The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), known as MONUC, on Wednesday decried the prevailing military tension in the Ituri District in northeastern Orientale Province despite continued widespread efforts to restore peace to the region, most notably through the establishment of the Ituri Pacification Commission (IPC).

Kenya's much awaited prison reforms began this week with the release of 29 death row inmates. President Mwai Kibaki, who issued the order, also commuted the sentences of another 195 death row prisoners to life imprisonment. Most of those released had already been in prison for more than 20 years, according to media reports.

Emerging slowly from decades of civil war, Angola stands at a crossroads between a spectacular recovery or further cycles of instability and crisis. The government that won the fighting must now move on a number of fronts – with international support – to win the peace. Although there are critical longer term political and economic issues, several immediate security and humanitarian challenges must be addressed to avoid laying the foundations for a return to conflict, says a new report from the International Crisis Group.

Lagos Lawyer Chief Gani Fawehinmi may be fielded as the joint presidential candidate of 28 political parties to stand against President Olusegan Obasanjo and Muhammadu Buhari, both of whom are retired generals and former military rulers.

At the last count, more than 30 communal clashes, bordering on religious ethnic conflicts have been recorded throughout the country between 1999 and 2002 with each claiming hundreds of lives and properties, running into several millions of naira. Similarly, many people, including women and children had been displaced in the process, resulting in untold hardship and suffering for them. As the incidence of ethnic/religious conflicts becomes worrying, a national workshop on the methods and techniques of arms control through the promotion of a culture of peace in Nigeria was put together recently to find lasting solution to the menace.

Ethiopia's prime minister has called on the west to reform damaging trade policies and increase development aid to help his country break its 20-year-long cycle of poverty and famine. Warning that millions of Ethiopians still face the threat of starvation because of the slow response to the current famine, Meles Zenawi said his country could run out of food by June.

The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR) says it is deeply concerned by news of the ongoing arrests of anti-Iraqi war activists in Egypt. The organisation said that on 19 February 2003 security forces had arrested Kamal Khalil, a leader of the Egyptian anti-war movement and director of the Socialist Studies Centre.

As organisations and individuals working for the environment and environmental justice, we have watched with increasing concern as the US government moves closer to an all-out attack on Iraq. We raise our voices in opposition to this war and invite others to join us in support of peace.

Rebels holding the northern half of Ivory Coast insisted Saturday that a French-brokered power-sharing deal be followed to the letter, leaving doubts of any breakthrough in the latest efforts to end a 5-month-old civil war.

The Programme Manager will be responsible for the overall management, planning and reporting of a newly to be started EU funded rehabilitation programme in Maridi and Yambio Counties. The programme has a duration of two years and will implement a variety of activities in two main sectors: small livestock development and HIV/AIDS awareness & control.

This issue includes the following articles:
* Refugee Protection and Fundamental Values, Rudd Lubbers, pp. 20-22 http://www3.oup.co.uk/refqtl/hdb/Volume_21/Issue_03/210020.sgm.abs.html
* Terrorism and Emergency Humanitarian Action, Yves Sandoz, pp. 33-44 http://www3.oup.co.uk/refqtl/hdb/Volume_21/Issue_03/210033.sgm.abs.html
* The Challenge of Humanitarian Values: Refugee Protection and Humanitarian Values, Stéphane Jaquemet, pp. 111-112 http://www3.oup.co.uk/refqtl/hdb/Volume_21/Issue_03/210111.sgm.abs.html

A Geneva-based NGO has called on Angolan authorities to step up protection for the vast number of displaced people returning to their areas of origin since the end of the civil war last year. In a new report, the Global IDP Project, which monitors war and displacement, said many returning Angolans faced ongoing human rights abuses and grim humanitarian conditions.

The United Nigeria Peoples Party (UNPP) chairman in Anambra State, Chief Joseph Ofia Diulu Okonkwo has said that his party will support wholeheartedly any coalition arrangement his party may enter into with other registered parties to dislodge the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) from power.

The Civil Society Movement of Liberia has warned that renewed armed hostilities between rebels of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) and government troops in the west of the country threatens to mar planned peace talks.

In recent international debate around Iraq and the dismantling of weapons of mass destruction, South Africa has been cited frequently as an exemplary case in nuclear disarmament. Local media have been quick to pick up on the issue, and we have been treated to interviews with FW de Klerk, Pik Botha and others about the Apartheid state’s secretly built nuclear arsenal and it’s dismantling in the early 1990s.

This posting from Africa Action contains a media statement and additional background from the Apartheid Debt and Reparations Campaign of Jubilee 2000 South Africa, on a new suit filed in New York Eastern District Court against international corporations and banks for reparations for their complicity in aiding and abetting apartheid. This builds on the original suit filed last November, with the same defendants but adding additional plaintiffs.

A Rwandan government delegation is in Tanzania to brief Rwandan refugees on voluntary repatriation, government-owned Radio Rwanda reported on Friday. It said the delegates were in the Ngara and Kibondo districts in the northwestern Kagera Region, where about 2,600 Rwandans are living in refugee camps.

Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from Bozoum (384 km northwest of the capital, Bangui) have started going home after government and allied forces recaptured the town on 13 February, government-owned Radio Centrafrique reported on 22 February.

Faction leaders attending the Somali peace talks in Kenya have condemned the slow pace of the conference and accused Somalia's neighbours - the so-called frontline states - of working for their own interests. A statement, signed by 11 faction leaders, blamed "continuous contradictions, differences and misunderstandings" between the three frontline states - Kenya, Djibouti and Ethiopia - for the "very slow progress of the process".

The Ethiopian government has identified a new camp for Sudanese refugees in the country after over 100 Sudanese were killed in violent ethnic attacks over the last five months.