So what does peace mean in this savage, corporatized, militarized world? This was one of the questions asked by activist Arundhati Roy in a speech delivered in acceptance of the 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture at the
Seymour Theatre Centre, University of Sydney.

“What does it mean in a world where an entrenched system of appropriation has created a situation in which poor countries which have been plundered by colonizing regimes for centuries are steeped in debt to the very same countries that plundered them, and have to repay that debt at the rate of 382 billion dollars a year?” asked Roy, who also stated that many resistance movements in poor countries and fighting injustice viewed human rights NGOs as “modern day missionaries who've come to take the ugly edge off Imperialism”.

“What does peace mean in a world in which the combined wealth of the world's 587 billionaires exceeds the combined gross domestic product of the world's 135 poorest countries? Or when rich countries that pay farm subsidies of a billion dollars a day, try and force poor countries to drop their subsidies? What does peace mean to people in occupied Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Tibet and Chechnya? Or to the aboriginal people of Australia? Or the Ogoni of Nigeria? Or the Kurds in Turkey? Or the Dalits and Adivasis of India? What does peace mean to non-muslims in Islamic countries, or to women in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan? What does it mean to the millions who are being uprooted from their lands by dams and development projects? What does peace mean to the poor who are being actively robbed of their resources and for whom everyday life is a grim battle for water, shelter, survival and, above all, some semblance of dignity? For them, peace is war.”

* Read the full speech by clicking on the URL provided.

Last year, UNHCR estimates, some 133 000 Angolans returned from the DRC, Zambia, Namibia and Congo, mostly in the five months before rains make roads impassable. UNHCR is working hard to repatriate over 300 000 Angolans still abroad before the organisation's planned departure from Angola in 2006, the year when national elections are supposed to happen. Foreign donations are dwindling because of diversions to crises in the Middle East and Sudan. Aside from rampant theft, diarrhoea and boredom, food is the cause of most complaints in Luau's transit camp.

As fighting renewed in Côte d'Ivoire last Thursday, Human Rights Watch called on all parties to refrain from targeting civilians and to respect international humanitarian law. According to their mandate, United Nations peacekeepers deployed in the country should protect civilians under imminent threat of violence. On Thursday, Ivorian government aircraft launched a series of bombing raids on the main rebel-held cities of Bouaké and Korhogo, signaling an end to the ceasefire declared in January 2003 and the peace process initiated at the same time.

This study examines through direct interviews and firsthand accounts the roles of non-state and state actors in this process of transformation. Changes that took place in Sudan and the efforts of several groups - including the knowledge and business communities, nongovernmental organizations, and peace-related sectors - consolidated the collective will to attempt to resolve the conflict peacefully and make the process of transition from war to peace irreversible.

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), stung by last week’s humiliating deportation of its top officials, is mobilising civic groups in the region to seal entry points into Zimbabwe for four days — a move that could trigger a diplomatic rift between the two countries. The proposed blockade, being coordinated in conjunction with Amnesty International in Johannesburg, South Africa, is pencilled for December 4 to 8 2004, according to information obtained by The Financial Gazette.

Applications are invited from persons living and working in Rwanda to participate in a distance learning course on ‘The role of the media in the genocide in Rwanda’.

The 1994 genocide in Rwanda provides a telling case study of two quite separate roles for media in a conflict situation. The genocide was among the most appalling catastrophes of the 20th century, and media played a significant part both internally and internationally. Prior to the genocide, radio stations and newspapers were carefully used by the conspirators to dehumanise the potential victims, Rwanda's Tutsi minority. During the genocide, radio was used by the Hutu extremist conspirators to mobilise the Hutu majority, to coordinate the killings and to ensure that the plans for extermination were faithfully executed.

While a series of terrible massacres of Tutsi were carried out and as the signs of ever-increasing violence grew, Rwanda was totally ignored by the international media. When the genocide came, the erratic media coverage largely conveyed the false notion of two ‘tribes’ of African ‘savages’ mindlessly slaughtering each other as they had done from time immemorial. As a result, there was little public pressure in the West for governments to intervene.

In this distance learning course you will study these two facets of the media role in the genocide in detail. You will see how easily the concept of free speech and free press in a local situation can be perverted for foul ends. We will ask how this dilemma could be resolved. We will explore the problem of inadequate or even distorted international coverage of crises and conflicts in areas poorly understood by Western journalists. We will consider whether this unfortunate situation can be improved in the future.

South Africa's judiciary is behind in the transformation process, says the country's Justice and Constitutional Development Minister Bridgette Mabandla. She was responding to a question in the National Assembly from former deputy justice minister and now Democratic Alliance shadow justice minister Sheila Camerer who noted that not a single white candidate had been considered by the Judicial Services Commission last week for posts of judges.

Africa has just emerged from a review of the progress made ten years after the Beijing Conference on women whose theme was equality, peace and development. This November, the world will commence the 16 days campaign against gender-based violence, an annual event that remains more relevant today especially with the reality of conflict, wars and political violence, which seem to accompany most elections in Africa. Violence against women and especially sexual violence remains a gross violation of rights of women irrespective of the global regional and national commitments made to address this issue. Women continue to organize and advocate for concrete and lasting solutions to eliminating gender based and sexual violence.

Around 100 women met recently in Kigali as policy makers, leaders, experts, citizens, daughters, mothers, sisters, care -givers, innovators and survivors of violence. They also met as problem-solvers, decision-makers, and real contributors of real solutions to the challenges facing the great lakes region. This was the Regional Women’s Meeting of the International Conference of the Great Lakes Region, organized and facilitated under the auspices of the United Nations and the Africa Union, this October 2004. Representing the core countries of Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia, women’s voices echoed over and over again the dominant concern of sexual violence against women and especially the use of rape as a weapon of war.

Against the backdrop of the search for solutions were horrific stories of rape and sexual abuse of women and girls in Darfur, Northern Uganda and Democratic Republic of Congo. The stories of rape as part of the genocide experience took on a magnified, almost tangible presence with a journey to the Kigali Genocide Museum. “Not only are we raped, infected with HIV & AIDS and ripped of our livelihoods, we remain with limited platform for sharing such experiences,” a woman delegate from DRC lamented. The stories of the abuse of refugee women in Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia formed parts of a terrible story that needed telling over and over.

At the centre of the experience-sharing, the search for long standing solutions underlined a resolve of commitment and action to ensure that zero-tolerance for sexual violence and rape must be embraced as a key element of peace and security, and in this context that the African Union Gender Equality Declaration and Protocol on Women’s Rights in Africa Declaration as well as the Security Council Resolution 1325 must be implemented with immediacy. The women called on the member states to accelerate ratification of the Protocol to the African Charter on Women’s Rights in Africa as a critical step towards implementation.

The direct relationship between insecurity, sexual violence and HIV & AIDS vulnerability and risk for women and girls grounded in systemic gender inequalities; and the power dynamics between men and women’s levels of control of arms and economic resources resonated with many in the region. The illegal exploitation of the region’s natural resources and the attendant insecurities it creates for the ordinary citizenry, and especially women, went to the depth of the issues at hand.

Women of the Great Lakes Region asserted their place in economic development and reconstruction of their families, communities and nations. They claimed their right to ownership and control over productive resources and especially land, property and income. This, the women argued is an issue of right, but also a long term solution towards provision of the capacities, resources and opportunities necessary for women’s empowerment.

In their Kigali Declaration (Editors note: Read the Kigali Declaration in the Women and Gender section of this edition.), the women appreciated the positive steps taken in increasing the number of women in decision making, with some of the countries almost reaching the AU threshold of gender parity, and several implementing affirmative action policies. However, women's role in the peace and security sector, as well as in the strategic institutions of economic governance, remains almost negligible. It is by having women and gender sensitive men at the negotiating table, in the demobilization commissions, the border commissions, conflict early warning institutions and others, that the issues of sexual violence and especially rape will be responded to with the seriousness it deserves - as a gross violation of human rights, a crime against humanity and a destructive force to whole societies. Women are asking for sexual violence, HIV & AIDS, and representation of women in decision making to be engrained in the Summit Declaration of Principles due to be adopted November during the Heads of State and Summit meeting in Tanzania.

The women of the Great Lakes in their wisdom, their creative energies and innovation affirmed their commitment to engage, influence, act, effectively participate, share, network and contribute towards a violent free, peaceful and secure region where the dignity and rights of men and women, girls and boys becomes the ethos of development and reconstruction. In this great struggle for justice and rights, I stand in solidarity with the spirit of the Kigali dialogue. If substantive progress is made towards achieving the rights of women within the Beijing +10 framework, there will be substantive hope in achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015.

* Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda is the Regional Programme Director for the United Nations Development Fund for Women in Eastern Africa. Contact email: [email][email protected]

* Please send comments to [email protected]

"But if there is to be any hope, it must lie with the people and not with the politicians and leaders. In both north and south the political leadership is largely discredited and holds little moral authority. A space must be created for civil society to play a greater part not only in the peace processes but also in the governance of the country. Inclusivity and transparency, as in the South African peace process, are essential. All sides must be prepared to set aside narrow factional and personal interests and negotiate in good faith for the good of the people. Peace will only come if the current situation can be transcended and transformed. A great challenge indeed."

People’s Armed Forces of Congo combatants under the command of General Jérôme Kakwavu tortured 24 civilians and killed six of them in October, Human Rights Watch charges. Operating in Ituri, a region in the northeastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the armed group has so far remained outside the peace process that has brought other rebel forces into a transitional government.

Zimbabwe's beleaguered ruling party has introduced a Bill banning foreign funding of, and imposing extraordinary state controls over, non-governmental organisations involved in human rights and governance activities. Resorting to Africa-centrism and its 1964 ideology of "we are our own liberators", Zanu PF claims these organisations tot up murder and torture accounts and teach the bourgeois delusions of multiparty democracy and individual liberty all for the Blair-Bush conspiracy. Zanu PF liberated Zimbabwe on its own, it says: so should its challengers. Is this belief myth or lie? Zanu PF's version of struggle history forgets scores of foreign supporters, argues this commentary on the website of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

Harvard University in the United States has invested millions of dollars in a Chinese oil company whose financial dealings with the Sudanese government, human rights activists say, have funded that regime’s ongoing slaughter of its own people, according to a report in the Harvard college newspaper, The Crimson. Filings by the Harvard Management Company indicate the University owned 72,000 shares of that oil stock, PetroChina, as of June 30 of this year. Human rights activists and international media have said that oil revenues are helping the government pay for weapons for the janjaweed and bombers to conduct air raids on Darfurian civilians.

"African states and governments need to be sensitised about their obligations towards IDPs, and about IDPs' rights under the African Charter, their respective constitutions and national laws. Urgent attention should be directed at the root causes of displacement in Africa. The absence of a binding international legal regime on internal displacement is a grave lacuna in international law," states Bahame Tom Nyanduga, Special Rapporteur on Refugees, IDPs and Asylum Seekers in Africa for the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. Nyanduga was writing in the September issue of Forced Migration Review.

An estimated 2,000 people, mainly women and children, have entered Uganda during the past three months after fleeing hunger in southern Sudan, local officials in northern Uganda said on Friday. "We estimate that up to 2,000 of them have crossed over to Moyo district," Akumu Mavenjina, the Resident District Commissioner in charge of Moyo told IRIN by telephone from Moyo town.

Aid workers have been forced to suspend plans to bring Liberian refugees back home after riots in the capital Monrovia killed at least 16 people in the worst outbreak of violence the West African country has witnessed since its civil war ended a year ago.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) will not prosecute child soldiers and will work with local elders striving to end northern Uganda's brutal 18-year-old war, Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo said on Monday. Uganda's government has praised the ICC probe but some northern religious leaders have criticised it, fearing it will create a crisis of confidence and stall further surrenders by rebels of the cult-like Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

The Peacebuilding and Reconstruction Program of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is inviting research proposals on the theme “Globalization, Violent Conflict, and Peacebuilding”. The purpose of the competition is to identify and support promising new research that sheds light on the various conflict-related impacts of globalization, seen as a complex and wide-ranging phenomenon with political, economic, as well as socio-cultural ramifications.

"We are the children of Sierra Leone. The war was targeted against us, our families and our communities. It was a brutal conflict, which we did nothing to cause, but we suffered terribly because of it. Every child in this country has a story to tell – a heartbreaking one.

Unfortunately only a handful of these stories have been told and made known to the world. The memories continue to weigh on our minds and hearts. We, the children of Sierra Leone, witnessed the worst possible human ruthlessness and terror. Children of this country were forced to fight for a cause we could not understand. We were drugged and made to kill and destroy our brothers and sisters and our mothers and fathers.

We were beaten, amputated and used as sex slaves. This was a wretched display of inhuman and immoral actions by those who were supposed to be protecting us. Our hands, which were meant to be used freely for play and schoolwork, were used instead, by force, to burn, kill and destroy.

We do not believe this is the end of our story. Rather, it is the beginning. We, who survived the war, are determined to go forward. We will look to a new future and we ourselves will help build the road to peace."

This is an extract from the first-ever version of a ‘Truth and Reconciliation Commission’ report intended specifically to be accessible by children. The report details the violations which occurred during the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone, in which children were deliberately and systematically targeted. When the violence ended and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established, the children of Sierra Leone were asked to participate. With UNICEF’s help a version of the Commission’s findings which children could understand has been produced. Children were involved in all stages of the inquiry – from creating some of the drawings in the report to framing its recommendations for peace-building. Special care was taken to protect them, as victims and as witnesses.

The 10 October election of Abdullahi Yusuf as president of Somalia proved divisive; clashes between Yusuf's Puntland territory and breakaway Somaliland killed over 100 on 30 October, with further violence likely, according to November's CrisisWatch report from the International Crisis Group. In Liberia, UN forces struggled to contain a flare-up in inter-communal fighting in Monrovia. The situations in Cote d'Ivoire, Egypt, Guinea-Bissau and Nigeria deteriorated in October.

'Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration' (DDR) refers to a temporary intervention designed to restore security and establish the preconditions for post-war recovery. In the Republic of Congo (RoC) DDR activities have focused on reducing the number of weapons in the hands of ex-combatants, their reintegration into society, reform of the armed forces and police, and repatriation of foreign ex-combatants. Evaluation of these activities suggests that DDR in the RoC is achievable, but requires more political and financial support.