Morgan Tsvangirai, leader of the Zimbabwean opposition, has pleaded for sanctions to be imposed on his country before the presidential election in March.

Militias of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu PF party have stepped up their campaign of violence against opponents ahead of Presidential elections due in eight weeks, the opposition Movement for Democratic Change reported on Sunday. An "orgy of violence" erupted in the central city of Kwekwe on Friday and continued on Saturday where a mob of militiamen burnt down the MDC's provincial offices, and also one of the pro-democracy party's pickup trucks.

Burundi will pull its troops out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, its government has announced. In exchange for that commitment, the authorities in Kinshasa have pledged to stop supporting Burundian rebels on Congolese soil.

Huge demonstrations in support of Madagascar opposition presidential candidate Marc Ravalomanana have entered their fourth day.

President Robert Mugabe's government is seeking to push through two controversial bills on Wednesday in a special session of parliament, ahead of the presidential election scheduled for March. A third bill, the Electoral Amendment Act, was defeated on Tuesday.

Zimbabwe's military chiefs have declared they will only back leaders who fought in the country's wars of liberation, dealing a fresh blow to the opposition presidential candidate, Morgan Tsvangirai.

Ministers from seven East African nations have approved a joint initiative to fight terrorism. Meeting in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, under the auspices of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the ministers from Sudan, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti condemned all forms of terrorism and agreed to co-operate closely in the fight against it.

The genocide in the central African state of Rwanda where an estimated one million lives were wiped out in a bloodbath that lasted just three months is still fresh in many minds. Two million refugees fled to neighbouring states. Journalists often find that they have to pay a high price for covering these events: they become vulnerable to attacks, imprisonment, torture, censorship by political and military leadership, and sometimes even execution.

This week, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joseph Kabila, told his countrymen in his New Year address that 2002 would be a year of peace and reconciliation.

When Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni meets with Sudanese leader Omar al Bashir this week in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, he is likely to seek the deportation of Joseph Kony, leader of a rebel group operating in northern Uganda with bases in southern Sudan.

A three-day international conference on child trafficking in West Africa, and strategies to dismantle networks that supply children for labour and other forms of exploitation opened on Tuesday in Yamoussoukro, Cote d'Ivoire.

Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa on Monday announced a new cabinet and policy reforms that some analysts said would allay concerns of him being a "puppet" president.

Zimbabwe's ruling party suffered a shock defeat in parliament on Tuesday when it introduced a controversial electoral amendment bill that critics allege is designed to boost President Robert Mugabe's re-election bid in March.

The Sudanese government's Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC), the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and "national and foreign organisations" on Wednesday began an assessment of the humanitarian requirements of the Nuba Mountains region of Southern Kordofan State, south-central Sudan, the official Sudan News Agency reported.

The Ugandan government is planning for a February start on the resettlement of a group of Ugandan returnees from Tanzania, currently camped in Kikagati in the southwest, where some of them have been camped under deplorable conditions for over a year, a senior official told IRIN on Thursday.

A recent legal agreement between the Tanzanian government and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) marks the formalisation of a good bilateral relationship and should help ease the work of the Red Cross movement, especially in the refugee camps in western Tanzania, an ICRC spokesman, Florian Westphal, told IRIN on Thursday.

There is renewed optimism for political stability within the islands of Zanzibar, following the signing last week of an agreement on the implementation of the October 2001 reconciliation accord between Tanzania's ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party and the opposition Civic United Front (CUF), according to sources in the capital, Dar es Salaam.

A reconstituted expert panel set up by the UN Security Council to examine the illegal exploitation of natural resources and other forms of wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is expected to reassemble in late January 2002 for an additional six-month period, UN News reported on Friday.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has criticised the Central African Republic's (CAR) human rights record in a new report.