Forcible repatriations from Rwanda of Tutsi refugees who fled from northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1990s to escape ethnic persecution appear to have ceased, Ron Mponda, the deputy representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Rwanda, told IRIN.

Scores of people have died in central Nigeria’s Plateau State in a series of raids by bandits and clashes between farmers and herders, residents and officials said.

Outgoing Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi on Friday dissolved the country's parliament, effectively signalling his plans to call general elections before the end of the year. The elections will mark the end of Moi's 24 year rule.

Military chiefs from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) held a closed door meeting on Friday in Abidjan to plan the deployment of a regional ceasefire-monitoring force.

Zimbabwe's opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) alleged on Sunday that voters in a key southwestern by-election have been bribed with food and intimidated into voting for the ruling party. Voters in the poor, famine-hit rural district of Insiza were told "they will be given maize only if the Zanu PF candidate wins," the MDC claimed in a statement.
Related Link:
MDC Election agents purged
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Negotiations are on a good track between the Lesotho Clothing and Allied Workers Union and the Exporters Association of Lesotho, despite earlier threats of a call for an industrial action.

An initial 3 months contract is offered with the possibility of an extension for a further 6 -9 months. SCUK's work in the Ivory Coast to date has been born out of the wider Mano River union (Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia) emergency and is interlinked with the organisation's programme in Liberia, being most recently established since 1999. The main focus of the work has been in the Refugee Zone in the West of the country, implementing a child protection programme in refugee camps and local communities.

Oxfam Great Britain is an International NGO working with others to find lasting solutions to poverty and suffering. Oxfam GB has supported a programme in Rwanda since the 1970s and is currently operating in the Northwest and Northeast of the country. The head office, which serves as the main support to the programme, is based in Kigali.

President Sam Nujoma attended a one-day post-war summit of allies of the Democratic Republic of Congo in Kinshasa. The president met with DRC leader Joseph Kabila, Angola's Jose Eduardo dos Santos and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe to review the way forward.

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has deplored the recent recommendation by a five-member military tribunal that editor Hassan Bility, who has been detained since June 24, be treated as a "prisoner of war."

The World Food Programme (WFP) said last Friday it was "very concerned" over a decision by the Angolan government to close all reception areas of former UNITA rebels and their families by the end of the year.

Amnesty International is urging the Cameroonian authorities to immediately release Albert Mukong, a former executive director of the Human Rights Defence Group (HRDG) and a reputable human rights defender, who was arrested on 28 September by the gendarmerie at Ayukaba, in South West Province.

Warring factions and the transitional government (TNG) in Somalia have signed a ceasefire deal aimed at bringing more than a decade of fighting and anarchy to an end, foreign mediators have said.

War, fire, logging and agriculture are taking a heavy toll on Africa's mountain regions, says the Nairobi-based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

An independent commission has called for the return to their homes of thousands of people displaced by violent clashes around the time of Kenya's last two general elections, in 1992 and 1997.

* Creating regional co-operation, stability, security and peace in the Horn of Africa involves re-appropriating and re-defining the state, civil society and market nexus of the region in order to create enduring institutional arrangements capable of self-correction, learning, self-reliance and innovation, argues this paper, presented at a conference entitled 'Horn of Africa: Cooperation instead of Wars and Destruction', held in Lund, Sweden between May 11-12 2002 and organised by the Somalia International Rehabilitation Centre. *

Civil society is neither good and peaceful nor violent and bad. It is neither all democratic nor all despotic. The concept is a generic term for containing and including every variety of association: grassroots organisations, civility expressing organisations, independent organisations, associational organisations, private organisations, private voluntary organisations, community based organisations and non-governmental and quasi- non governmental organisations. All those associations that are neither wholly market guided nor all state guided fall in the civil society sphere. Civil society is an old idea made newer by so- called third wave democratisation and the contemporary realities of a post cold war world. Its revival owes to the emergence of a globalising agenda driven largely by donor finance that dominates the world's intellectual, political and moral space and vision.

Civil society became popular after globalisation had fully discredited the planning state (e.g. former Soviet Union states) and the interventionist state (e.g. the Keynesian welfare state in the western states) in favour of a minimalist role of the state in the economy (the liberal state). It appears that globalisation and democratisation have changed world politics and economics in favour of the rich, markets, corporations, private finance or speculative capital, and against the poor, the state, trade unions and even non-financial capital. If state action cannot deliver better possibilities, it is said civil society, and non-profit making voluntary sectors, and community based organisations and other social networks and NGOs may step in. The role of NGOs is also related to helping reduce the most unacceptable side of the mainly economic driven globalising logic. It is this international context of globalisation that explains the emergence of the current interest and development on civil society. There is thus much value in identifying the ideological contamination of this concept from the current go-go globalisation and the rhetoric of democratisation in order to distil and rescue the role of civil society in development, peace- making, and in fostering security and long-term co-operation.

There are some important indicators that are necessary but not sufficient to measure the contribution of civil society in fostering co-operation, stability, security and peace building in the Horn of Africa area:

- Spreading a culture of civility as a counter weight to war and violence;
- Institutionalising a culture of service by community based self-organisations to counter rampant poverty and inequalities;
- Spreading ethics and moral sense as a civic culture and virtue in order to overcome prevailing social interchanges marred by violence, deception, force and blackmail;
- Creating a new standard for cultivating self-aware citizens at all levels to foster long-term co-operation, security, stability and peace in the region.

The question is whether the current array or constellation of civil society associations, communities and organisations as they are evolving and persisting to exist in the region contribute to civility and civilisation or war, poverty and discord. There is an assumption that creating and spreading these associational forms will strengthen civility, co-operation and peace. There is an equal assumption that market and state failures make the latter the least attractive candidates as agencies for civilised co-operation and peace. This benign approach to civil society and uncharitable approach to markets and the state should not be taken at face value. For example, in Somalia with the disintegration of the state, civil society has become the source for the perpetuation of unending horizontal violence. Armed civilians in the context of conflict can be as lethal as militaries. The civil action that is violent should not be criminalized if the objective is to end all violence and transform chaos and incoherence with social transformation underpinned by notions of justice and equity.

Thus taken by themselves, none of the institutional actors representing markets, civil society and the state are, a priori, innocent or guilty. The context of their existence and persistence matters in identifying the social content of their occurrences in time and space co-ordinates. They are all complex organisms. They all have their own specific functions and problems. They can do different things differently. As a heterogeneous and complex sphere, civil society too can be a factor of discord and violence. There is in fact military civil society operating as a transitional network at present that has alarmed the hyper power of our time to declare the world disposition of political forces into those with the hyper power or the rest. Civil society has to be scrutinized and re-conceptualised first before we admit that it can be a factor for peace and co-operation in the region.

Despite the withdrawal of foreign forces from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), "elite criminal networks" have become so deeply entrenched that continued illegal exploitation of the country's natural resources is assured, independent of the physical presence of foreign armies, said the latest report from the United Nations Panel of Experts on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth of the DRC.

Sudan has reacted angrily to a US resolution that threatens sanctions if the Khartoum government does not negotiate in good faith to end the country's 19-year-old civil war.

Five thousand refugees from Meheba refugee camp in Solwezi have gone back to Angola following the signing of the peace accord in that country in September.

As warlords, faction leaders, members of the Transitional National Government and others gather in the western Kenyan town of Eldoret for "make-or-break" peace talks, a small group of "alternative" invitees is slowly making its voice heard.