Wednesday is the day the United Nations Security Council threatened to impose a second wave of sanctions on anyone obstructing Cote d'Ivoire's peace process. But will the travel bans and asset freezes be forthcoming?Algerian ambassador Abdallah Baali, the Security Council president for December, seemed to hint on Monday that the UN might wait and give a recent peace drive by South African President Thabo Mbeki time to bear fruit.

Armando Emilio Guebuza of Mozambique's ruling FRELIMO party is heading for a landslide victory in the recent presidential polls, if the results published so far are to be believed. A coalition of twenty opposition parties however says they are a result of massive fraud and demands fresh elections. The preliminary results from six out of Mozambique's ten provinces have already been published. According to the National Electoral Commission, FRELIMO candidate Guebuza received about 70 percent of the vote in these provinces.

The World Bank has urged Madagascar to begin developing a controversial titanium mine with mining giant Rio Tinto, saying it would help alleviate poverty. Friends of the Earth say the project would dredge millions of tons of mineral sands along a 6 000ha strip to extract the mineral, devastating forests, endangering rare wildlife, and affecting 360 000 inhabitants.

For the international community to intervene decisively in a particular conflict, it is always better if a clear picture of good guys and bad guys can emerge. Anything less and the world dithers. Most decision-makers take an 'innocent until proven guilty' approach to ruling parties and rebels.

Unfortunately, it is not always possible to give easy answers. At times, all the protagonists are unfit to rule. What can the international community do then? That is the fundamental problem in Côte d'Ivoire today.

Until last month, an uneasy ceasefire held between the government and rebel troops, who seized the northern half of the country in 2002. Despite the presence of UN peacekeeping troops the Ivorian government broke the détente by bombing rebel positions. In the process, nine French soldiers and an American aid worker were killed. In retaliation, the French army destroyed most of the Ivorian air force.

Recently, the UN Security Council imposed an arms embargo, a welcome first step but not enough to end the cycle of violence in what was once regarded as the most stable country in a very unstable region. Before mediators can find a solution, they must understand the depth and complexity of the country's leadership crisis.

The present crisis began to take shape in 1993, when the country's first president, Felix Houphoüet-Boigny, died after 33 years in power. Under his reign, Côte d'Ivoire became the most advanced economy in West Africa. As the world's top cocoa producer, the country was able to afford a modern capital and an impressive network of roads. Foreign investment and a policy welcoming migrant labour from neighbouring countries were part of the country's success story.

During the boom years, millions of economic migrants from all over West Africa settled permanently in Côte d'Ivoire. With time they acquired Ivorian citizenship and their children were born in the country.

By the time Houphoüet-Boigny died, Côte d'Ivoire was on the verge of implosion. The winds of democratisation were sweeping Africa. Prices for the nation's major crops, cocoa and coffee, were dropping, the currency, the CFA franc, was devalued. National debt had risen to unsustainable levels and unrest gripped the country.

Former finance minister Henri Konan Bédié succeeded Houphoüet-Boigny. To bolster his power base and exclude rivals from contesting for power, Bédié promoted a new concept of 'Ivoirité' (Ivorian-ness), which sought to distinguish between 'real' Ivorian citizens and foreigners.

Hidden behind this question was the issue of land ownership, entitlement to what was left of the riches of the country and access to political power. Due to their geographical proximity and cultural links to countries such as Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea, the burden rested (and still rests) on people from the northern part of Côte d'Ivoire to prove that they are not foreigners. In the past few years identity cards have been denied to a lot of people on the basis of their Malinké sounding names. Consequently, during the last elections a substantial number of northerners were disenfranchised.

Alassane Ouattara became the flashpoint of this politics of exclusion. He draws much of his support from the north. He served as prime minister in Houphouët's last government and was, with Gbagbo, the most popular rival to Bédié. Being a Muslim of Burkina Faso descent, Ouattara's Ivorian citizenship has been contested by Bedié and Gbagbo's governments. This has effectively barred him from being a presidential candidate.

In December 1999, Gen. Robert Guéi toppled Konan Bédié in a coup d'état. Despite promises to the contrary, Guéi stood as a candidate in elections that also barred Ouattara from participation. Guéi declared himself the winner, but was forced to flee by popular uprising. Laurent Gbagbo, long an opponent of Houphouët's ruling party, took power as the presumed winner of that flawed election. Ouattara called for fresh elections, but Gbagbo refused. Fighting erupted between Gbagbo and Ouattara supporters.

Instead of conciliation, Gbagbo continued to stir ethnic division. He financed and armed the Young Patriots, a party militia that has staged violent demonstrations, attacked foreigners and is accused of extra-judicial killings of opposition party organisers.

Within two years, rebel soldiers from the north rose against his government and succeeded in cutting the country in two. Rapid deployment of French troops stalled the conflict, but neither side has shown willingness to compromise. Both sides have broken the Marcoussis peace accord brokered by the French as well as the Accra II and III agreements. Gbagbo continued to re-arm and failed to follow through on pledges to reform electoral and citizenship laws.

French troops and political pressure were without doubt instrumental in stopping all-out civil war. But as the former colonial power, France does not have the profile of a neutral party. Through state media propaganda, Gbagbo effectively used the destruction of the nation's small air force in November to whip up anti-French sentiment among the population and divert international attention from his abrupt violation of the cease-fire.

Left alone, the country will return to war, which will have devastating consequences for the region. Fresh elections are necessary, but many issues must be settled first.

Given their track record, it seems unlikely that either Gbagbo or Guillaume Soro of the rebel forces will lay down their arms unless the international community imposes its will. Elections must be organised by a body that is broadly accepted as neutral but is forceful enough to insist on fair play. Unless the elections are free and fair, the conflict will start again.

Ouattara and Bédié are planning to join forces and contest the elections together, with Bédié running as president and Ouattara as prime minister. Bédié pledged to serve only one term and hand over to Ouattara. An alliance between Ouattara and Bédié, a Christian, is capable of defeating Gbagbo in a fair vote and would help diffuse the threat that southern Christians perceive from a northern Muslim running the country.

The first step to effective outside mediation is recognising the extent to which all players have acted in bad faith so far. Grand corruption went unchecked under Bédié, who celebrated his outrageous fortune with champagne and caviar. He also fathered the present politics of exclusion. Gbagbo has stirred ethnic tension, continually delayed implementation of the peace accords, unleashed the violent Young Patriots and pumped out hate speech on state media. He is not committed to a diplomatic resolution of the crisis. As for Ouattara, although he could have diffused tensions and relinquished control of his party to someone with less problematic nationality, he led his party to boycott elections even though this was a bad political move.

The northern rebel forces, who remain tainted for having tried to violently seize power, have no political experience or party organisation able to assume leadership. Moreover, the government has accused them of being backed militarily by Burkina Faso.

Given this background, the best option would be to bar Gbagbo, Bédié, Ouattara and Soro from politics. Indeed, judging from previous actions, Gbagbo's government will try everything to prevent the elections from taking place in the face of the Bedié-Ouattara alliance or will simply bar Bédié from being a candidate.

An interim government must therefore take over and lead the country to internationally supervised elections.

* Véronique Tadjo is a writer and artist from Côte d'Ivoire. A former lecturer at the University of Abidjan and author, her latest novel, Reine Pokou, will appear next March in Paris. This article was first published in e-Africa, an electronic journal published by The South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). It is reproduced here with permission of SAIIA. (http://www.saiia.org.za/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&s…)

* Please send comments to [email protected]

This report from the Consortium for Street Children looks at the situation of Kenyan street children in general and those in conflict with the law in particular. It examines the status of the Kenyan juvenile justice system and the reasons behind children ending up in the street as well as the offences they commonly commit/are accused of committing. Whilst the study explores the socio-cultural factors behind the commission of crimes, it also features children's resilience.

The end of a devastating civil war and substantial oil wealth have done little to develop Angola or improve the lives of its 13 million people, the head of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said on Tuesday. Speaking at the Angolan launch of the UNDP Human Development Report for 2004, where Angola ranks a poor 166th out of 177 countries, Pierre-Francois Pirlot told IRIN that three years of peace had still to bring significant benefits, particularly outside the capital and more prosperous coastal areas.

I've been trying to get the authorities here for suggestions and/or to take some kind of action regarding this matter but have not had any practical feedback from anybody, yet.

There are some doctors and nurses belonging to the community who perform this these days and because it is such a close-knit community, it's very difficult to catch the perpetrators or the parents/guardians who take their little girls of between 5 and 6 years to them.

The Kenyan organizations who deal with this matter and to whom I've written have offered to take no action, unfortunately. They all want somebody to volunteer (including the police), to plant a trap to catch them red-handed. I wouldn't personally have minded doing this if I had a daughter, but I don't.

So, what other alternative does one have in the circumstances? Because if nothing is done, this practice will continue, ad infinitum, and the poor little girls continue to suffer and ironically they themselves will practice it on their daughters when the time comes.

Any suggestions on what to do?

I agree with you entirely on this issue (Pan-African Postcard: Gluttons who vomit on shoes, 29 July 2004). I just wanted to say that this British High Commissioner is serving a country where pirates and thieves of the worst sort are worshiped as national heroes. This tells you everything about his lot.

Talk about gluttons, do they Europeans ever get satisfied with anything? They want to possess and control the whole world. And to think they are our “donors”: is Western Europe still not more dependent on Afrika than the reverse?

That British High Commissioner will never say one bit against his own country, where corruption is institutional. I have always pointed out the fact that in a place like “Cameroon” where I hail from, it is not really corruption when a policeman demands money in return for a favor or not; it is an exercise or abuse of power or position. But in a place like Western Europe where you find MPs sitting on the board of directors and where contracts are only awarded after heavy bribery, you will never hear them talk of corruption. And then Transparency International will come up with Cameroon as being the most corrupt country on earth. Ridiculous!

I see it as a relentless effort to control us by controlling our minds. And we are made to believe that we can only achieve progress if we stop the corruption, engage in voting for fools and so on. What nonsense! We Afrikans have to understand what the main issue is. We have to understand what it means to redefine ourselves after the long period of devastation through foreign involvement in our business.

They even go as far as choosing Mandela as Afrikan president of the century and Mugabe as the worst. And so the former is given red carpet treatment all over Europe and the later gets a hell of a whipping from the international imperialist press. But the Afrikan youths must understand that the President who addresses the land question (which is a very pressing issue) best is automatically the president of the decade or century. We have to understand basically that we live on what comes out of the land not on elections. First things first!

We have to be very critical in our thinking. We have to assess all these NGOs all over Afrika being financed from abroad. What a thing! Our governments are forced to cut down expenditure on vital domains like education and health care. At the same time NGOs are encouraged to carry out functions which only the state can carry out most effectively.

Talk about women’s rights: Can you separate women’s rights from human rights? And who came up with this? The World Bank! Can you imagine? And now our educated women go about repeating this without analyzing further. Don’t get me wrong. I oppose the maltreatment of women. I would be a bastard not to respect women. But a European male cannot educate me on women’s rights. Let him do his homework first.

I will not only say what displeases me without trying to suggest a solution. I think we need some serious education, not to be confused with literacy. Education is the ability to link one with his environment and literacy can serve as a very effective tool. This means that education has to start with historical knowledge, because it is history which teaches us about our background. A very central point in this is our cultural history.

Every time I see a black woman say she is a feminist I feel like crying. If she understood Afrikan history she wouldn’t say a thing like that. I am very much aware of the weakening of the central position of the Afrikan woman in society above all after the transatlantic slave trade period. We have to go beyond signing petitions on women’s rights, which seems to deviate our attention from the real issue, which is Afrikan liberation. You cannot talk about the rights of women in a society living in slavery.

We have to deal critically with issues like bearing European and Arab names and fooling ourselves that these are religious names. You find Afrikans using names like Peter, Paul, Mary, Linda and so on. What a shame! A name stands for an identity. Pambazuka the name of this site is an Afrikan word and means much. We should get out of the way if we cannot call ourselves like Afrikans should. We have to deal with foreign religions and the role they play in our underdevelopment. These are very pressing issues to be dealt with.

The Sister Eno Deborah Anwana wrote a well-researched article “Taking control of Africa’s resources”. I was a bit irritated by the last sentence mentioning the promotion of the African Union through NEPAD. I always thought the AU was an Afrikan creation and that the NEPAD was another initiative from the imperialist West to undermine the AU. Maybe she could inform me more on the issue.

I must say your website is well organized. I would like to know about your goals and aims.

Very often I have found that we Afrikans are very interested in moving forward whilst neglecting our past. We have to understand that we need to study the past in order to design the future. It is only when we understand this that we shall learn to stop imitating people who are imitating us. We should learn about people who tried to organize Afrikan communities all over the world. Our goal should be to create a synthesis of all Afrikan peoples at home and abroad. And we on the Afrikan continent have to understand basically that we are directly responsible for the well-being of Afrikans worldwide. When I write of Afrikans worldwide I mean each and every Blackman on this planet. In the past the Pan-Afrikan impulse came more from the Afrikans born abroad; this has to be equaled by those born on the mother continent. We on the mother continent should try to reach the others outside. The Afrikan Union will only succeed and be complete if we bear this in mind. We must remember that the Pan-Afrikan idea, which led to the creation of the OAU (AU) sprang up from the Caribics and evolved as a 3-way exchange between Afrikans in the Caribics, the American mainland and Afrika. Maybe this could serve as an impulse for your website.

Maybe you could also deal with the fact that we should learn about those leaders who tried to organize Afrikan peoples like the great Chaka Zulu, Nzinga, Marcus Garvey, Nkrumah, a.o. and also on prominent historians like the late great John Henrik Clarke, Dr. Ben, Cheikh Anta Diop, Theophile Obenga and the great Ivan van Sertima, a.o.

Continue with the good work.

Swaziland's King Mswati has bought a $500,000 (£260,000) luxury car. Reports of the absolute monarch's latest purchase contrast with accounts of suffering in Swaziland, which has the highest Aids rate in the world. The Maybach car has a television, DVD player, 21-speaker surround-sound system, fridge, cordless telephone and sterling silver champagne flutes.

International Anti-Corruption Day, held last Thursday, may well have struck a particular chord with South Africans this year. The country is currently witnessing a high-profile corruption case, which is being held in the eastern port city of Durban. The trial involves flamboyant businessman Schabir Shaikh, who is accused of paying over 180,000 dollars to Vice-President Jacob Zuma in return for having the latter promote his business interests. Although Zuma himself is not in the dock, media interest in the proceedings has been intense, (the trial began in October).

"I have few expectations of Tony Blair's Commission on Africa. We do not need another commission to look at Africa's problems," writes Yao Graham, co-ordinator of Third World Network-Africa, based in Accra, Ghana, in The Guardian UK. "The archives of the United Nations, African institutions and many other bodies are bulging with reports and proposals on how to resolve the world's north-south divide. There are many international agreements that have been frustrated by western governments and corporations. And, more importantly, African governments have come up with many demands, in forums such as the World Trade Organisation, which have been blocked by western governments, including the UK under Blair."

With an unprecedented number of repatriation operations underway in Africa, the United Nations refugee agency has launched a $1.1 billion appeal, nearly $100 million more than in 2004, to fund its work for next year to care for some 17 million refugees and other people worldwide. “While we are providing assistance to over 1 million returnees, for millions of others hope is still remote,” Mr. Lubbers noted.

The leader of the Central African Republic (CAR), Francois Bozize, announced on Saturday he would contest presidential elections due to be held in January 2005 as an independent candidate. Bozize, a former army chief of staff, took power on 15 March 2003 when he ousted President Ange-Felix Patasse after leading a six-month rebellion. About a month later, he said would not seek election as president. On Saturday, however, Bozize said: "After thinking thoroughly, and being deeply convinced and keeping in mind the nation's interest, I grasped the deep sense of my people's calls. As a citizen, I'll take my responsibility."

Paul Biya, Cameroon’s president for 22 years and fresh from re-election, has named a trusty aide as the new prime minister and brought a few new faces into government. Ephraim Inoni, a 57-year-old English-speaking financier who has served as a top presidential aide for the last ten years, was appointed to take over as premier from fellow anglophone, Peter Mafany Musonge, national radio announced last week.

A top adviser for the New Partnership for Africa's Development has been implicated in a multimillion-rand bribery scandal. It is alleged that Reatile Mochebelele, the Midrand-based adviser to Nepad on water affairs and sanitation, was paid to secure contracts for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. He has been named by the government of Lesotho as the recipient of more than DM1 million (about R3.9 million) in bribes during his tenure as the chief delegate of the government of Lesotho on the Highlands Water Commission from 1996 to 1999.

After a decade of civil war, Burundi has a chance for real peace but only if it holds to its tight election schedule - five months with a constitutional referendum, local, national assembly and senate elections, and finally selection of the president by parliament. The sequence is ambitious but necessary to finalise a difficult peace process, says the International Crisis Group in a new report, available in French from their website.
* Related Link: New delay to Burundi referendum
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4095961.stm

Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa has instructed his lawyers to sue opposition Patriotic Front leader Michael Sata for defaming him as corrupt, the official Zambia Daily Mail said on Sunday. Darlington Mwape, the president's special assistant for legal affairs, was quoted as saying that Sata has defamed the president by alleging that he is corrupt. A statement issued by Mwape Saturday said Sata had alleged on Radio Icengelo that the president had acquired eight farms and equipped them with combine harvesters and tractors since he came into office in early 2002.

Kenya's government has missed its best chance to stamp out rampant corruption and faces a tough task to regain credibility, Transparency International (TI) said last Thursday, International Anti-Corruption Day. More than half of Kenyans do not think graft is decreasing, TI Kenya executive director Gladwell Otieno said. "The political class's dismal performance over the past two years has resulted in a highly negative perception by Kenyans," Otieno said at a news conference launching TI's Global Corruption Barometer survey.

"The National Association of Non Governmental Organizations, representing over 1000 NGOs in Zimbabwe, would like to state that the NGO bill is unacceptable to the NGO community. NANGO is disappointed that many of the amendments that had been submitted by NGOs to Government and Parliament were out rightly rejected. It is therefore difficult to envisage how NGOs are expected to comply under the new law given the restrictions placed on every part of their work. Various clauses in the NGO Bill will result in the shutting down of the majority of NGOs. For example under the proposed NGO Law [Non Governmental Organisations Bill-H.B.13, 2004], NGOs will not be allowed to receive foreign funding for activities that include the promotion and protection of human rights and issues of governance. This therefore threatens the work of NGOs, given that there is no local funding. Even the recently presented 2005 Budget estimates have not shown significant contributions to welfare organisations. The work that NGOs do in the promotion and protection of human rights include:- Child Rights; Women’s Rights; Rights of people living with HIV and AIDS; Rights of people with disabilities; Freedom of expression, association and assembly, and the Right to development." Click on the link below for statements from a range of Zimbabwean human rights groups.

The African Union (AU) has voted for a fourfold increase in its budget, but cuts still have to be made to some programmes. Among areas that have been put on hold until next year is the continent-wide, anti-poverty blueprint – the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad). The AU had wanted $200 million a year to finance Nepad – in areas like road and bridge building - then cut that figure to $30 million before it was shelved. The current AU budget is $43 million, but only $27 million has been paid up.