Hundreds of villagers in the Eastern Cape have been struck by waterborne disease for the first time, with 14 people having died from Cholera and more than 800 people having been treated in hospital.

The Government has conceded to an acute shortage of teachers following the introduction of free primary education.

"Max", a South African Anti-Eviction activist, was kidnapped by four men and a woman who had earlier been seen at an Anti-Eviction Campaign meeting. They are suspected of being NIA agents, writes Anna Weekes.

There have been a number of world conferences organized around UN-related themes. At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) information and communication are on the agenda for the first time. From 17 to 28 February, the second preparatory committee meeting - PrepCom 2 - is taking place in Geneva. In an extensive conference, which stretches over two weeks, delegates from all over the world are attempting to clarify organizational issues and common ideas. According to the WSIS secretariat, this conference shall produce drafts of the action plan and the final summit declaration.

The hammer came down at exactly 19.00hrs on Friday the 21st February 2003 when the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa came into being. This was at a gathering of about fifty (50) WSIS participants including government delegations, Civil Society actors, UN Agencies, the media among others.

This issue includes the following articles:
* Refugee Protection and Fundamental Values, Rudd Lubbers, pp. 20-22 http://www3.oup.co.uk/refqtl/hdb/Volume_21/Issue_03/210020.sgm.abs.html
* Terrorism and Emergency Humanitarian Action, Yves Sandoz, pp. 33-44 http://www3.oup.co.uk/refqtl/hdb/Volume_21/Issue_03/210033.sgm.abs.html
* The Challenge of Humanitarian Values: Refugee Protection and Humanitarian Values, Stéphane Jaquemet, pp. 111-112 http://www3.oup.co.uk/refqtl/hdb/Volume_21/Issue_03/210111.sgm.abs.html

This publication examines U.S. undermining of multilateral treaty regimes on nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, landmines, global warming, and international justice. "This book provides a comprehensive overview of how, at a time when Americans are keenly aware of international threats to peace and security, the United States is systematically undermining the International Criminal Court and other mechanisms that would reduce those threats," says Jayne Stoyles, former Program Director, NGO Coalition for the International Criminal Court.

Your powerful editorial (Pambazuka News 100: Public Broadcasting - Elections, Democracy and Human Rights in Africa) clearly defined what is happening in Africa where governments manipulate media to their own advantage, negating public interests. Such incisive writing should be heavily encouraged to promote democracy and uphold the professional role of the media, particularly broadcasting in Africa. It was a well thought piece of journalism.

Proven track record in administering, monitoring and evaluating public health projects in developing countries and knowledge of vaccine-preventable diseases epidemiology and immunization required.

The Centre for African Family Studies (CAFS) is an African institution dedicated to strengthening the capacities of organisations and individuals working in the field of reproductive health, population and development in order to contribute to improving the quality of life of families in sub-Saharan Africa. CAFS conducts regional and in-country courses that enable health care providers, administrators, researchers and programme managers to meet Africa's health challenges.

CAFOD's Emergency Support Section (ESS) provides specialist support, technical and humanitarian assistance to CAFOD International Division programme staff and partners across the globe during humanitarian crises. ESS is looking for a key specialist to join its team. To help with the humanitarian crisis reaching across southern Africa, CAFOD's ESS needs a new specialist member to provide support to CAFOD's Africa section in coordinating the overall response to the crisis.

The Programme Manager will be responsible for the overall management, planning and reporting of a newly to be started EU funded rehabilitation programme in Maridi and Yambio Counties. The programme has a duration of two years and will implement a variety of activities in two main sectors: small livestock development and HIV/AIDS awareness & control.

Angola, a hoped-for oil ally of the United States and with a seat on the United Nations Security Council this year, should be doing well. Its civil war ended last April after the death of Jonas Savimbi. The price of its growing oil exports has been boosted by the Iraq crisis. Yet the nation's foreign reserves have sunk to less than US$200 million, raising again major questions about government accountability. The government is not saying where up to $900m of export earnings have been spent since last July.

Time is running out for Swaziland to sell eleven ''orphaned'' elephants to zoos in the United States, even if the sale means incurring the wrath of powerful animal rights organisations. The position of the Big Game Parks of Swaziland, a private collection of three animal reserves whose unofficial but powerful patron is King Mswati III, is that too many elephants are ruining the habitats of other wildlife, including some endangered species.

Rebels holding the northern half of Ivory Coast insisted Saturday that a French-brokered power-sharing deal be followed to the letter, leaving doubts of any breakthrough in the latest efforts to end a 5-month-old civil war.

Most people are uncomfortable with the term "sexual rights." This is not surprising given the fact that the issue of sex and sexuality is a taboo subject in many parts of the world. While such discomfort often stems from religious and cultural mores that are difficult to overcome, the need to respect women's sexual rights is increasingly understood as a key to achieving women's rights. Earlier this month, close to 200 people from the region and around the world converged in Johannesburg, South Africa to attend the African Women's Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Conference from February 4 - 7.

After the three days informal WTO meeting held in Tokyo last weekend, Oxfam International has concluded that the WTO process is far off the development track. Developed countries again failed to act in the spirit of the Doha Development Agenda and to make trade fair.

In the next 24 hours, 30,000 children will die from preventable diseases on planet earth. These deaths can be stopped. Join www.TheMillionSignatureCampaign.org, a march demanding Health for All.

The thousand fold gap in spending on healthcare between the richest and poorest countries must be reduced, and this will require fairer trading conditions. “Perhaps it will feel uncomfortable at first for us rich 10%. But we'll get used to it, and indeed relish living in a world that's becoming more just, more uniformly wealthy and more secure,” writes John Sulston, founding director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Reporters sans frontières (RSF) says the detention of Ismael Mbonigaba, editor of the newspaper "Umuseso", who has been imprisoned for the past month for allegedly "inciting people to be divisive and practice discrimination" was simply an excuse for the government to crack down on independent media and the opposition.

UNICEF Ghana initiated an integrated early childhood development (IECD) pilot project in mid-2002 to reach out to deprived children and their caregivers in Konkomba market, a slum in the capital city of Accra. The project involves partnership and network building among various stakeholders including governmental agencies, NGOs, and the media. Key strategies include bringing child minders and parents together to understand the needs and rights of the children under their care. To this end, project activities include empowerment and capacity building of parents, child minders, and the community through education and support for proper child care.

The fourth edition of the "Guide to European Population Assistance" has recently been published, giving you access to funding from all major European budget lines in the field of sustainable development. The Guide is a reference work for development organisations and provides an overview of available public funding from 15 European countries and the European Community.

Africa took centre stage in Geneva last week with the planned launch of an organisation aimed at promoting the use of open source software throughout the continent. The launch was part of the World Summit on the Information Society's Prepcom 2 meeting in Geneva.

While societies enter into the information and knowledge society, and modern technologies develop and spread at rapid speed, 860 million adults are illiterate, over 100 million children have no access to school, and countless children, youth and adults who attend school or other education programmes fall short of the required level to be considered literate in today’s complex world. This is the reason why the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the United Nations Literacy Decade for the period 2003-2012, launched this month.

Despite having pretended as if the issue of last year's widespread strike organised by the Progressive Teachers Union (PTUZ) had been resolved, the government has now begun to penalise all the 625 teachers who participated in the strike by threatening them with transfers to remote and politically volatile areas, The Standard reports.

At the last count, more than 30 communal clashes, bordering on religious ethnic conflicts have been recorded throughout the country between 1999 and 2002 with each claiming hundreds of lives and properties, running into several millions of naira. Similarly, many people, including women and children had been displaced in the process, resulting in untold hardship and suffering for them. As the incidence of ethnic/religious conflicts becomes worrying, a national workshop on the methods and techniques of arms control through the promotion of a culture of peace in Nigeria was put together recently to find lasting solution to the menace.

The toll from the ebola outbreak in Congo has risen to 75 deaths among 93 cases, but is believed to be under control, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday. The figures, which exceed the number of victims in Congo and Gabon a year ago, came from an investigating team of WHO and government experts deployed in the remote northwest area.

The culture of reciting poetry has become a part of the lives of Gauteng youth. They say poetry unites people from different backgrounds. Timbila poetry sessions are held in Braamfontein at the Yard of Ale and integrate creative thoughts from the townships to other parts of Johannesburg suburbs.

The controversial South African student website "Get A Life" (www.gal.co.za) launches an online game on the 25th of February that ridicules President George W. Bush's stance on war with Iraq.

South Africa's Finance Minister Trevor Manuel on Wednesday unveiled a range of poverty relief measures in the country's budget for the next financial year which include extending the child support grant, raising pensions and providing for a food relief fund.

As they have for nearly two weeks now, desperate Liberian refugees continued to demonstrate in front of the offices of the United Nations refugee agency in Abidjan demanding to be evacuated out of Côte d'Ivoire or moved to a safer location.

No fewer than 65 women from various parts of the country are to vie for various political offices in the forthcoming elections under the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), the office of the party National Woman Leader, Mrs. Josephine Anenih has said.

At the male-dominated Sudanese peace talks around the world, tall, slim, dark-skinned Awut Deng Acuil is a prominent figure. For 20 years, she has made working for peace her life. Awarded the InterAction Humanitarian Peace Award last year, Deng has helped start the Sudanese Women Association in Nairobi and the Sudanese Women Voice for Peace, groups that work for peace and women's rights. The widow of a former vice president of Southern Sudan and mother of seven knows the pains of war intimately.

Photographer Margaret Courtney-Clarke, born and raised in Namibia, understands why people in the West picture Africa as a place of starvation, military coups and disease: These images are usually the only ones they see. Throughout her career, Courtney-Clarke has devoted herself to revealing Africa's other faces to the world. One aspect that has particularly intrigued her is women who have managed to maintain artistic traditions in the face of continuous turmoil created by ongoing social, political and economic challenges.

Media watchdogs and other human rights groups observing Africa's political landscape have this year continued past calls for an end to the harassment of a number of journalists in African countries and the release of others they say are imprisoned there.

The focus of the UN summit in Johannesburg in September 2002 was ‘people, planet and prosperity’, yet at the same time, Johannesburg is the staging post for millions of tonnes of UN food aid. About 13 million people in southern Africa face severe food shortages and famine. What are the causes of this crisis and who is responsible? The food crisis in southern Africa has many causes, which vary in magnitude from country to country. A study by Oxfam suggests that one major cause of the critical food insecurity is the failure of agricultural reforms designed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Agricultural trade is of vital importance for developing countries, accounting for a large share of GDP and being a primary source of employment, livelihoods and basic food for the majority of the population. For this reason the rules governing the trade in agriculture deserve distinctive treatment within the WTO. This paper concludes that the negotiations on agriculture should pay more attention on food security and equal opportunities for developing and developed countries.

A Nigerian government panel on Monday confirmed allegations of $197-million fraud in a state-run oil firm before it was privatised two years ago. The government last August set up the panel to investigate allegations that management of African Petroleum Limited (AP) failed to disclose the true financial status of the company before it was sold off to an indigenous oil firm, Sadiq Petroleum Nigeria Limited.

Gender at Work is a new knowledge and capacity building network focused on gender and institutional change, working with development and human rights practitioners, researchers and policy makers. Gender at Work aims to develop new theory and practice on how organisations can change gender-biased institutional rules and change the political, accountability, cultural and knowledge systems of organisations to challenge social norms and gender inequity.

Kenya's much awaited prison reforms began this week with the release of 29 death row inmates. President Mwai Kibaki, who issued the order, also commuted the sentences of another 195 death row prisoners to life imprisonment. Most of those released had already been in prison for more than 20 years, according to media reports.

The UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), known as MONUC, on Wednesday decried the prevailing military tension in the Ituri District in northeastern Orientale Province despite continued widespread efforts to restore peace to the region, most notably through the establishment of the Ituri Pacification Commission (IPC).

African Rights has written to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), in Arusha, Tanzania, urging it to address the "deterioration" in its relations with Rwandan genocide survivors, the human rights organisation reported on Monday.

An international committee is being set up to monitor a shaky ceasefire accord signed by Somali faction leaders, Kenya's special envoy for Somalia Bethwel Kiplagat said on Tuesday. He was speaking at a plenary session to relaunch the Somali peace talks at their new venue in Mbagathi, near Nairobi.

The German government will, through its technical and financial cooperation bodies, provide Tanzania with US $86.12 million worth of aid over the next three years. At least half the money would be spent on water and sanitation projects, but there would also be significant contributions towards health projects and budgetary support, Detles Mey, the Tanzania country director of the German government's aid agency, the Gersellschaft fuer Technische Zumsammenarbeit (GTZ), told IRIN.

While KwaZulu-Natal education officials have been spending hundreds of thousands of rands on sprucing up their offices, the Japanese government has donated R50-million in a year-long project to build schools in the rural areas of the province.

Connections between conflicts in Africa and its lack of development seem to speak for themselves. The 1990s saw three million African people killed while 160 million lived in countries with intra-state conflict. Intra-state conflict comprised 79 of the 82 conflicts of the last decade and 90% of casualties were civilians. Average income per capita in the continent is less than the 1960s, and it has the largest proportion of the world's poor. African wars are fought with few military resources so that appropriation of natural resources is a natural form of accumulation. Resources become used for pillage, protection money, to trade for arms, labour exploitation, land, and to claims for its mineral and water resources. Conflict is obviously anti-developmental, and an arena where the civilian poor, and women in particular, are likely to be the major casualties.

Within Africa four key structural conditions lead to violent intra-state conflict: authoritarian rule, marginalisation of ethnic minorities, socio-economic deprivation and inequality, and weak states lacking capacity to manage conflict effectively. The potential for conflict is heightened when these conditions are simultaneously present. Other problems add to that potential – lack of fit between nations and states due to the imposition of the 80,000 kilometres of colonial borders, land and environmental pressures, the small arms trade in itself linked to resource-based conflict, debt, and economic imbalance and unfair trade practices.

Within the last fifteen years the inter-relation between conflict and lack of development has been overlaid by the HIV/ AIDS pandemic. Conflict has arisen in response to stabilisation programmes where Southern regimes under pressure from Northern financial institutions and growing balance of payments constraints introduced policies abandoning social services. Policy moved from fulfilling popular demand to the removal of market barriers so that state-society relations became highly confrontational.

But conflict, including violent conflict, can also drive forward development and the fight for liberation and justice, as in South Africa. It is the reaction of social elites which determines whether such conflicts become violent. Violence may also be a liberating outlet for disaffected youth with no economic future and available for clan warlords as in Somalia or for gerontocratic leaders hanging on to power in Zimbabwe. Equally, 'development' can provoke conflict over resources and/ if its benefits are inequitably distributed (arguably a contributory factor in the Rwanda genocide). Emergency aid in 1980s Somalia for the victims of war and drought subsidised clan warfare. Terrorism is not strongly linked to poverty, but more to frustration, alienation and humiliation by, for example, colonization or marginalisation. Peace (or 'negative peace' in Johan Galtung's words) may hide major fault lines and human rights abuses, as is currently happening in Zimbabwe. Often gender discrimination is the most hidden, which poses problems for those who want a quick fix in peace-making and development.

At the moment we see a number of paradoxes when analysing the link between conflict and development. Indeed, historically, those working in peace/conflict resolution and those in development (for cynics neither of them spectacularly successful) long occupied different spheres (first and second generation human rights). Rethinking started in the mid-90s after post Berlin Wall hopes of a new international order were dashed by Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Angola. Conflicts subsumed under Cold War ideologies have now become more properly understood. The conflict and development disciplines are edging closer to each other nervously bringing 'identity', 'democracy' and 'good governance' with them. Increasingly, both spheres are aware that globalisation in making the world safe for investment is simultaneously widening inequalities and provoking insecurity as it reaches into less opened up regions. In response, there have been the beginnings of a reordering of international human rights work marked by: new international institutions like the International Criminal Court and various tribunals, qualifying absolute state sovereignty in the interests of a people's right to protection ('responsible state sovereignty'), tying basic human needs (including the right to enjoy a self-ascribed identity) into conflict avoidance or management (human security) and a critical examination of humanitarian intervention and the role of the United Nations (including the Brahimi Report).

In development the technical fixes of the 1960s moved into the basic needs approach of the 1970s to the rights-based approaches we currently see. To say this in a different way, people have begun to assert their right to be the subject rather than the object of development – the poor as claimers of their rights rather than passive recipients. Conflict mediation has ceased to be merely the preserve of nations and the rich and powerful. Recognition of needing to understand and address the roots of conflict has seen the emergence of alternative or Track Two diplomacy/mediation on a people-people basis.

On the other side, mantras like sustainable or rights-based development, and governance, become neutralised and depoliticised by the multilateral agencies and international financial institutions vaunting the magic and inevitability of the impersonal hand of the market. Good governance is a long way from 'democratic governance' where non-market development could be a preferred option.

At the present time we see a preponderance of ethnic conflict plus the resurgence of religious-focused conflict with overtones of medieval Europe and Asia meeting. In fact these conflicts can be posed as being over identity in which human needs are not being met, meaning that we have to see peace and development within the new thinking around human security. Traditionally, security has been viewed as firmly rooted in the nation state, itself the source of 'identity'. It has operated through agreements between different militaries and political elites: a strongly male arena. But what happens to traditional security - and identity - when weaker nation states are less able to control their own policy as power shifts to global social formations, and markets are dominated by (Northern) transnational corporations, multilateral financial and trading institutions? Building development on more strongly felt 'ethnic' identities and diversities may be one way forward in overcoming conflict and promoting development. There is a natural link here with human security - of people not just territory, individuals not just nations, through development not arms.

Finally if we are talking genuine North-South partnership to deal with conflict and lack of development, partners have the right to demand of British-based NGOs what they are doing in relation to their own government's rush to war. It is important therefore that we and they understand what is happening, as we have attempted to do in a joint Catholic Institute for International Relations(CIIR) and Conflict, Development and Peace network (CODEP) seminar in October 2002. In disputing he was 'Bush's poodle' Tony Blair said ironically 'it's much worse than that, I would do it anyway', i.e. be prepared to engage in war with Iraq. This re-running of Gladstonian moral foreign policy is more worrying as we are being invited to be a junior global policeman on shaky international legal justification in an open-ended war without frontiers against terrorism. The challenge is for principled opposition to war against Iraq to respond in an analytical and measured way to the question 'what would you do against terrorism?' 'Attack global poverty, Western hypocrisy, and dismantle unfair global economic architecture' is a necessary but not sufficient answer. Obviously the Al-Quaeda - Iraq link demands a great deal more proof beyond the fact they both share the letter Q. The British government's linkage with the USA is based on a fallacy. London's case rests on attacking both poverty and terrorism in an attempt to link attributed cause and effect. All evidence from Washington over such disparate but developmental and conflict-related matters as Kyoto, Israel, International Criminal Court, and increased subsidies for farmers show a unilateralist approach based on dominance and firepower without regard to either cause or effect. The questions posed at a recent CIIR/ CODEP seminar - how do we use global resources equitably, how do we control weapons of mass destruction and how we deal with the imbalance between the powerful and the rest of the world still remain the key questions in the relation between violent conflict and development.

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Renowned South African actor comedian and talk show host Desmond Dube’s comment on his comedy show, Dube on Monday, unleashed a storm of furry from South African Tsonga people. This happened three weeks ago when Dube likened Shangaan people to baboons. A voice over apology was aired at the end of the show after a flood of calls from concerned citizens to the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) condemning Dube’s annotations.

Job Sikhala, 30, a tall, energetic leader of Zimbabwe’s opposition Movement for Democratic Change, chain smokes as he tells his story: Although he sits in Parliament, he has been arrested 17 times in the last three years. The last time police took him, blindfolded, to a basement room outside Harare. During the next eight hours they beat him, applied electrodes to his mouth and genitals, urinated on him and forced him to swallow poison. Two days later they released him on bail, charged with sedition - an accusation quickly thrown out in court. During hospitalization, doctors confirmed evidence of torture. "It was a terrible experience, gruesome and horrendous,” he says. “This regime has lost control of its senses. It should not be recognized by anyone.”

Justice Paddington Garwe has ordered the chief witness in the high treason trial of three top MDC officials to provide the defence lawyers with certain documents they say would help exonerate their clients. Ben-Menashe, who was last Friday granted leave to return to his Canada base, will be notified of the ruling by the Attorney-General's Office.