Africa

Algeria

Reuters 28 Mar 2001 Suspected rebels killed 15 people in an Algerian shantytown in the second such massacre this week, residents said Wednesday. A family of 11 was killed in their home and four members of another were also shot dead in the shack next door. The attacks followed the Sunday deaths of a family of 13, killed near Blida. About 450 people have been killed so far this year, mainly civilians shot or knifed in isolated villages. Like in many poor suburbs across the country, the population of Hai Benachour has risen in the past three years as thousands of people have fled the killings in remote villages for the apparent safety on the outskirts of bigger towns.

BBC 29 Apr 2001, Clashes in Algeria between protesting Berber youths and security forces have continued for another day in the Kabylie region to the east of Algiers. Eyewitness reports from the regional capital, Tizi Ouzou, speak of pitched battles in the town centre. Residents in nearby Bejaia said that a protest march today had degenerated into violence. About fifty people are now thought to have died in clashes over the past ten days. They were originally sparked by the killing of a Berber youth in police custody, but have turned into a more general protest against poverty and alleged discrimination. The mainly Berber political party, the RCD Rally for Culture and Democracy, has now threatened to pull out of the government, accusing it of firing live ammunition at the protesters. Correspondents say this does not threaten the government's survival but puts further pressure on President Abdelaziz Bouteflika who has, separately, come under criticism for failing to end the Islamist rebellion. The Berber community in Algeria has long campaigned for greater minority rights.

Reuters 30 Apr 2001 Clashes between protesters and security forces resumed today in the Berber region around Kabylia. Anger over reports that 40 people had died in ethnic-based rioting spread to the capital, Algiers. This city of 600,000 remained paralyzed as stone-throwing rioters fought battles with police officers who fired tear-gas canisters. Gunshots wounded two people, medical sources said. Some calm returned in the afternoon to streets strewn with debris, burned tires and felled trees. In Bejaia, to the east, tension also eased and shops reopened, the official APS news agency reported. Traffic on the road that links Tizi- Ouzou to Algiers, 55 miles west, returned to normal after residents had erected barricades on it. A week of violence in Kabylia, set off by the shooting of a student in custody and fanned by hatred of the police, has left at least 40 people dead, according to medical sources and residents. The government says 32 people have been killed and more than 600 police officers have been injured. The Algerian news media have given higher death tolls. Interior Minister Noureddine Zerhouni said bullets were used "as a last resort." Hospital workers said some victims were shot in the back. Most residents of Kabylia said the protests were mainly directed at the police. Most residents of Kabylia are Berbers, who have inhabited the North African coast since prehistoric times.

Burundi

The Nation (Nairobi) 22 April 2001 Burundi's President Pierre Buyoya is not ruling out a wider conspiracy behind last Wednesday's attempted coup and has ordered a commission of inquiry to fully investigate the affair. In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Nation yesterday, President Buyoya also did not rule out complicity by what he termed "elements" opposed to the Arusha peace accords and to his government's policy of negotiations with Hutu rebel leaders.President Buyoya was in Libreville, Gabon, when a little-known junior officer, Lt Gaston Ntakarutimana, took control of Burundi's national radio station with several dozen soldiers of his platoon and announced the overthrow of the government.

Congo

NYT 16 Apr 2001 The United Nations' special envoy to Congo said a decision by Rwandan-backed rebels to deny clearance to land over the weekend to a plane carrying 120 United Nations peacekeepers "puts in jeopardy the process" of peace. "Sometimes I really wonder whether Rwanda and Uganda are really willing to leave Congo," the envoy, Kamel Morjane, said in an interview before the incident over the northeast city of Kisangani. The government of President Laurent Kabila, the new president's slain father, had been regarded as the main obstacle to peace talks. But there is now growing pressure on the rebels' backers, Uganda and Rwanda, to rein in their activities in Congo, according to officials from the United Nations and Congo and Western diplomats. The Kinshasa government — with, more importantly, its Zimbabwean and Angolan allies — has seized on this shift. Over the weekend Mr. Kabila announced a new cabinet that included only one hard-liner from his father's government and that immediately received the endorsement of Belgium, the former colonial ruler. In an interview last week here in the capital, Mr. Kabila, 29, also called on the West to be tougher against Rwanda and Uganda, which have backed Congolese rebels and sent their own troops to fight in the nearly three-year-old war. The Security Council has so far committed 3,500 peacekeepers to Congo. "Personally, I would like to see justice being done," Mr. Kabila said. "Our country's aggressed. The West should be there to say, `Mister, you've aggressed a country. Get out of that.' What happened in Iraq and Kuwait is a good example. In Kosovo, I was seeing recently, you've got 50,000 troops there — a country that can go 50, 60 times into the Congo. And here we send 3,500 men. What a joke." The reality was, of course, more nuanced. To begin with, Laurent Kabila became Congo's president only after the Rwandans and Ugandans plucked him from obscurity in 1996, and they supported him until a falling out led to this war in August 1998. The late president never held elections, ruled brutally, and many Congolese regarded his presidency — as they do the son's — as illegitimate. Another reason is the West's growing impatience with Rwanda and Uganda, which claimed to have entered Congo to protect their borders, and yet showed an equal, if not greater, interest in plundering the country's mineral riches. Yet another reason was that Mr. Kabila became president in January, around the same time as President Bush's own inauguration. Uganda and Rwanda were two of the Clinton Administration's staunchest allies in Africa. There was a genocide in Rwanda that each and every human being must condemn," Mr. Kabila said last week. "That's one. But when people try to use this problem of genocide as a weapon against another nation, which is basically what happened in the Congo, that's why you have a problem." "The Congolese people were not in Rwanda in 1994 to commit genocide," he added. "We're not part of that genocide." Soon after becoming president in January, Mr. Kabila visited Washington. The Bush administration is said to have received him more warmly than it did Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, who visited at the same time. A harder approach toward Rwanda and Uganda in the Security Council became immediately noticeable, said Mr. Morjane, the special envoy here, attributing it in part to the change in the White House. "The Republicans were not in power in 1994, so they are being more pragmatic," Mr. Morjane said.

WP 28 Apr 2001 Six Red Cross workers were found dead on a muddy, remote road in northeastern Congo on Thursday in the deadliest attack on the international agency since six nurses were killed in their sleep at a hospital in Chechnya in 1996. Thursday's attack occurred about 30 miles north of the small city of Bunia, in a region that has seen horrendous tribal fighting over the past two years. It was not known who committed the killings, or even how they occurred. In the past, warring tribes have accused aid agencies of providing support to one tribe over another. In 1999, the medical relief group Doctors Without Borders closed its operations in the area after staff members were attacked. The victims were killed while traveling to learn the medical and food needs of the local population. They were discovered by Ugandan soldiers, who nominally control the area along with a Ugandan-backed rebel group, the Congolese Liberation Front. The bodies were near two four-wheel drive vehicles clearly marked with large red crosses. The dead were Rita Fox, 36, a nurse from Switzerland; Julio Delgado, 54, a relief worker from Colombia; and four Congolese: drivers Aduwe Boboli, 39, and Jean Molokabonge, 56; Veronique Saro, 33; and Unen Ufoirworth, 29, who worked reuniting families separated by fighting.

IRC 30 Apr 2001 Preliminary Findings Indicate Some Two and a Half Million Deaths in Eastern Congo Conflict - The International Rescue Committee is finalizing a report on mortality in war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Initial estimates point to a shocking number of deaths as a result of fighting since August 1998. The IRC conducted a mortality survey in five provinces earlier this year and found that there has been an estimated 2.5 million deaths since the outbreak of fighting, in excess of the number that would have occurred using normal baseline mortality rates during this 32-month period. “If anything, the situation is worse than last year, when our previous Congo mortality survey estimated the loss of 1.7 million lives,” said epidemiologist Les Roberts, the IRC’s director of health policy and author of the study. This year’s survey reexamines several areas studied last year and covers three new health zones. Roberts found a stunningly high death rate in nearly all the areas surveyed—with extraordinary losses among children. The 2000 and 2001 surveys both indicate that the overwhelming majority of deaths were related to disease and malnutrition, while a proportionately smaller number were directly attributable to violence. Last year’s survey put the number of such deaths at 200,000. The ongoing fighting has driven hundreds of thousands of people into forests, jungles and other remote areas, where they have no food, medicine or shelter. Health care systems in the region have been decimated and war-affected areas have been largely inaccessible to aid organizations because of the insecurity. The International Rescue Committee hopes that the start of troop withdrawals from eastern Congo, the deployment of UN forces and the reinvigorated peace process will increase access to populations in need. www.theIRC.org o

WP 30 Apr 2001 Death Toll in Congo War May Approach 3 Million Conflict Leaves Trail of Starvation, Disease and Carnage As foreign armies pull back from Congo's farthest reaches and aid agencies move forward, the human toll of the country's 32-month war is being sketched in apocalyptic terms beyond any previously documented in an African conflict. According to a new "death census" conducted by a private American aid agency, the number of lives claimed by the Congo war now approaches 3 million. The survey by the New York-based International Rescue Committee (IRC) was conducted only in the rebel-held eastern half of the country, where most of the fighting and even more of the accompanying hardship has taken place. The toll would almost surely be higher if the government-held western half were included. The survey attributes a relatively small proportion of the deaths -- a few hundred thousand -- to the battles waged by the Congolese army, its rebel foes and troops from the half-dozen other African countries that have fought on both sides of the conflict. The vast majority of deaths have resulted from starvation, disease and deprivation on a scale emerging only as aid workers reach areas that have been cut off by fighting and lack of roads. "People are dying of nothing, of everything," said a worker for Pharmacists Without Borders, after returning from a humanitarian assessment in the Kasai region. Until the IRC sent survey teams into eastern Congo, little was known about the human toll of a war fought largely out of the world's sight. "Things are a little worse than the picture we painted last year," said Les Roberts, an epidemiologist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who conducted this year's IRC survey and one last year that estimated the death toll in eastern Congo at 1.7 million. "And last year's estimate turns out to have been low." Independent experts who have reviewed both IRC reports say the surveys appear to be sound. Epidemiologists offer two explanations for the extreme numbers: Strife in Africa usually goes unmeasured, and the strife in Congo has gone on for almost three years, perhaps a dozen times longer than the epidemics and carnage that typically produce the stunning death rates that IRC reports.The conflict began in August 1998, when rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda rose up against Laurent Kabila, then the president of Congo. After Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia sent troops, warplanes and armor to aid Kabila's army, the war settled into a stalemate that has left the vast country divided roughly in half. An agreement to bring in U.N. peacekeeping troops has moved forward since Kabila's assassination in January put his son, Joseph, in power. The new President Kabila frequently quotes IRC's first death estimate, calling it evidence that "this stupid war" verges on genocide. As assessments of Congo's devastation accumulate, help has been very slow in coming. A January plea from the World Food Program to more than double its Congo food aid to $110 million has been barely one-third funded by rich countries. UNICEF has received just a tenth of the $15 million needed for essential drugs and therapeutic feeding centers. And despite vows of action from Washington that greeted the IRC's first survey, U.S. disaster relief to Congo remains at just $13 million. Halfway through the fiscal year, that sum is already exhausted. In Congo, the hugely elevated mortality rates have continued for 32 months, steadily racking up deaths by the hundreds of thousands across a vast region rendered inaccessible to aid because of fighting and the lack of roads. For its latest estimate, IRC ventured into eight health districts scattered in the five provinces that historically define eastern Congo, an area of 20 million inhabitants. With the help of IRC country director Michael Despines, Roberts selected roughly representative zones that could be reached by plane or secure roads. Asked whether concerns about safety might bias the sample, Roberts said they surely did -- against finding the worst. "What's the main killer of the war? The main killer is people who don't have enough money in their pocket so they can take their kid to the clinic in time." Even so, IRC estimated that 200,000 of the first 1.7 million deaths were by violence, almost all of them civilians. Even as a cease-fire has held on the front lines, massacres have continued behind rebel lines where militias and rebel armies terrorize some of Congo's more densely populated districts, attacking villages on the suspicion inhabitants are helping the other side. Some groups are simply homicidal. The men with wild hair and bushy beards who kicked in the door of Jean Pierre Mushobozi's hut in the village of Buguli one night in November were Hutu extremists from Rwanda, who are associated with the group that carried out the 1994 genocide that killed more than a half-million Rwandan Tutsis and are now fighting for the Congolese government. They slashed to death the two youngest children, slashed the leg of another and carried away the family's goats, hens, money and clothes -- even the spoons. Congo's vast jungles are now populated by untold thousands who no longer feel safe in their homes but are ill equipped for living in the bush. "People hide in the forest," said Claude Jibidar, head of the World Food Program office in Bukavu, capital of South Kivu province, where 380,000 people have been driven from their homes, many into the forest. "You don't really see them. You don't see the bodies." "It's damn rare we see these kinds of hardship," Roberts said, using famines as reference points. "Probably in Somalia in the 1990s when we saw these skinny kids on TV. Probably in Ethiopia in 1984 you saw numbers like that." The IRC's figures are one-third higher than the number of deaths estimated from 18 years of war in Sudan, and three times the most frequently quoted death count for the Biafra conflict of the 1960s.

Cote d'Ivore

Reuters April 13 2001 Six paramilitary gendarmes in Ivory Coast have been charged with murder in connection with the massacre of 57 young men during violence after last year's elections, the ruling party's newspaper said on Friday. The bullet-riddled bodies were found in a forest reserve on the outskirts of the main city Abidjan days after a controversial presidential election last October triggered political and ethnic clashes in the West African country. The dead were thought to be mostly from the Muslim north, the heartland of support for former Prime Minister Alassane Ouattara, whose exclusion from the poll was at the root of clashes between his militants and FPI activists. The charges against the gendarmes come at a time when the Ivorian government is trying to prove it has put more than a year of political and ethnic strife firmly behind it. Foreign donors, who froze aid after Ivory Coast's first coup in December 1999, have indicated that its resumption could depend on the punishment of those responsible for last year's violence and the release of political prisoners. In December the United Nations ordered a separate inquiry into the killing, the results of which are not yet known.

Ethiopia

BBC 17 Apr 2001 Hundreds of Ethiopian riot police armed with batons and riot shields stormed central Addis Ababa today beating up civilians including women and children. A wing of the Ethiopian police, known as the 'special forces', were called in to break up a riot which erupted when a peaceful demonstration turned into a violent protest. The rioters, who were not students, say they sympathised with the week-long boycott of classes by over 3,000 university students. The students have been demanding the removal of armed police from their campus.

BBC 26 Apr 2001 Ethiopia's released students tell their stories Nita Bhalla hears from some of the thousands of students from Addis Ababa University who were released on Thursday after eight days in detention following riots last week. Most students appeared exhausted and weak as they congregated outside the University campus to retell what they have described as their "unforgettable experience". Family members and other students gathered around to hear first hand of how thousands of students were taken from churches where they sought refuge last Wednesday, and transported in the middle of the night to a police training college in the village of Sendafa, 38 km outside of Addis. The students, who were all male, wore soiled clothes and had bloodshot eyes and looked weary. They say up to 3,000 students were crammed into an assembly hall at the police camp and claim that they were monitored at all times by armed police officers, who beat them severely if they spoke aloud or attempted to communicate with one another. The students say they are innocent and were not involved in any violence or rioting. The riots were Addis Ababa's worst for 10 years The government has accused certain opposition parties of inciting the riots and more than 100 members from the two main opposition parties have so far been arrested. In an attempt to incriminate the parties, the students claim that the police are trying to link the students with the opposition. "We were asked about our ethnic identity, which political party we support and even what newspaper we read," said one student. Despite their release, the students this afternoon were adamant that they would not resume classes. To gain re-admission, students have been asked to fill in a pre-conditional form admitting that they were responsible for the violence which took place last Tuesday and Wednesday. The students are refusing and say they are innocent.

Liberia

Reuters 9 Apr 2001 Liberia has begun mobilizing thousands of fighters from its 1990s civil war to deal with an upsurge of fighting that has raised fears of a return to widespread bloodshed, military sources said on Monday. The new rebellion in northern Liberia, which erupted last year, is part of a power struggle centered on a remote, diamond-rich corner of West Africa where forces from Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia and several rebel groups are engaged in a brutal, messy war. The military sources said some 15,000 fighters of the now defunct National Patriotic Front of Liberia, which former warlord Charles Taylor led until he won the 1997 presidential election, were being assembled for battle in Monrovia. At least 1,000 people are reported dead there in clashes since last September which Guinea blames on Taylor. At its peak, Taylor's NPFL had an estimated 40,000 fighters. Like all the other factions in Liberia's war, the NPFL was often accused by local people of committing atrocities.

Panafrican News Agency (PANA - Dakar) April 22, 2001 As the 7 May deadline for the coming into effect of the UN sanctions on Liberia draws near, current efforts by Monrovia to avert the sanctions may have failed to impress the UN team that visited the country last week. By resolution 1343 on 7 March, the UN slammed sanctions on Liberia, accusing the country of supporting the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in its 10-year war against the government of Sierra Leone and using the rebels against other countries in the area. The sanctions, whose take-off date was delayed for two months at the request of ECOWAS, may include a travel ban on the leadership of the country. Liberia has been under a UN arms embargo since 1992. The resolution requires Liberia to expel all members of the RUF from the country, cease financial and military assistance to the rebels and end direct or indirect import of Sierra Leone's rough diamonds not regulated through the Certificate of Origin regime.

WP, April 25, 2001; President Charles Taylor's forces are being bloodied in an escalating border war with Guinea. His country's economy is descending ever deeper into the hole. The United Nations is moving toward imposing stiff sanctions on his government next month. Bad news is everywhere, but none of it seems to faze Taylor, a former warlord accused by the United States and Britain of destabilizing West Africa in general. In response, he is moving his nation to a war footing, stifling dissent and calling up 15,000 veterans of his old guerrilla army to active duty. "Taylor is always at his best when he is cornered," said a diplomat who has dealt with him for years. "He is a warlord at heart, not a politician, so when he has to fight, maneuver and keep everyone off balance, he is in his element." Last week dissident Liberian forces based in Guinea shot and killed a government minister visiting the war front. They also staged several attacks along the border. In a sign of the government's growing concern, Taylor last week mobilized 15,000 veterans of his guerrilla army to return to active military duty, despite an empty treasury. Since the war ended, the army has been left without weapons, communications equipment, transport or pay. Instead, Taylor has relied for security on paramilitary forces led by the Anti-Terrorist Unit, trained by South African mercenaries.

Libya

PANA April 20, 2001 From Algiers to Lusaka, 20 Months of Libyan Efforts It has taken 20 months of focus and re-focusing, debate and controversy, under the often sceptical scrutiny of foreign opinion, for the idea of an African Union to gain acceptance. With its institutional framework now set, there is no gainsaying that the dreams of its initiators will soon become a reality. Brought to the fore by the Libyan leader, Col. Moammar Kadhafi during the 35th OAU Algiers summit in July 1999, the idea had initially shocks the entire African diplomats present. The central idea was to transform by positive evolution of the concept of African unity as conceived during the creation of the OAU in 1963, to a more dynamic organisation, capable of preparing the continent to face the demands of globalisation. Once the Treaty of the African Union goes into force, the AU will replace the OAU for good. Let us take a retrospective look at this historic process which, in fact, is a continuation of the cherished African fight for unity initiated more than a century ago and upheld by successive generations of Africans. - 12 JULY 1999, ALGIERS: The Libyan revolutionary leader makes a plea of more than one hour immediately after the official opening ceremony of the 35th OAU summit. Col. Moammar Kadhafi reviews the long struggle of the sons of Africa and the Diaspora since the beginning of the century, for the liberation and subsequent unification of the continent. He proposed that the OAU such as it had been since 1963, should be scrapped and a "Pan African congress" established in its place. In that perspective, he suggested the holding in September 1999 during festivities marking the 30th anniversary of the Libyan revolution, of an OAU extraordinary summit in Sirte, Libya to have an in-depth discussion on the issue. The proposal was approved. . .2 MARCH 2001, SIRTE II: The fifth OAU extraordinary summit ends in Sirte with a solemn declaration for the establishment of the African Union whose birth will be effective 30 days after the submission of the 36th instrument of ratification to the OAU General Secretariat.

Reuters (Middle East Times) 27 Apr 2001 Qadhafi wants Africans to expel whites Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi urged Africans on April 22 to drive white people out of the continent and make them pay compensation for their exploitation of it. "The white colonialists have no place in Africa and their presence is unlawful," said Qadhafi, addressing a gathering of African women activists in Tripoli. Qadhafi, whose remarks were reported by the official Libyan news agency Jana, monitored in Tunis, also urged Africans to rid themselves of the white man's cultural legacy, including language. "This is another battleground before us, to shake off the leftover of the colonialist culture," he said. "Their languages and the colonial culture cannot express our feelings and thoughts, which we can do only by speaking the languages of our forefathers," he added. Qadhafi urged Africans to take their cue from Libya's experience when it expelled some 20,000 Italians during the late 1960s, and to do the same with whites who are still settling in other African states. "We (Africans) demand compensation from them and (then) send them packing because they colonized us and slaughtered us and made the most of our lands during the colonial era," he went on. The 59-year-old Qadhafi is the driving force behind a project to unify the 53 African nations into one state modeled on the United States of America. He hosted the signing of a declaration by 46 African countries in March announcing the birth of an African Union to replace the four-decades-old Organization of African Unity (OAU). Qadhafi said he was amazed to hear some white farmers in Zimbabwe asking for compensation from President Robert Mugabe, who vowed last week to continue his controversial drive to seize white-owned firms for redistribution to blacks. "Colonialist whites exhausted the African land, turned it into desert, destroyed forests and impoverished its soil," said Qadhafi.

Nigeria

Vanguard Daily (Lagos) March 28, 2001 Lagos President of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC), Dr. Frederick Fasehun wants the Federal Government to pay reparations to the victims of [1999] Odi massacre. He was reacting to the reported apology made by President Olusegun Obasanjo over the Odi tragedy. The tragedy should not have happened in the first instance, he said, adding "if it had happened through human error, humans should endeavour to make reparations, not just verbal expression of remorse. The remorse must be genuine; it must be seen to be genuine and it must be a pointer to reparations."

Vanguard (Lagos) April 6, 2001 Former Minister of Sports, Air Commodore Samson Emeka Omeruah (rtd) has declared that only the practice of true federalism where all the federating units control their resources can set Nigeria on the track of actualising its full potentials. The former airforce chief who was reacting to President Olusegun Obasanjo's declaration that the clamour for resource control will lead to another civil war said the gruesome 30 months civil war which rocked the 60s was not the struggle for resource control but because of the genocide committed against the Igbos. The war started because the Igbos were purged, they were being massacred and they didn't know where to go but only to run to their homeland. "There were some argument which were not met and because of disagreement in meeting those agreement there was a civil war. "So it was basically not resource control war. If we know there was so much oil in Igboland as it is now the war would have been highly competitive."

Guardian (Lagos) April 14, 2001 AFTER a late-night attack on Tuesday, villagers in Qundum in Qua'an Pan council area of Plateau state, are protesting. They are seeking justice for the wanton destruction allegedly visited on their homesteads by the Fulani in the community. The villagers who stormed the Jos office of The Guardian claimed that Plateau state government's reference to the face-off as a "communal clash" did not reflect the true situation arguing that it was an incident where the Tiv in the area were singled out for attack. Spokesman for the Tiv in Jos, Mr. Ter Moses said his people in Qundum had fled the area because they could no longer guarantee their safety. Moses described the situation as "unfortunate," and blamed the acting chairman of the local government, Alhaji Mohammed Longsen for trivialising the issue. "The chairman said it was a communal clash whereas it was not. Only Tiv people were killed and their houses burnt. If it was a clash, why is it that nothing of Kwalla was torched or destroyed?" the leader questioned. He said the Kwalla people "targeted us while we were asleep and killed us like fowls. He frowned against a situation where people referred "to us as settlers," saying Tivs have been in Qundum locality before Nigeria's independence". According to Moses," The area was carved out by white settlers in those days and named it Sabon-Gida Gamji because of the stream, while the head of that place was called Bakur, while we still have Sabongida Jirm and Sabongida Magaji populated majorly by Tivs. The spokesman of the fleeing Tiv maintained that in the Qundum crisis one woman had her breast slashed which led to her death at the community's cottage hospital, claiming that no fewer than 20 people (Tivs) died in the raid. All attempts to get comments of the representative of the Fulani in the community proved unsuccessful.

BBC 24 Apr 2001 The heads of Nigeria's army, navy and air force have all retired in what is being seen as a major shake-up of the country's armed forces. The announcement of the retirement of army chief General Victor Malu, navy chief Vice Admiral Victor Ombu and air force chief Vice Marshal Ibrahim Alfa came as a surprise to most Nigerians. Political analysts in Nigeria are saying that the fact that the three men have stepped down at the same time is no coincidence and they may have been forced out. There is speculation that President Olusegun Obasanjo is trying to rid the armed forces of people who may be loyal to the previous military regime. The three men will be replaced by Major-General Ogomudia, who will head the army, Rear Admiral Afolayan, will head the navy and Air Vice-Marshal Wuyep will head the air force.

Guardian (Lagos) April 30, 2001 A spill-over of the violent clash that occurred early this month between Qundum and Tiv communities in Qua'an Pan council has claimed six more lives in Gidan Zuru and Makera Agu in Shendam council of Plateau State. The Divisional Police Officer (DPO) in the area, Yahaya Ogiri, who confirmed the incident, said four men and two women were confirmed dead while several others were wounded in the clash. The clash, which left Gidan Zuru, a predominantly Tiv settlement and Makera Agu, with surrounding villages deserted, is believed to be a spill-over of the conflict that occurred between Qundum and Nyeswe communities in Qua'an Pan local council early this month. The villages were burnt down by some people believed to be Fulanis (Hudawas). According to the witness, "what is however baffling about this uprising is the fact that nobody could identify the real people behind this act of terrorism and the destruction of lives and property." The Hudawas, whose number could not be ascertained, are still believed to be hiding in a thick forest bordering Awe Local council of Nassarawa State and Shendam and Qua'an Pan councils of Plateau State; also believed to be well armed with dangerous weapons. However, a community analyst said that the target of the Hudawas, (the Fulanis), seemed to be the Tiv people who were allegedly said to have killed a prominent Fulani farmer residing in Jirim in Awe local council in Nassarawa State, last year. The decomposed bodies of the six people killed in the early hours of Wednesday were buried in a mass grave in the Gidan Zulu village after post mortem examination by some doctors.

Rwanda

PANA April 2, 2001 Rwanda Rwandan Public Prosecutor Gerard Gahima, has accused Uganda, his country's former ally of assisting "genocide perpetrators" by allegedly granting them passports to avoid being taken to court. Gahima, who made the allegation on Rwandan Radio programme at the weekend, said "they (genocide perpetrators) are in our friendly and neighbouring country, Uganda, where dreadful Rwandan Hutu militiamen, killers known to all, are travelling using their (Ugandan) passports." Gahima also claimed that "many" of the genocide perpetrators were in several other countries. "But there are countries where their numbers are greater. Among these can be cited the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Zambia, France and Belgium," he charged.

PANA April 5, 2001 Rwanda Judicial sources in Kigali say over 20,000 suspects of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda have confessed their crimes since trials got underway in December 1996. The figure, observers noted, is insignificant compared to the 115,000 suspects presently held in Rwandan prisons. Since the opening of the genocide trials, 500 suspects have been condemned to death including 22 who were executed in April 1998, while 700 others were acquitted

ICRC News 5 Apr 2001 Over the last few days, the ICRC has stepped up its aid to Rilima prison, situated in the region of Bugesera, south-east Rwanda. The majority of the 7,400 inmates are being held awaiting trial, but deteriorating hygiene has killed dozens over the last few months. Poor detention conditions and lack of food are accentuating the effects of malaria (endemic in the region), typhus (diagnosis still to be confirmed) and diarrhoea. The ICRC makes regular visits to places of detention in Rwanda, meeting over half the food requirements of 92,000 detainees spread over 19 central prisons. Rwanda is currently trying to deal with the problem of holding 115,000 detainees, most of them accused of involvement in the genocide of April to July 1994. Some 20,000 are being held in village lockups, of which three-quarters are in the provinces of Gitarama and Butare.

BBC 6 Apr 2001 About three-hundred Rwandan exiles have held a demonstration at the Hague to highlight accusations of bias against the International War Crimes Tribunal. The rally was timed to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the shooting down of the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents in 1994. The mainly Hutu demonstrators handed in a petition to the tribunal urging its branch in Arusha, in Tanzania, to investigate alleged war crimes by Tutsis as well as Hutus. All the forty-four suspects detained by the court so far are Hutus. The demonstration was organised by a pressure group, the Rally for the Return of Refugees and Democracy.

IRIN April 9, 2001 Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused the international community of being "unjust and merciless" towards his country. In a speech on Saturday to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the 1994 genocide, broadcast by Rwandan radio, he recalled that the massacres - in which at least 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed - took place "before the eyes of the international community". Today, he said, the international community was accusing Rwanda of being in the DRC to plunder its wealth, rather than for security reasons. "We went to Congo for the sake of Rwandan security," he said. "We went there to make sure that what you see now [memories of the genocide] does not recur. I am saying this because the world is unjust and merciless...They [international community] see us as being in Congo in a search for minerals, and to kill people."

PANA April 9, 2001 Rwandan authorities Monday announced that an arrest warrant has been issued for former prime minister Pierre Celestin Rwigema, who is wanted for genocide crimes he allegedly perpetrated in 1994. Rwigema, 47, from the majority Hutu Republican Party (MDR), was appointed Minister of Education in July 1994 after the then rebel Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) took over government. He was Rwanda's prime minister since 1995 until January 2000 when a vote of no-confidence by legislators on charges of corruption, misappropriation of public funds and abuse of office forced him to resign. Rwigema is said to have been in charge of security in Biryogo and was coordinating the hunting down of Tutsis by issuing the lists of those to be killed.

AP April 10, 2001, Rwanda delivered an international arrest warrant to the United States for former Prime Minister Pierre-Celestin Rwigema, who is wanted in connection with the 1994 genocide, prosecutors said Tuesday. Rwigema, 47, was forced to resign from office in February 2000 after a parliamentary vote of no-confidence over allegations of corruption and mismanagement. He then fled to the United States and sought asylum, claiming persecution by the government.

BBC 12 Apr 2001 The exiled former Prime Minister of Rwanda, Pierre-Celestin Rwigema, has strongly denied charges from Kigali that he helped organise the 1994 genocide. Speaking in a BBC interview after the Rwandan authorities issued a warrant for his arrest, Mr Rwigema questioned the motives of his accusers. Mr Rwigema is thought not to have done enough to stop the genocide He said such a charge had never been made against him throughout his nearly six years in government, following the mass killings of Tutsis and moderate Hutus. However, Mr Rwigema, a Hutu, said he had faced a politically-motivated attack in Kigali, which forced him to flee. Mr Rwigema, who stepped down as prime minister last year after five years in government, has been seeking asylum in the United States since last June. A warrant for Mr Rwigema was issued last month and Interpol is currently handling the case.

Reuters 11 Apr 2001 The Rwandan government has agreed to hand over to a United Nations tribunal any army officers suspected of committing crimes against humanity during and after its rise to power in 1994, officials have said. State-run Radio Rwanda said President Paul Kagame gave the pledge to the chief prosecutor for the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Carla del Ponte, in Kigali on Monday. So far the tribunal has confined itself to trying prominent civil and military leaders of the defeated former Hutu government, as well as members of the notorious Interahamwe militia which led the 1994 massacres. But Hutu opposition organisations and some human rights groups have accused the court of bias for ignoring war crimes committed by the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels who rose to power in 1994. They ended the genocide and now dominate the government. Late last year Del Ponte said the tribunal might soon issue indictments against Rwandan Tutsis who took revenge in the aftermath of the genocide or while attempting to stop it.

AP April 17, 2001, The United Nations is looking into the legal basis for extraditing a U.N. employee to Rwanda to face charges of alleged involvement in the central African country's 1994 genocide, a U.N. official said. Callixte Mbarushimana was arrested Wednesday in Kosovo, where he had been working for the U.N. mission that has been administering the Serb province since the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said Monday. He was employed by the U.N. Development Program in Rwanda at the time of the 1994 massacre and is suspected of informing the Hutu Interahamwe militia of the location of Tutsi members of the UNDP, Eckhard said.

Reuters April 27, 2001 A former Rwandan bishop has been arrested in Kenya and taken to a U.N. court in Tanzania to face charges of involvement in Rwanda's 1994 genocide, the court said on Friday. Samuel Musabyimana, 47, was arrested by the Kenyan police in Nairobi on Thursday and was immediately transferred to the detention facility of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha. ``He is charged with four counts including genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide and crimes against humanity, specifically extermination,'' the ICTR said in a statement. An estimated 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were massacred by Hutu extremists in Rwanda in 1994, after a three and a half year civil war between the Hutu-led government and Tutsi rebels. The indictment against Musabyimana charges that in April and May 1994, in Gitarama prefecture in central Rwanda, he ''publicly stated that the situation for the Tutsi was very bad and that their end had arrived.'' It is also alleged the former Anglican bishop ordered a subordinate to register refugees arriving at his Shyogwe diocese according to their ethnic groups. ``The list of refugees was later used to select Tutsi refugees who were taken to nearby sites to be killed,'' the statement said. Musabyimana is also accused of paying the marauding Hutu militia who carried out the killings. Rwanda's government, which came to power to end the genocide in 1994, welcomed the arrest. ``We have enthusiastically hailed the arrest of Bishop Musabyimana,'' Justice Minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo said. ``This is just one of the many genocide criminals of different denominations who are scot-free in Western countries, notably Belgium, France, Italy, and Switzerland,'' he said. Musabyima fled Rwanda after the genocide. He was originally arrested in South Africa in September 2000 on immigration charges, but was later deported to Kenya where he escaped. An arrest warrant against Musabyimana was issued by the Tribunal on March 13, 2001.

Hirondelle News Agency (Arusha) April 30, 2001 Rwanda plans to create some 11,000 grassroots courts with between 250,000 and 300,000 elected judges when it launches its so-called gacaca project, said Vice-President of the Supreme Court in charge of Gacaca Aloysie Cyanzayire in a radio debate on Sunday. The long awaited gacaca project is based on an ancient form of traditional justice. An "organic law" laying down the workings of the system has been approved by parliament and by the country's Constitutional Court. It was published in the Official Journal of March 15th, 2001, meaning that it has now come into force. The government hopes gacaca will help resolve Rwanda's chronic problem of prison overcrowding, promote national reconciliation and speed up the pace of genocide trials. At the current rate of about 1,000 per year, dealing with all genocide and crimes against humanity cases would take more than a century. Cyanzayire said on Sunday that gacaca should last only five years. Last March, Cyanzayire said that gacaca judges could be elected at the end of May or beginning of June this year "if all goes well". She said one of the conditions would be publication of all the necessary legal texts. In particular, a presidential decree is still needed to define how elections for gacaca jurisdictions (General Assembly, Seat of 19 judges and Coordinating Committee) will be organized. Justice Minister Jean de Dieu Mucyo said in the same debate on Sunday that the bill was being finalized and would shortly be presented to the cabinet for approval. The President of the Supreme Court must also publish the operating rules for the gacaca courts. Training gacaca judges Before taking up their posts, the gacaca judges, who will not be trained lawyers, are to benefit from short training sessions in their home areas. The original idea was to run such courses simultaneously throughout the country. However, Cyanzayire said that would require more than 3,000 trainers and had proved impossible. She added that some one thousand trainers would now be available, including career magistrates, lawyers, law professors and students, and that they would themselves need some preparatory training. In March, Cyanzayire said that the election of the judges could be followed by their training in July and August and that gacaca courts could begin their work around the end of September. Before proceeding with trials, they will have to draw up lists of genocide suspects, categorize the suspects and collect evidence. Some 125, 000 people are currently held in Rwandan jails, of whom 115,000 are accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Since 1996, Rwandan law has divided such suspects into four categories. Gacaca courts will be responsible for trying suspects classed in Categories Two, Three and Four. Category One suspects will still be answerable to the existing national courts. A new, updated Category One list published three weeks ago contains 2,898 names. Category One consists of "planners, organizers, instigators, supervisors and leaders of the crime of genocide or of crimes against humanity", perpetrators of sexual torture or violence, and notorious murderers whose criminal acts were marked by "zeal or excessive malice". Category Two consists of "persons whose criminal acts or whose acts of criminal participation place them among the perpetrators, conspirators or accomplices of intentional homicide or of serious attacks" which caused death or were intended to cause death. Category Three is of those who allegedly committed or were accomplice to serious attacks, without the intention of causing death to victims, while Category Four is of people suspected of "having committed offences against assets". Justice Minister Mucyo said the first gacaca trials would concentrate on suspects who had pleaded guilty and confessed their crimes. In March, the minister said that 20,000 prisoners had confessed to genocide and crimes against humanity. Gacaca court files are to be kept at administrative offices at the sector level, but out of 1,500 sectors countrywide, only 500 so far have suitable offices. Cyanzayire said the government had promised to make sure that every sector was provided with suitable premises for the files. She said that the transport of prisoners would require a large amount of vehicles and fuel.

Senegal

BBC 7 Apr 2001, The Senegalese President, Abdoulaye Wade, has said the former President of Chad, Hissene Habre, must leave the country. "We have given him 30 days to leave Senegal," President Wade told Sud FM radio in Dakar, the Senegalese capital. But he said Senegal had not been given sufficient evidence by the Chadian Government for the courts to prosecute Mr Habre for alleged crimes against humanity. The case against Mr Habre, who has been in exile in Senegal since he fled Chad in 1990, has drawn comparisons with that of former Chilean President Augusto Pinochet, who avoided a trial abroad following a legal battle in the United Kingdom.

Sierra Leone

Agence France-Presse (AFP) 4 Apr 2001 The Sierra Leonean government and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group appear more upbeat than ever that an end to the 10-year-old bloody civil war is at hand. RUF's traditional backer, Liberian President Charles Taylor, he added, was also succumbing to international sanctions and telling the rebels to talk peace. Taylor is accused of supplying arms to the RUF in return for "blood diamonds" mined from RUF-controlled areas in northern and eastern Sierra Leone. Spencer said RUF had split, with one faction, headed by Issa Sesay, ready for peace and a smaller group "of die-hard Foday Sankoh loyalists and Charles Taylor surrogates bent on continuing in the same path." RUF leader Sankoh, a hardliner, is currently in jail in Freetown. A UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) official said a big obstacle to peace in the west African country was that junior Defence Minister Hinga Norman was promoting the Kamajors -- a ragtag force comprised mainly of illiterate peasants -- to promote his own interests. "He is pushing them as a support base and preparing them for an eventual induction in the army," the official said.

ICG 11 Apr 2001 Sierra Leone is a human tragedy of massive proportions that is rapidly becoming a security nightmare for all West Africa. Two-thirds of Sierra Leone’s population are thought to have been displaced during the ten-year civil war. Another 600,000 have become refugees in neighbouring countries. The war is spilling over into Guinea, where heavy fighting since September 2000 threatens the collapse of the government and has already produced a massive, new refugee problem. In effect, Sierra Leone is now at the heart of a series of conflicts that risk forming an arc of violence from southern Senegal to the Ivory Coast. ICG believes the international community needs to take a radically different approach to that in which it has engaged so far. There should be no further negotiations with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) other than for its complete disarmament and demobilisation. If the international community does not make a substantial commitment to help Sierra Leone resolve both its military and political problems now, however, it is all too easy to foresee the contagion of violence spreading out of control in West Africa much as has happened in Central Africa. RECOMMENDATIONS: To the UN Security Council 1) Abandon the Lomé Agreement and make no further deals with the RUF. 2) Call for immediate surrender of the RUF and, against those who refuse, support the threat and eventual use of military force by the Sierra Leone army, supported by the UK. 3) Give UNAMSIL a tougher mandate to occupy and protect areas liberated by the SLA and harmonise its objectives with the UK and with West African heads of state. 4. Impose targeted sanctions on Charles Taylor’s regime in Liberia -- involving visa restrictions, freezing of bank accounts and the like -- in order to persuade it to end its support for the RUF. 5. Provide adequate financing so that the Special Court established under UN Security Council Resolution 1315 of August 2000 can begin to investigate and prosecute those responsible for war crimes and a Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission can start operations. 6. Support Demobilisation and Reintegration Programs for RUF and government militia (CDF) combatants. 7. Commit to a continuing international role in Sierra Leone, which may need to last five or more years, to assist the Sierra Leone government constitute a more reliable army, re-establish good governance, and restore its shattered society. http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/

AP April 18, 2001, The United Nations has been unsuccessful in raising the millions of dollars needed to finance a war crimes tribunal to try those responsible for atrocities during the West African nation's civil war, a U.N. spokesman said. Secretary-General Kofi Annan sent a letter on March 23 asking for funds for the tribunal, but so far no pledges have been received and Britain is the only country to announce its intention to make a contribution – $715,000, spokesman Farhan Haq said Tuesday. The operating cost for the tribunal is estimated at roughly $30 million a year, he said. Last August, the Security Council asked Secretary-General Kofi Annan to negotiate an agreement with Sierra Leone to create a joint war crimes tribunal, to be based in the country's capital, Freetown. Foday Sankoh, imprisoned leader of the Revolutionary United Front, is expected to be among the first people tried by the international court for crimes dating back to 1996.

AFP 27 Apr 2001 Sierra Leone's rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) has accused pro-government Kamajor militiamen and Guinean troops of renewed attacks against rebel positions in the east of the country, state radio said Friday. In protest against attacks in the rebel-held Kono district, the RUF on Thursday snubbed talks which were to have been held with government officials at Lunsar, 80 kilometres (50 miles) east of the capital. The rebels, who hold much of the country's diamond territories, in March authorised UN peacekeepers monitoring a fragile peace pact to deploy in Lunsar.

Sudan

ICRC 5 Apr 2001 As part of a programme to incorporate international humanitarian law into the training of the Sudanese armed forces, 40 Sudanese Air Force officers – mainly fighter pilots – attended a law of war course in Khartoum at the end of March. The course was organized by the ICRC delegation in Sudan and given by an Indian instructor specialized in this type of training. The seminar – the first of its kind for the Sudanese Air Force – examined humanitarian law issues, focusing on the rules of air warfare and the responsibilities of commanders.

IRIN April 6, 2001 Two Kenyan nationals working with the US humanitarian agency Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) were handed over to the Kenyan ambassador on 31 March, in Khartoum. The release followed a plea by the visiting Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi to the Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir. They were released by the militia on 16 March, but were then held in government "safe house" until Saturday. According to official sources, the humanitarian workers were held for being in the country "without proper visas".

AFP 8 Apr 2001 A ship carrying 23,200 tonnes of wheat has been diverted to Sudan from a neighboring country amid heightened efforts to avert a new Sudanese famine, the World Food Program (WFP). In a report, the WFP warned that it was running out of food aid supplies and appealed to the international community to provide more than 100 million dollars in assistance over the next year. UN officials are asking donors to act swiftly to avoid a repeat of the famine that left around 250,000 people dead in 1985 and the devastating food crisis that hit war-torn Bahr al-Ghazal in 1998.

IRIN April 23, 2001 A plane carrying relief for the Nuba Mountains was bombed on 16 April at Kawdah (11.06N 30.31E) airstrip. A press release by the Italian NGO Koinonia Community said government planes dropped a total of about 14 bombs in three attacks, killing one person and injuring two. The first attack took place when hundreds of civilians had gathered at the airstrip around a relief plane on the ground. The arrival of a second plane carrying relief masked the noise of the approaching bomber, the press release said. The pilot of the approaching relief plane aborted the landing, and escaped unharmed, as did the plane on the ground, which took off immediately with its passengers. Kawdah airstrip is in an area controlled by the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The airstrip was described by the NGO as a vital link for civilians and the SPLA. "For a long time, relief organisations, human rights groups and churches have been pushing to gain access to the Nuba Mountains to deliver food and other relief supplies," the NGO said in the press release. The Sudan government has denied that government air force bombers attacked the Kawdah airstrip.

AFP 20 Apr 2001 The Sudanese government denied Friday reports that it had twice bombed civilians earlier this week, killing two of them, as they were gathered at an airstrip in the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan. Army spokesman General Mohamed Beshir Suleiman also denied rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) claims that it has seized control of five areas in the Sudan's southeastern Blue Nile province after battles that killed hundreds of government troops. SPLA spokesman Samson Kwaje said Wednesday that two people -- Yusuf Hassan and El-Amin Kuku -- died when Antonov planes dropped 14 bombs at Kauda airstrip near a Roman Catholic missionary school two days earlier. On Tuesday, the Antonov planes again dropped eight bombs at Changaru, near the airstrip, wounding a student named Salah Hassan, Kwaje said. General Suleiman said Kwaje allegations were "baseless." Meanwhile, referring to the rebel claims about Blue Nile, General Suleiman said only that an "army reconnaissance unit had clashed with rebels at an SPLA position" in the province." He said the unit had successfully completed its mission of collecting intelligence on rebel arms and materiel.

IRIN April 23, 2001 A Sudanese plane dropped 16 bombs in and around the southern Sudanese town of Narus, Eastern Equatoria, on 22 April, Catholic church sources said. Two bombs landed in Narus marketplace and another two hit the church school, destroying adjacent buildings. According to the sources, one child was evacuated to a Kenyan hospital in critical condition, and two people sustained minor injuries.

IRIN 30 Apr 2001 The official Sudanese government spokesman, Information Minister Ghazi Salah al-Din al-Atabani, has expressed satisfaction at approach of the new US administration. "This is the first time that the US is adopting a direct approach to Sudan since 1998," Muhammad Dirdeiry, spokesman for the Sudanese Embassy in Nairobi, told IRIN. US Secretary of State Colin Powell set three conditions for relations with Sudan to improve, Reuters reported on 26 April. He said Sudan would have to cooperate with the US on a peace plan for the south, which could lead to "a higher level of US representation" in Sudan. 1) Khartoum would have to stop the aerial bombardment of southern towns and villages, and 2) ease restrictions on humanitarian relief to the south. 3) The US would like to see the Sudan get rid of "any vestiges of terrorist organisations within the country". Powell was testifying before the appropriations sub-committee of the House of Representatives' Commerce, Justice, State and Judiciary Committee. He told the panel that the Bush administration "have developed a road map on how to approach the authorities in Khartoum", according to Reuters. The sub-committee chairman, Frank Wolf, who visited southern Sudan in January, showed Powell a video on the effects of Sudanese air force bombings and urged him to name a special envoy for Sudan, Reuters reported. Powell, however, told the panel that "before you name someone you have to have a clear policy for that person to carry out, and we are still coming up with that policy", according to Reuters. Dirdeiry told IRIN that Sudan welcomed US involvement in the Sudanese peace process, but wanted the sanctions imposed on it lifted. He said that before there was any such US involvement, Sudan should be removed from the US State Department's list of states sponsoring terrorism.

Tanzania - ICTR

Pana (Arusha) April 3, 2001 American legal figure Ramsey Clark is at the ICTR to represent Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, an elderly Rwandan pastor about to face trial for genocide and crimes against humanity at the ICTR. On Monday Clark told the tribunal judges that the court itself is not independent, that it threatens detainees' fundamental rights and should not have been created by the UN Security Council under article VII of the UN Charter, which he calls "a war powers act." Far from denying the horrors of 1994, he sees the current one- sided prosecution as a manipulation of history, a rewriting of history using courts to serve a particular political agenda. That agenda serves the UN, and whether by accident or design, the current Rwandan government. And underlying that government's will, and UN politics, Clark sees the American government's foreign policy agenda as a primary driver. During our conversation Clark elaborates on the political and legal allegations in his motion and oral arguments, which highlight many of the legal issues that run through the other cases he has worked on recently, and which he sees recurring in US foreign policy. Considering Iraq, Clark talks about what he perceives as genocide against the Iraqi people through sanctions initiated and enforced by the US. He has lobbied the UN General Assembly and Security Council, visited Iraq and Turkey many times, and led an International Inquiry into war crimes committed in Iraq, to try to end what he sees as massive, needless suffering on the part of innocent Iraqis, in particular, women, children, and elderly civilians. The situation of Iraqi civilians is analogous to that of the Rwandan Hutu for Clark, in that they are being made to pay with lives or in criminal court in support of the moral victors in the war against their criminal leaders. Clark has spent much of the 1990s trying to convince the UN that the United States, along with several European countries are responsible for genocide in Iraq, as they use sanctions as the ultimate tool of persecution, targeting a large group of people based on their nationality.

NYT 26 Apr 2001 Two new judges have been added to the war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, raising the number to 11 and allowing the court to reinforce its appeals chamber. The new judges are Winston Churchill Matanzima Maqutu of the Lesotho High Court, and Arlette Ramaroson, former president of the criminal chamber of the Madgascar Supreme Court. The tribunal was set up after the 1994 genocide in which at least 500,000 Rwandans died. Barbara Crossette

Uganda

AP 30 Apr 2001 Uganda's president withdrew on Sunday from a peace accord designed to end Congo's 2 1/2 -year civil war, infuriated by a U.N. report accusing his nation and other parties in the conflict of plundering Congo's vast natural resources. The United Nations is helping broker an end to the war, which now involves five foreign armies and has left the Congolese government holding just 40 percent of a country the size of Western Europe. Aid workers say the conflict is indirectly responsible for the deaths of at least 1 million Congolese and the displacement of 2 million more. Uganda's withdrawal could give the Congolese rebels it backs less incentive to stick to the peace agreement, reached in Lusaka, Zambia in 1999 by all warring sides. It could also enable Uganda to arm those rebels, unrestrained by the accord's prohibition on further military aid. But Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni also reiterated his commitment to pulling his troops from neighboring Congo, saying now that they have defeated Ugandan rebels operating there, it was time for his forces to leave. Museveni said his decision was motivated by an April 16 U.N. report that implicated his country, members of his government and his family in the alleged plundering of resources from Congo. The report called for sanctions against Uganda and Rwanda and the prosecution of their leaders and rebel leaders for economic crimes. ``The U.N. report does not only distort the source of the conflict in the Great Lakes region and malign us, but they also seek to destroy the Lusaka peace agreement. The report is in the main, shoddy, malicious and a red herring,'' Museveni said in a statement in the government-owned New Vision newspaper. ``Genocide, terrorism and disenfranchising the Congolese people are causes of this problem, not minerals,'' he said. Congo has vast deposits of key minerals, including diamonds, copper, cobalt, gold and coltan — a natural alloy of columbite and tantalite used to manufacture high-tech electronics. It also has large forests for timber. Museveni said his army will remain on the mountain slopes overlooking the Congo border to flush out any rebel incursions. He left open the possibility his troops may return to Congo if he decides they are needed there. In his statement, Museveni also cited the region's chaos and the world's ``indifference.'' ``Owing to the indifference to Africans suffering in the world, owing to ideological confusion and fragmentation in Africa where you cannot tell who is an enemy and who is a friend, I have decided to ... withdraw completely from Congo and also from the Lusaka peace process,'' Museveni said.

Americas

Canada

Toronto Star Apr. 12, 2001 Leon Mugesera, a man accused of inciting a 1994 massacre in Rwanda is not a war criminal and can remain in Canada, a federal judge said Thursday as he urged a review of the man's deportation case. Mugesera, who had been ordered deported by two immigration board tribunals, cleared a major hurdle in his bid to stay in Canada but could still eventually be forced to leave. Federal Court Justice Marc Nadon said one of the tribunals erred in its ruling that Mugesera should face charges of crimes against humanity. He also asked the lower tribunal of the immigration board to review its claim that Mugesera helped incite hatred and genocide. Deportation proceedings against Mugesera's wife and five children must be halted immediately, Nadon ordered. Nadon concluded there is no proof linking the speech to about 800,000 murders in the spring of 1994. He said the appeals tribunal of the immigration board should re-examine two conclusions it made. The first was that, although the speech may not have caused the deaths, it may have incited genocide. The other was that the speech incited hatred. It had been expected that Nadon's ruling would be the final step in Mugesera's long fight to stay in Quebec City, where he has lived since coming to Canada in 1993. The government can still appeal to the Federal Court of Appeals, said a spokesman for the federal Citizenship and Immigration Department. ''We are evaluating all our options,'' said department spokesman Rene Mercier. ''I want to underline that for war crimes and crimes against humanity, our position is not to accept these people in Canada.'' In his 1992 speech in Rwanda, Mugesera, an adviser to a Rwandan cabinet minister, implied that Hutus needed to cut Tutsi throats before Tutsis cut theirs and referred to Tutsis as Inyenzis, an ethnic slur. Mugesera wasn't in the country when three months of killings were sparked April 6, 1994, when Rwandan president Juvenal Habyarimana died as his plane was shot down.

Colombia

AP April 1, 2001 The victims show up most mornings along streets or in grassy gullies. They are typically young men shot five or six times in the head – a trademark, officials say, of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, known as the AUC. Already this year, police have recorded nearly 200 homicides, compared with 570 for all of last year. The landowner-backed AUC previously operated mostly against rural villages. But the group is now believed to control about 80 percent of the neighborhoods of Barrancabermeja, a city of 300,000 people that processes three-fourths of the country's petroleum and was for decades a guerrilla stronghold. The assault on Barranca follows AUC advances in smaller towns and villages throughout a large northeastern region along the Magdalena River that was the cradle of the National Liberation Army, Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group. The AUC first stormed into a poor Barranca neighborhood in May 1998, killing seven people at a street fair and taking 25 others away in trucks. The prisoners were "tried" as rebel sympathizers and executed, the AUC later announced. Such massacres have now given way to selective assassinations, with rebels themselves taking part in the slaughter, officials and human rights monitors said. Offered guns, cell phones and a $250 monthly salary – more than they ever earned as guerrillas – dozens of rebels have defected to the paramilitaries and identified former comrades.

BBC 16 Apr 2001, . Initial reports said that about 50 villagers had been killed, but a local official later put the number at "about 25", including several children. Rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), the country's largest guerrilla group, raided the village of Caucana in northern Antioquia Province, following skirmishes with right-wing paramilitaries. They used guns and domestic gas canisters packed with explosives to attack a petrol station and other buildings, leaving only smoking ruins where the village used to stand, local mayor Angel Gomez told Caracol radio. Meanwhile, human rights investigators have arrived in a remote mountain area in south-western Colombia where as many as 30 civilians were reported to have been killed by the AUC last week. The massacre is said to have taken place at the town of Alto Naya, 650km (406 miles) south-west of Bogota. Human rights groups accuse the AUC, which is believed to have more than 6,000 fighters nationwide, of committing most of the massacres and other atrocities in an increasingly brutal civil conflict that has claimed more than 35,000 lives in the past decade. Both the AUC and their opponents are suspected of receiving substantial funds from the cocaine trade.

AP April 21 2001 Colombia Massacre Warnings Unheeded - As searchers comb mountain hamlets for the bodies of those killed in an Easter week chain saw massacre, fresh charges have surfaced that Colombia's U.S.-backed military is turning a blind eye to rightist paramilitary violence. Documents and statements by human rights workers suggest that top defense officials and army units stationed in the area of the massacre in western Cauca State had advance warning that the attack on villagers might occur. The military army contends it did all it could to prevent what may turn out to be the largest massacre in the South American country this year. Officials estimate that as many as 40 people were killed. But some say the three-day paramilitary rampage though a swath of high Andean villages demonstrates a pattern established in dozens of previous cases. ``It's a very similar situation,'' said Armando Borrero, a former national security adviser [under President Pastrana's predecessor, Ernesto Samper] who heads a $1 million U.S.-funded project to create an ``early warning system'' to stop attacks before they occur. ``The massacre is announced. There is information. But at the moment it occurs apparently no (troops) are in the area where the danger was the greatest.''

AP 30 Apr 2001 Claiming a major strike against rightist paramilitary groups, Colombia's military said it had killed three members of a rightist militia and captured 58 others involved in a gruesome Easter week massacre of dozens of villagers. The military cited the crackdown Monday as proof that security forces are fighting the right-wing United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, as well as leftist guerrillas. The operations show the ``total commitment of the Colombian government and its armed forces to combat all of the illegal groups, independent of their ideology,'' Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez told reporters in Bogota. Ramirez said it was the largest single capture of AUC fighters on record and raised the number of paramilitaries arrested this year to 320, equal to the number captured all of last year. He claimed an entire paramilitary front had been ``practically dismantled'' in the operation, in which marines reportedly clashed on six occasions with the AUC. Earlier in the day, reporters flown to a naval base on Colombia's Pacific coast were shown 17 of the detainees, young men accused of belonging to the AUC. The AUC has admitted it carried out the slaughter in mountain hamlets in Cauca state. Human rights officials say as many as 40 villagers were killed after being accused of collaborating with leftist guerrillas. Some were attacked with chain saws, the officials said. The massacre, one of the largest this year, raised fresh criticism that the U.S.-backed military is turning a blind eye to paramilitary violence. Human rights and refugee officials had warned the army repeatedly that a massacre might occur. Defending his troops, army chief Gen. Jorge Mora said Monday that he did not have enough troops to ``be in every part of country we would like to be.'' Ramirez, the defense minister, promised the massacre would ``not remain in impunity'' - as do so many killings by all factions involved in Colombia's 37-year conflict. Military officials deny there are any systematic links between the armed forces and the paramilitaries, who have massacred thousands in a ``dirty war'' against suspected leftists.

Guatemala

BBC 30 Apr 2001, A Guatemalan human rights group says it believes it has found bones belonging to sixty four victims of a massacre dating back to May 1982. The organisation, the Mutual Support Group, said on Sunday that remains had been found in nineteen communal graves near the village of San Antonio Sinache north of the capital, Guatemala City. The group said the victims are believed to have been murdered by the army together with local villagers who had been formed into so-called "civil self-defence patrols". It said that they appeared to have been tortured, attacked with both machetes and gun fire and in some cases raped before being killed and then burnt.

Guyana

Reuters April 25 Guyanan President Bharrat Jagdeo and opposition leader Desmond Hoyte have agreed to work to halt racially motivated violence that has shaken this South American nation since an election in March. After a meeting in Georgetown late Tuesday, the two political rivals issued a statement in which Hoyte's People's National Congress Reform coalition recognized the government of Jagdeo's People's Progressive Party/Civic alliance. The March 19 election victory of Jagdeo's party, which is backed by the country's Indo-Guyanese majority, sparked a series of anti-government protests from ethnic African supporters of the PNC in this poor country where racial tensions run high. A woman died from gunshot wounds in the disturbances over the last month, in which property was set on fire and destroyed. ``The two parties accept that violence ought not to be part of any protest and will work toward the lessening of tensions,'' said the declaration by Hoyte, a 72-year-old former president, and Jagdeo, 37. On the eve of Tuesday's meeting, police reported violence outside opposition headquarters after party officials said gunmen opened fire on the complex. PNC militants overturned and burned a bus and damaged two others but no injuries were reported. While Hoyte's opposition party formally recognized the government elected in last month's poll, which was supervised by international observers, it reserved the right to challenge the election result in court.

Times of India 29 Apr 2001 Guyana's Indian community has come under increasing attacks since President Bharrat Jagdeo returned to power in March, with the opposition People's National Congress (PNC) saying the Caribbean nation should not be ruled by an "Indian party." Senior officials at India's foreign ministry, who are monitoring the situation closely, feel the stepped up violence is part of the poll hangover and would taper off. "This sort of attacks have always been there, but their intensity appears to have gone up. It is not anyway as alarming as what happened in Fiji," one official remarked. People of Indian origin make up for 50 per cent of Guyana's seven million population. The return to power of Jagdeo's Progressive People's Party (PPP), which has its support base among the Indian community, has been a bitter blow to his rival and PNC veteran Desmond Hoyte, whose predominantly Afro-Guyanese party has been in political wilderness since being voted out of office in 1992. The March 17 defeat is the third consecutive electoral setback for the PNC, and has triggered a minor revolt against the aging Hoyte's leadership, particularly from the younger generation who want him to "move over." There have also been reports of defection by some senior PNC leaders to PPP. Hoyte, who had threatened a "slow fire" before the elections, called for "more fire" after he lost the election in what is seen as an attempt to divert criticism about his leadership. According to reports from Georgetown, Indian-owned business blocks around the capital went up in flames after the elections results were announced. Gangs of Afro-Guyanese indulged in violence against the Indian community.The PPP government is in a quandary. If it calls in the security forces, the move could boomerang because the police and the security forces are largely composed of Afro-Guyanese who may well take the side of the attackers, going by the country's record of ethnic relations. The Indians, who were taken by the British as indentured labour to work in the island's plantations, were mostly from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The Afro-Guyanese form about 32 percent of the population, the rest belong to mixed races. The Indian community has undergone remarkable transformation since its arrival in the country and today controls most of the economy. There is anger among members of the Indian community against the government for its failure to control the violence and its seeming unwillingness to help the victims, almost all of whom had voted for the PPP. And there have been charges of ethnic cleansing and comparisons with Yugoslavia and criticism of black leaders for not doing much to end it. PNC supporters who set ablaze dozens of Indian-owned businesses spared African-owned businesses. Some Indian PNC supporters also fell victim to the attackers. Indian officials said the situation was unlikely to go out of hand as the recent Quebec Summit of Americas had made it clear that any overthrow of lawfully elected governments of the 34 member nations would attract punitive measures and exclusion from the free trade area the summit proposes to establish by 2005.

Mexico

April 20 2001 The Mexican army finished closing seven bases in the conflict-torn state of Chiapas on Friday in a key step toward the resumption of peace talks between the government and Zapatista rebels. The Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) took up arms in the impoverished southern state in 1994, saying it was defending the rights of Mexico's 10 million Indians. Before the rebels would agree to resuming stalled peace talks, they demanded the closure of the seven army bases, along with the liberation of Zapatista prisoners and Congress' passage of an Indian rights bill. ``With these actions, the federal government is advancing toward meeting the demands made by the EZLN for renewing dialogue and peace negotiations,'' government peace commissioner Luis H. Alvarez said. The EZLN guerrilla war lasted only about 10 days in early 1994, but peace talks stalled, and the state has seen a tense standoff between rebels and the military. Violence also continues to plague Chiapas, which has a large indigenous population and simmering disputes over land and resources that often pit Zapatista supporters against backers of the PRI or the state's powerful landowners. On Thursday, eight Chiapas peasants died in an ambush, officials said. In a radio interview on Friday, Gov. Pablo Salazar said officials were investigating three possible motives for the crime. One theory was that it was part of a long-standing rivalry between three groups with conflicting land claims, he said. Salazar said there was no reason to believe the massacre was related to the army's withdrawal.

AP 30 Apr 2001 Mexico's Zapatista rebels broke off all contacts with the government Thursday and called upon supporters to protest against an Indian rights bill that he says fails to meet rebels' demands. Subcomandante Marcos said the bill, modified by the Senate and passed by both houses of Congress last week, weakened clauses guaranteeing autonomy and self-determination contained in accords reached in 1996 by Zapatistas and members of a government peace commission. ``With this reform, federal legislators and the Fox government close the door to dialogue and peace,'' Marcos said in a communique issued from the rebel's jungle base in the southern state of Chiapas. ``It sabotages the incipient process of reconciliation between the government and the Zapatista National Liberation Army.'' Marcos also lambasted President Vicente Fox for praising the bill. ``In this way Fox demonstrates that he only pretended to make the initial agreement his, while he negotiated with hardline sectors of Congress a reform that doesn't recognize the rights of the indigenous communities.'' The Zapatistas want regional autonomy for Indian areas on issues like native languages and traditional government and law based on councils of elders or village assemblies. In Congress' version of the bill, autonomy would be more locally based, and state legislatures would have to enact those customs into law. The original version also established Indians' communal rights to land and natural resources. Congress inserted language protecting private land holdings in Indian areas and said Indians would have preference, but not sole rights, to natural resources in their territories. The Zapatistas launched a short-lived revolution in the name of Indian rights on Dec. 1, 1994. More than 140 people died in 12 days of fighting. While the rebels have not been a major military threat since, they have mounted a successful campaign to demand that Mexico rethink its treatment of its 10 million Indians. Passage of the bill was one of the three conditions established by the Zapatistas to reopen peace talks with the government. Submitting the bill to Congress was Fox's first official act after taking office in December. Last Wednesday, the Senate unanimously passed a modified version. The lower house of Congress overwhelmingly approved it Saturday. Salazar, the Chiapas governor elected by a coalition of political parties including Fox's National Action Party and the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, also rejected the bill Thursday, saying it represented a ``triumph for conservatism'' in Mexico.

Peru

AP April 2, 2001; A lawmaker on Monday asked Congress to investigate disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori for possible links to a paramilitary death squad blamed for two massacres and human rights abuses. Congresswoman Anel Townsend filed a "constitutional denunciation" against Fujimori for murders and disappearances committed by the Colina death squad, which human rights groups say was formed by his fugitive ex-spy chief Vladimiro Montesinos. Fujimori's 10-year autocratic rule ended in November after he fled to Japan, his parents' homeland, amid mounting corruption scandals surrounding Montesinos. Colina group members are widely blamed for the 1991 killings of 15 people in a tenement building in Lima's Barrios Altos district. For years, they were protected from prosecution under a 1995 military and police amnesty used to secure their release from prison for the 1992 assassinations of nine students and a professor at La Cantuta University.

Reuters April 8 Peruvians voted for a new president on Sunday to replace disgraced former leader Alberto Fujimori , but the poll pitting an ethnic Andean Indian against a lawyer and a failed ex-president was not expected to produce an outright winner and instead go to a second-round showdown. Peru's 14.9 million voters, many of whom have trekked by canoe and donkey from remote highland and jungle areas to polling stations across the country, have until 4:00 p.m. to vote for a new leader and Congress. Surveys show Alejandro Toledo, a centrist free-marketeer of Andean Indian descent, is up to 15 percentage points ahead of right-of-center ex-congresswoman Lourdes Flores, with leftist ex-President Alan Garcia trailing by around three points in a race for second place that is too close to call. Polls show five other minority candidates have no hope of winning. They also show most Peruvians expect Toledo, whose humble ethnic roots have struck a chord in this Andean country, where half of the 26 million people live in poverty, to become their next president even if a run-off is tight.

United States

NewsFactor Network March 30, 2001 IBM Holocaust Lawsuit Dropped IBM, led by chairman and CEO Lou Gerstner, had been the subject of a lawsuit alleging that its German subsidiary used its tabulating machinery to help Adolf Hitler persecute victims of the Holocaust. The lead attorney for five plaintiffs who last month sued IBM for "knowingly suppl[ying] technology used to catalog death camp victims and aid[ing] in [their] persecution, suffering, and genocide" has agreed to drop the case. Michael D. Hausfeld, the plaintiff's attorney, told news sources Thursday that the case would be dropped so that his clients, all Holocaust survivors, would be able to collect from the compensation fund jointly established by the German government and German businesses. Last July, the German government and the country's business community jointly established the "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" foundation to oversee the compensation plan funds, said to amount to approximately US$5 billion. Hausfeld said that the U.S. State Department promised to renew its efforts to obtain all the materials IBM archived during its period of apparent complicity with the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945. Said the State Department's Boucher: "The United States strongly supports the opening of all archives, public and private, relating to the Holocaust era in order to facilitate further research and encourage greater understanding of the Holocaust and its historical context." Added Hausfeld: "If IBM opens their archives and turns all their materials over to us, that satisfies our objective." IBM has already donated more than 10,000 pages of documents delineating the company's Nazi dealings to Hohenheim University in Germany and to New York University. Edwin Black, whose book "IBM and the Holocaust" was published in February in tandem with Hausfeld's lawsuit, has asserted that there are probably 100,000 or more documents "scattered in basements and corporate archives around the United States and Europe."

AP April 11, 2001; New York Life Insurance Company reached a settlement with the beneficiaries of 10,000 heirs living in the United States and abroad whose family members purchased policies from before 1915. Under the settlement, New York Life will pay beneficiaries 10 times the face value amount of the policy and will contribute $3 million to Armenian civic organizations, the plaintiffs' attorneys said. The settlement comes months after Gov. Gray Davis signed into law what was known as the Armenian genocide bill, which allowed survivors or their heirs to sue in California courts to recover policy benefits and extended the statute of limitations to cover lawsuits filed by 2010. The original plaintiff in the case, Martin Marootian, said he was not pleased with all the details of the settlement, which attorneys said could be addressed in a court hearing on the settlement. The elderly Armenian filed his lawsuit in November 1999 after years of frustration with the company over a policy his uncle took out before being killed in 1915.

AP April 18, 2001; President Bush visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, an event on the Jewish calendar commemorating the 6 million victims of the Holocaust during World War II. "This isn't like any other museum," Bush said. "This museum bears witness to the best and worst of the human heart. We must always remember the cruelty of the guilty and the courage of the innocent. An evil had never been so ambitious in its scope, so systematic in its execution and so deliberate in its destruction." In an awkward moment, Bush admonished his own guests when they applauded his arrival with hoots and whistles. With a frown, Bush said the museum was a "hallowed place" and that they should "behave." He then went on to praise the effort to forever capture the atrocities committed against the Jewish people. Bush also sent a signal that the United States' relationship with Israel is still that of close companionship. Bush, who was set to speak at a Capitol Hill ceremony marking the Days of Remembrance on Thursday, said he would "convey America's commitment to a friend as a friend to the Jewish people, to their cause and to the nation they built."

Armenian National Committee of America http://www.anca.org PRESS RELEASE President George W. Bush today broke his promise to recognize the Armenian Genocide, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA). In a statement issued on April 24th, the annual day of remembrance for the Armenian Genocide, the President resorted to the use of evasive and euphemistic terminology to obscure the reality of Turkey's Genocide against the Armenian people, saying "Today marks the commemoration of one of the great tragedies of history: the forced exile and annihilation of approximately 1.5 million Armenians in the closing years of the Ottoman Empire. These infamous killings darkened the 20th century and continue to haunt us to this day. Today, I join Armenian Americans and the Armenian community abroad to mourn the loss of so many innocent lives. I ask all Americans to reflect on these terrible events." In February 2000, prior to the hotly contested Michigan primary, then Governor Bush affirmed, "The Armenians were subjected to a genocidal campaign that defies comprehension and commands all decent people to remember and acknowledge the facts and lessons of an awful crime in a century of bloody crimes against humanity." Just two weeks ago, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura, by signing a Minnesota Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day proclamation, brought the number of U.S. states officially commemorating the Armenian Genocide to thirty. Last October, responding to threats by the Turkish government, the Clinton Administration pressured the U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who had himself previously pledged to support Armenian Genocide Resolution, to withdraw it, only moments before it was to have come to a vote. As a candidate in 1992, then Governor Clinton had properly characterized the Armenian Genocide in campaign statements.

AFP 3 Apr 2001 Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told US counterpart George W. Bush in Washington that "partition of Sudan was not an option," Egypt's Foreign Minister Amr Mussa said Tuesday. "Whether Sudan adopts a federal system or not is an internal issue," Mussa added. During last week's Arab summit in Amman, Mubarak and his Sudanese counterpart Omar el-Beshir agreed Cairo would attempt to improve US-Sudanese relations. Sudan recalled its ambassador to the United States in 1998 after Washington bombed a Khartoum pharmaceutical plant, which it said was producing chemical weapons.

WP April 19, 2001, An influential energy task force headed by Vice President Cheney has broached the possibility of lifting some economic sanctions against Iran, Libya and Iraq as part of a plan to increase America's oil supply. According to a draft of the task force report, the United States should review the sanctions against the three countries because of the importance of their oil production to meeting domestic and global energy needs.Until the president makes final decisions on that product, everything is subject to change." The energy report, due in the next few weeks, will be about 100 pages and divided into 10 chapters, administration officials say. A cross-section of the energy industry, including oil companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and production services companies such as Halliburton, have been pressing Congress and administration policy-makers under Bush and former president Bill Clinton to give them access to Libya, Iran and Iraq. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has taken the lead in promoting a plan to ease the economic embargo on Iraq while tightening restrictions on imports and oil revenue that can be used to develop its military. Under the U.N. Security Council's oil-for-food program, Iraq is allowed to export petroleum -- much of which ultimately is sold in the United States. But the profits must be placed in a U.N. account, which can be used to pay for food, medicine and other humanitarian goods. Administration officials plan to craft a new program of sanctions on Iraq by June, when the restrictions come up before the Security Council for a review.

April 24, 2001 A white man has been accused of shouting racial slurs at a black man and then throwing a brick through his car window during three days of riots in black neighborhoods in other parts of Cincinnati, Ohio A grand jury has indicted Craig Carr, 20, on a charge of ethnic intimidation for throwing the brick April 12 during the riots that followed the fatal shooting by police of an unarmed black man, prosecutors said. Carr, of Cincinnati, also was indicted Monday on charges of criminal damaging and aggravated menacing. If convicted, he could be sentenced to a year behind bars for ethnic intimidation and six months each on the other two charges, for a total of two years incarceration. In Ohio, ethnic intimidation - the state's definition of a "hate crime" - cannot be charged as a sole offense, but can be attached to other criminal charges to bring a stiffer punishment, Hamilton County Prosecutor Michael Allen said. Officials announced 63 indictments Friday on crimes that were allegedly committed during the riots. All but one of the defendants are black. The same grand jury that returned those indictments lodged the charges against Carr, prosecutors said. The rioting stopped when Mayor Charles Luken imposed a citywide curfew on April 12 that remained in effect for four nights. Allen said a grand jury will soon investigate the April 7 shooting of Timothy Thomas, 19, that prompted the violence.

NYT April 26, 2001 Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator who won the Medal of Honor for his military service in Vietnam, has acknowledged that a combat mission he led there three decades ago caused the deaths of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. Days before an investigation of his role in the incident was to be published in The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Kerrey began describing his version of the events in interviews that appeared yesterday in other newspapers and on television. He first spoke publicly about the incident, which occurred Feb. 25, 1969, in the Mekong Delta, in a speech last week at the Virginia Military Institute. "I have been haunted by it for 32 years." At the time, Mr. Kerrey was a 25- year-old lieutenant who had arrived in Vietnam only a month earlier. On Feb. 25, 1969, he led a group of six Navy Seals — the informal name for Sea-Air-Land units, specialists in unconventional warfare — on a mission to capture a Vietcong leader who was supposed to be having a meeting in the area that night.

NYT 30 Apr 2001 WASHINGTON, April 30 For the first time, the State Department added the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia [AUC], an umbrella organization made up of paramilitary groups, to its compilation of terrorist groups. Two rebel groups are already on the list of designated foreign terrorist organizations. The Colombian National Police said 804 assassinations, 203 kidnappings and 75 massacres could be attributed to the paramilitary groups during the first 10 months of 2000. International terrorist attacks rose 8 percent last year from the previous year, largely because of an upsurge in bombings of a Colombian oil pipeline by two terrorist groups there, according to a State Department report issued today. In its annual report on the patterns of global terrorism, the department said South Asia remained the focal point for terrorism directed against the United States. The Taliban in Afghanistan continued to provide safe haven for international terrorists, and Pakistan continued to lend support to terrorists, the report said. Despite these concerns about Pakistan and Afghanistan, which were included in the report for the second straight year, those countries were not added to the previous list of nations accused of state-sponsored terrorism: Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea , Sudan and Syria. Of the 19 Americans killed in acts of international terrorism last year, 17 victims died in the attack against the destroyer Cole in October in the Yemeni port of Aden. Another American victim was one of three aid workers murdered in West Timor. In addition, an American journalist was killed when rebels in Sierra Leone fired at the car in which he and other journalists were riding. Over all, there were 423 terrorist attacks around the world in 2000, with 200 of them directed at the United States. The bombing attacks in Colombia accounted for much of the rise, officials said. US Dept of State http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/

WP 28 Apr 2001 U.S. intelligence agencies used a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals after World War II to help cope with the new threats posed by the Soviet Union and its communist allies, a long-secret trove of CIA records showed yesterday. The collaboration was mainly with middle-ranking Nazis, men with obscure names but often deadly backgrounds. Among them were an SS officer who hunted Jews in Genoa, an emissary in Rome wanted for a 1944 massacre, a Nazi intelligence officer "well versed" in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz and the "intellectual leader" of an SS think tank who was wanted in Poland for war crimes. Their work for Hitler's Germany and then the Americans and other Western intelligence agencies is detailed in 20 CIA "name files," the first of several hundred to be made public. The CIA had refused to acknowledge the existence of the records until Congress passed a 1998 law requiring their declassification. Files on Adolf Hitler and other notorious war criminals were among the 10,000 pages released yesterday, but the most striking disclosures were about a second tier of Nazis who aligned themselves with Western powers eager to use their expertise against the Soviet Union. Many of these lesser-known men "committed serious crimes, but in the postwar period received light punishment, no punishment at all, or received compensation because Western intelligence agencies considered them useful assets in the Cold War," according to a panel of historians enlisted by the government to study the records. The documents confirm that three Nazis charged with war crimes -- Emil Augsburg, Wilhelm Hoettl and Klaus Barbie -- were employed by the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps or the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA, according to former representative Elizabeth Holtzman (D-N.Y.), a member of a federal panel in charge of carrying out the 1998 law.

WP April 14, 2001, The Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, radio talk show host Joe Madison and Hudson Institute fellow Michael Horowitz were arrested yesterday after they handcuffed themselves to the front of the Sudanese Embassy to protest the Khartoum government's war with southern Sudan and its failure to end the enslavement of people captured from the south. "If they want slaves, then take me and release those today who are in human bondage," Madison said before attaching himself to an iron lamp next to the embassy's front door. Madison decided not to post bail and was planning to remain in jail for the weekend. The three said they want the Bush administration to make stopping the war in Sudan a top foreign policy priority. And they added that yesterday, Good Friday, they hoped to begin inviting a series of arrests similar to those that took place during the 1980s outside the South African Embassy and that drew attention to the anti-apartheid campaign. "The time has come for people of conscience across this nation and around the world to take direct action to end slavery in Sudan," Fauntroy said. The Bush administration has condemned the government of Sudan. In his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called on the Khartoum regime "to stop acting in such a deplorable, horrible, terrible way with respect to its own citizens." About 2 million people have died in fighting over the past 17 years between the predominantly Muslim north and the largely Christian south. With virtually no economic interests and only modest strategic concerns in Sudan, the Bush administration is not likely to take an interventionist approach. Powell, however, has been holding talks about Sudan with advisers and others, including Fauntroy. Fauntroy told a group of about 35 people in front of the embassy that during a trip to southern Sudan last week, "I saw with my own eyes, I heard with my own ears, I felt with my own heart the deep pain that the people of southern Sudan experienced and the pain that my forebears years ago experienced." He appealed to others to court arrest at the embassy next week and to continue the campaign, "for however long it takes," to galvanize the Bush administration and to change the Sudanese government's policies. The few people who demonstrated in front of the embassy were diverse, including some Sudanese exiles and members of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Alexandria.

AP 30 Apr 2001 Kenneth Starr is remembered as the dogged special prosecutor who presided over the Whitewater investigation. Johnnie Cochran is the defense attorney whose successes include acquittals of O.J. Simpson and Sean ``Puffy'' Combs. On Tuesday, the two celebrity lawyers will share a table in District of Columbia Superior Court to defend a radio talk show host, a minister-lawmaker and a former aide to President Reagan on a misdemeanor charge. The three are accused of illegal entry in connection with an April 13 incident at the Sudanese Embassy. They handcuffed themselves to the entrance of the diplomatic mission to protest civil war and famines that have claimed 2 million lives since 1983. ``This is a holocaust going on, and decent people don't sit out holocausts,'' said Michael J. Horowitz, 63, the former Reagan staffer now with the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank. Horowitz and his co-defendants want the Bush administration to appoint a special envoy to force changes in Sudanese government policies they describe as genocide and enslavement targeting animal worshippers and Christians who live in the southern region of the north African nation. Cochran will represent Horowitz, while Starr will represent talk show host Joe Madison and the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a Baptist minister and the District of Columbia's former delegate to Congress. All have said they plan to plead innocent. Convictions on the charges carry penalties of up to six months in jail.

Asia-Pacific

Afghanistan

AFP 1 Apr 2001 Afghan Taliban militia have again fired at refugees camping on the border between Tajikistan and war-torn Afghanistan, Russian frontier guards said on Sunday. An armed group drove towards the refugee settlements on islets on the Pyandzh river on Saturday and twice fired rounds from an anti-aircraft gun. Some 13,000 refugees who have fled intensifying warfare between the ruling Taliban militia and supporters of Afghanistan's ousted president Burhanuddin Rabbani are sheltering on the border.

WP April 1, 2001 Religious Minorities Tread Carefully Under Taliban Rule. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban severely enforces its conservative interpretation of Sunni Islam, practicing any other religion is a tense and tenuous proposition. To survive, Sikhs and Shiites must constantly negotiate with authorities and adapt their worship to Taliban dictates. Other major religions scarcely have a presence here. There are only a few hundred Hindus in Afghanistan, virtually no Christians, and the only known Afghan Jew is a rabbi who is allowed to maintain Kabul's sole synagogue. There are no practicing Buddhists, but the Taliban recently demolished two historic Buddha statues in the central province of Bamian, claiming they were un-Islamic and idolatrous. The Sunni-Shiite schism also is largely responsible for long-standing enmity between Afghanistan and its majority-Shiite neighbor, Iran. "The government wants to null and void our culture," one Shiite man said. "They don't allow women to join in our celebrations, and in the past several years they didn't allow us to celebrate at all. Sometimes they caught us and put us in jail. Now things are getting better, and they mostly tolerate us.For Afghanistan's tiny Sikh minority, which includes a close-knit community of perhaps 500 people in Kabul, relations with the six-year-old regime have been sm