Two people have been shot dead and several trade unionists have been arrested in isolated flare-ups of violence triggered by Nigeria's general strike. Lagos, the commercial capital of the West African country, remained shut down on Tuesday for the second day running. Banks, schools, offices and most businesses stayed closed in Nigeria's other main cities, except for Abuja. The four-day stoppage began on Monday and was called by Nigeria's largest trade union movement to protest at a recent 25 percent increase in fuel prices.

The 1,618 Congolese-Tutsi refugees who massed at a border crossing between Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) since mid-last week were taken to a site in the centre of Uvira on Tuesday, despite strong opposition to their return home, South Kivu Province Deputy Governor Didas Kaningingi told IRIN. "Everything went well," he said from Bukavu, capital of South Kivu. "We have transferred all 1,618 registered refugees without incident and hope that the humanitarian bodies will now take care of them."

Kenya's war on graft came under the spotlight yesterday at a meeting of anti-corruption experts, with President Kibaki asking to be judged fairly. Saying he was personally in charge of the war on graft, the President said he had not wavered and would live true to his promise of zero-tolerance to corruption. But he pleaded for more time, explaining that fighting corruption was not simple. Soon after the President left, anti-corruption experts made a strong case for the immediate sacking of Cabinet ministers and top government officials implicated in corruption.

This is a summary of a full-length case study, to be published in December 2004. It examines the role of land access in the conflicts which have affected Eastern Congo, especially since 1993. Based on fieldwork and an extensive review of secondary literature, it includes recommendations for the Government of the DRC, the international community, and civil society actors. It concludes that since the start of the Congolese war, land has turned from a 'source' of conflict into a 'resource' of conflict.

Rwanda's government has dismissed a recent report by the European Union (EU) criticising it for backing a move to investigate and prosecute civil society organisations and individuals for allegedly having genocidal ideologies. "We cannot maintain silence on serious issues like genocide," Protais Mitali, the minister for regional cooperation, said on Tuesday. "We know what genocide did to this country and how the preparations were carried out as organisations like the European Union just watched."

Southern African countries, hard-hit by recent droughts and floods, have been urged to adopt disaster management legislation to improve their response to emergencies. An agricultural economist, Andries Jordaan, told IRIN on Tuesday that the legislation should provide for setting up an early warning system and proactive prevention policies. Jordaan was at a three-day conference and exhibition on African Aid, Disaster Management and Relief, which opened in South Africa on Tuesday.

Human rights defenders were subjected to hate speech and other forms of bigotry and incitement over the weekend at a SWAPO Party rally intended to introduce the party's new manifesto to the electorate. In this case, hate speech is public speech intended to hurt and intimidate or to incite violence or any other prejudicial action or hate crime against real or perceived political opponents.

Zimbabwe's tiny San community has laid the blame for their ongoing economic hardships squarely on the government, which they accuse of discrimination and neglect. While the San argue that they are a disadvantaged people in need of humanitarian support in order to escape poverty, some neighbouring villagers look down on them - accusing them of alcoholism and a refusal to embrace "modernisation".

At least 1,000 Congolese Tutsi refugees, mostly women and children, have been stuck on the Burundi border with Democratic Republic the Congo (DRC) since the middle of last week, waiting on authorities in the Congo to let them back in. "Not a single organisation, either in Congo or Burundi had assisted us until [Monday]," Boniface Rukumbuzi, one of the refugees, told reporters. The only help had come from friends or other Congolese Tutsis living in Burundi, he said.

Morocco has urged Algeria to allow the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) "fulfil duly its mandate in (Tindouf) camps," and voiced "support" to carry on the visit exchange program between families in the camps and their families in southern Morocco. Families in Tindouf (southern Algeria) and their relatives in southern Morocco have been separated for almost three decades because of the conflict between Morocco and the Algeria-backed Polisario separatists that are claiming the secession of Morocco's southern provinces known as the Sahara.

So abhorrent and damaging is the racism label that I'm amazed we haven't seen a rash of civil cases brought by people who have been accused of racial discrimination without good cause, or at least without solid proof. After all, labelling somebody racist, even when there is not a shred of evidence to support the accusation, can be devastating in a country with a racially divided past and an incumbent government that is determined to stamp out every vestige of apartheid.

Upbeat mood in Washington News of Prof. Wangari Maathai's award of the Nobel Peace Prize has instantly raised the face of Kenya in the international community. Everyone here is happy with the decision of the Noble Committee in Oslo. It is important for Kenyans to reflect on this award and what it means for Kenya. Wangari has become the first African woman to win the coveted peace prize. Kenya now ranks second to South Africa in the journey of peace. The first peace prize in Africa was bagged by Chief Albert Luthuli in 1964. Wangari not only stood up fiercely against the irrational leadership of president Moi but also raised the profile of the Kenyan woman. In 1992 she tried unsuccessfully to unite the opposition even as backed Jaramogi Oginga Odinga against the will of her tribe mates. The culturally cursing women public nudity that involved Koigi's mother was reminiscent of Mary Nyanjiru's removal of her skirt to give cowardly men who refused to storm the Nairobi police station to release Harry Thuku in 1922. It is in line with Kikuyu protest tradition that saw Waiyaki wa Hinga burried alive near Kibwezi rather than succumb to humiliation by a colonial officer in Dagoretti,a Mr. Purkiss.

Wangari is an ambitious woman. She vied for presidency in 1997 not so much because she had any chances but because she never wanted Charity Ngilu to take another first from her by being the first woman presidential candidate in Kenya. This nobel prize has raised Kenya's visibility abroad. It can have an impact in tourism and giving a general clean bill of health to the new leadership in Kenya. It should be given the right interpretation and place in the Kenyan psyche so that it can inspire the right attitudes and behavior in society. I admire the way South Africans would have used such an occassion to make a national celebration. This is because it has a healing potential for the nation. I would be optimistic to believe that this award will inspire women and men to strive for hard earned recognition rather than mediocre short cut (corruption) based elevation that have propelled some leaders in Kenya.

There are many more women in Africa who would give Wangari a run for her money. In Kenya alone there is the renowned women educationist Dr. Eddah Gachukia, in Tanzania we have Mrs. Getrude Mongella, now Chairman of AU parliament and UN boss Anna Tibaijuka, in Uganda we have legislators Winnie Byanyima and S. Kazibwe. We can't forget the late Rwandese Prime Minister, Agatha Uwilingiyimana and first woman president Ruth Sando Pere of Sierra Leone and Sirleaf Johnson, a 1997 presidential contender in Liberia. We can't also forget Winnie Madikizela Mandela and Graca Machel Mandela. Wangari has opened the way for honoring more African women honors. Hongera!

The race to succeed South African President Thabo Mbeki began unofficially yesterday with the opening in Durban of a high-profile corruption case. Mr Mbeki, re-elected to a second term in April, is not due to step down until 2009. But the integrity of Jacob Zuma, his deputy and most likely successor, will be in the spotlight as Schabir Shaik, Mr Zuma's former financial adviser, is tried for corruption, fraud and theft linked to a big arms deal.

This is the second part of Gerry Caplan's "The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again" published in Pambazuka News 177 last week.

The Genocide Specialists From the first, I had thought my report should put the Rwandan genocide into some historical context, and I began reading in the field of genocide generally. Before long, I had come face to face with the burgeoning world of genocide studies. This subculture, I soon discovered, is quite separate from that of high-profile Holocaust studies. While some specialists in "other" genocides are also students of the Holocaust, for a long time only a handful of Holocaust specialists were prepared to accept experts in comparative genocides as their kin. According to New York City College Professor Henry Huttenbach, a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany, most Holocaust specialists still demand that the genocide of the Jews be treated as qualitatively different from - really a greater catastrophe than - the genocide of others. And "any whiff of comparison was automatically condemned as a form of denial, revisionism, trivialization, etc." This is an enormously emotional and divisive issue, but the evidence surely corroborates Huttenbach's assertion. In his intellectually thrilling and morally courageous study, The Holocaust in American Life, University of Chicago historian Peter Novick introduces the concept of "the Olympics of victimization," a fierce competition for primacy among the world's victims that the Jews are determined to win. Largely, they have succeeded. Even a good number, though not all, of my newly discovered genocide studies family share the view that the Holocaust - always with a capital "H" - is at the farthest point of the genocide continuum.

In 1999, when I began working on Rwanda, the world of non-Holocaust genocide studies was just beginning to flourish. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn's The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies in 1990 was way ahead of the curve. It was Rwanda and Srebrenica that really set things off. The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) had been organized in 1994. In 1999, Huttenbach founded the Journal of Genocide Studies, the first of its kind not exclusively dedicated to the Holocaust. The same year, a two-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide appeared. In 2002, a thick and engrossing collection of essays appeared called Pioneers of Genocide Studies - imagine: pioneers already! - and Samantha Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her exceptional study A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Imagine: humanity had inflicted on itself an entire era of genocide, and we were living through it.

The field was taking off. In June, 2003, I was among two hundred people attending the IAGS conference in Galway, Ireland. There were forty-four intriguing panels to choose from, so many I couldn't even attend all the Rwanda sessions let alone those on Burundi, Srebrenica, Armenia, the Third World and the Holocaust, the Herero of southwestern Africa, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Korea, Bangladesh, Assyria, the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, Cambodia, genocide prevention, genocide denial, comparative genocide, genocide art, genocide and children, survivors, truth commissions, the problem of reconciliation, the problem of reparations, the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and even more.

Size is relative, of course. This small, tight world of genocide mavens is some-thing of a movable feast really: I keep meeting them at other conferences, in London, northern England, Stockholm, Lund, Washington, Toronto, and Rwanda itself. Their hero is Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish lawyer who coined the word "genocide" and was the driving force behind the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. They know by rote the convention's key clauses and even its wildly optimistic title: "The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide." And they know the politics. After long, acrimonious negotiations that included early intimations of Cold War hostilities, the General Assembly agreed soon after World War II that genocide would be defined as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group."

From these few words spill a host of complications. How do you prove intent? Exactly how many victims are necessary to constitute a "part"? What about "politicide," the word invented to describe attempts to eliminate political opponents, the stock-in-trade of both governments proudly promising to introduce "socialism" - Stalin's USSR, Mao's China, Pol Pot's Cambodia - and those defending the "free world" against "socialism" - U.S.-backed military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, Chile, Indonesia, the apartheid government in South Africa. What's the difference between mass murder, pogroms, or large-scale massacres and genocide, and why does it matter? And - the central conundrum - how can we know whether a conflict will escalate into a genocide until it actually does?

Then there are the bedeviling practical issues. What are the consequences of a determination that genocide is being carried out? Countries that ratify the convention "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide perpetrators, and are entitled to call on the UN "to take such action under the Charter of the UN as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide." That's all. There's no call for direct military intervention. So, de-spite the apparent angst by the Clinton administration in 1994 that if it recognized Rwanda as a genocide it would be obliged to dispatch U.S. troops, many authorities agree that a strongly worded resolution at the Security Council would fulfill the obligations of the convention - even if the genocide continued.

These issues have been debated at interminable length by the cognoscenti, who mostly agree about the flaws of the 1948 convention and disagree about attempts to amend it. As a result, like it or not, it will remain unamended, unsatisfactory as it clearly is, while the new International Criminal Court and the rest of us make do as best we can. And we will continue to disagree on what is and what is not a genocide. Some well-regarded scholars argue there have been as many as fifty such calamities since the world vowed "Never Again" after Hitler's defeat in 1945. Others say that only four really meet the criteria set out in the UN Convention: the extermination of the Hereros, the Armenians, the Jews, and the Tutsi. It's more than a merely pedantic academic debate. But it will never be resolved. Genocide specialists seem to hold, simultaneously, two quite separate big ideas: that under certain circumstances all humans are capable of perpetrating unspeakable crimes against humanity; and that the only sound motive for being a "genocide freak" - as one of them wryly calls the group - is to figure out how to prevent its recurrence. Intuitively, the two may seem to be in conflict. After all, the record indisputably shows that humans have used violent means to resolve disputes ever since our species first evolved. How can we prevent genocide - or violence between humans of any kind - since humans are clearly hardwired to resort to force under any number of circumstances? To activists, however, the resolution of this dialectic is obvious: we must learn to predict the onslaught of genocide and have the capacity to nip it in the bud.

It came as no surprise to me that so many well-known, highly reputable genocide scholars subscribe to the old insight memorably articulated by Walt Kelly's sweet comic book character, Pogo Possum: "We have met the enemy and he is us." You can't study this subject without wondering about yourself. And we all do. Most of the two dozen men and women who are the "pioneers of genocide studies" explicitly believe that they themselves are potentially capable of the most atrocious behaviour imaginable. In the words of scholar and author Eric Markusen, "the vast majority of perpetrators, accomplices and bystanders to genocidal violence are not sadists or psychopaths, but are psychologically normal according to standard means of assessing mental health and illness." Yehuda Bauer, an Israeli and one of the Holocaust scholars, told me that genocidal attitudes now exist among both Palestinians and Israelis. This is not a man to use such language loosely. As for Rwanda, hundreds of thousands of Hutu were actively involved in the genocide. Most of them were ordinary Rwandans. What possible reason is there to believe they were fundamentally different from me? Or you?

But genocide scholars believe - hope? pray? - that our capacity for evil can be constrained. Perhaps the driving passion of genocide scholarship is to learn from the past to prevent recurrences in the future. As the presentations at the Galway conference amply demonstrated, these are scholar/activists who make no pretense to scholarly detachment. It's not that they eschew solid academic research; on the contrary, most take it very seriously and some are very good at it. But many openly pursue their academic work for activist ends. Virtually all of them are committed either to the prevention of future genocides or to having the world offer appropriate recognition to their own special genocide. A good number are committed to both. Indeed, there is now a Genocide Watch and a full-blown International Campaign to End Genocide supported by twenty-four active member organizations.

Why should this be? After all, you won't find all of the innumerable students of war marching with the peace movement, and no one expects them to. They're scholars for the sake of scholarship - or, perhaps, for publication. But I'd confidently say that all experts in the Armenian genocide have as their overriding purpose getting the world to recognize the 1915 genocide inflicted by the Turks. What drives them mad is the continuing success of Ankara in pressuring the governments of Germany, Britain, the U.S., and - in an unnerving triumph of realpolitik over the solidarity of victims - Israel, to refuse to officially recognize the genocide of the Armenians.

The personal is political in genocide studies. Most authorities on the Armenian genocide are Armenians, descendants of the genocide's victims or survivors. Here, of course, is the key to their militancy and activism. Similarly, most of the pioneers of Holocaust and genocide studies, and the founders of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the Journal of Genocide Studies, have been Jewish - survivors, relatives of survivors, or child refugees. Another perceptible group, small but influential, focus on genocide scholarship from a Christian perspective; that is, genocide as the ultimate violation of the laws of God. This, needless to say, is not the bellicose Christianity that so many Americans now seem to embrace.

So Galway wasn't just another academic conference, a talk shop where the arcane and obscure so often reign. This was a coming together of people who had consciously steeped themselves in the most terrible calamities humans have wrought on each other. Many had been touched directly by a genocide. All had a cause, most of them worthy ones. Just about every imaginable horror show of the past century was flagged in those few days.

Yet every single person at that conference was aware that "Never Again" had proved to be one of the greatest broken promises in history; as any genocide maven will aggressively tell you, "Again and Again" is the more accurate phrase. The very reason the genocide prevention movement is thriving is because the phenomenon itself is thriving. Look at the last decade alone. Bosnia and Rwanda. Serbs and Kosovars. Chechnya and East Timor. Nuclear threats, inherently genocidal, between Pakistan and India. Sierra Leone, with its child militias and child amputees. Potential genocide in the Ivory Coast. Burundi on a knife's edge. Rwanda enigmatic and unpredictable. The ongoing calamity in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. And the latest test case: the disaster in Darfur in western Sudan.

If crimes against humanity continue - and they do, as I write - it's not because specialists in genocide aren't trying to prevent them. The question is how to do so. Most of these "preventionists" argue for an early warning system that would allow experts to predict when a genocide is likely, so that the world can be informed and take appropriate action. For the last couple of years, some advocated for a "genocide prevention focal point" to be set up permanently at the UN, and as his contribution to the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced something very much like that. The premise is straightforward: through empirical and scientific observation of conflicts, we can isolate the variables and causal mechanisms at work and predict future genocides before they occur. With this information, we can then intervene and prevent the tragedy.

Once again, complications arise. There's no more reason for genocide scholars to agree on everything than for genocide victims to do so. Not everyone agrees on which conflicts in the past have been "real" genocides. Not every-one agrees on the variables and stages that lead to genocide. In practice, it's usually more credible and accurate to speak of large-scale massacres and atrocities than of genocide. The Nazi genocide against the Jews didn't begin until 1941. Until it was actually launched in Rwanda, no one could be sure there'd be a genocide; but there had been anti-Tutsi pogroms galore. Already there's a heated dispute as to whether Darfur constitutes a genocide or "ethnic clean-sing." Surely there's no need to resolve this semantic dispute before intervening?

Two intertwined dilemmas remain. Without meaning to sound pretentious, I'd say that preventionists must address the question of human nature. In spite of endless "Never Again" rhetoric and unprecedented efforts to prevent genocide in the past decade or so, and in the face of the rapid growth of what has been dubbed the "genocide prevention industry," before our very eyes the phenomenon of genocide has continued and even intensified. In this sense, the work of the preventionists is a Sisyphean labour of hope and faith over reason and evidence.

Even more problematic is the premise that if we're able to forecast an imminent genocide, policymakers will then naturally jump in and end the crisis before it escalates. I don't see it: I regard it as the genocide specialists' equivalent of "the truth shall make you free" - one of life's great fallacies. Fore-knowledge of genocide might just as easily have the opposite effect. Given the track record to date, it's at least as plausible to argue that early warnings of potential genocide are most likely to help politicians distance themselves from any obligation to intervene in the conflict. In the words of Samuel Totten, a highly respected genocide scholar, developing potential early warning signals "is easy - and this is a vast understatement - compared to mobilizing the political will of the international community to act when such signals appear on the horizon." Two factors are at work here. Human nature, for politicians, is to avoid entanglements they can't control and which have little political payoff. Beyond that, the interests of the preventionists' world and the powers-that-be seem largely antithetical. Almost all of us oppose the major interventions initiated by the U.S. and Britain, while they in turn are largely indifferent to the interventions we plead for.

As I write, Darfur stands as the test. Despite a flurry of activity, at the moment the world is failing badly, the penalty, as always, being paid by those under siege. Darfur is routinely called "the new Rwanda," but I'm more taken with the differences. The massive attacks by Arab Muslim militias on African Muslim peas-ants and farmers, supported by the terrorist government in Khartoum, began in early 2003. Since then, the usual suspects among humanitarian and human rights agencies, joined by the International Campaign to End Genocide, have been demanding that action be taken. Early in 2004, with the death, rape, and refugee counts mounting, the calls for action intensified. Mainstream media coverage became widespread around April with the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. An unprecedented informal coalition emerged, including the Bush administration. Maybe it's a genocide, almost certainly it's severe ethnic cleansing, and it is without question a world-class atrocity. Everybody now agrees the situation is intolerable. This makes the situation almost more terrible than Rwanda's a decade ago. Despite everything we know, despite all the demands made on the terrorist Sudanese government by the most powerful forces on earth, nothing has changed. Verbal threats are backed by mealy-mouthed resolutions promising serious consideration of future action if the militias aren't suppressed immediately. Meanwhile, the arrival of the rainy season in May blocked sup-plies to the hundreds of thousands of displaced African refugees, and the raids continued. How many more will be added to the fifty thousand dead and the hundreds of thousands of pathetic refugees, while the world attacks with a torrent of words?

The real comparison with 1994, then, is simply inaction in the face of gross provocation. At the end of the day, no Geneva Convention on genocide, whatever its language, and no early warnings, however unmistakable, can substitute for political will among the powers-that-can. The extent of recent coverage of the Darfur tragedy suggests that media and public interest can indeed influence governments to appear to care. But garnering such interest, as Darfur plainly shows, is a long, drawn-out process, and the move from concern to action can take forever. Pessimists will not be disappointed.

For the record, none of those who betrayed Rwanda has ever faced the consequences. Not a single government has lost an election for allowing hundreds of thousands of Africans to be murdered. Not a single French politician has been held accountable for allowing the genocidaires to escape from Rwanda to Zaire/Congo, thereby setting in motion the catastrophic wars that have since plagued the African Great Lakes region. No one has been called on to resign for their actions or advice. Bill Clinton's 957-page memoir, My Life, calls Rwanda "one of my greatest regrets," and spends exactly two pages in total on the subject. This is truly the globalization of impunity.

Nor did those guilty of sins against Rwanda deign to atone by commemorating the tenth anniversary of the genocide in Kigali in April. Kofi Annan went to Geneva instead. The U.S. sent a mid-level diplomat who offered a derisory handout of a $1 million (U.S.) for orphans, widows, and aids victims. Canada's delegation consisted of a former junior cabinet minister and the ambassador to Rome who advises on things African. Among all Western nations, only the Belgians sent their prime minister to apologize and repent. The Rwandans were disappointed but philosophical; their expectations were low.

None of this can give the preventionists a single reason for optimism. It's true that the Remembering Rwanda movement achieved some success. Commemorations of the tenth anniversary occurred around the world and Rwanda got more media coverage in those ten days than during the past ten years. But even if this attention proves to be sustainable, even if the victims and the survivors and the perpetrators and the "bystanders" are all remembered, what then? We will not have changed. Darfur reminds us that, once more, "Never Again" seems beyond human nature. Too many of us like to cause harm and too few of us care enough to prevent it.

Yet we go on. Why? Maybe because if we refuse to give up, we will stumble across an answer. Maybe because it matters that the victims gain some posthumous dignity. That the survivors will know someone cares. That the perpetrators are reminded that they can run but they can't hide. That those guilty of crimes of commission or omission - the French, the Americans, the Catholics, the Brits - will remember that there is no statute of limitations on accountability, and that we will keep naming and shaming them as long as is necessary. For myself, maybe it's because Carol will be reassured that I emerged from my encounter with genocide gloomier than ever but not ready to surrender. Not yet immobilized. And no less willing than before to throw myself - with the usual modest expectations, of course - into the eternal struggle that the pursuit of social justice and equality has always demanded.

* Gerry Caplan is a Canadian-based public policy analyst and international coordinator of the "Remembering Rwanda" Project. He is also a public affairs commentator and author of "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide," the report of the International Panel of Eminent Personalities To Investigate the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU). He is presently co-editing a book on the Rwandan genocide ten years later.

* This article was first published in the October issue of The Walrus, a new Canadian general interest magazine. It is reproduced here with their permission. The Walrus magazine is available on newsstands and book stores in the US as well as Canada, with subscribers from all over the world. For more information about The Walrus:

* Please send comments to [email protected]

What qualify genocide? Let us not be selective. When it happen in some countries it called "genocide" and everyone agree with the label. But then when other countries experienced even worse in every sense the way,it is put to analysis. So in order for an organization to respond to an emergency to an horrible act, we need to debate whatever it is a genocide or not. Any way one looks it, after wasting time debating on the issue, it becomes a genocide. Is this a good way to handle an emergency?

On 23 September 2004, the National Security Agency (NSA) arrested two University of Khartoum students and took them to the NSA political section offices at Khartoum North. It was alleged that they were beaten and punched all over their bodies for an hour, as they were questioned about the activities of the Darfur Student Association. Abd Alrahman Mohamed Abd Alrahman (27 yrs) was released the next day, Friday 24 September 2004, at 4pm. Faisal Dawood Abd Alrahman's (26 yrs) current whereabouts are not known.

The National Society for Human Rights (NSHR) condemns the Government of Namibia (GRN) Bill virtually banning the marking of December 10 as International Human Right's Day in Namibia. "Bearing in mind GRN’s general anti-human rights agenda over the years, NSHR is not surprised at this virtual banning of marking December 10 as International Human Rights Day. This state of affairs appears to be perfectly in line with the ruling SWAPO Party’s deplorable pre-independence human rights record", observed NSHR executive director Phil ya Nangoloh.

The Secretary-General's Special Representative has warned that the conflict in the Sudan, if not properly addressed, could create the conditions for a widening regional, if not global, confrontation. He also stressed the need to prevent the conflicts from turning into a general antagonism between people with different religions or different ethnic backgrounds. Once the struggles in the Sudan were perceived as a clash between cultures - Arabs against Africans, Sudan versus the West, Islam versus the rest - they became unmanageable and spread to other places.

Some 100 officials from 39 African countries started a five-day meeting in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, on Monday to discuss the threat that small arms pose to human security and development across the continent. "Africa has been ravaged by many conflicts. Most of these conflicts were fought primarily using small arms and light weapons that pose one of the greatest challenge of our time," Ugandan Interior Minister Ruhakana Rugunda said in a speech he read on behalf of President Yoweri Museveni.

The UNHCR representative in Botswana, Benny Otim, told Angolan refugees yesterday that his office would immediately start registering those willing to return home. Otim was briefing refugees at the Dukwi refugee settlement outside the city of Francistown. His registration call comes at a time when only about 50 of an estimated 882 Angolan refugees living at the Dukwi refugee camp has registered for voluntary repatriation.