President John Agyekum Kufuor has appointed 11-member committees to run the affairs of six Dagbon districts in northern Ghana, where a state of emergency has been in force since the murder of the Dagbon king, Ya-Na Yakubu Andani, in March.

Senegal abandoned the recovery of victims from the MS Joola Tuesday, with only 80 of at least 970 identified — saying its next step might be to sink the doomed ferry together with its dead to the Atlantic Ocean floor. Senegal's government suffered its first backlash Tuesday for Africa's deadliest ferry disaster ever, with Cabinet ministers for the armed forces and transport resigning.

Rwanda has withdrawn many of its forces from the Democratic Republic of Congo under a fragile peace deal to end four years of war in central Africa. The remaining few thousand troops are due to leave this month.

Nearly 900 Burundians have fled to neighbouring Tanzania in recent days, with more expected to follow amid reports of heightened fighting, house burning and the killing of civilians in the strife-torn country.

The conflict that has gripped this country for almost two weeks has its source in xenophobic policies unleashed nine years ago by the death of Felix Houphouet-Boigny.
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Those who forced children and their families from their homes, used children as child soldiers and refused humanitarian access to children enjoyed continued impunity, said United Nations Executive Director Carol Bellamy in a speech to the 53rd Session of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. “In refugee and IDP camps all over the world, girls and boys are spending their most developmentally crucial years in conditions of almost unimaginable misery and squalor,” she said.

The "pressure is still on" for Congolese refugees in Rwanda's Gihembe camp to go home, the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported on Friday. Teenage boys in the camp said they were afraid to return to their homeland, because they knew they would be conscripted into rebel forces in eastern DRC.

The withdrawal of foreign forces from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been applauded by Zambia, but the southern neighbour is also worried by the instability that could follow. "There are still some clashes here and there ...That causes concern for us, as when affected people start running, the first place they end up is Zambia," a government official explained.

The United Nations refugee agency has reported that it is "desperately" looking for new sites to house refugees who have been forced from their homes by recent violence in Abidjan, the main commercial city of Cote d'Ivoire.

Fourteen individual plaintiffs filed a class action suit against Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport, plc, on September 20 for alleged human rights abuses in Ogoniland, Nigeria. The complaint, filed by Philadelphia-based class action law firm Berger & Montague, uses the federal Alien Tort Claims Act to charge violations of customary international law relating to Shell's oil operations in Ogoniland, an area north of the Niger delta in southeast Nigeria.

The rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) has offered to suspend military actions during peace negotiations, which have been stalled since government negotiators walked out three weeks ago.

Two incidents have occurred involving the Guinean army and armed assailants in Nzerekore, near the border with Liberia, amid reports that the situation at the border is getting increasingly tense.

About 570,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) have resettled or returned to their areas of origin in Angola over the past five months, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its latest situation report.

As two days of polling in local council elections in rural areas of Zimbabwe drew to a close on Sunday, the main opposition party disputed the legitimacy of the vote, saying government opponents had been subjected to ongoing violence and intimidation.
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Sudan must revoke a relief flight ban announced on September 26 to prevent a humanitarian crisis from becoming a famine, Human Rights Watch has said. The ban covers all relief flights and vehicles into southern Sudan from the main relief bases in Kenya and Uganda.

Bilateral relations between Sudan and Uganda have not been threatened by an incident this week in which Sudanese military planes bombed a Ugandan military detachment in southern Sudan, a Sudanese diplomat has said.

The South African government on
Thursday denied media reports that the Burundi cease-fire
negotiations underway in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, have collapsed.

The US Committee for refugees has written to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers to discuss the refugee situation in Ghana and to inform the High Commissioner of the current condition of UNHCR programs and of the formidable challenges before the agency.

In Rwanda in 1994, rapid population growth and extreme environmental degradation were closely linked to the outbreak of genocidal violence, reports James Gasana in an article in the September/October issue of World Watch magazine. Gasana was Rwanda's Minister of Agriculture and Environment in 1990-92, and Minister of Defense in 1992-93. While serving in the government, he collected statistics, which show that the conflict had much more complex roots than just deep ethnic hatred.

Due to the UN Security Council’s inaction on Liberia, the Liberian timber industry remains a primary source of funding for Liberia’s war machine. Many logging companies continue to be actively engaged in illegal arms imports for the government, committing human rights abuses and destabilising Liberia and the entire West Africa sub-region. A new Global Witness report, titled Logging Off: How the Liberian Timber industry fuels Liberia’s humanitarian disaster and threatens Sierra Leone, exposes the direct links between Liberia’s timber industry and the conflict.