Somalia's political leaders signed a promising new declaration at Eldoret in Kenya on 27 October 2002. The framework for dialogue is sound and comprehensive, most major political movements are represented, and key members of the international community are engaged. However, mismanagement, regional rivalry, lack of political support and financial constraints have brought the talks to near collapse. As the conference enters its main phase, the UN Security Council should ensure that the arms embargo against Somalia is actually enforced and commit to targeted sanctions against warlords or politicians who undermine the negotiations. The EU and U.S. should construct a package of incentives for reaching a peace agreement, enhance their representation and technical aid, and conduct robust public diplomacy in support of the process, says the International Crisis Group.

The ruling African National Congress (ANC) holds its first national conference in five years at Stellenbosch University next week -- with elections likely to indicate whether the left or "right-wing" of the movement holds sway.

SciDev.Net and UNESCO are pleased to announce a five-day training workshop on the use of information and communications technologies — in particular the Internet — to improve reporting on the science of HIV/AIDS, to take place in Uganda in April 2003. The workshop is aimed at those who are (or would like to be) professionally engaged in communicating HIV/AIDS information to the public through print, radio or electronic means. It will have 15 places, and is restricted to women participants. All travel and accommodation costs will be covered.

Immediate action is needed to protect Southern African women from the combined effects of violence and HIV/AIDS, Amnesty International says. Despite commitment by Southern African governments to eliminate 'all forms of discrimination [and] all forms of violence against women and girls' to reduce their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS, there continues to be evidence of widespread economic, social and legal discrimination along with high levels of violence, including sexual violence, against women and girls in Southern African countries, Amnesty International said.

Western nations have been "too slow" to help fight HIV/AIDS and hunger in Africa and have employed a "double standard" regarding treatment of HIV-positive Africans and HIV-positive Westerners, Stephen Lewis, the U.N. Secretary General's special envoy on HIV/AIDS, has said.

Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed an agreement on Monday for the voluntary repatriation of 193,000 Angolan refugees in the Congo, a UNHCR official said.

This book exposes the role of the Belgian government, the US government and CIA, the UN, Mobutu and others in the assassination of independent Congo's first leader.

Since Pambazuka News started 18 months ago, subscribers to the newsletter have grown from a few hundred to nearly 10 000. Those subscribers continue to tell us that we are providing a valuable resource, but we believe there are thousands more people who don’t know about us and would find use in our weekly e-newsletter. That’s why we would like to enlist your help to spread the word about Pambazuka News. We’re asking our subscribers to forward their edition of Pambazuka News to as many of their friends and colleagues as they think may be interested in the newsletter. We’re also asking subscribers to encourage people to visit or to send an email to [email protected] with ‘subscribe’ in the subject line. If all our subscribers recruited only one extra subscriber, we could double our existing subscriber base.

The International Rescue Committee supplied emergency services for thousands of Burundians who fled northern and eastern regions of Burundi’s capital Bujumbura late last month following a heavy attack by rebel forces.

4t HIT Mail Privacy Lite allows you to send and receive data securely hidden in images of various types (gif, jpeg, tiff, etc). This application uses a strong encryption algorithm to make communications secure.

Today sees the opening of the Consultative Group meeting between Tanzania and its development partners. The government will receive the usual plaudits for its sound economic policies, and a commitment of one billion US dollars (100 billion shillings) in grants and loans for the coming year. Inflation is down to under five percent, the economy grew by 5.6 percent last year, foreign investment is high by African standards, domestic and foreign debt are at sustainable levels. Compared to earlier years of 'negative' growth and rampant inflation, these are solid achievements. There's one big blot on this otherwise rosy landscape: the expected benefits of economic stabilisation and growth are not reaching the poor, especially in the rural areas.

Elderly people are more vulnerable during crises and disasters, and their special needs should be better reflected in relief operations, Helpage International says. Research shows that older women faced chronic vulnerability due to a lifetime of gender-based disadvantage. A large proportion was likely not to have had any formal education and to suffer chronic untreated health conditions.

Communities from across Durban will converge in Merebank on the 11th December 2002 to plan a campaign of rolling mass action against the City's new relocation policies. Residents in South Durban who face increasing industrial expansion and pollution have found common cause with the poor of Chatsworth, Sydenham Heights and Umlazi, who face evictions for rental arrears and unpaid rates bills.

My NGO needs your Newsletter as we believe it will be a very good tool in working with the poorest of the poor farmers we work with.

The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN is deeply concerned at the news of the detention of Ezra Fessehaye, a journalist with the government-owned newspaper "Hadas Eritrea". According to PEN's sources, Fessehaye was arrested by security forces in July 2002 and has not been heard of since.

The Landless Peoples Movement and Urban Evicted People of Kwa-Zulu Natal have united to fight landlessness and evictions. On the 12th of December 2002, hundreds of members of both organisations will converge on the Durban City Hall for a protest.

Environmental NGO GroundWork has called for Minister of Health, Dr Manto Tshabalala Msimang, who recently announced her intentions to make it compulsory for alcoholic drinks to carry health warnings similar to those used on tobacco products, to go further and make it a requirement that there are health warnings on other products which are consumed daily or used by young children and pregnant women.

The Basel Action Network, Greenpeace International, Toxics Link of India and a coalition of Trade Unions have discovered that the Congress and the Bush Administration have reversed a moratorium against toxic waste ship dumping.

Namibians in Windhoek marked Human Rights and Namibian Women's Day with two separate commemorations - one Government-sanctioned and the other organised by civil society.

There has been no cohesive voice recognizing the effects of the war on terrorism on Africa and no progressive discussion with regards to what role Africans should play in making the world safe for Africans and other marginalized people in the world. And as the slogans - war on terrorism, axis of evil, with or against us - continue to be brandished like weapons, the world, which includes Africa, sits in a precarious position. These are not innocent slogans: they are intended to close the debate, to put a lid on reason and replace it with nursery school rhymes, says this commentary for www.zmag.org.

The cholera outbreak reported in Kampala and Wakiso has spread to six other districts, health minister Jim Muhwezi says.

At the opening of an Africa-wide meeting on landmines, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) called on African leaders to ensure full and rapid implementation of the 1997 agreement prohibiting antipersonnel mines.

Uganda is known as the star-pupil of the IMF in Africa. During the last ten years, the country pursued IMF policies of fiscal austerity combined with structural adjustment, and also implemented a far reaching poverty reduction strategy. Based upon these achievements, Uganda was the first country to benefit from debt relief under both the original and enhanced frameworks of the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative. But the star-pupil of the IMF does not have a sustainable level of debt even after reaching the HIPC completion point twice – a devastating result for the whole HIPC initiative.

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Guinea reported on Wednesday that some 17,857 Guinean nationals, fleeing the insecurity in neighbouring Cote d'Ivoire, had been registered by the Lola Prefecture near the border with Cote d'Ivoire.

The rebel Conseil national pour la défense de la démocratie-Forces pour la défense de la démocratie (CNDD-FDD) and the government army accused each other on Tuesday of numerous violations of the ceasefire agreement they signed on 2 December.

Analytical Kenyans are about to give up on the coming elections. Rather than tackle specific policy questions, the campaign has centred around posturing, spin doctoring and procrastination. The sad reality is that, as ever, the campaign is really being fought on the power of personalities and the ethnic allegiances they command.

Ivory Coast's army has reclaimed another town, pushing deeper into the country's rebel-held, cocoa-rich West as a nearly three-month conflict escalates toward all-out war, military officials said Wednesday.
Related Link: Mass grave discovered
http://iafrica.com/news/worldnews/193659.htm

Scanning the savanna with a pair of binoculars and a global positioning unit, biologist Robin Reid counts the number of zebra, giraffe and cows that graze in one of the world's most famous wildlife reserves. Reid is the lead scientist in Mara Count 2002, one of the most ambitious attempts ever to inventory an ecosystem. Nineteen teams and two planes counted 23 species and classified the vegetation in an equally divided 965 square mile area.

Geoff Brown and Tyrone Woods are on a unique cycling expedition. The Johannesburg-based AAA School of Advertising students arrived in town here on Tuesday en route to Cape Town to raise funds for burn victims. They began their journey at the Botswana border last month.

Christmas trees, Rastafarians, punk rockers and even postboxes were just some of the fun costumes worn by runners in the Community Chest Twilight Team Run on Tuesday. Last year, the event raised over R190 000, which was distributed to more than 520 social welfare and development projects throughout the Western Cape.

The popular Cancer shave-a-thon has come to an end. Guys and girls of courage lost their silky locks for a good cause as donors poured in hundreds of rands for the sake of cancer patients.

On the occasion of the commemoration of the first international Human Rights Day (December 10) following the establishment of the African Union, we are writing to you to express our deep concern over the lack of improvement in the human rights situation in Africa. In the five months of the AU’s existence, rights violations have actually increased in many member countries of the Union while the Union maintains a rather deafening silence.

In Eritrea, for instance, there has been a clamp down on freedom of expression, the rights of Eritrea's people to freely choose their own government and of the media, which has resulted in a ban on the entire independent media. In Liberia and Cameroon, human rights defenders and journalists have either been charged with treason or imprisoned. In Nigeria, a fatwa has been issued against a journalist, Isioma Daniel, calling for her arbitrary and extra judicial murder. And in the past one week, Nigeria's government has prevented several human rights advocates and defenders from travelling out of the country on the unsubstantiated grounds that they are "security risks".

In Egypt, human rights advocates are prosecuted or threatened with prosecution for exercising their right to freedom of expression or making lawful democratic demands. In Côte d'Ivoire, the government presides over the persecution of both its own nationals and nationals of neighbouring African countries.

In Zimbabwe, and Uganda, among other countries, legislation has been introduced which restrict or threaten punitive measures against the media. In these and many countries, individual journalists are still persecuted for reports, which are not denied or proven to be untrue. These attacks on the media and individual journalists by many African governments reflect a trend which shows in real terms that they are yet to accept that democracy and good governance are indispensable to stability and development.

Also, women and in particular young girls continue to suffer violence and from the consequences of conflict and poverty. Although violence against women is a universal problem, there seems to be no hurry to adopt and implement the Draft Protocol To The African Charter On The Rights Of Women In Africa.

Around the African continent, Africans are prevented from travelling freely by immigration rules that privilege non-African nationals. For instance, many Africans travelling to other African countries outside their sub-regions have to wait for between four and six weeks for visas, which many non-Africans can acquire within a week or on arrival at entry points. Collective expulsions of Africans within the continent are also routine practice and refugees and illegal immigrants within the continent continue to be subjected to unspeakable dehumanisation.

In all, twenty-six of the fifty-three member countries of the African Union have engaged in notable rights violations since the formation of the Union in July 2002. To the best of our knowledge, the African Union has not responded robustly to any of these rights abuses. Most rights abuses involve violations of the rights to opinion, expression, association, assembly, free movement and press freedom.

This state of affairs directly contradicts the AU’s stated objectives to “promote democratic principles and institutions, popular participation and good governance” and to “promote and protect peoples' rights in accordance with the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights and other relevant human rights instruments”.

To cap all these, about thirty million people in Africa are now in danger of severe malnutrition and starvation. The situation is particularly bad in Ethiopia and southern Africa. While lack of rainfall and other circumstances are not man made, the lack of adequate short and long term remedies or preventive measures are direct reflections of repressive legal and institutional frameworks, which compel millions to painfully await circumstances which could have been avoided or ameliorated by openness and more democratic participation in government.

The above examples and countless other unreported violations which have gone unchallenged by the African Union are without doubt manifestations of an absence of political will, and an inability to effectively implement existing mechanisms for the supervision of the provisions of Africa's human rights instruments. On this occasion of Human Rights Day, we therefore call on you to without delay utilise your good office to:

*Publicly and unreservedly censure those African governments that violate the human rights of their nationals, foreign residents or inhabitants or deprive victims of such violations of effective remedies;
* Remind African governments of the primacy of the right to life, freedom of expression, participation in government and associated rights, and guaranteeing human rights generally. The AU should announce measures to guarantee that the rights of people to freely choose their governments in free, fair and open elections shall be taken seriously, respected and not be tampered with by the Union or any its member governments;
*Take immediate and active steps to guarantee better funding of the institutions of the African regional human rights system, including in particular the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights and the African Committee on the Rights and Welfare of the Child;
*Take immediate and active steps to ensure that AU member countries ratify the Protocol for the Establishment of the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights without further delay;
*Remind all AU member governments of their obligations to observe, promote, protect, and fulfil human and peoples' rights in Africa, including the economic, social and cultural rights of all persons in Africa;
*Take immediate measures to ensure appropriate priority is accorded to the effective protection of refugees and other victims of forced displacement in Africa. We would be pleased if you could address these concerns, and take this occasion to clarify how the AU intends to realise the quite ambitious obligations that are contained in the Constitutive Act concerning the protection of human rights.

The Constitutive Act represents an orientation towards the protection of human rights different from the OAU Charter that it replaced. Articles 4 and 30 of the Constitutive Act require the countries of the Union to be proactive in the protection of human rights generally, and, most especially, in situations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and unconstitutional changes in government among others. These new and far reaching obligations require African governments and the African Union itself to take the protection of human rights seriously because this is the only way that a degeneration into genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, fratricidal conflict, civil unrest and unconstitutional changes in government can be avoided.

In the OAU Refugee Convention and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights, the member States of the Union have a body of norms and obligations, adherence to which would greatly contribute to positively transforming Africa's human rights record. More than one year after the entry into force of the Constitutive Act in May 2001, we are yet to see evidence of a readiness on the part of the Union to provide the leadership that is required by the Constitutive Act in ensuring compliance with Africa's and international human rights standards. The optimism inspired by the adoption of radical new provisions of the Constitutive Act is now at risk of having been in vain.

We look forward to your response to these issues and to the opportunity of working with you and the AU for the effective protection of human and peoples' rights on the African continent.

Yours Sincerely,
Rotimi Sankore
Coordinator
Centre for Research Education and Development of - [CREDO] – Freedom of Expression and Associated Rights

* CREDO is an International human rights organisation based in Senegal and London and focusing on work in Africa.
* Send comments for publication in the Letters and Comments section of Pambazuka News to

Human Rights Day Related Links:
* UN Should Integrate Human Rights Into Security Council Work
http://www.hrw.org/press/2002/12/unhrwork.htm
* Joint Declaration on International Mechanisms for Promoting Freedom of Expression
http://www.article19.org
* Make Human Rights Day Count

The Regional Network for Equity in Health in Southern Africa (EQUINET) and Oxfam GB are inviting expressions of interest from individuals or organisations based within the region for a programme of work on Equity issues in HIV/AIDS, Health Sector Responses and Treatment Access in Southern Africa between February and July 2003. EQUINET and Oxfam seek to inform the policy debates and advocacy that have grown around health sector responses to HIV/AIDS in the region, particularly with respect to care and health sector responses and treatment access within the region.

The Department of Rural Water Supply in the Ministry of Agriculture in Kunene North has received 2,2 million Namibian dollars from the government. The money will assist to alleviate drought conditions and to drill new boreholes.

The number of children orphaned by HIV-AIDS in Windhoek is expected to escalate to 30 000 over the next 10 years from the current estimate of 6 600, the Mayor of the City, Matheus Shikongo, said last Wednesday.

At least 33 Sudanese refugees have been shot dead in violent clashes at a refugee camp in western Ethiopia, humanitarian organisations said on Monday.

West Africa, the poorest region in the world, is preparing to treat 400 000 HIV positive people with anti-retrovirals within the next three years. This translates into anti-retroviral access for at least one-third of the people in the region in need of treatment. Currently, some 10 000 people in West Africa have access to anti-retroviral treatment.

Aids and human rights are so closely linked that any attempt to stop the spread of the killer virus must also fight against poverty and exclusion, the French chapter of Amnesty International said on Sunday to mark World Aids Day.

We are writing on behalf of the World Association of Newspapers and the World Editors Forum, which represent 18,000 publications in 100 countries, to express our serious concern at the proclamation of a fatwa against journalist Isioma Daniel. According to reports, on 26 November the government of the majority-Muslim northern state of Zamfara announced that a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Ms Daniel had been issued in response to her allegedly blasphemous article published in ThisDay newspaper on 16 November. The article claimed that the Prophet Mohammed might have considered marrying a Miss World contestant had he seen them and sparked rioting in which about 200 people were killed, despite several published apologies by the paper and the resignation of Ms Daniel.

Since the floods of three years ago, Mozambique has rebuilt its infrastructure impressively quickly, with hard work and intelligent decision making. But now the country faces a new threat.

More than 30,000 people were displaced during four days of religious riots in the northern Nigerian city of Kaduna, the Nigerian Red Cross said last Thursday.

The Lesotho Highlands Water Project has throttled wild rivers and drowned verdant valleys. Its concrete megadams have flooded out thatched huts, subsistence farms and grazing lands here in the impoverished mountain region known as the Roof of Africa. And now the project is embroiled in one of the biggest corruption scandals in the checkered history of African development.

A group of women in northern Namibia have become "flying mothers" for children orphaned by Aids. They got together four years ago after losing relatives to the disease, or taking in nephews and nieces after their parents had died.

SC UK has been working in Sudan since the 1950s. The focus of SC UK work in Sudan is around issues of food security, health care, water and sanitation, education, protection of vulnerable children. SC UK is currently involved in the health sector in assisting the conflict affected and displaced population of Khartoum, Bahr el Ghazal and South Darfur.

The Media Monitoring Project Zimbabwe (MMPZ) has noted with concern the continued harassment of The Daily News by ZANU PF supporters and state agents. The MMPZ described the “blatant acts of intolerance” as a violation of the public's right to access information through media of their choice.

It took courage for Noe Sebisaba to tell his fellow Burundian refugees in Kanenbwa camp, in western Tanzania, that he was HIV positive. "Yes, to be HIV positive is a shame in our refugee society," he wrote of his dilemma in a refugee organisation's annual report.

AIDS threatens our very raison d'etre; our ability to live and our instinct to create life. Little wonder, therefore, that HIV and AIDS are so feared. As the articles in this IRIN World AIDS Day web special (http://www.irinnews.org/webspecials/aids/) illustrates, fear is at the heart of much of the stigma and discrimination that surrounds HIV and AIDS.
Related Link: http://www.kff.org/worldaidsday/