Since the successful elections on 14 May 2003, the donor community and the people of Sierra Leone have grown increasingly frustrated with stagnating reform and recovery, says this new briefing from the International Crisis Group. UNAMSIL is due to depart by December 2004 but the police and military are still fragile, so it would be wise to have contingency plans. The situation in neighbouring Liberia also remains a security risk. There is no systematic plan of decentralisation, and local elections scheduled to take place by the end of the year are likely to be postponed. Efforts to address rampant corruption have proved fruitless and Sierra Leone’s diamond mines remain poorly monitored with illegal mining and smuggling still estimated to produce hundreds of millions of dollars that are unaccounted for and unavailable to help rebuild the economy.

Any lasting peace agreement in Sudan must provide meaningful guarantees for the protection of the human rights of all segments of Sudanese society including their rights to participate in post-conflict political processes, says a new briefing paper from Human Rights Watch. The talks aimed at ending the twenty-year civil war between the Sudanese government and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which have been underway again since June 2002, are taking place on an informal but high-level basis in Kenya in September 2003, under the auspices of the regional Inter Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD, comprised of Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti), led by Gen. (Ret.) Lazarus Sumbeiywo.

After conflict has shattered the capital of the poor, what must be done to ensure that reconstruction benefits the majority? How can economic policy contribute to building peace? Can commercial alliances of state and private actors be prevented from working against broad-based recovery? A report from the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER) takes a critical look at post-conflict recovery in Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, warning that the ending of conflicts has not necessarily delivered secure livelihoods.

The Commonwealth is divided by a blistering row over Zimbabwe after South Africa bluntly told Australia to stop trying to prevent President Mugabe attending its December 5 summit meeting in Nigeria. South Africa accused John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, of using “mega-phone diplomacy” after he announced that he had received assurances from Nigeria that Mr Mugabe would not be invited to the biannual meeting of 54 mostly former British colonies.

Peace talks intended to end more than a decade of violence and chaos in Somalia entered their final stage on Tuesday after delegates adopted a transitional charter, mediators said. The negotiations had been stalled for weeks because of disputes over what type of federal government best suited the troubled Horn of Africa nation, which has not had an effective central government since the 1991 ouster of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre.

The past two weeks have seen the highest-level and most important meetings between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in the last twenty years, yielding high hopes for a peace deal, according to the think-tank, International Crisis Group.

A summit of African leaders trying to rescue Burundi's peace process ended on Tuesday without agreement on a power-sharing solution to a decade of civil war. An estimated 300,000 people have been killed in 10 years of conflict between the Tutsi-led army and Hutu rebels fighting to end the traditional political dominance of the Tutsi minority.

Two Central African Republic (CAR) ministers have called upon some 41,000 refugees who have been living in southern Chad since early 2003 to return home, Radio Centrafrique reported on Tuesday.

Santigie Kanu, a non-commissioned officer who formed part of a military junta that ruled Sierra Leone from 1997 to 1998, was indicted for war crimes on Wednesday by the country's UN-backed Special Court. Kanu, who is popularly known as "Brigadier 55," was charged on 17 counts with violating article three of the Geneva Convention and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The United States is planning to move some of its forces from Europe to Africa. The thinking is being driven, in part, by the new oilfields being developed off the coast of West Africa. Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea have already reached access agreements allowing the Americans to use their airfields.

The Nigerian government has warned Liberia's former president Charles Taylor not to interfere in the affairs of his home country. The statement comes just days after the UN Secretary General's special envoy to Liberia, Jacques Klein, alleged that Mr Taylor had been meddling in Liberia's political affairs.

Police in Zimbabwe have arrested more than 100 opposition supporters trying to hold a rally against President Robert Mugabe. The protesters - organised by the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) - were gathering in a square in central Harare when the riot police arrived and broke up the crowd.

"The military of Guinea Bissau has taken this action because the government is abusing the constitution and seems incapable of resolving the country's mounting political and economic problems,” says Verissimo Correia Seabre, the army General who led Sunday's coup. Already, the coup has been condemned by the regional body ECOWAS, or the Economic Commission of West African States, the African Union, the United Nations and the Association of Portuguese Speaking Countries. And mediation efforts are underway.
Related Link:
* President resigns
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3113572.stm

Hundreds of Sudanese refugees are streaming into Chad to escape new air attacks, reportedly by government forces, in Sudan's war-scarred Darfur region, pushing the number of Sudanese who have recently fled to the neighbouring country to nearly 70,000, according to the UN refugee agency.

After much wrangling from the French, the UN Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1495 right on the July 31st deadline for the rollover of the MINURSO peacekeeping operation in Western Sahara. In the best diplomatic tradition, the resolution affirmed the commitment to provide for the self-determination of the people of Western Sahara, even while it seriously compromised on it by supporting a peace plan that would allow the Moroccan settlers in the territory to vote on independence in five years.

Liberian government forces and rebel fighters are committing grave human rights abuses while peacekeeping forces remain inadequate, Human Rights Watch says in a new briefing paper. A U.N. peacekeeping force of 15,000 has been proposed for deployment in October, but it could take months for the force to reach full capacity. Despite assurances by U.S. forces and the West African peacekeeping force known as ECOMIL that the situation in Liberia has stabilized, marauding armed bands continue to commit murder, rape, forced recruitment and looting.

The Eritrean government should release political prisoners and allow for freedom of the press, Human Rights Watch said on the second anniversary of a major crackdown against civil society. Eritrea’s practice of arbitrary arrests and detentions continues to this day. "Eritreans, who struggled valiantly to become free and independent, deserve to have their human rights respected," said Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa Division of Human Rights Watch. "Unfortunately, the government continues to deny them that opportunity."

As a new deadline looms for illegal immigrants to leave Djibouti, the UN refugee agency is to begin training government officials to sit on eligibility commissions that will determine who is entitled to refugee status in the tiny nation in the Horn of Africa.

Another 177 internally displaced people (IDPs) were transported out of Monrovia on Friday by the UN refugee agency, as efforts to relieve the pressure on the chronically overcrowded Liberian capital, as well as to launch exploratory missions and spread aid elsewhere in the country, start to gather momentum.

Thousands of activists converged on Cancun to declare that the brutal economic model advanced by the World Trade Organisation was itself a form of war, writes author Naomi Klein. "War because privatization and deregulation kill - by pushing up prices on necessities like water and medicines and pushing down prices on raw commodities like coffee, making small farms unsustainable. War because those who resist are routinely arrested, beaten and even killed. War because when this kind of low-intensity repression fails to clear the path to corporate liberation, the real wars begin."