Month: April 2021

Zimbabwe’s main opposition party says the government is again cracking down on critics with a prison sentence given to 28-year old Makomborero Haruzivishe.  A court found him guilty of inciting violence, but rights groups say the real aim is to intimidate protesters demanding more financial support for the poor.  Columbus Mavhunga reports from Harare. Camera: Blessing Chigwenhembe   
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Sudan’s Cabinet approved a bill Tuesday that will roll back a 63-year-old law that strained relations between the country and Israel, according to a statement.  The decision aimed at repairing diplomatic and trade ties with the Jewish state comes months after both countries struck a peace deal. Sudan joins the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco in repealing the law that barred Arab nations and allies from doing business with Israel. Last year, Egypt and Jordan were the only Arab countries that recognized Israel. Before then, serious sanctions that included hefty fines and jail terms were handed down to those who defied the law. Despite shifting positions, other Arab countries will not recognize Israel until the Jewish state reaches an agreement with its neighbors, especially Palestinians. In the statement, the Sudanese Cabinet echoed a “firm position on the establishment of a Palestinian state within the framework of a two-state solution.” Sudan’s change of heart can also be attributed to a deal it struck with the U.S. government under the Trump administration that will see it removed from a blacklist of nations suspected of sponsoring terrorism.President Donald Trump wraps up a phone call with the leaders of Sudan and Israel as Cabinet officials and advisers applaud in the Oval Office of the White House, October 23, 2020.Mass protests in 2019 forced former President Omar al-Bashir to end his 30-year Islamic rule, during which the African country took a strong stance against Israel. The new transitional government charts a new path of restoring ties with the international community, however, as part of its efforts to resuscitate the economy and ensure development. That decision seems to be paying off as the country received many diplomatic visits, particularly from Israel. Reuters reports that Israeli Intelligence Minister Eli Cohen, who visited Khartoum, said the move to recognize Israel is a “necessary step toward the signing of a peace accord between the countries.” The bill still needs to receive the backing of Sudan’s ruling sovereign council before the order goes into effect. 
 
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The retired Catholic archbishop of South Sudan, Paulino Lukudu Loro, died Monday in Nairobi at the age of 80. The archbishop served for 30 years and was hailed by many in South Sudan for his efforts to promote peace during the country’s long civil war.The Reverend Father Samuel Abe, spokesperson for the Catholic Archdiocese of Juba, said Archbishop Loro was rushed to Kenya’s capital last month when his condition started deteriorating.“First of all, last Saturday he had a very severe stroke which affected his dying and so it escalated into instability of his blood pressure and today the pressure just went down, and it is the cause of the death; primarily it is the stroke on his head,” Abe said.Abe said Loro’s death has left a great void, because he was a key player in advising political leaders on how to achieve peace in South Sudan.“It’s very clear as a peacemaker, a man of peace, he always advises people to take the interest of the country above our personal and our individual interests,” Abe said. “And so, his words are still I think in our minds, his words are still with us and it’s up to us to put all his endeavors (and) his initiatives into practice, especially the political leaders, (and) the religious leaders of this country.”Abe said he wished Loro had witnessed peace in South Sudan before his death but noted that people are still fighting and still dying.Eli Joseph, youth chairperson at St. Kizito Parish, said Loro played a significant peacemaking role among various factions during the years when South Sudan was fighting for its independence from Sudan.During South Sudan’s more recent civil war, Simon Gore, youth coordinator at St. Theresa Cathedral, said he remembers Bishop Loro for his boldness in telling the truth to the warring leaders.“The peace process, he was not favoring any side, when he feels that there is slowness in implementation, he approached both of the partners and aired out his voice, and the right thing that they should be doing in order for his flocks not to suffer,” Gore said.Loro was appointed archbishop of Juba on February 19, 1983, and served in this office until his retirement last year.Archbishop Stephen Ameyu announced a four-day mourning period due to Loro’s death. It is not clear when Loro will be buried.  
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Authorities in Sudan say at least 50 people are dead and more than 100 others injured after three days of clashes between ethnic groups in West Darfur. Sudan’s military has vowed to restore peace to the region.The clashes between Arab and Masalit tribes began a few days ago in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state.The government declared a state of emergency in West Darfur Monday after the clashes continued for a third day.The Committee of West Darfur Doctors confirmed the death toll and called on the government to secure access for the committee to collect full figures.According to Khalid Shogar of Committee of West Darfur Doctors, the committee counted 50 people killed in the violence, with the death toll reaching 132 people. Others killed and injured the committee couldn’t count as a result of access being restricted due to the bad security situation, he added.The fighting started when two young men from the Masalit tribe were killed Saturday. Militia fighters from Masalit and Arab tribes fought in El Geneina, using heavy weapons and vehicles.Sudan’s Security and Defense Council accused unnamed armed militias of fueling the conflict.Defense Minister Major General Yassin Ibrahim said the government is taking steps to end the fighting.  Yassin said all of the security apparatuses have been authorized to resolve the tribal conflicts. He said a higher committee will be formed from local councils to deal with all of the breaches in the peace agreements. He said a third decision is to implement laws for security forces to help control the fighting in legal ways, along with a monopoly in weapons usage by the government, and continued weapon collection from the citizens.The conflict in Darfur broke out in 2003 when the government of then-President Omar al-Bashir empowered Arab militias to fight rebel groups.The conflict resulted in the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the displacement of more than two million people.The transitional government that followed Bashir’s ouster in April 2019 signed peace agreements with rebel groups.Earlier this year, the conflict between Arab and non-Arab tribes in El Geneina flared up again, resulting in the death of 129 people and the displacement of 108,000.Political analyst Abbas Mohamed worries renewed violence in Darfur could undermine the peace process in Sudan.He said six months after the signing the peace agreement it became so obvious that the difficulties of sustaining peace were not only in the details but embodied in the resurgent tribal conflict in Darfur. Those epicenters of violence, he said, could undermine the peace process and prevent the U.N. peacekeeping mission from protecting civilians.  The International Criminal Court in The Hague has charged Bashir with war crimes and crimes against humanity for his treatment of civilians in Darfur. Bashir is in a Khartoum prison after a Sudanese court convicted him of corruption in late 2019. 
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Teachers in Malawi’s public schools have resumed a nationwide strike after the government backed out of a promise to pay bonuses for COVID-19 risk. Malawi authorities say the government has no money to pay the teachers, who risk contracting the coronavirus by teaching classes in person.Malawi’s public-school teachers resumed their nation-wide strike Tuesday after the government did not honor a promise to pay bonuses for their risk of contracting the coronavirus while on the job.President of the Teachers Union of Malawi, Willy Malimba, said they began the stop work action after authorities failed to meet a seven-day ultimatum.  “We felt cheated on this one because we agreed and at that time it was a high-level meeting.  We did that one at parliament,” said Malimba. “We had Presidential Task Force [on COVID-19], we had committee of education, when we were making that agreement.”Malimba said teachers take risks when working in packed classrooms during the pandemic and will not resume work until the government gives them the promised bonus.But Malawi’s government says teachers were not among those budgeted to receive a COVID-19 risk allowance. Teachers in Malawi Strike Over COVID-19 Risk Allowances The teachers are demanding bonus pay for working during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as better protective equipmentMalawi government spokesperson Gospel Kazako says, despite what was promised, they do not have the money to meet the teachers’ demands.”People can squeeze government but, if the government doesn’t have a resource, it does (not) have a resource and you must know that we are not doing these things out of malice or that we are careless,” said Kazako. “No, we are not.”Kazako is also Malawi’s Information Minister and a member of the Presidential Taskforce on COVID-19.  He says they will meet teachers on Thursday to discuss their welfare – but not the bonus, which he argues would be short-term anyway.   “Teachers have a lot of problems beyond COVID allowances,” said Kazako. “We need to sort out their salaries, we need to sort out their condition of service, we need to sort out their housing allowances, so many other things not just COVID.  The thing is, assuming in the next three months there is no COVID, it means they will not have any allowance.”Steve Sharra specializes in education for the Nairobi-based, non-profit African Institute for Development Policy.  He says the government should reach a deal with teachers so that Malawi’s students don’t lose any more class time.   “It will be important for movement to be quite open about what’s going on.  If they say there is no money, that’s not enough of an explanation,” said Sharra. “It is possible for the government to have no money but to come up with an explanation that teachers can understand and can compromise and then they can resume work.”Malawi’s teachers first began striking in January when schools reopened after months of being closed due to the coronavirus.  They resumed work in February after the government promised to give them money to buy personal protective equipment.Malawi first closed schools in March 2020, even before it confirmed its first cases of COVID-19.The government reopened schools in September only to suspend classes again in January after a surge in infections, including among some teachers and students.
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France’s role before and during the 1994 Rwandan genocide was a “monumental failure” that the country must acknowledge, the lead author of a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron said, as the country is about to open its archives from this period to the public.The report, published in March, concluded that French authorities remained blind to the preparations for genocide as they supported the “racist” and “violent” government of then-Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana and then reacted too slowly in appreciating the extent of the killings. But it cleared them of complicity in the slaughter that left over 800,000 people dead, mainly ethnic Tutsis and the Hutus who tried to protect them.Macron’s decision to commission the report — and open the archives to the public — are part of his efforts to more fully confront the French role in the genocide and to improve relations with Rwanda, including making April 7, the day the massacre began, a day of commemoration. While long overdue, the moves may finally help the two countries reconcile.Historian Vincent Duclert, who led the commission that studied France’s actions in Rwanda between 1990 and 1994, told The Associated Press that “for 30 years, the debate on Rwanda was full of lies, violence, manipulations, threats of trials. That was a suffocating atmosphere.”Duclert said it was important to acknowledge France’s role for what it was: a “monumental failure.””Now we must speak the truth,” he added. “And that truth will allow, we hope, (France) to get a dialogue and a reconciliation with Rwanda and Africa.”Macron said in a statement that the report marks “a major step forward” toward understanding France’s actions in Rwanda.About 8,000 archive documents that the commission examined for two years, including some that were previously classified, will be made accessible to the general public starting Wednesday, the 27th anniversary of the start of the killings.  Duclert said documents — mostly from the French presidency and the prime minister’s office — show how then-President Francois Mitterrand and the small group of diplomats and military officials surrounding him shared views inherited from colonial times, including the desire to maintain influence on a French-speaking country, that led them to keep supporting Habyarimana despite warning signs, including through delivery of weapons and military training in the years prior to the genocide.”Instead of ultimately supporting the democratization and peace in Rwanda, the French authorities in Rwanda supported the ethnicization, the radicalization of (Habyarimana’s) government,” stressed.FILE – Historian and Commission chief on France’s role in 1994’s Rwandan genocide, Vincent Duclert, right, presents a report to French President Emmanuel Macron, at the Elysee Palace, in Paris, March 26, 2021.France was “not complicit in the criminal act of genocide,” he said, but “its action contributed to strengthening (the genocide’s) mechanisms.””And that’s an enormous intellectual responsibility,” he said.  The report also criticized France’s “passive policy” in April and May 1994, at the height of the genocide.  That was a “terrible lost opportunity,” Duclert noted. “In 1994, there was a possibility to stop the genocide … and it did not happen. France and the world bear a considerable guilt.”Eventually they did step in. Operation Turquoise, a French-led military intervention backed by the U.N., started on June 22.Duclert said that France’s “blindness must be questioned and, maybe, brought to trial,” though he insisted it was not the commission’s role to suggest charges.The report was welcomed as an important step by activists who had long hoped France would officially acknowledge its responsibilities in the genocide. On a visit to Rwanda in 2010, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy admitted that his country had made “errors of judgment” and “political errors” regarding the genocide — but the report may allow Macron to go further.  Dafroza Gauthier, a Rwandan who lost more than 80 members of her family in the mass killing, welcomed it as a “a great document against genocide denial.””For 27 years, or longer, we were in a kind of fog,” said Gauthier, who with her husband, Alain, founded the Collective of Civil Plaintiffs for Rwanda, a French-based group that seeks the prosecution of alleged perpetrators of the genocide. “The report is clearly stating things.”There also may be a shift in the attitude of Rwandan authorities, who welcomed the report in a brief statement but have given no detailed response. They said the conclusions of their own report, to be released soon, “will complement and enrich” it.  That’s different from Rwanda’s firm assertions of French complicity as recently as 2017. Relations between the two countries, strained for years since the genocide, have improved under Macron’s presidency.Félicien Kabuga, a Rwandan long wanted for his alleged role in supplying machetes to the killers, was arrested outside Paris last May.And in July an appeals court in Paris upheld a decision to end a years-long investigation  into the plane crash that killed Habyarimana and set off the genocide. That probe aggravated Rwanda’s government because it targeted several people close to President Paul Kagame for their alleged role, charges they denied.It now appears Rwandan authorities will accept “the olive branch” from Paris, said Dismas Nkunda, head of the watchdog group Atrocities Watch Africa who covered the genocide as a journalist.  “Maybe they’re saying, ‘The past is the past. Let’s move on,'” he said of Rwandan authorities.  The Gauthiers said the report and access to the archives may also help activists in their efforts to bring people involved in the genocide to justice — including potentially French officials who served at the time.There have been three Rwandan nationals convicted of genocide so far in France, they stressed. Four others are expected to go on trial. That’s out of about 30 complaints against Rwandan nationals living in France that their group has filed with authorities.  That’s still “very few” compared to the more than 100 alleged perpetrators who are believed to live on French territory, they said.
 
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Mozambique’s government said it is reclaiming territory from Islamic State-affiliated insurgents that besieged the key northern coastal town of Palma, with some of the thousands of civilians who fled now going back to take stock of their losses. “The population is returning, but they have nothing to eat because the terrorists have looted almost everything,” Agostinho Muthisse, a Mozambican military commander, said to a small group of journalists that the government flew in to visit Palma on Sunday. Militants armed with rocket launchers, rifles and machetes began an assault on Palma — a town of 75,000 in Mozambique’s impoverished but resource-rich province of Cabo Delgado — on March 24. That day, the French oil gas company Total had planned to resume work on a nearby liquified natural gas (LNG) project after insecurity forced it to suspend operations in December. By last Friday, the company had withdrawn all its personnel. The fresh attacks have uprooted more than 9,100 people in the province, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Even before the recent attacks there had been roughly 670,000 internally displaced people since 2017 as a result of the insurgency in northern Mozambique In this image taken from militant video released by the Islamic State group on Monday March 29, 2021, purporting to show fighters near the strategic north eastern Mozambique town of Palma.“The government urgently needs help from the Southern African Development Community and the African Union,” Dewa Mavhinga, southern Africa director for Human Rights Watch, wrote last week in an op-ed for News 24.He encouraged Mozambican President Filipe Nyusi, current SADC chairperson, to “tap into regional support to ensure civilian protection against attacks and to restore security in Cabo Delgado.” Mavhinga, who also accused the African Union of being “slow to act” in the Cabo Delgado crisis, recommended that SADC and the AU “consider appointing special envoys to lead stepped-up efforts to protect civilians, “end the abuses by armed groups and government security forces,” and ensure accountability.  Amnesty International, in a report in early March, called upon the African Union to get more involved in resolving Cabo Delgado’s “massive humanitarian crisis.”  SADC already has met several times on the issue.  Separately, several sources in South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s administration told VOA they’ve been trying to get Maputo’s cooperation for a long time, to no avail. “South Africa is pivotal to at least decreasing the violence,” Liesl Louw-Vaudran, a senior researcher with the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, told VOA.  The Maputo government has accepted limited support from outsiders, Louw-Vaudran noted. “The stumbling block seems to be that Mozambique doesn’t want help from the neighbors,” Louw-Vaudran said. “… Is it because Mozambique doesn’t want to admit that its army is too weak to actually safeguard citizens?” Military training The Pentagon announced March 15 that a team of U.S. Special Operations Forces had just launched a two-month program to train and support Mozambican marines in fighting violent extremism. Portugal also is training troops to take on the insurgents.US Warns Containment the Only Option for Some African Terror Groups Intelligence revealed in a new inspector general report sees gains by al-Qaida and Islamic State affiliates outpacing the ability of the US and African countries to fight backMozambique also has been paying the Dyck Advisory Group, a South Africa-based private military company, to supply security agents and helicopter gunships to bolster Mozambican forces. These agents been accused of atrocities in Cabo Delgado. Dyck’s contract with Mozambique expires Tuesday, DAG founder Lionel Dyck confirmed to AFP.  Willem Els, a former senior South African police and intelligence officer, pointed out the insurgency’s broadening threat. It has drawn in “foreign fighters from especially Tanzania as far as Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, DRC and even South Africa,” he told VOA. “So, what started off as a very localized challenge is now a regional challenge.” Trouble ahead? Eva Renon, a senior analyst with the London-based risk and research firm HIS Markit, anticipates more danger. “Unless the security situation changes significantly,” she wrote in an assessment posted Monday on the company website,“in the next six months insurgents are likely to attempt to capture Pemba,” the Cabo Delgado provincial capital.  Renon also wrote that insurgents “will likely target beachfront hotels, government facilities, and the personnel and assets of non-governmental organizations, the Catholic Church, and the United Nations.” The analyst sees other potential hazards. “If insurgents capture Pemba,” she wrote, “they are likely to turn their attention west” to areas around the Cabo communities of Montepuez and Balama. “These areas are rich in ruby and graphite deposits, respectively, with the insurgents likely to seek to extort then ultimately control mining operations, with associated risks of kidnap, injury, and death to mining staff and subcontractors.” Most observers agree the long-term solution lies in SADC states, the African Union and the United Nations drawing up a road map to peace, with special emphasis on the development of Cabo Delgado. This would mean less opportunity for the extremists to exploit local grievances. This report originated in VOA’s Africa Division, with Darren Taylor reporting for the English to Africa Service from Johannesburg and Simião Pongoane for the Portuguese Service from Maputo.   
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At least 40 people have been killed in Sudan’s West Darfur region after three days of ethnic clashes that have prompted the government to declare a state of emergency, the United Nations announced Monday. The clashes in El Geneina, which is close to the border with Chad, also left at least 58 people wounded. Fighting among members of the Arabi Rizeigat and Masalit tribes in El Geneina began after armed men shot two people and wounded two others in the Masalit tribe, according to the U.N. While authorities have yet to determine the cause of the shootings, gunfire exchanges between the two tribes continued into Monday, claiming at least 40 residents.  Residents told Agence France-Presse they heard fresh gunfire accompanied by loud explosions at dawn Monday as the violence spread to the suburbs. The witnesses who described thick smoke hovering over the city also said women and children are among those fleeing. Sudan’s security council, which declared a state of emergency, said it had deployed troops to the area to restore peace. Conflicts erupted into war in 2003 in the Darfur region, claiming at least 300,000 lives and displacing about 2.5 million people, according to the U.N Several peace accords have been signed since, but the area remained under the shadow of the war. Easy access to weapons, coupled with ethnic differences and confusion about land or water ownership, has resulted in a string of killings. In January, two weeks after the United Nations-African Union peacekeeping mission ended its 13-year occupation of the area following the October peace deal, about 200 people died in ethnic clashes. Like now, this conflict also stemmed from disagreements between Arab herdsmen and non-Arab farmers in South Darfur. 
 
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