'battle' are all about power exercised in ways that are potentially harmful, justified by a utilitarian calculation. But if we want to provide a rights-based approach to HIV, these analogies are all painfully wrong.

I believe that at some level, this preoccupation with the 'war' metaphor is not just about words. It is also about how people unconsciously see the epidemic and what needs to be done. A war is not a space where you guarantee access to health care, or respect for human dignity. It allows unspeakable things to be done to other humans in the name of security and state interests. I think it is part of the cognitive dissonance that political leadership sometimes exercises in viewing themselves as entirely removed from the problem, and placing themselves on the side of the solution, when in fact, they are the problem, or part of it. Having a war on your hands means you need not ask hard questions about your own accountability for human rights.

I would like to see the 'war' metaphor heaved onto a dustbin of global HIV/AIDS discourse. I think it takes us backwards, not forwards. It opens opportunities for bad practice, not good practice. It is not just about words, but about how we view struggles for social justice and human rights.

Tension has mounted in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur State in western Sudan, amid fears that rebels may launch an offensive on government forces being reinforced to defend the town, humanitarian sources said on Tuesday (5 December 2006). Militias attacked the cattle market on Monday and clashed with former rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), according to African Union (AU) sources.

More than 150 rebels were killed when U.N. peacekeepers fought off a rebel offensive in east Congo last week, officials said on Tuesday (5 December 2006), adding that the heavy losses had led to surrenders among the divided insurgents. The casualty figure was the highest recorded from fighting involving U.N. troops in Democratic Republic of Congo, where the U.N. has its largest peacekeeping mission in the world.

Rebels in Chad have attacked government positions at Guereda, in the far east of the country close to the border with Sudan. Fighting began early in the afternoon when a rebel coalition including the Rally of Democratic Forces [RAFD] and three other groups attacked soldiers in the area, a military source said on Friday (1 December 2006).