Amnesty International has condemned the policy adopted by the Italian government to manage the arrival of large numbers of migrants on the Italian island of Lampedusa in recent days. The immediate forced return to Libya, by aeroplane, of over 300 foreign nationals newly arrived in Italy constitutes a very serious violation of national and international laws and conventions relating to the right to seek asylum, said the organisation.

Hundreds of Burundians in the northern province of Kirundo have fled to Rwanda in the last two weeks following rumours of imminent violence should elections be delayed beyond October, ending three-year transitional period, a local official told IRIN."They were told that if elections are not held before 1 November, killings similar to those of 1993 would take place," Ildephonse Ndagijimana, the administrator of Bugabira, a commune in Kirundo, said.

With up to four million of its citizens living as refugees in neighbouring countries soon after the 1994 genocide, the government of Rwanda has introduced a low-cost housing scheme, known locally as "Imidugudu", to resettle thousands of people who returned after the killings. So far, the government has constructed at least 300,000 of these mud-bricked homes under the Imidigudu initiative, although it is still grappling with the impact of the genocide on human settlement.

The government of Sierra Leone should bring to justice those responsible for the brutal murder of FannyAnn Eddy, founder of the Sierra Leone Lesbian and Gay Association and a lesbian rights activist known across Africa, Human Rights Watch said October 4th. Eddy, 30, was found dead on the morning of September 29 after being raped repeatedly, stabbed and had her neck broken. FannyAnn Eddy's statement to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights on April 18, 2004 is available at: http://hrw.org/english/docs/2004/10/04/sierra9439.htm.

Ten years ago, the international community stood by as the horror of the Rwandan genocide unfolded. This summer, Western political will could have stopped the mass killings in Sudan. Why do we not act?

On a quiet Sunday in the early summer of 1999, I was recruited into the tiny but growing army of enigmatic characters who devote their lives to studying genocide. It was a phone call that did it. Stephen Lewis, my lifelong comrade-in-arms and now UN Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, was offering a chance for us to work together again, but on a subject of unprecedented gravity: unraveling the truth about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. Rwanda became my obsession from that moment to this. Stephen was a member of a special seven-member International Panel of Eminent Personalities (IPEP), which had been appointed by the Organization of African Unity (OAU) to investigate the genocide. Despite their genuine eminence - two were former African presidents, one a potential future president, another the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of India - the panel members just didn't know what to do with the information they had been accumulating. After traveling to half a dozen nations interviewing people with links to the genocide, they didn't know what they wanted to say. They decided they needed a writer post-haste. Appropriately enough, they sought an African writer, but for various reasons none of their choices was available. Stephen mentioned me. Though I knew little of Rwanda, I had a doctorate in African history; I'd lived in several African countries; I'd co-chaired two public policy commissions in Canada; I was a writer; and I'd been involved in the struggle against white rule in Southern Africa. I suppose a combination of sheer desperation plus these credentials led to a near total stranger being brought on to take over the panel's task.

As it happens, Stephen and I had already discussed the panel at length. He was thrilled and honoured to have been appointed to it and I was wildly envious. I had gone to live in Africa for the first time as a doctoral student way back in 1964 and had kept renewing my connections over the years. So when the call came, I was willing and able, yet seriously anxious. Carol, my wife, very wise about many things (not least the secrets of my soul), proved so once again. We could cope as a family, she was confident, even if it meant I'd be absent a fair bit. But she wasn't as sanguine about me. Could I deal with the subject emotionally? Could my already dark, lugubrious, pessimistic, Hobbesian view of the world handle such intimacy with one of the most hellish events of our time? After a lifetime dedicated to various crusades for social justice, I'd become the stereotypical glass-is-half-empty guy, always able to find an ominous cloud in a deep blue sky. My gag: being a pessimist may not be fun but at least I'm rarely disappointed. Now, this new assignment raised real fears of me being traumatized into utter depression and immobilizing hopelessness. These were serious questions, but both Carol and I knew immediately they could only be answered after the event. There was no way I could resist this offer. This was history in the making. This was Africa, my life's preoccupation. This was another Holocaust, a subject that had tormented me forever. This was about the very nature of our species. I began getting my shots the next day and reported to the Panel's headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the home of the OAU, nine days later.

I signed up on the assumption that the panel members would tell me what they wanted to say, and that I'd be their pen. This was hardly my usual or favorite role but, under the circumstances, I was prepared to play it. I needed their guidance about how forthright they were prepared to be. Although no expert on Rwanda, I did know how controversial and sensitive the issues were. Since this was an OAU mission, presumably dedicated to offering an African perspective on the genocide, was the panel ready to say that there would have been no genocide at all if some Africans hadn't chosen to exterminate other Africans? How far were they prepared to go in describing the OAU's own failure to intervene effectively? Beyond Africa, were they willing to tell the truth and accuse the French government of virtual complicity in the genocide? Would they agree to condemn Rwanda's churches, above all the Roman Catholic Church, for their shameful betrayal of their flock before, during, and since the genocide? Were they prepared to say that American politicians (both Democrats and Republicans), fearful of losing votes if U.S. soldiers were killed for such a remote cause, had knowingly allowed hundreds of thousands of Rwandans to die terrible deaths? Were they going to tell the truth about the serious human rights abuses that had been committed by the largely Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front - the "good guys" in the genocide and now the government of the country?

To my astonishment, when the panel flew in to meet me in Addis Ababa, they offered no guidance at all. To this day I'm still not sure I understand it. Maybe they were paralyzed by the enormity of the topic and their responsibility. All I know is that after my very first meeting with the members, I was left to produce the report on my own, sending them drafts for approval. I was distraught. How was I to deal with all the vexing issues I had fruitlessly raised?

Waiting for the flight back to Toronto, where I would do all my reading and writing, I went for a long and dusty walk with Dr. Berharnou Abebe, the panel's research officer, a remarkable Ethiopian intellectual with whom I had immediately bonded. Berharnou grasped the situation completely. Like other non-Rwandan Africans I was to meet, he felt personally ashamed of the genocide and approached his role on the tiny panel professional staff with the utmost gravity. We walked and walked, going over the problem again and again, getting grimier and more hoarse with each polluted block. Finally, he stopped, looked at me, and said: "It is simple, Gerry. You must write not for the seven, but for the 700,000. It is their story that you must tell."

Ignoring the murky politics of both the OAU and some of the seven panelists, I accepted Berharnou's advice with a vengeance. I would give them a draft based on wherever the evidence led me.

For almost a year, I immersed myself in the topic totally. I thought of nothing else. Weekends and evenings disappeared. Somehow, I absorbed a wealth of knowledge as if by osmosis. In the end, however, the work was done and approved - even though some panel members were rather less enthusiastic than others in accepting some of my harsh, unforgiving, and thoroughly documented assessments of the French and U.S. governments, the Catholic Church, the UN Secretariat, the OAU itself, the post-genocide government in Rwanda, and just about everyone else involved in this terrible tragedy except Canadian General Romeo Dallaire. Dallaire, almost alone, emerged with his honour intact. Howard Adelman, a Rwandan expert at York University in Toronto, once wrote that Rwanda's was "the most easily prevent-able genocide imaginable," and the panel unhesitatingly accepted my suggestion that we call the three- hundred-page report "Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide." What can never be forgiven is that none of those with the capacity to pre-vent it cared enough to try. The report was released in mid-2000. I don't mind saying the OAU had never seen anything like it - independent, outspoken, undiplomatic, and easily read, it was the very antithesis of the turgid bureaucratic documents the OAU normally spewed out. It was also largely ignored. Not because it pulled no punches, I'm afraid, but out of plain lack of interest. Africa's heads of state, who had authorized the report two years earlier, never bothered to discuss it at all. I was deeply disappointed by the unceremonious burial of the report, suffering from the inevitable anticlimax after such an intense experience, and finding it hard to come to grips with what I had learned. Not only was the assignment over, so, it appeared, was my time with Rwanda. Wrong again.

About a year later, it dawned on me that outside Rwanda itself, the genocide was already being forgotten. I became extremely agitated. The survivors were living as traumatized, maimed paupers. Most of the perpetrators were getting away with murder, often mass murder. The sins of commission of the French government and the Catholic Church, and the sins of omission of the American and British governments, were being completely ignored: the "globalization of impunity" I had called it in the report. Carol, once again seeing things far more clearly than I could, suggested that the tenth anniversary of the genocide in 2004, two-and-a-half years away, could be a natural occasion to renew interest in the tragedy. The result was "Remembering Rwanda," an international voluntary movement organized with no funding, largely on my Mac, with the assistance of Louise Mushikiwabo in Washington and Carole Ann Reed in Toronto, with adherents around the globe, all dedicated to ensuring that the memory of the genocide and its victims would not be buried, and that those responsible for it would not escape accountability. I had already befriended some Diaspora Rwandans who signed up immediately. They included a group of remark-able widows, particularly Esther Mujawayo in Germany and Chantal Kayetisi in New Hampshire, who had lost their husbands, among dozens of other relatives, to the genocide while they and their children miraculously survived, and who are dedicated to making sure the genocide would not be swept under history's table. Leo Kabalisa, one of life's natural gentlemen, was another; Leo, who now teaches French in a Toronto high school, counts by name fifteen members of his immediate family and eighty-two of his extended family who were murdered during the one hundred days.

Other Rwandans, though, were inevitably suspicious. In Johannesburg one night, I met with a group of Rwandan expatriates attached to the Rwandan Diaspora Global Network. I knew them through e-mail correspondence and, finding I had to be in Johannesburg on other UN business, I had asked to meet them. We had a good couple of hours, got along well, and agreed to work together. But it was obvious they couldn't quite figure out why I was doing this. What did I want? What could I get out of this? Rwandans, who have been betrayed by the outside world as much as any people on earth, are entitled to their suspicions of all outsiders.

In trying to explain my interest, I found myself, to my own surprise, telling them that I was Jewish. My family had fled Poland before the Hitler era, I said, and, probably as a result, I had great empathy with their own genocide. It was all true. Although I'm a convinced atheist, deeply at odds with those who represent themselves as the voice of Canadian Jewry, and a passionate foe of Israel's occupation of Palestine, I've always felt my Jewishness deeply. I've been fascinated with the Nazis and the Holocaust since my teen years. For decades now I've read, almost as a matter of principle, at least one book related to the Holocaust every year. Although many Jews disagree, for me the self-evident lesson of the Holocaust is a universal, not a particular, one; it is not merely that anti-Semitism must be opposed with all of our might, but that all injustice, racism, and discrimination is unacceptable and has to be com-bated. The Rwandans loved this answer. Many Tutsi regard themselves, with considerable pride, as the Jews of Africa. Most know about, and identify with, the Holocaust. Some have been to Auschwitz, others to Yad Vashem. Many are far more supportive of Israeli policies than I am. Yet my core Jewishness and our shared genocides is a bond between us.

Sometimes I learn from experience. During a visit to Kigali in 2002, I had the opportunity to address nearly one thousand Rwandans at a major assembly dedicated to reconciliation. I described the Remembering Rwanda movement and asked, before they could: Why was a white outsider, a muzungu, in the widely used Swahili term, leading this initiative? The moment I said that as a Jew I instinctively felt a close bond with Rwanda, the mood in the huge parliamentary chamber palpably changed. Suddenly, trust emerged; we understood each other. The solidarity of victims prevailed. Certainly some suspicion still existed; I could hardly blame them. But after the speech I was confronted by a hand-some, dynamic woman I didn't recognize, who abruptly embraced me. Yolande Mukagasana, a genocide survivor, had made it clear in a brief e-mail that she didn't know why I was involved in this issue, didn't trust me, and could continue the fight for the memory of the genocide's victims without me, thanks anyway. Now, she said, she knew we would be in the struggle together. Yolande, a poet and storyteller and a passionate keeper of the survivors' flame, invited me to dinner later at her small house in Kigali, now home to thirteen adopted children who were kibitzing in a room nearby. As I tried politely to continue eating, she pointed to the photos on the wall of her husband and three young children and explained in graphic detail how, ten years earlier, they had all been hunted down and murdered not far from where we sat.

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 is the first of a two-part series entitled "The Genocide Problem: 'Never Again' All Over Again". The second part will appear in Pambazuka News 178 next week. This article was first published in the October issue of The Walrus, a new Canadian general interest magazine. It is reproduced here with the permission. The Walrus magazine is available on newsstands and book stores in Canada. For more information about The Walrus:

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For all their differences, one thing Zimbabwe and South Africa have in common is that land issues, dating back to colonial times and white settler government, are highly emotive, evoking difficult questions of history, race, politics, economic opportunity and international diplomacy. Blood and Soil offers a detailed analysis of the different challenges of land reform in both Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Just over two weeks ago, The Daily Nation's reporter Peter Kimani and photographer Stephen Mudiari were among the first team of African journalists to travel to Darfur. In these five part series, reported jointly for all Nation Media Group newspapers in Kenya (Daily Nation), Tanzania (The Citizen) and Uganda (The Monitor), they get close to the survivors of Darfur and tell the human story of the tragedy. They begin with the story about getting to, and then out of, Darfur.

Close to four million internally displaced people have returned to Angola following the ceasefire agreement of April 2002 between the governing MPLA and the UNITA, which marked the end of 27 years of civil war. According to the UN, only between 40,000 and 60,000 people can still be considered internally displaced, whereas the government's estimates goes as high as 340,000. Most of the internally displaced people (IDPs) have returned spontaneously without any assistance from the government or humanitarian organisations.

Optimism about prospects for peace in northern Uganda is growing. Recent news reports cite increased desertions from the rebel Lord's Resistance Army and some reduction in the number of displaced people. A new report from World Vision Uganda highlights the continuing obstacles to peace and the enormous damage done to children and to society at large from this 18-year war that has received very little attention from the international community. For the full text of the report, entitled "Pawns of Politics: Children, Conflict and Peace in Northern Uganda", visit: http://www.worldvision.ca/home/media/PawnsOfPolitics.pdf

New legislation that cuts all social aid for rejected asylum seekers has left refugees starving and freezing on the streets of Oslo (Norway). As five rejected refugees from Ethiopia have had to escape hunger in Norway by turning to Sweden, the UN's refugee agency and the Norwegian Church are now protesting against the "inhumane" legislation in one of the world's richest countries.

Judge President John Hlophe of the Cape High Court has lashed out at the white legal fraternity for what he described as calculated attempts to undermine black judges and stall transformation. Racial tensions have often been expressed within the court, but this is the first time they have bubbled into the public domain. It is widely acknowledged that further transformation of the Cape High Court bench is urgently needed. Norman Arendse SC, chairperson of the General Council of the Bar of SA(GCB), the body that regulates the conduct of all practising advocates, has ordered an investigation into the matter.

Vincent Hogg, former chief executive of the Zimbabwe Cricket Union will inform the ICC's investigators this week about several incidents involving black ZCU directors. These were the main reasons he left the job two months ago after two and a half years, he said. "For instance one director told me that whites have no right to be in the country at all, and that was during a formal meeting. Some of the directors were totally out of order in this regard and it was extremely upsetting to have to listen to that sort of racist language."

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Wednesday appealed for US $7.8 million to fund projects to help an estimated 1.6 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in strife-torn northern Uganda. UNICEF said that during the past 12 months it had expanded and accelerated its response in health, water and sanitation, education and HIV/AIDS prevention and noted that these sectors remained inadequately funded.

Ivory Coast's week of reconciliation, to mark the second anniversary of the crisis, ended with 160 children being made United Nations ambassadors of peace. The children, from throughout this divided country, spent four days in no-man's-land between the rebel and government forces learning how to avoid conflict.

Kenya's human rights commissioner Tirop Kitru has criticised conditions at Meru jail, where seven prisoners have died. After a tour of the prison, Kitur said many of the inmates had open wounds because of the cramped conditions and poor ventilation. Prison officials say the prisoners who died suffocated in a cell the size of a single bed. Another 28 inmates are in hospital in a critical condition.

The Mauritanian government has announced that it has foiled a fresh coup plot and has once more accused Burkina Faso and Libya of supporting disaffected soldiers seeking to overthrow President Maaouiya Ould Taya. This is the third time in 15 months that the authorities claim to have foiled an attempted coup against Ould Taya. The former army colonel himself seized power in this desert nation of 2.8 million people through a coup in 1984.

In April this year, South Africans for the third time overwhelmingly re-elected the ruling African National Congress, now led by President Thabo Mbeki. Not surprisingly, the elections lacked the euphoria that marked the formal end of apartheid, led by Nelson Mandela, a decade ago. What’s more, the victory of the ANC may be dimmed by its own policy mistakes and the stubborn legacy of apartheid, an albatross that holds the young democracy in a death choke.

Liberia and its neighbouring countries today signed a series of agreements with the UN refugee agency, giving Liberian refugees the right to choose repatriation starting on October 1. The Liberian government and UNHCR signed three separate agreements with the governments of Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and Sierra Leone to set the main legal and operational framework for the voluntary return of more than 340,000 Liberian refugees scattered around the region. An agreement was also signed with the government of Ghana on September 22 in Accra.

The hearing to investigate allegations of racism levelled against the Zimbabwe Cricket Union by the group of rebel players began in Harare on Wedneday. If found guilty, the ZCU could face a range of penalties, including possible expulsion from the ICC. The findings will be presented to the ICC's executive board for discussion at it's next full meeting in October. The ZCU will deny all the charges, and is expected to counter-claim that there is a legacy of racism by whites in Zimbabwe and that previous regimes did nothing to encourage blacks.

CARE, the charity running the camp in eastern Chad, reckons there are about 4,500 children who should be in school. But with the formal education programme yet to swing into action, it admits that only half of those children are currently having lessons. Some 800 pupils are lucky enough to learn in one of the five school tents erected at the centre of the camp. Another 1,400 cluster more informally for classes under trees and the rest wile away the hours either helping with chores or playing in the dirt.