A group of leading international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on Friday called on the international and humanitarian communities to agree upon "clear and consistent disincentives" for warring parties who commit abuses against civilians and humanitarian aid agencies in Sudan.

The Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) has expressed its concern that Burundi refugees may effectively be forcibly repatriated, contrary to international law, following repeated calls from Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa on them to go back to safe zones in Burundi.

In 2001, Burundi "remained profoundly affected by massive violations of human rights, in particular the right to life, due principally to the continued civil war between the national armed forces and the two principal armed [rebel] factions, the Front national de liberation (FNL) and the Forces pour la defense de la democratie (FDD)", Ligue Iteka, a local human rights organisation, stated in its newly released annual report.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Ruud Lubbers, on Friday 1 March visited Congolese refugees in a camp in Gihembe in Byumba Prefecture, northern Rwanda, on the last stop of his four-nation tour of the Great Lakes region, the agency reported.

Former rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), including its leader, Foday Sankoh, appeared in court in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, on Monday on various criminal charges including murder, news organisations reported.

Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) government negotiators at the inter-Congolese dialogue (ICD) in Sun City have demanded the expulsion of Rwandan and Ugandan security chiefs from the holiday resort.

An "explosion with devastating consequences" could engulf Southern Africa if President Robert Mugabe tampers with the results of March 9-10 presidential elections in Zimbabwe, the heads of four major international rights groups have warned this week.

Sudan police launched a campaign against child trafficking in early February, a news report said. The move seeks to stop young boys from being trafficked as camel jockeys to countries in the Gulf. Police recently stopped five men who possessed photographs of children, passports and other documents, the report from PANA (Pan-African News Agency) said.

Prospects for the resumption of Congo peace talks in Sun City, South Africa took a further nosedive Wednesday, when government and rebel representatives accused one another of violating the ceasefire which is the bedrock of the Lusaka Peace Accords of 1999.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe suffered two potentially serious setbacks in the courts when both the Supreme and High courts gave judgments against his government that are likely to boost the opposition vote at next month's presidential election.

Top Zimbabwean generals, government Ministers and close relatives of President Robert Mugabe have made millions of dollars from the illegal smuggling of 'blood diamonds', a US diamond executive has claimed.

Zimbabwe has banned the BBC but John Sweeney spent two weeks there, secretly filming witnesses to torture and mass murder.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo says a deal has been reached at the Commonwealth summit in Australia on the question of Zimbabwe. He said Zimbabwe would not be suspended from the Commonwealth before next weekend's presidential election. But, after the election, the new committee will consider the report of the Commonwealth's election observers and take action against Zimbabwe if they think it is necessary.

Statements from ZANU(PF) members inciting violence.

The President of the Zimbabwe Civil Service Employees Association, Ephraim Tapa, and his wife Faith Mukwakwa, have been missing since the 16th of February when the vehicle they were traveling was intercepted by war veterans at Corner Store between Mutoko and Murewha.

By almost any measure, the war on AIDS is more important than the war on terrorism. Yet Washington’s fixation with the latter--still loosely defined--campaign threatens to crowd out attention to Africa’s priorities. And those priorities, from obtaining support for international peacemaking and peacekeeping, to canceling illegitimate debts and arresting the growing disparities between rich and poor in the world, to defeating the AIDS pandemic, are all equally global priorities.

Angola's ethnic conflicts are products of a double colonization. By the 1950s, there were two deeply frustrated, opposed social groups: the weakened Creole elites and the black Africans of the interior, poor and uneducated. The Mbundu living east of Luanda were a partial exception in that they were accustomed to interaction with the Creoles. The Angolan nationalist movement was thus divided from the start. The FNLA of Holden Roberto and MPLA of Agostinho Neto represented two long-separate sets of interests: the Kongo elites of the North vs. the Luanda Creoles and their Mbundu allies. The FNLA considered the MPLA Creole leadership as "non-African" even if several MPLA leaders were black Africans.

Genocide suspect Laurent Semanza has told judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) that he believes there was no genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Semanza has been testifying in his own defense since 13 February.

The half-built genocide museum in Kigali stands bone white against the lush hills of Rwanda's capital, its unfinished windows staring out at the city. The dark interior of the memorial is as hollow as the thousands of human skulls it soon will hold. For now, they are stacked crudely in a corrugated-iron shed with row upon row of bones, neatly separated into piles of arms and legs. Several cavernous concrete tombs contain more remains of tens of thousands of Rwandans killed in the 1994 genocide, when as many as 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu moderates died in this tiny Central African country. The remains are to be sorted and put in glass display cases in the new museum, complete with tiled floors, library, video presentations and cafeteria. There will be a lengthy list of names of the dead, ages and personal details.

The Council of Government observed with regret that the said report and the ferocious campaign that accompanied it contradicted the efforts deployed by both Algeria and Morocco for strengthening trust and mutual trust for the benefit of good neighbourliness and cooperation between the two Algerian and Moroccan brotherly peoples, and the process of building the Arab Maghreb Union.