Plans are well advanced for large holding camps near the Zimbabwe border to accommodate thousands of refugees should the situation in that country deteriorate in the run-up to and aftermath of the March presidential elections, according to the department of home affairs.

A protracted US war against terror must combine military force with the resources of the criminal-justice system. And this exercise must be multilateral in two complementary senses: Military campaigns and their aftermath require the assembly of coalitions, the cooperation of allies, and the use of international peacekeeping forces and relief efforts under the aegis of international agencies. Furthermore, a war against terror necessarily requires the cooperation of many nations in hunting down and bringing to justice individual suspects. Simply to try all suspected terrorists before U.S. military tribunals intended for emergency battlefield conditions would put America at odds not only with its own domestic constitutional safeguards but with international conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war.

For the past decades, poverty and war have scarred the planet in ways that continue to frustrate the efforts of the international community to curtail them. Wherever the fault lies—in the unreadiness of post-colonial societies for democracy, in the inefficiency or shortsightedness of international organizations, in the cultural insensitivity of many multinational corporations, in varieties of human greed, or (most likely) some Gordian knot entangling all of these, one thing is certain—the need to solve the problem grows by the day. After September 11, it is clear that innovation and a commitment to utilize all of our resources will be a central hallmark of the strategy not only to win the war but also to win the peace. Privatizing Peace: From Conflict to Security is the first book to explore the possibilities of a fusion in depth. Drawing on first-hand experience of World Bank and UN initiatives, the authors pinpoint the weaknesses in the numerous peacekeeping missions of recent decades, as well as the blind spots in the thinking that guided them. Even more significantly, they clearly demonstrate the ways in which well-meaning stabilization and reconstruction programs fail to accommodate the economic and social imperatives of war-torn societies. But this visionary work is not merely an indictment of First World myopia in the face of Third World devastation. The authors offer cogent, well-thought-out recommendations, firmly grounded in current reality, with a powerful determination to avoid the repetition of past mistakes. Transnational Publishers, 2002, 1-57105-147-3.

What is peace education? Does it mean creating a separate subject in the school curriculum? Or does it involve the creation of a dimension across the curriculum, a concern that may be explored in different ways with any age group and in any subject?

Reading the title of this article and knowing the history of Uganda, one may ask: “which war?” There have been several civil wars in my country since independence; in fact, currently (un)civil war rages in the northern and southwestern regions of Uganda. The civil strife that I refer to here is that which Ugandans witnessed between 1981 and 1986. The war itself was concentrated in the so-called “Luwero Triangle” - a large swathe of land lying just 50 miles northwest of the capital city, Kampala. Nevertheless, generalized violence and bloodshed rippled throughout the length and breadth of the country and touched each one of us. Moreover, the civil war took place against a historical backdrop of vicious military and civilian dictatorships in Uganda's post-independent politics. The words “duka-duka” were reminiscent of the times - running for cover and fleeing civil strife.

The Strategic Defence Procurement Package, better known as the arms deal, has angered the South African public. Common sense indicates that in the middle of a health crisis such as HIV/Aids which requires massive public investment, spending large amounts of money on military hardware is gravely inappropriate. Media attention on the arms deal has been primarily focused on Cabinet's lack of accountability to parliament, and the corruption in the procurement process. These are crucial issues that deserve close media scrutiny. Furthermore, without the incentives for graft that exist in the arms industry, it seems unlikely that the deal would have taken place, so an analysis of the arms deal that does not consider corruption would be incomplete. However, it is arguably the misplaced priority given to arms spending that is at the core of public dissatisfaction with the deal. If no evidence of corruption had arisen, and Cabinet had received unequivocal approval from parliament for the deal, it is likely that civil society organisations would still have reacted with indignation.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) reacted today with outrage at the arbitrary arrest of the President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Adams Oshiomhole. In a letter to ILO Director General, Juan Somavia, the Brussels-based labour group strongly condemned the arrest of the labour leader, incarcerated while leading a nation-wide protest over a hike in petrol prices.

This week the UK Foreign Secretary begins a three-day trip to the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Next month Tony Blair will follow with a trip expected to take in Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. In his conference speech last October, Blair said that Africa is a 'scar on the conscience of the world'. Whether he has anything more than a sticking plaster to offer as a cure will soon become clear.

The Zimbabwean army is disillusioned with Robert Mugabe and will not support his attempts to cling to power if he loses the forthcoming presidential election, according to a former guerrilla commander who was close to Mr Mugabe during the war that brought him to power.

Final Communique of the SADC Extra-Ordinary Summit of Heads of State and Government, January 2002, Blantyre, Malawi.

At least 18 people were injured in Zimbabwe on Sunday when pro government militants blocked the opposition from holding a rally, the party's secretary general said.

The congressionally mandated Nuclear Posture Review (NPR, not to be confused, even for a second with "National Public Radio"), released last week, was an opportunity for President Bush and his team to provide a framework for formulating a U.S. nuclear strategy for the post-cold war world--something the Clinton administration failed to do with its own nuclear review in 1994. However, much like the Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Review, which was described by Senator Carl Levin as "full of decisions deferred," ambiguity prevails.

The east African nation of Somalia is being mentioned with increasing frequency as a possible next target in the U.S.-led war against international terrorism. Somalia is a failed state--with what passes for the central government controlling little more than a section of the national capital of Mogadishu, a separatist government in the north, and rival warlords and clan leaders controlling most the remainder of the country. Before the U.S. attacks that impoverished country, however, it is important to recognize how Somalia became a possible haven for the followers of Osama bin Laden and what might result if America goes to war.

The nineteenth Meeting of States Parties to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination have elected, by secret ballot, nine members of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination for four-year terms, to replace those whose terms of office will expire on 19 January. It also elected its chairpersons and four vice-chairpersons.

Aid agencies in the Democratic Republic of Congo have been struggling to help thousands of desperate people in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Many refugees refused to go into camps to be fed and insisted on returning to their homes in Goma to inspect damage, relief officials said on Sunday.

The political landscape in Swaziland is daily changing due to the intensified brutality and terror of a desperate regime. This desperacy is met with the untiring resolve of the struggling masses of our country to meet fire with fire. This last week saw a huge turn out at a National Prayer service for the jailed President of PUDEMO – Cde Mario Masuku, just a few days before the beginning of the 10-days marathon trial in the capital city of Swaziland, Mbabane, which begins on the 24th January, 2002.

In the bad old days of 19th-century eugenics, scientists who had supped at the table of social Darwinism would construct evolutionary trees that had twigs within the species Homo sapiens. Each twig was a racial group. The top twig was, of course, the white Caucasian one—since the scientists who did this work were themselves white Caucasians. Modern genetics has shown the error of their ways. Systematic genetic differences between people from different parts of the world, though they exist, are small compared with variations between people from the same place. The visible differences, such as skin colour, are the result of a mere handful of genes. Under the skin, humanity is remarkably homogenous. Racism, however, is ubiquitous. It is not only white Caucasians (whatever that term means, in the context of current knowledge) who are guilty of it. That has led to another biological hypothesis, that people are somehow "programmed" to recognise race and be racist. Robert Kurzban, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, three evolutionary psychologists who work at the University of California, Santa Barbara, find this hypothesis unlikely. And they have published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that supports an alternative hypothesis. That hypothesis is that racism is actually an unfortunate by-product of another phenomenon—a tendency to assign people to "coalition groups", and to use whatever cues are available, be they clothing, accent or skin colour, to slot individuals into such groups (or "stereotype" them, as modern usage might term it). The good news is that experiments done by the researchers suggest that such stereotypes are easily dissolved and replaced with others. Racism, in other words, can be eliminated.

After months of wrangling, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights says agreement has finally been reached on a document setting out the terms for global action against racism and xenophobia. Publication of the document was delayed by a dispute over whether several paragraphs referring to slavery and the slave trade should be included in a programme of action. European nations objected to this proposal, fearing it might expose them to claims for compensation from African nations. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, says the world.

THE European Union has given Zimbabwe seven days to make a written undertaking that it will allow international observers and news media personnel for the country's presidential election scheduled for 9 and 10 March.