The Ugandan government has started implementing a six-month emergency plan to resettle thousands of people displaced by the 20-year old conflict between the army and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the eastern region, a senior official said.

The voluntary disarmament of militia in Ituri District, in the northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has ended, with 4,000 former fighters surrendering in the past two months, officials in charge of the programme have said.

Dozens of armed men attacked a police station in Nigeria’s southeastern Anambra state leaving four people dead, among them two policemen, police said on Monday, July 24. The attack on the police station in the trading town of Nnewi on Saturday is part of a pattern of recent attacks on police stations in Anambra linked to a group campaigning for an independent Biafra republic for the region’s mainly ethnic Igbos.

Does the news coverage reflect the reality on the ground? Through the voices of scholars, media critics, peace activists, religious figures, and Middle East experts, Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land carefully analyzes and explains how--through the use of language, framing and context--the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza remains hidden in the news media, and Israeli colonization of the occupied terrorities appears to be a defensive move rather than an offensive one.

Clutching an assault rifle, Ekai Lokipeng shows off six marks on his chest, the result of ritual scarification ceremonies to indicate the number of people he has killed. The scars symbolise the pride that Kenyan pastoralists along the country's volatile border with Ethiopia take in protecting their herds from rustlers. But they are also a source of despair for Lokipeng who has grown tired of decades of constant cross-border raids and deadly inter-clan violence, reports the Mail and Guardian.

Two people have been found dead aboard a small boat that arrived in Spain's Canary Islands carrying 48 immigrants. The boat from Africa was spotted by a merchant ship early on Monday (July 24). Many of the illegal immigrants have been transported to local hospitals.

Thousands of Somalis have staged a rally in Mogadishu calling on Ethiopian troops to leave their country. The demonstrators burnt Ethiopian flags at a protest in the capital, which since June has been run by the powerful Union of Islamic Courts (UIC). The UIC has vowed to expel Ethiopian troops who are deployed to assist the weak transitional Somali government.
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Gunmen have killed 682 civilians, including a foreign journalist, in executions over the past year in Somalia, a local rights group said Sunday (July 23). The killings took place largely in the Somali capital, Mogadishu. Some came during battles for control of the city, others were due to clan differences, a few were kidnappings and some were for unknown motives, according to the report by the Dr. Ismael Jumale Human Rights Center.

Times are hard and getting harder in Zimbabwe, where people too proud to cry about hunger, joblessness and misrule could soon find it too dangerous to joke about them. Parliament plans to debate proposals next month to empower the secret police to eavesdrop on mail, e-mail and phones without any court approval.

Early one morning in April, a desperate young Algerian man slipped into a warehouse on the outskirts of Algiers and sealed himself inside a shipping container destined for France. The guard he had bribed to let him into the warehouse begged him to reconsider. Every year, tens of thousands of impoverished Africans lured by Europe's prosperity risk their lives attempting to reach the continent illegally. European Union officials estimate the number doubled this year, though they have no firm figures.

Congo’s elections on 30 July could become the root of renewed violence unless Kinshasa and donors increase efforts to create a transparent and accountable government. This is the country’s most promising moment since independence, but there are huge dangers as well because the poll will create a significant class of disenfranchised politicians and former warlords tempted to take advantage of state weakness and launch new insurgencies.

This edition of the Forced Migration Review covers many aspects of the vulnerabilities of the victims of forced migration. This issue looks not only at the struggles of refugees and internally displaced people, but also victims of human trafficking.

Former Liberian President Charles Taylor on Friday (21 July) made his first court appearance in The Hague since leaving Sierra Leone last month. Taylor's lawyer Karim Khan told the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL), sitting at International Criminal Court (ICC) facilities, that Taylor is unhappy with prison conditions at The Hague, calling conditions at the Freetown, Sierra Leone prison that formerly detained Taylor far superior to his current conditions, reports the Jurist.

South Africa deported more than 51,000 illegal Zimbabwean immigrants between January and June this year as floods of people fled economic collapse. The Department of Home Affairs says it is now deporting 265 Zimbabweans a day. Last year, 97,433 Zimbabweans were deported compared with 72,112 in 2004. The government is considering building a second detention centre in Limpopo to cope with the dramatic increase in illegal immigration from Zimbabwe.

The real problem with the Darfur Peace Agreement, contends one of the advisors to the negotiations, is not its detailed provisions, which are both substantive and the result of significant input even from factions that eventually refused to sign. It is the lack of will to implement the accord, whether on the part of the government of Sudan, the rebels in Darfur, or the international parties that must guarantee its implementation.

Two initiatives launched this month aim to mitigate the 'brain drain' caused when scientists and others emigrate from African countries to work elsewhere. Last week (11-12 July) government ministers from 58 European and African countries met in Rabat, Morocco for the first Euro-African Conference on Migration and Development, reports SciDev.

A call has been made in Kenya for initiatives to ease the re-entry of prisoners into society - this after government's July 13 announcement that almost 8,000 inmates will be freed to reduce overcrowding in jails. "A lot of civic education needs to be done to inform the public that people who go to prison are members of our society," said Samwel Mohochi, acting executive director of the Independent Medico-Legal Unit (IMLU).

Four soldiers and seven civilians were killed in the southern Sudanese town of Rubkona after soldiers of the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the southern Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) opened fire in the middle of town, according to residents.

The Forces nationales de libération (FNL), Burundi's remaining active rebel group, has continued to attack civilians even as it continues ceasefire negotiations with the government in Dar es Salaam, the commercial capital of Tanzania.

The fall of the infamous dictator Idi Amin heralded a new era for Uganda. Unfortunately for the northeastern region of Karamoja it also heralded the era of the gun. Fleeing soldiers abandoned their arsenal of automatic weapons and local pastoralist Karamojong quickly found that the Kalashnikov was more effective than the spear. Cattle raiding would never be the same again.