The Eritrean government is to demobilise 5,000 soldiers this week as part of a pilot project, the head of the National Commission for Demobilisation (NCD) said.

The rebel Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) has dismissed "as a joke" the power-sharing agreement signed on 19 April between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) government, the rebel Mouvement pour la liberation du Congo (MLC) and members of the unarmed opposition and civil society at the end of the inter-Congolese dialogue (ICD), the BBC reported.

Liberian refugees fleeing to Guinea are in extremely poor physical condition and up to 20 percent of them suffer from malnutrition, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees reported on Tuesday.

Combat between government forces, assisted by Angolan forces, and the "Ninja" militias of Rev Frederic Bitsangou (alias Ntoumi) is continuing in various locations of Pool region, and the number of displaced and affected persons in the interior appears to be rising, humanitarian sources in the Republic of Congo (ROC) reported on Sunday.

This weekend, the US will attempt to kill off the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the multilateral body with responsibility for enforcing the Chemical Weapons Convention. In what the activist George Monbiot, in this week’s UK Guardian describes as an international coup, the US this Sunday will finally seek to oust the director-general of the OPCW, a Brazilian called Jose Bustani, after a sustained campaign over the last few months to get Bustani to resign.

Bustani’s record at the OPCW, Monbiot points out, is exemplary. In the five years he has been in the post, two million chemical weapons and two thirds of the world’s chemical weapons facilities have been destroyed; and the number of state signatories to the Convention has risen from 87 to 145. So successful has Bustani been that last year he was unanimously re-elected to the job by member states, and even received a plaudit from Colin Powell over his “very impressive” work. Yet, since January 2002 he has faced charges from the US State Department of ‘financial mismanagement’, ‘demoralisation of his staff’ and, more tellingly, ‘bias’ and ‘ill considered initiatives’.

After failing in March to carry a vote of no confidence in Bustani, the US have finally taken the gloves off. In direct contravention of the Convention, they have called for a ‘special session’ of member states this weekend where they will try and get rid of him, by using familiar US tactics: threatening to withdraw funds unless other member states support them. Monbiot reports Bustani as saying that the Europeans are so scared the US will abandon the Convention they are likely to support US demands, which means the only effective resistance to the US move would come from the UK government. Given Blair’s increasingly sycophantic relationship with Bush, this seems implausible, which means the US are likely to get their way.

US dissatisfaction with Bustani is twofold. First, they are unhappy with the impartiality with which the OPCW examines facilities. Just like Iraq, the US has refused to accept inspectors from countries it considers hostile, and has controlled access to sites to those inspectors it has let in. Perhaps more significantly, it does not want Bustani to succeed in getting Saddam to sign up to the Convention - something Bustani believes is achievable with UN Security Council backing – because Bustani’s success would take away their only excuse for war on Iraq. In Monbiot’s words, “Bustani must go because he has proposed a solution to a problem the US does not want solved”.

As Jim Lobe and Tom Barry point out in a recent edition of Foreign Policy in Focus, the US are increasingly willing to abandon four decades of multilateralism in foreign policy in favour of a self interested ideology that is being driven by fundamentalist right wing think tanks like The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who have extremely powerful allies within the administration such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and his chief deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.. Such a fundamentalist vision is driven by several core beliefs that include: an almost messianic belief that the US and Israel are the same and face the same enemy; that the PLO is a terrorist organisation and need not be negotiated with; that the war against terror will not be completed until Saddam Hussien has been politically – and like members of Al Qeada probably literally – destroyed; and that diplomacy and moderation have no role in this new world vision.

It is bad enough that the US administration should exercise such double standards, hypocrisy and corruption when it comes to any form of multilateral agreement they do not wish to abide by. As Monbiot says, their attempt to oust Bustani and close down the OPCW means that no multilateral organisation is safe from US bullying. But what is even more worrying is that the US should use such lawless tactics to overtly and actively court the destabilisation of the Middle Eastern region in the name of a fundamentalist agenda. This abandonment of multilateralism means, not only that no organisation is safe from the long reach of US influence – wherever in the world they are based, but that such an agenda should be used to promote regional war, with its own potentially devastating global implications.

George Monbiot: A War Against the Peacemaker:

U.S. Middle East Policy: "Enough is Enough":
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0204pnac.html

The associate provides critical administrative and clerical assistance to the Arms Division, including: information management, maintenance of files, formatting reports for publication, production assistance for press releases, official letters and mass mailings, maintaining communication among HRW's domestic and international offices, responding to requests for information, tracking advisory committee matters, preparing for staff and advisory committee meetings, drafting and editing correspondence, managing web page content, arranging travel, recruiting and supervising interns, coordinating the hiring process for and training of new staff, recording departmental finances, taking minutes at meetings, word processing, photocopying, filing, faxing, answering phones, and processing incoming mail. The associate will primarily provide assistance to the Arms Division's work on landmines.

SC UK is currently working with the government of Angola to establish, manage and implement a national family tracing and reunification programme(FTRP). In this role you will report to the Social Welfare and Protection Manager and be responsible for boosting emergency preparedness and responding to the new crisis in SC UK's family tracing and reunification work.

The divide between Africa and the West never seemed wider than after Zimbabwe's recent election. As Western governments condemned President Robert Mugabe, African presidents - all except one - rallied behind him or greeted his stolen victory with silence. The critical voice belonged to Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, who was elected president two years ago in this West African nation after struggling in the opposition for 26 years.

In his book We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, Phillip Gourevitch quotes an American military intelligence officer he met in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, who equates genocide to "a cheese sandwich" and the Genocide Convention to something that "makes a nice wrapping for a cheese sandwich." The military officer is a non-Rwandan genocide denier, who refuses to admit that a crime against humanity was committed in Rwanda. Sadly, there are many like him, among them Rwandans.

A senior Kenyan cabinet minister has asked the Ogiek and Maasai tribes who were being evicted from Enoosopukia in the Narok District in southwestern Kenya to defy the order.

Wouter Basson’s acquittal on a host of most horrendous charges in the Pretoria High Court is a shameful day for truth and justice in post apartheid South Africa, Jubilee South Africa said in a statement.

Last week's convergence around a set of proposals from South African President Thabo Mbeki seemed in danger of falling apart on Monday when a plenary session of the inter-Congolese dialogue (ICD) failed to take place, then postponed until the following day. Meanwhile, the parties to the dialogue have submitted to the facilitators of the dialogue objections and counterproposals to Mbeki's blueprint for the transition period.

Drug trafficking in Southern Africa is on the rise and South Africa is increasingly being used as a base for the illicit trade. The country's geography and infrastructure make it the perfect springboard for trafficking throughout the region.

5 months after sanctions against the Somali company, several American officials said the government has only limited evidence of a direct tie between Al Barakaat and Al Qaeda. One senior official said the information came from a single source.

Five months ago in Burundi, on 1 November 2001, a transitional national government was inaugurated in which the majority Hutu ethnic group would share power with the minority Tutsi, who have dominated politics for most of the country's 39 years of independence from Belgium. IRIN asked Senate President Bararunyeretse about the role of the Senate in moving the country away from years of civil war towards peace and stability. Also discussed was the ongoing repatriation of Burundi refugees from camps in western Tanzania, as part of a tripartite agreement between the UN agency and the governments of both countries.

A group of doctors have warned their South African colleagues against becoming accomplice to a new wave of "atrocities" by refusing to administer anti-retroviral drugs. In a statement published in the latest edition of the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), the group says doctors have a moral duty to prescribe the drugs.

A senior member of the Zimbabwean opposition says his party will pull out of talks with Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party, if they fail to reach an agreement to re-run last month's presidential elections within four weeks of negotiations. Tendai Biti, a spokesman on foreign affairs for the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) told Tim Sebastian for BBC HARDtalk that his party would call off negotiations with the Zimbabwe Government if the matter was not addressed.

EU foreign ministers have beefed up their sanctions against Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe and his government to include a ban on bilateral ministerial contacts "until further notice". In a statement, they expressed "deep concern at reports of continuing politically motivated violence against opposition supporters" by Mugabe's governing Zanu PF party.

President Robert Mugabe's government gave notice on Tuesday that it would ignore court orders that restrained police in security issues, according to state radio.

The not guilty verdict in the trial of apartheid chemical and biological warfare expert "Dr Death" Wouter Basson was delivered on Thursday in the Pretoria High Court, has left many South Africans unhappy. According to media reports this week, Basson was facing 67 charges including murder, fraud and the possession of drugs.