A bold new film from Golden Bear winning director, Mark Dornford May (“U-Carmen eKhayelitsha” – Golden Bear Berlin, 2005) is being released countrywide from the 7th of March. “Son of Man” is a revolutionary film that explores an interpretation of the Jesus Christ story in a contemporary African context and should spark lively debate about its portrayal both of Christ and of Africa. Released by Spier distribution the film will begin its run at the Rich Mix Centre in Bethnal Green before branching out to sites in Bristol, Edinburgh, Cambridge and elsewhere in the UK.

Mam Sait Ceesay, a former editor of the Daily Observer, a Banjul-based pro-government newspaper was again on February 25, 2008 arraigned before a Banjul Magistrate Court over charges of publishing false information. The journalist's appearance in court followed a brief detention on February 2, 2008 at the Serious Crime Unit of The Gambia Police Force.

Speaking ahead of the World Bank/ International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2008 spring meeting in Washington, United States of America in April 2008. Africa IDP Voice said it was now vital to introduce a new United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) requiring governments to prevent and reduce prevalence of Internal Displacement and put in place national , regional and international legal, policy and institutional frameworks for their protection and assistance as an indispensable part of the fight against poverty.

The Centre of African Studies (London), based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), is pleased to announce a two-day conference on ‘Researching Violence and Conflict: Methodological and Ethical Considerations,’ to be held at SOAS 4 and 5 July 2008. This conference will be held in conjunction with the Africa-Europe Group for Interdisciplinary Studies (AEGIS).

The underground bomb shelter in Levinsky Park near Tel Aviv's Central Bus Station has, in recent months, turned into a squalid, staggeringly overcrowded little refugee camp. Some 200 African men, mainly from Eritrea, sleep crammed into every possible nook and cranny in two airless, low-ceilinged rooms and a corridor. The dirty concrete floor is heaped with mattresses and blankets, and scattered with scraps of food and debris. Hanging from the walls are plastic bags stuffed with clothing.

This is the problem with Cameroon: All power in the country rests in the hands of one man, the President - Paul Biya.

He is the commander-in-chief-of the armed forces, the Fon of Fons [Chief Monarch amongst all monarchs], the chief magistrate of the land, head treasurer and of course chief legislator.

Truth be told, most of those passing for legitimate legislators and representatives of the people, and they know it, owe their seats to his benevolence. To say the least, Cameroon is a one sophisticated scheme of a neo-colonial entity.

In Cameroon, the president decides when elections are held and who participates in them. He initiates, writes and executes the rules of the contest. And as the sole architect of Cameroon’s nascent democracy, he has the executive privilege of appointing an impartial electoral commission to run the elections. During presidential elections he funds his own campaign and those of his rivals. His appointees declare and certify election results. By the way, in his 25 years in power, he has never lost an election. His party has never lost an election either. Besides, he is his party. His youthful image adorns party uniforms. He is his party's official mascot.

One of the problems facing Cameroon today is that the President has too much power. He knows he has too much power and like most rulers of his inclination uses that power to his utmost advantage with impunity. Biya is accountable to no one and uses that twist of misfortune as a means to serve his ends even if it means drowning an entire nation of over 16 million people in the process.

He is drunk with power but skillful and tactful in his execution of it. And like any effective dictator employs a team of illusionists and reality crafters to perpetuate the lie that has is his reign. The national radio, television and press corps combined form the core of his personal public relations firm. They are a much disciplined regiment and have been loyal to their paymaster.

In Cameroon, the national media is not an instrument of nation building. Its sole purpose is to glorify and celebrate a man whose sole preoccupation has been his own entrenchment in power. The idea of building a viable nation that can compete with other nations in the global economic and political realm is frightening to such a man. It is alien in his worldview and counterproductive to his motives.

So, every decree and decision is meant to tighten his grip on his subjects. The thought of a citizenry confident enough to demand what is theirs by right: freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not compatible with the Biya agenda. The idea of empowering Cameroonians threatens his reign; it is a thought that renders him sleepless. It is a pebble in his shoes.

This is where the issue of fear comes into play in the rusty machinery that runs Cameron. For Biya and his cohorts, fear is a reliable ally in their scheme to impose themselves on the country. It has become their weapon of choice in their assault on the collective psyche of Cameroonians. They employ it will face no judge or jury. In Cameroon, the men and women in uniform are above the law. In fact, they are the law. They arrest, judge, prosecute and execute.

Earlier this year, another instance of the brutality and excesses of the Cameroon police took place in Limbe, South West Province. A Cameroonian citizen but a resident in Germany was visiting relatives when one day he had an encounter with the local police. It would be his last encounter with anyone. A few minutes after a few words were exchanged he was lying in his own pool of blood, murdered. He had been beaten to death on the side of the road in broad daylight. No one intervened. No one can intervene. No one was held accountable and no one will. That is Biya’s Cameroon.

In Biya’s Cameroon riot police shoot live bullets at peaceful protesters.

In Biya’s Cameroon let it be noted for the record that in 2008, civilians can still be detained and beaten to death for verbal infractions with the police. How is this possible in this haven of peace and stability? It is possible because the man who has preponderance of power over all levels of power, Biya, has created the kind of police officer and soldier that serves his and only his interest, not the interest of the citizens they are supposed to serve and protect. The role of the soldier in Cameroon is to serve and protect the President’s interest. The military perpetuate his misrule and are paid generously. They are the first and last lines of defense against freedom in the battlefield of opinions and ideas in Cameroon.

It is their role, the military, to stuff the leechlike gods lording over Cameroon with the carcasses of protesting youth in this season of feasting. Their belches can be heard resonating from the damned walls of Etoudi across a landscape blighted with abuse of power, brutality, corruption, intolerance, lies, misrule and tyranny. They carry the laughter of the remorseless tyrant and his cohorts.

Their laughter is demented and nightmarish, one that rewards evil and celebrates vice. It is making exiles of a people. It is making beggars of a people. It is making thugs of a people. The stench of their vices is putrid. It is nauseating to the human soul. In their shortsightedness, the rulers of Cameroon pollute an entire people’s collective future as a compliment to an already tainted and bloodied past.

Geo-politically, Cameroon is within the French sphere of influence and enjoys some of the privileges that come with being a member of that unenviable fraternity. Biya has friends in high places. He owes his survival to those friends in high places. Like his brother, Idriss Derby in Chad and Omar Bongo in Gabon, he knows if push comes to shove, his friends at the United Nations Security Council will come to his aid—a booster in his toxic tonic.

Therefore it comes as no surprise that recently in Douala, forces of law and order in keeping with their oath reacted with brute force at peaceful protesters demonstrating against unjustified fuel price hikes, the banning of a popular radio stations and against an unpopular government bent on imposing itself on yet another generation of Cameroonians.

Between Saturday, February 23rd and Monday the 25th, five people have been killed in Douala and scores have been wounded. According to news reports, there was widespread looting and chaos in certain parts of the port city.

This time around no one is being fooled. Cameroonians are very familiar and intimate with the Biya agenda. They are fed up with it. Kenya is branded in their consciousness. They know that no constitutional reform in Cameroon could be intended to strengthen non-existent democratic values or institutions. They are not blind. They also know that reforms initiated by an unscrupulous regime could not be in their interest. They know it is only meant to keep Paul Biya and his cohorts in power. They are not numb and will react appropriately.

It is time for the Paul Biya era to be vanquished from our collective memory!

*Kangsen Feka Wakai is a Houston based writer and journalist. He is the author of Fragmented Melodies, a collection of poems available on

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Pius Adesamni looks at the recent Raila Odinga visit with Obasanjo and argues that African ruling classes are so prodigious in the production of political farce that all one needs to do is read African newspapers for absurd realities that no African writer has as yet to match.

Give it to politicians, the military, and other professional hijackers of the state in Africa! They are able to squeeze the juice of comedy out of the stone of unspeakable tragedies they routinely visit on their people and the continent. The most unfortunate victim of the inexhaustible creativity of the African political class, their cynical mastery of the resources of the proscenium, is African fiction. The political class in Africa constitutes the most potent threat to the health of African literature. Simply put, our politicians are driving our writers out of business.

Why do I need to spend my hard-earned money on Wizard of the Crow and Petals of Blood when Raila Odinga and Mwai Kibaki have manufactured realities in Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiongo’o’s brilliant imagination simply cannot match? All I need is regular internet access to Kenyan newspapers to avail myself of a direct taste of Kenya according to her politicians.

Why do I need Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People and T.M. Aluko’s One Man, One Matchet in my seminar room when the blood and flesh versions of Chief Nanga and Benjamin Benjamin in Abuja have turned Achebe and Aluko into dwarves in the business of fiction? The Nigerian ruling class is so prodigious in the production of political farce that all I need do is read Nigerian newspapers for quotidian realities that no Nigerian writer has the imagination to match.

That African politicians are constantly and permanently ahead of hapless African writers was brought home by two recent events. Ogaga Ifowodo, one of Nigeria’s best poets, wrote an essay in which he imagined a meeting between Mwai Kibaki and Umaru Yar’Adua. What did Yar’Adua tell Kibaki, Ifowodo asked? To create his hypothetical situation, Ifowodo deployed the full arsenal of his trade: sarcasm, hyperbole, allusions, and the like. At the end of the essay, Ifowodo was sure he had delivered his message effectively and unambiguously: the Nigerian presidency is so diseased, so morally compromised, that the possibility of the Nigerian government having a say in the Kenyan debacle can only exist in the realms of fiction and the most outrageous imagination. Given the rotten political pedigree of the people in charge in Abuja, Nigeria’s involvement was so improbable that Ifowodo treated it as fiction, something better left as material for the exclusive use of the African writer.

As is sadly often the case in Africa, Odinga, the politician, was miles ahead of Ifowodo, the writer. Odinga did not wait for Ifowodo’s ink to dry before hopping on a flight to Nigeria last week. His mission? Wait for it: to consult with Chief Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria’s immediate past president) and persuade him to convince Alhaji Umaru Yar’Adua, current president and Obasanjo’s puppet, that it was time Nigeria got involved in fashioning an African solution to Kenya’s political impasse! It has taken Ogaga Ifowodo more than twenty years of sustained production of brilliant poetry to establish his reputation as one of Africa’s leading users of the imagination. Raila Odinga and his Nigerian hosts have eclipsed this record in a couple of hours.

When I read about Odinga’s trip to Nigeria, I had a tough choice between laughing and crying. I settled for the former. To grasp the tragedy in all its unpleasant ramifications, one has to unpack Odinga’s company in Nigeria: Obasanjo and his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) machinery. Of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, the least said the better. Writing about Obasanjo here would turn this piece into an exposé on unbridled corruption and the defoliation of Nigeria’s destiny in two tragic installments: 1976 – 1979, and 1999 – 2007. Whenever tails are mentioned in a discussion, the toad hurriedly suggests changing the topic and moving on to other issues! So, let’s leave Obasanjo and move on to Yar’Adua and the PDP.

History’s final verdict on African political parties would be hard pressed not to record the PDP as the most vicious, most corrupt, and most visionless political organization ever to bestride the Nigerian – and African political landscape. It would be sheer travesty of justice if the National Party of Henrik Verwoerd and Pieter Botha fared worse than Nigeria’s PDP in the reckoning of history. Ever since its unfortunate formation, the PDP has been home to the worst elements of Nigerian humanity. Although it loves to delude itself as Africa’s largest political party, the truth is that the PDP is Africa’s largest assembly of funny characters with zero moral capital. Excellence in political thuggery, treasury looting, and election rigging are key attributes of membership and upward mobility in party ranks. It is significant that in a supposedly democratic dispensation, the PDP has surpassed Sani Abacha’s record of unresolved political assassinations. The rate of intra-party assassinations became so breathtaking at a point that the inimitable Wole Soyinka baptized the PDP as a “nest of killers”. Soyinka forgot to add that the PDP is also a lair of Africa’s most gifted thieves. To go through the list of party leaders – Party Chieftains in Nigerian parlance – is to be in stark contemplation of the tragedy of modern Nigeria: Olusegun Obasanjo (self-appointed Father of modern Nigeria), Olabode George, Ahmadu Ali, Lamidi Adedibu (stark illiterate, recently designated Father of the PDP!), Andy Uba, Chris Uba, and thousands of other birds of similar feather, looting the state dry in rigged political positions.

That these low-quality characters and their scions have hijacked the Nigerian state is a precise indication of the abysmally low depths to which Nigeria has fallen. Among the many sins of this dishonorable cabal and their dishonorable party, the 2007 election pretty much takes the cake. Nigerians are in agreement with the international community that the PDP’s 2007 electoral heist ranks among the worst in human history. It is unnecessary to rehash the details here. Suffice it to assert that Umaru Yar’Adua, Nigeria’s current president, is the morally compromised custodian of a purloined mandate who has been unable to rise above the debased values of his cabal and do the right thing. Rather, he has ignored the festering leprosy his diseased party has foisted on Nigeria while hypocritically making a show of his determination to cure negligible ringworm infections.

This is a snapshot of the kind of company Raila Odinga went to keep in Nigeria. The story of Nigeria’s sorry pass in the gangrened grip of the PDP cartel is globally ubiquitous: not even a blind and deaf kindergarten pupil in Siberia can claim ignorance of the Nigerian situation. What part of this narrative did Raila Odinga not understand? The ways of the African politician are truly perplexing! How did Raila Odinga arrive at the conclusion that Olusegun Obasanjo, Umaru Yar’Adua and his PDP government, morally compromised perpetrators of the worst electoral heist in human history, are in any position to advise him on the way forward in Kenya? How did he determine that Nigeria’s forty thieves deserve a place at the table of serious African conversations on credible elections, good governance, and democracy? Who are Odinga’s handlers in Kenya? How could all of them have missed the fact that the people he was going to consult in Nigeria practice a version of democracy that consists in assassinating your opponent or rigging your way to political office? Do we need to translate “nest of killers” to Swahili before Mwalimu Odinga can understand that simple expression? By going to consult the worst Nigeria has to offer, Odinga has spat on the graves of the Kenyans who have lost their lives so far and added to our frustration and helplessness as ordinary Nigerians.

Nigerians are in a particularly sensitive phase of their national life. We are a beautiful country of beautiful people who have had the extraordinary misfortune of being held hostage by the worst among us. Although we once contributed exemplary characters to Africa’s leadership pool during the nationalist and immediate post-nationalist eras, we have never known democracy in any real sense. The closest we came to it was on June 12, 1993 when ‘we, the people’ voted in the only free and fair election we have ever known. Our hopes and aspirations were quashed by the same vicious enemy-cabal that aborted our dreams of post-independence nationhood and have held us hostage ever since. Sometimes, this cabal comes in army fatigues; sometimes it wears flowing civilian robes but it is the same rotten organism that perpetually recycles itself. When people who should know better invite the worst we have to offer to the table, the wound cuts deep in the Nigerian psyche. It reminds us painfully of Frostian roads not taken. And in this case, we are much more certain than Frost of what could have been had the right people taken the roads not taken.

It bears repeating: the Nigerian state, currently held hostage by a dishonorable cabal and a bloodthirsty, kleptocratic political party, does not qualify to be consulted or invited to the table when good governance and credible elections in Africa are in the agenda. If Raila Odinga was so desperate for Nigerian advice, all he needed do was ask and we would have supplied him names of Nigerians who qualify to be at the table. Nigeria has more that a hundred million names that could have given Odinga advice from an eminently moral high ground since members of the dishonorable enemy-cabal are, thankfully, in the minority and in no way represent what we have to offer as a people. If Odinga had consulted serious people before embarking on his worthless trip to Nigeria, one would have given him such meritorious names as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Gani Fawehinmi, Patrick Utomi, Edwin Madunagu, Odia Ofeimun, Okey Ndibe, Omoyele Sowore, just to mention a few. These are among our very best, the kinds of people who still make it possible for Nigerians to defy the rape of their humanity by the jokers in the PDP and identify proudly with their nation.

If, however, Mwalimu Odinga insists on getting his advice on how to move Kenya forward from discredited African sources, we can also help him. Let him return to Nigeria and consult with all the corrupt PDP governors currently facing embezzlement charges. On his way back home, he may want to stop over in Libreville and Yaounde for consultations on credible democracy with Omar Bongo and Paul Biya. A stopover with Eugene Terreblanche in South Africa will spice up things nicely. He may then return to Nairobi and tell Kofi Annan that he has received superior advice from more credible sons of Africa!

* Pius Adesanmi is Associate Professor of English and Director, Project on New African Literatures at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Apart from his academic work, Dr. Adesanmi publishes opinion articles regularly in various internet fora. He runs a regular blog for The Zeleza Post where this article first appeared. He has contributed to Counterpunch, Slepton and Chimurenga online.

** Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org This article first appeared at The Zeleza Post.

The 2008 session of the CODESRIA sub-regional methodological workshops will explore the conditions for the employment and validation of qualitative perspectives in African contexts. To this end, the workshops will be open to all the social research disciplines. These disciplines are uniformly confronted with broadly similar difficulties of understanding social reality and the challenges posed by techniques of data collection and analysis, which, on account of their “qualitative” nature, are suspected by some to be seriously lacking in scientific rigour.

The 2008 session of the CODESRIA sub-regional methodological workshops will explore the conditions for the employment and validation of qualitative perspectives in African contexts. To this end, the workshops will be open to all the social research disciplines. These disciplines are uniformly confronted with broadly similar difficulties of understanding social reality and the challenges posed by techniques of data collection and analysis, which, on account of their “qualitative” nature, are suspected by some to be seriously lacking in scientific rigour.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/broadcasts/peter_hallward_damming_flood.... Hallward, author of Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment, talks over the phone with Jacques Depelchin from the Ota Benga Alliance for Peace Healing and Dignity, and visiting Professor at the Centre for Afro-Oriental Studies at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil, and Firoze Manji, founder and co-editor of Pambazuka News, about his book and the lessons of Haiti.
Peter Hallward's book “Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment”, published by Verso Press in 2007, is likely to become a classic reference on the most recent history of Haiti, thanks especially, to a fascinating and informative analysis of the clash between mass-based and elite driven politics. In the fierce battle over and around which ideological lens should one use to look at and make sense of Haiti's most recent history, including the overthrow and kidnapping of President Jean Bertrand Aristide, Peter Hallward's book is a welcome counterbalance to those offered by both mainstream journalism and books such as Alex Dupuy's “Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Ariside, the International Community and Haiti” published by Rowman & Littlefield in 2007.

About 650,000 or half of all children in Darfur do not receive an education, despite efforts by various organisations to provide schooling in camps and towns across the western Sudanese region, an international NGO said."Education is the foundation for economically viable and more peaceful societies. But the international community has been loath to fund schooling in conflict situations," Charles MacCormack, president of Save the Children US, said in a statement on 27 February. "This is shortsighted."

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The full text of the agreement signed by Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga is available at the link below.

WWF recently released a report on "EU Consumption, Global Pollution". The report shows that the global CO2 emissions from EU consumption are 500 megatonnes (12%) higher than EU production. The countries most impacted by the EU's carbon imbalance are China, South Africa and Russia. The situation reflects the fact that the Europe mainly exports services and high-value added products while importing more energy-intensive and low-value added products. Imported goods also tend to cause more emissions because production in some countries is more pollution intensive than in Europe.

The official death toll from violent protests in Cameroon this week has risen to 17 as troops attempt to restore order in the capital, Yaounde. Barricades were erected in Yaounde, youths fought police in the port of Douala and three deaths were reported in the north-western town of Bamenda. President Paul Biya has accused his political rivals of orchestrating the unrest to depose him.

A new campaign is being launched calling on the UN to push for the immediate arrest of two men accused of war crimes in Sudan's Darfur region. Some 45 organisations have signed up to the Wanted for War Crimes campaign. The International Criminal Court named Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ahmed Haroun and militia leader Ali Kushayb as suspects a year ago.

Africa Democracy Forum is pleased to announce its Regional Training Program on Nonviolent conflict from 21st -26th April 2008 in Nairobi Kenya. This training will be organized in partnership with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (Washington DC,USA) and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS).

Kenya's children run increasing risk of physical and sexual assault and face worsening food shortages in the aftermath of recent bloodshed, aid agency Save the Children said on Thursday. A disputed December 27 election sparked widespread violence that killed 1,000 people and displaced some 300,000. The aid group said over half of those were likely to be children, who were by far the most vulnerable.

Providing HIV drug cocktails to people in their homes can cut AIDS-related deaths substantially in poor, rural areas of Africa, researchers said on Friday. A study in Uganda showed that hiring local health workers to help people stick to a strict regimen of drugs cut the number of AIDS deaths by more than 90 percent.

With the number of reported cases of children raped in Zimbabwe surging more than 40 per cent in the last three years, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has joined with the Government and religious groups in an awareness campaign to fight the scourge. The Zimbabwean Ministry of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, the National Faith Based Council of Zimbabwe, and UNICEF have launched their Stand Up and Speak Out campaign against child abuse, aiming to reach more than six million of the African country’s citizens.

With only one third of Liberians reaching the fifth grade of school and children less likely to read than their parents, the head of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has announced a $20 million programme to help rebuild the education system of the West African country, which was gutted during a long, brutal civil war.

Five of Cameroon's ten provinces are currently under severe and massive strike actions called Monday, February 25 by the Syndicate of transporters in Cameroon. These provinces include; Centre (hosting the capital city Yaounde), Southwest, Northwest, Littoral, host of Cameroon's economic capital, Douala and West.

Two hundred years ago last month (January 2004), the French colony of saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola became the independent nation of Haiti. Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacri?ce or promised more hope. And few have been more thoroughly forgotten by those who would have us believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and meaningful independence in the developing world.

The Zimbabwe Youth Network (ZYN) and the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA) have announced that there will be a huge demonstration at the Zimbabwe Consulate in Jo'burg on Wednesday, one day before another protest is due at the same location on Thursday. The Wednesday protest is being supported by numerous Zimbabwean groups, including the Crisis Coalition, Zimbabwe Political Victims Organisation (Zipovo), Civil Service Organisations Forum and both formations of the MDC.

A Nigerian rebel group from the oil producing Niger Delta accused the government on Friday of denying their detained leader access to lawyers and relatives despite a court order that he should be allowed to see them. Henry Okah of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) was arrested in Angola on September 3 and handed over to Nigeria on February 14. His detention in a secret location by Nigerian authorities has raised tensions in the delta.

More than half the women in the world live in countries that have made no progress in gender equity in recent years. This is the main conclusion of the Social Watch 2008 Gender Equity Index (GEI) which, for the first time, shows recent evolution and trends in bridging the gap between men and women in education, the economy and empowerment.

The security situation may have improved in areas of Kenya hit by post-election violence, but many of the thousands of refugees who fled to Uganda are still too scared to return.

PLAAS is pleased to announce the launching of a new small grants project for action research on gender and land in Southern Africa: Securing Women's Access to Land - Linking Research with Action. In this initial phase, PLAAS is seeking Expressions of Interest led by community based organizations (CBOs) in collaboration with NGOs, research institutes and policy organizations for action research on women’s access and rights to land in Southern Africa (due by March 15th, 2008).

In the absence of a reliable supply of other energy sources, the Zimbawean Government has launched a programme to promote the use of solar energy as an alternative source of energy for computers in schools around the country, in conjunction with Mukonitronics Private Limited. The programme to be spread to all the country's provinces is also being implemented with the Zimbabwe Academic Research Network.

According to the government’s current estimates, donors will need to provide 20,000 tonnes of food aid to compensate for expected production shortfalls in 2008. Aid experts in Bissau, however, said that if the government had better policies, and if the rains came at the right time, the country should be able to feed itself with current levels of international assistance.

Some of the young people who seek help at the Youth Information and Orientation Centre for Reproductive Health (CIOJ) in N'Djamena, capital of Chad, do not understand how they became pregnant or contracted a sexually transmitted infection (STI). Workers at the centre blame the high levels of ignorance on the failure of parents to talk to their children about sex.

People living with HIV in Chad risk becoming victims of the explosion of violence in the capital, N'Djamena, in early February. During clashes between the army and groups of rebels from the east of the country, health services were damaged and many organisations working to fight the epidemic were looted.

A culture of impunity is the root cause of Somalia's humanitarian and political crisis and unless the world urgently addresses it, war crimes and crimes against humanity will continue unabated, a civil society activist has told IRIN. "No one has ever been held accountable for these crimes," Marian Hussein Awreeye, chairwoman of the Isma'il Jimale Human Rights Centre, said.

The AU Monitor's Monthly Discussion Paper Series presents its current paper, based on the "Open Letter to Africa's Present and Future Leaders" written by the 2007 Archbishop Desmond Tutu Fellows. Among other recommendations, the letter urges "the establishment of a high-level African Union led campaign to fight tribalism and inequality in all its forms across the continent." Forum members are encouraged to contribute to the discussion and answer the proposed questions.

This week's AU Monitor brings you news from the African Union, where only half of its member states have ratified the Protocol establishing the African Human Rights Court. The Court's President Gerard Niungeko urges the remaining African states to ratify the protocol to enable "individuals and non-governmental organizations to approach the Court with their cases".

The second ordinary session of the AU Conference of ministers in charge of Youth (COMY) has called on the private sector to implement youth activities at national and sub-national levels in order for youth to play a significant role in the development of the continent. It was concluded that "Africa's victory against poverty, violence, insecurity and bad governance lies in the continent's capacity to empower the youth so that they could take control and develop its resources".
In other AU news, the AU Commission and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) will meet this week to exchange views on recent African developments, human security concerns and discuss ways of enhancing economic growth on the continent.

Mozambique, considered one of the strongest economic performers in Sub-Saharan Africa, will host the 43rd Annual Meetings of the African Development Bank (AfDB) in May 2008. The meeting will bring together 1500 participants and is being held on the theme: "Fostering Shared Growth: Urbanization, Inequality and Poverty".
In U.S.-Africa news, Ambassador Cindy Courville, the first full-time U.S. envoy to the African Union (AU), speaks of a growing U.S.-Africa relationship and highlights the monetary assistance the U.S. has provided for the continent.

While Abid Aslam reports on the recent visit of U.S. President George Bush to Africa as being a way to "polish his image and advance U.S. interests", highlighting both positive and negative U.S. initiatives in Africa, Horace Campbell outlines the motives behind Bush's visit as an attempt to coerce African countries to sign on to the proposed U.S. Africa Command (Africom). Campbell calls for activists to "oppose the plans for the remilitarization of Africa under the guise of fighting terrorism in Africa".

In regional news, the East African Community (EAC) Secretary General Ambassador Juma Mwapuchu has stated that the Kenyan situation has affected regional integration processes and has had ramifications on the entire EAC region. Ambassador Mwapuchu pledges that his organization will play a central role in resolving the political situation in Kenya.

Also regarding the situation in Kenya, a coalition of Kenyan human rights organizations have presented a Memorandum to the African Commission on Human and People's Rights (ACHPR), addressing concerns and recommendations to restore peace in Kenya following the contested presidential ballot of December 2007.

In environmental news, the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD) recently held a conference on their "great greenbelt initiative", a 15 km wide greenbelt containing wildlife that can serve the region's economic interests as well as the development of a network of inland basins and other social infrastructure. Further, Peter Bosshard of International Rivers analyzes the potential downside to China's State Environmental Protection Agency's (SEPA) Equator Principles, highlighting that it could serve as a risk to regions with weaker environmental standards, such as Africa.

Finally, a recent reception of the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF) called for countries to intensify capacity building efforts by mobilizing existing resources, in order to increase development of the continent and end dependency on Western countries.

The present void as exists in Kenya, says Annar Cassam, is very dangerous for it renders both the elections and the observer missions irrelevant and robs the voters of their democratic rights twice.

Nearly two months after Kenya's rigged elections and Kibaki's "victory" claim set the country on fire, there is one question that has been on everybody's lips and it has still to be answered.

How can it be that this "model" African country,this island of stability, democracy, good governance, economic excellence and humanitarian solidarity in an otherwise chaotic, conflict-ridden and backward part of the continent, can so quickly collapse into tragedy? And this as a result of rigged elections which take place all the time and all over the world, but seldom with such horrendous consequences?

This perception of Kenya being the exception, the model, is widespread, among Kenyans especially and in the outside world but is it really justified, is it not more fiction than fact?

It is difficult to square this image with one simple truth universally acknowledged, that, Kenya is one of Africa's most corrupt countries. Its history of state corruption is not a secret, nor is it complicated to understand, thanks to the country's vibrant and vigilant press and to well-documented investigation reports of major financial scandals, such as the Goldenberg scam (under Moi) and the recent AngloLeasing scam (under Kibaki).

For those who wish to know more about Kenya's endemic culture of corruption at the highest level,a seminar with John Githongo would be useful. Githongo is the former head of the country's anti-corruption unit, now living in exile in London, having fled Kenya in fear for his life in 2005. The myth about Kenya's economic status has long been promoted by representatives of the World Bank and IMF who imagine that Kenya, by virtue of its hosting the "most powerful economy" in East Africa and the UN Office in Nairobi, exists in some other parallel universe, far away from African realities.

However, the people of Kenya are now poorer than ever. According to the Financial Times, in 1990, 48% of the population lived below the poverty line. "Today, four decades after independence, 55% of Kenyans subsist on a couple od dollars a day"(FT.1/1/2008).

Since independence in 1963, the international donor community, led by the UK, has contributed some $16bn in aid. It is also under their watch that Kibera, so-called "the largest slum in Africa" has expanded and festered in the capital city where about 1.2mn people live without clean water and sanitation amenities, many of them without employment or adequate medical care. Vast amounts of Kenya's arable land are owned by the three ruling families,namely, Kenyatta,Moi and Kibaki. Half of the nation's wealth is in the hands of 10% of the population.

Kenyan MPs earn allowances amounting to tax-free salaries of more than $10,000 per month. This is a democratic model very few African countries can afford to emulate. The international community, so massively present in Kenya, has been complicit in fabricating the "model" country myth, to the detriment of the suffering of the Kenyans.The parallel universe complex referred to earlier afflicts the UN Office in Nairobi, the only UN HQ to be based in a developng country, the others being in New York, Geneva and Vienna.UNON is also the seat of two Specialised Agencies, UNEP (environmental programme) and HABITAT (human settlement) and to an ever-expanding network of international organisations, NGOs and commercial enterprises providing financial, policy and logistic support for the many conflict ad disaster-prone populations in the region.

But the plight of the ordinary citizens seems not to be in the mandate of the leadership of this privileged group of international experts who live in daily contact with Kenyans who look after their children, drive their cars, provide security for their property, etc. In the last 10 years, Kenya has become a major exporter of fresh vegetables and flowers to European markets. In the Lake Naivasha area, acres of land lie covered under green-houses where a water-intensive, high-tech industry produces millions of fresh roses to be flown to Holland (for very low prices). The environmental damage caused to local water resources and the hardship this means for the local rural population's ability to grow food crops is a case study for our experts.

Myths can take on a life of their own, unaffected by concrete realities which in Kenya are only too visible. The so-called economic success story should be seen in context. For, however impressive may be the gains on the Nairobi Stock Exchange, the tonnes of agricultural exports, the thousand of tourists, the millions of dollars in aid funds and the 6% growth rate since 2006, this cannot hide the misery and the humiliation of over half the population which used to live on $2 a day before the current breakdown.

It is time to re-consider the continued presence of the UN Office in a country whose government holds such a record of mismanagement and corruption ... and now of election fraud. Kenya's Central Bank, the main beneficiary of the money the UN and allied networks spend in the country will feel the loss,(the "UN business" is said to provide 20% of Kenya's annual forex earnings) but the UN's leadership must surely demand some basic standards of ethical behaviour from the host government, both for its own integrity and credibility and for the sake of the millions of Kenyans now in obvious distress and disarray.

As for the spread of democracy, the Kenyan debacle provides an opportunity for a fresh look at the role of observer missions which arrive in developing countries as watchdogs for the godess of free and fair elections. Is it really enough to fly in, observe, declare this or that and then vanish? Some serious attention needs to be paid to a code of ethics and follow-up mechanisms which can apply in situations where a mission's verdict on rigged elections is ignored and power is grabbed by the faudulent party.

The present void as exists in Kenya is very dangerous for it renders both the elections and the observer missions irrelevant and robs the voters of their democratic rights twice.

Finally, a word about the man who would be president for the second time. By having the elections rigged and then clinging to the trappings of power, Kibaki has shown an abysmal lack of moral principle and leadership. While the country self-destructs and his people turn on each other, while chldren are burnt to death, women and girls raped and many thousands become refugees in their own land, Kibaki has contributed strictly nothing by way of a solution. This is dereliction of duty and reponsibiity which is contemptible and which must be condemned. Kenya, after all is no man's personal property and elections, even when rigged, are not a passport to impunity.

* Annar Cassam is Tanzanian, former Consultant at UNESCO/PEER Nairobi and former Director, UNESCO Office, Geneva
** Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The Global Zimbabwe Forum would like to express its dire concern at the current state of the preparations for the forthcoming harmonized elections that are due to be held in Zimbabwe on 29th March 2008.

We would like as Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, to state in no uncertain terms our unequivocal stance on the following issues:

The outcome of the forthcoming elections will be highly compromised by the fact that over three million eligible voters who are now living outside Zimbabwe will be excluded from participating in the process. We believe that the exclusion of the Diaspora vote is a fundamental flow that brings the credibility of the elections into question.

We also note with concern the rather inconclusive nature of the SADC mediation process that was being led by President Thabo Mbeki. Should Zimbabweans expected more from this rather protracted process.

We further call upon SADC and Africa in general to ensure that the elections are held in accordance with the expectations of the SADC Protocol on Elections that was adopted in Mauritius in August 2004.

We urge all the interested political parties and independent candidates in the forthcoming elections to promote a spirit of peaceful election campaign process. Political violence must be condemned unconditionally.

We endorse current efforts to mobilize some Zimbabweans in the Diaspora especially those living in the SADC region to return home and vote in the forthcoming elections.

While we respect the individual members' preferences of candidates of their own, we do not endorse any candidates in the elections since we are a politically non-partisan organization but urge the Zimbabwean electorate to vote for a candidate who will seek to promote the democratic ideals of Zimbabwe especially the interests of the diverse Diaspora community.

We urge all Zimbabweans at home to go turn out in their numbers on 29th March and fully exercise their right to elect the leaders of their own choice.

Issued in Johannesburg on Monday 25th February 2008 by

The Global Zimbabwe Forum c/o The Zimbabwe Diaspora Forum 4th Floor, Noswal Hall, Braamfontein Johannesburg, South Africa Tel/Fax: +27113393629

There she is, dead again,

that grandma with her jowls

and battered cardigan,

her headscarf and her

grainy backstreet photograph.

From week to week

her image stares to haunt us.

It’s the text that brings her

sharply into focus:

Loving mother of…

The grandma of…

An in-law through some cousin

to a councillor from such

and such a ward…

And, yes, the family will meet

at somewhere rural

and the hearse will leave

from such and such a Home

at 10a.m. (not prompt), proceed

to some small church

where she will Rest in Peace

Forever be Remembered

when Promoted to His Glory…

For us all, the same old story.

But her age in days like these,

her stunning age. Indeed,

the obit’s whole normality

earns which: our envy? Praise?.

*Stephen Derwent Partington, is the Kwani? poetry editor and a member of the Concerned Kenyan Writers Initiative.

**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Neo Simutanyi and Owen Sichone argue that Zambia's Ambassador to Libya, Mbita Chitala was fired for calling on African leaders to consider the immediate establishment of an AU government as opposed to the gradualist approach favored by the Zambian government.

On 31st January 2008 President Levy Mwanawasa dismissed Zambia's ambassador to Libya Mbita Chitala for having written an article entitled "The Federal Union of African States Must be Established Now" published by The Tripoli Post. The article written in a private and personal capacity is alleged to have caused 'untold embarrassment' to President Mwanawasa as it contradicted Zambia's position on the African Union (AU) government. It was further alleged that Chitala's article effectively undermined the candidature of Ambassador Inonge Lewanika who was vying for the post of Chairperson of the AU Commission.

On 7th February, 2008 Foreign Affairs minister Kabinga Pande said that the Zambian government was not opposed to the establishment of a United African States of Africa, but advocated a 'gradual and incremental approach' as opposed to the immediate establishment of an AU government. Further, Pande described Chitala's article as having been 'ill-informed, blatantly mischievous and very undiplomatic'.

It is important to look at Mbita Chitala's ideas on their own merit. People should not be cowed into silence by the fear of being dismissed from their positions by politicians. While it is understandable that President Mwanawasa has the right to hire and fire those he appoints, every human being has the right to think and express their views freely and there is no doubt as to which is the more important human right. It is surprising that Chitala is being forsaken even by some of his close friends who have distanced themselves from him. Some over-zealous ones, such as MMD spokesperson Benny Tetamashimba, have even called for his expulsion from the party. Is that how to treat our free and independent thinkers?

Chitala was fired for calling on African leaders to consider the immediate establishment of an AU government. But there was nothing dramatically new in his argument, it was first made by Kwame Nkrumah and other Pan Africanists long before Africans attained their independence. However, Chitala's article had an angry sense of urgency which many Africans frustrated by the inertia and lack of progress on the continent must be feeling. Indeed when one looks at the crises in Chad, Sudan, Kenya, Somalia and Zimbabwe and reads the critical audit of the AU by Professor Adebayo Adedeji's independent audit review panel one cannot help but feel that African leaders do not take the lives of their fellow citizens seriously enough.

It appears that President Mwanawasa did not accept that Chitala was writing in his own personal capacity and did not hesitate to sack him just as he did with former foreign minister Vernon Mwaanga and former Vice President Nevers Mumba for embarrassing him over foreign policy matters. Since the days of President Kenneth Kaunda, Zambian presidents have jealously monopolized foreign policy matters for fear of provoking hostility from neighbours, foreign powers and to protect their image abroad. It is not surprising therefore that no minister of foreign affairs has ever been allowed to become an authority in international relations, let alone an influential voice. It should be recalled that just before his dismissal Zambia was celebrating Chitala's successful mobilization of over $400 million of direct Libyan investment, in agriculture, tourism and manufacturing. We wonder what is more important to President Mwanawasa, obtaining direct foreign investment from Libya to serve the interest of Zambians or pleasing other heads of state. We are not sure whether Chitala's dismissal enhanced Inonge's chances of election or undermined them. Given the low number of votes Zambia received, it would appear that the country lacks sufficient clout to lobby support across the continent. What is clear is that President Mwanawasa demonstrated that he lacks the spine to defend individual rights of his citizens when they express personal opinions on intellectual issues and can easily be swayed by external forces.

Whatever Chitala's errors in diplomacy, we must not throw away the Pan-African baby with the ceremonial bathwater and we must not let the desire for African unity be championed only by Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, who now appears to be reverting to Arab nationalism in his frustration with Africa. The issue of an African Union Government was agreed in principle at the July 2007 AU Accra Conference. What now divides African states is the speed of the implementation of this idea. At least seven countries, including Libya, Senegal, Liberia, Ghana, Ethiopia and Chad advocate for the immediate establishment of the AU Government. While the rest of African states led by South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are for a gradual or snails pace approach. But what is wrong with the immediate establishment of African Union government by those who are ready and willing?

Why should African leaders be content with producing oil for America, copper for China and flowers for Europe? Why is it so difficult to imagine that Zambia might import oil from Angola instead of Kuwait or that Zambian copper can be used to make cables, pipes and sheets for the rest of Africa? African people are tired of being asked to produce visas each time they visit relatives across the colonial border. Does anyone seriously believe countries such as Nigeria can compete against India and China on their own?

Attempting to achieve economic integration before political unity is unsustainable and unworkable because the battle against neocolonialism is above all a political one. Whenever African states form a common market, European powers will always sponsor a competing development community causing duplication of effort and bureaucratic rivalries which do no serve the interests the African people. As it is, the continent is grouped into a myriad of regional economic communities with overlapping memberships and, in some cases, conflicting agendas. It is clear that the limited progress on economic integration in all but a handful of countries reveals the gulf between rhetoric and reality espoused by African leaders. We do not wholly agree with Chitala's proposition when he states in his article that the reasons for some countries, such as South Africa's opposition to political integration was based on the false assumption that they would 'on they their own develop to be sub- imperialist powers.' South Africa, for example, has not succumbed to European pressure on the war against Iraq and regime change in Zimbabwe. But it is true that instead of Africa having one permanent seat in the UN Security Council, we now have Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa and others wanting to be the special ones.

The call for the immediate establishment of the AU Government needs to be supported by all those who want to see African advancement. The argument for a 'gradual and incremental approach' only masks the real reasons for the opposition to the AU Government, which is the desire for personal glory and fame using the excuse of national sovereignty. It cannot be denied that an Africa divided will always play second fiddle, to Europe, America, India and China. Political unity is the only guarantee to Africa's economic success and this will require a political decision.

African leaders' self-interest and narrow nationalism and tribalism has largely been responsible for poverty, hunger and violence in many parts of the continent. We do not agree with Foreign Affairs minister Kabinga Pande's argument that African states, including Zambia, should first 'consult and popularize the concept'. This is an excuse meant to buy time as African leaders are not known to consult their people on any important matter, let alone foreign affairs.

The dismissal and public humiliation of Mbita Chitala despite his efforts to woo direct foreign investment to Zambia demonstrates a lack of appreciation of free and independent thinkers. Having expressed a personal opinion, Chitala did not deserve to be sacked in that manner for simply expressing an intellectual opinion on a matter of continental interest. His views did not affect the country to which he was accredited neither did they undermine Zambia's national interest.

In a democracy one should be free to argue one's case in a logical manner by using intellectual means of persuasion. To dismiss a public official for expressing a personal opinion condemns our public servants to silence and sycophancy and is an affront on the right to think and freedom of conscience. African leaders will need to develop a better appreciation of free and critical thinkers for the good of democracy.

*Neo Simutanyi is based at the Institute of Economic and Social Research, University of Zambia.
**Owen Sichone is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town.
***Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Ann Jones looks at the various ways in which the war against women continues long after the peace deals have been signed

INTRODUCTION

Liberia's war came in three successive waves lasting 14 years altogether, from 1989 to 2003. Sierra Leone's war started in 1991 when guerillas of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, trained in Liberia, invaded their own country. The war drew many players and lasted until January 2002, a decade in all. In Côte d'Ivoire, a civil war started in 2002 when northern rebels attempted a coup to oust President Laurent Gbagbo, but by that time the international community had decided to act to prevent any further destabilization of the region. French, African, and later UN peacekeepers stepped in and a treaty was signed in 2003.

Officially, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire are now designated "post-conflict zones," but they are so fractured, so traumatized, and -- especially in the cases of Liberia and Sierra Leone -- so devastated and impoverished that they cannot be said to be securely at peace either. Sierra Leone has replaced Afghanistan as the poorest country on the planet and, like Afghanistan, it is a nation of widows. Visit one of these countries and you'll see for yourself that, at best, real peace will take a long, slow time to come. The destruction in Sierra Leone's Kailahun District, for instance, is as shocking as anything I ever saw in the devastated Afghan capital, Kabul. UN officials and an array of international aid organizations like to use the term "post-conflict" for such places in such moments. It sounds vaguely hopeful, even if it designates a desperate place embarked on a difficult period of "recovery" that may or may not be recognizable after a decade or two, or even a generation or two, as peace.

Just last month, the Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague resumed proceedings begun last June against Charles Taylor, the charming American-educated sociopath and former president of Liberia. Taylor faces 11 charges for war crimes related to matters including terrorizing civilians, murder, rape, sexual slavery, amputations, and enslavement. These atrocities were committed not against his own country but against his neighbor. It was Taylor who backed RUF rebels as they terrorized the populace and augmented their numbers by abducting civilians.

Both Taylor and RUF leader Foday Sankoh reportedly received tactical training in Libya from Muammar Gaddafi, who aimed to disrupt the West African region. Yet these wars were largely not about ideology or even politics. They were about greed, about the power to control and exploit the natural resources of the region -- Liberia's primal rain forests and especially Sierra Leone's "blood diamonds." Political scientists and military historians may eventually advance other theories to explain these wars -- though they'll be hard pressed to find any redeeming features, any "just cause" -- but West Africans will tell you that they took place simply because a few "bad, bad men" craved power and wealth. When Foday Sankoh's RUF forces invaded Sierra Leone, they numbered no more than 150 men, but what they started laid waste to a promising country.

Here's what I want to remind you of, though: When you think about these men who start wars, remember what they've done not to soldiers on either side, but to civilian populations -- especially to women. Today, it is civilians who are by far the most numerous casualties of war. Each successive conflict of recent times has recorded a greater proportion of civilians displaced, exiled, assaulted, tortured, wounded, maimed, killed, or disappeared. In every modern war, most of the suffering civilians are women and children.

In many wars, maimed and dead civilians are counted (if at all) merely as "collateral damage" -- like the estimated 3,000 innocent citizens who died in the initial American bombing of Afghanistan in 2001. In the West African wars, civilians became the designated targets. Foday Sankoh intended to conquer Sierra Leone, but having only 150 fighters, he resorted to forcible recruitment. Like Charles Taylor's forces in Liberia, Sankoh's destroyed whole villages, murdering most of the residents and taking away only those who might serve them as soldiers, porters, cooks, or "wives." Again, many of the dead and most of the abducted were women and children.

And here's a little-known reality: When any conflict of this sort officially ends, violence against women continues and often actually grows worse. Not surprisingly, murderous aggression cannot be turned off overnight. When men stop attacking one another, women continue to be convenient targets. Here in West Africa, as in so many other places where rape was used as a weapon of war, it has become a habit carried seamlessly into the "post-conflict" era. Where normal structures of law enforcement and justice have been disabled by war, male soldiers and civilians alike can prey upon women and children with impunity. And they do.

So I'm writing to you, here in "post-conflict" West Africa, from an active war zone. I'm writing from the heart of the war against women and children.

COUNTING CASUALTIES

Listen to this report from Amnesty International. It describes the least of the West African wars, the relatively short civil war in Côte d'Ivoire:

"The scale of rape and sexual violence in Côte d'Ivoire in the course of the armed conflict has been largely underestimated. Many women have been gang-raped or have been abducted and reduced to sexual slavery by fighters. Rape has often been accompanied by the beating or torture (including torture of a sexual nature) of the victim... All armed factions have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate sexual violence with impunity."

Human Rights Watch points out that "cases of sexual abuse may be significantly underreported," because women fear "the possibility of reprisals by perpetrators... ostracism by families and communities, and cultural taboos."

The Amnesty report documents case after case of girls and women, aged "under 12" to 63, assaulted by armed men. The more recent and thoroughgoing report by Human Rights Watch records the rape of children as young as three years-old. During the civil war, women and girls were seized in their village homes or at military roadblocks, or were discovered hiding in the bush. Some were raped in public. Some were raped in front of their husbands and children. Some were forced to witness the murder of husbands or parents. Then they were taken away to soldiers' camps to be held along with many other women. They were forced to cook for the soldiers during the day and every night they were gang-raped, in some cases by 30 to 40 men. They were also beaten and tortured. They saw women who resisted being beaten or killed by a simple slicing of the throat.

Many women were raped so incessantly and so brutally -- with sticks, knives, gun barrels, burning coals -- that they died. Many others were left with injuries and pain that still linger long after the war. Many who had been scarred as girls by "excision" or FMG (female genital mutilation) were literally ripped apart.

The Amnesty report coolly says: "The brutality of rape frequently causes serious physical injuries that require long-term and complex treatment including uterine prolapses (the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond)" -- one has to wonder what lies "beyond" the vagina -- "vesico-vaginal or recto-vaginal fistulas and other injuries to the reproductive system or rectum, often accompanied by internal and external bleeding or discharge." It notes that such women usually can't "access the medical care they need." Some still find it hard to sit down, or stand up, or walk. Some still spit up blood. Some have lost their eyesight or their memories. Some miscarried. Many contracted sexually transmitted diseases and HIV. No one knows how many of them died, or are dying, as a result.

And many are still missing, perhaps dragged across borders when rogue militias from a neighboring country went home. Perhaps slaughtered along the way.

WAR AND ITS SEQUEL

Historically, women have long been counted among "the spoils of war," free for the taking; but, in our own time, women in large numbers have also been pawns in deliberate military and political strategies intended to humiliate the men to whom they "belong" and to exterminate their ethnic groups. (Think of Bosnia.) The Amnesty report traces the wholesale violence against women in Côte d'Ivoire to December 2000 when a number of women were arrested, raped, and tortured at the government's Police Training School in Dioula -- because their presumed ethnicity and political affiliation allied them with the opposition. According to Human Rights Watch, this was but one of many such cases incited by government-sponsored propaganda before the civil war even began.

No man responsible for any of these crimes has ever been brought to justice.

Next door in Liberia, by the time fighting ended in 2002, 1.4 million Liberians had been displaced within the country. Almost a million others had fled. In a country of three million people, that's one in three citizens gone. At least 270,000 people died. That's nearly 10% of the population. And here again the easy targets were women. A World Health Organization study in 2005 estimated that a staggering 90% of Liberian women had suffered physical or sexual violence; three out of four had been raped.

Typically, ending the war did not end the violence against women. A study in preparation by the International Rescue Committee -- the organization for which I currently work as a volunteer -- and Columbia University's School of Public Health concludes, "While the war officially ended in 2003, the war on women continued."

Well over half the women interviewed in two Liberian counties, including the capital city, Monrovia, had survived at least one violent physical attack during an 18- month period in 2006-2007, years after the conflict had officially ended. Well over half the women reported at least one violent sexual assault in the same period. Seventy-two percent said their husbands had forced them to have sex against their will. A 2003 IRC study among Liberian refugees in Sierra Leone found that 75% of the women had been sexually violated before they fled their country; after they fled, 55% were sexually assaulted again.

WOMEN LIKE ME

Countless women will never recover from the assaults they suffered during the war. I met many such women in Liberia.

On a visit I made to Kolahun, in Lofa County, where fighting had been heavy, one showed me her scars: a series of parallel horizontal ridges starting just below one ear and moving toward the throat. Some guerilla in Charles Taylor's army had locked this whisper of a woman against his chest and slowly, inch by inch, laid open the flesh of her neck in ribbons of blood. But that wasn't all. Taylor's men had broken all the fingers of her left hand so that they now point backwards at seemingly impossible angles. They slammed her back so forcefully with rifle butts that one leg and one arm (the one with the useless hand) are now paralyzed. She can still walk, leaning on a homemade wooden crutch; but that leaves her without a good arm, and she can't carry anything on her head, having lost the ability to balance. She has five children, some of them fathered by rape. The soldiers held her a long time. How many raped her she cannot say.

In the tiny village of Dougoumai I met a woman people refer to only as "the sick lady." She lay on a bed in a one-room mud-brick house. As I came in, she managed to sit up with great difficulty, using her twisted hands to move her swollen, useless legs. Her sister says she was captured by a militia fighting against Charles Taylor and gang-raped repeatedly by ten men. Nobody can say how long they kept her. They rammed their gun butts into her back -- evidently a common technique -- paralyzing her legs. She cannot walk. They smashed her hands. She cannot hold anything or feed herself or comb her hair. Her mother and two sisters, who luckily survived the war, feed her by hand, their lives too now dominated by the consequences of the violence done to this woman.

Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the UN Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) surveyed surviving women in Lofa County, the center of Charles Taylor's operations. More than 98% said that, during his war (1999-2003), they lost their homes; more than 90%, their livelihoods; more than 72%, at least one family member. Nearly 90% of them survived at least one violent physical assault; more than half, at least one violent sexual assault. No one inquired about the number of women now caring for the permanently disabled.

In Sierra Leone, where terrorizing the civilian population was the main tactic of war, the violence against women and children was, as Human Rights Watch has reported, even more brutal. All parties to the conflict committed countless atrocities. Official reports document appalling crimes: fathers forced to rape their own daughters; brothers forced to rape their sisters; boy soldiers gang-raping old women, then chopping off their arms; pregnant women eviscerated alive and the living fetus snatched from the womb to satisfy soldiers betting on its sex. A brother is hacked to death and eviscerated; his heart and liver are placed in the hands of his 18-year-old sister who is commanded to eat them. She refuses. She is taken to a place where other women are being held. Among them is her sister. She sees her sister and other women murdered. Their heads are placed in her lap. These crimes, which violate primal taboos, aim to destroy not just individual victims but a whole culture as well; yet the individual victims are important in their own right, and in most cases they are women and children.

Perhaps the worst crime of the bad, bad men has been turning children -- mostly boys -- into armed guerillas as bad as themselves. In his bestselling autobiography A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah vividly describes his life as a boy soldier. Separated from his family by the war, he was captured by soldiers in the army of Sierra Leone, trained to fight, kept high on drugs (as all soldiers were), and forced to kill. When boy soldiers begin to rape and murder girls and women willingly at the instigation of men, civilization has collapsed.

CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN

In recent years, every kind of horror has been inflicted on girls and women in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire because they are female. If females were a particular ethnic group -- Albanians, let's say, or Tutsis -- or if they espoused a particular religion, as did Bosnian Muslims, we could recognize what goes on as a kind of "gender cleansing" or mass femicide. But we don't speak of crimes against women in that way. When did you last hear someone speak of "crimes against women" at all?

Interviewed for a TV documentary on mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a smiling guerrilla says he's "made love" to many women. The interviewer asks if all the women were willing, and he laughs. He admits that many fight him, and he says -- still grinning -- "If they are strong, I call my friends to help me." Despite his use of euphemisms, he knows just what he's doing. When the interviewer labels his love-making "rape," he typically insists that rape happens in wartime and that when the war is over, he won't do it anymore. The state of war excuses men's crimes against women because rape -- so the claim goes -- is something that just naturally occurs in war.

The war against women in West Africa and elsewhere is different from other wars -- whether driven by ideology, politics, greed, or personal ambition -- in that every faction, every side, makes war on women. They all abduct and rape and force women to labor. They all murder women. In West Africa, only the Civil Defense Forces (CDF) in Sierra Leone refrained for a considerable time from rape. They were traditional hunters, recruited by the government to defend their own areas from the rebels. Their customs kept them from sexual intercourse, believed to deplete a warrior's power, and they operated close to home, where they were known; but, as the war went on, they, too, began to act like all the other fighters. Their initial restraint was important, however, offering evidence that rape does not have to be something that "just happens" in war, but is instead an elective, wildly popular choice.

After war, in the "post-conflict" era, even some international peacekeepers have joined the war against women. Human Rights Watch and others have documented cases of rape by peacekeeping soldiers in West Africa, but none have been prosecuted. Perpetrators are simply repatriated or moved to a new post. Human Rights Watch also reports on the widespread practice among peacekeepers of using children who have turned to prostitution to survive. (There are few other options for girls who have been orphaned or rejected by their families, and many of these child prostitutes had already been used as sex slaves during wartime.) But apparently the peacekeepers recruit many girls themselves.

Here in Kailahun District, the place where the Sierra Leone war started and ended, women are upset and angry about the sexual exploitation of their adolescent daughters. Parents in this part of the country -- many of them war widows -- take seriously the advice to send their daughters to school, which costs more than most can easily afford. If a girl student becomes pregnant, she is required by law to drop out. (Consider the impact on a small village struggling to recover from war of the loss of even a few prospective teachers, nurses, or social workers.) If the father of the expected child is a fellow student, he can continue his studies, denying all responsibility. Often, however, it's not the boys who are to blame. Many still-virginal girls drop out of school early to escape predatory teachers, and women report that the incidence of teen pregnancy drops when peacekeeping forces leave town.

Even then, however, rape and child rape continue, largely unabated. It's hard to tell with certainty just how high this is, because raped women and girls are normally too shamed by the crime to report it. In war time, it was somewhat easier because they had so clearly been forced by armed men; with the war "over," rape once again becomes a woman's own fault. Nonetheless, angry parents in this region of Sierra Leone, increasingly report child rape to authorities. Here in Kailahun District, women mobilized to force the local magistrate to hear the case of a 7-year-old rape victim. The magistrate, apparently related to the admitted perpetrator, had prevented prosecution by postponing his trial, again and again.

Domestic violence -- wife-beating, marital rape, emotional abuse, torture, economic deprivation, and the like -- is common. Impoverished women with many children to feed have no choice but to endure "normal" levels of violence. But as in wartime, habitual violence invites the thrill of excess. Just the other day, a man in Moyamba District killed his wife and cut off her head.

BAD MEN MAKE GOOD

For bad, bad men, terrorizing civilians holds advantages -- beyond the immediate gratification of the rush of power. Such acts can land them important posts in government. When atrocities become sufficiently conspicuous and horrific -- such as the notorious amputations of arms and legs in Sierra Leone -- the international community steps in to initiate a peace process. Usually they bring to the negotiating table all the bad, bad men who have been causing so much trouble and buy them off with positions of power in a new "interim" or "transitional" government. Witness, in another part of the world where women are notoriously badly treated, all those well-known warlords the Afghan people wanted tried for war crimes who somehow wound up in President Hamid Karzai's cabinet, or -- after elections advertised as democratic -- in parliament.

Foday Sankoh had been condemned to death for treason when he was summoned to just such peace negotiations. From them, he emerged as the head of the government commission in charge of managing Sierra Leone's natural resources, including the diamonds that financed his war. Charles Taylor, while committing mayhem and rape in refugee camps for displaced persons, was elected president of Liberia. Voters seemed to figure, as battered women often do, that the best way to stop the man's violence was to let him have his way, though this is a path to certain disaster.

Bad, bad men are quick to learn from the rapid advancement of their brothers elsewhere. Laurent Kunda in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), widely recognized as a prime candidate for trial before a war crimes tribunal, is now said to be jockeying for a high position in the government of the DRC in exchange for laying down his arms. The current rapid descent of Kenya into "tribal warfare" owes much to the same theory. Raila Odingo, having lost a clearly suspect presidential election, exploits genocidal violence with good reason to hope that international intervention will usher him into office by the back door.

Although UN Security Council Resolution 1325 calls for women to be included in all peace processes, they are rarely invited to the table. With men in charge of governments almost everywhere, the fearful fascination with bad, bad men continues and the perverse preference for predators trickles down. In Sierra Leone, ex-combatants were rewarded with motorcycles. The theory was that violent young men would be less dangerous if they could serve a useful purpose and make some money carrying passengers on brand new highly-chromed bikes in a country where most cars had been torched. The result? Every public square in the dodgiest districts of Sierra Leone is now dominated by a motorcycle gang consisting mainly of young men already surely skilled in the sexual exploitation of girls. Perhaps in the end, the transport scheme will work out; but in Sierra Leone most women and girls still walk.

Here in Kailahun District, women tell the story -- possibly apocryphal -- of an old woman who was huddled over her cook fire when RUF rebels entered her village. She was frying some tasty frogs. Rebels surrounded her, peering into the pot to see what she was cooking, and one of them said: "We are freedom fighters of the Revolutionary United Front. We have come to save you from the government." The old woman -- unafraid -- replied: "Then you must go to the capital. The government is not in my pot." Women in Kailahun District tell that story over and over, and they laugh every time. They are so proud of that lone, bold, old woman who told those rebel men off. That's the spirit of survival, still alive in them, though they must know that the rebels probably shot the woman and ate her frogs.

*Writer/photographer Ann Jones is working as a volunteer with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) on a special project for their Gender-Based Violence unit called "A Global Crescendo: Women's Voices from Conflict Zones." Her blogs about the project can be found here This article first appeared on Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute.

**Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

***Note on sources: A number of the reports discussed in this piece, all PDF files, can be read on-line: Amnesty International, "Targeting Women"; Human Rights Watch, "'My Heart Is Cut': Sexual Violence by Rebels and Pro-Government Forces in Côte d'Ivoire; The World Health Organization; The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the UN Fund for Population Activities, "Women's Reproductive Health in Liberia, The Lofa County Reproductive Health Survey"; Human Rights Watch, "'We'll Kill You If You Cry': Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict"; UN Resolution 1325.]