Pambazuka News 413: Zimbabwe on the edge of the precipice

Members of the Somali parliament allied to Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president, have said that they are in hiding after they received death threats. The group said on Thursday that they were in Baidoa, in south-central Somalia, after militia men and soldiers entered parliament.

UNHCR is seeking $92 million to ease the plight of nearly 250,000 Somalis in one of the world's oldest, largest and most congested refugee sites amid growing fears of even more arrivals as the situation in Somalia deteriorates. The emergency assistance to Somali refugees in Dadaab, Kenya, focuses on relieving dramatic overcrowding in three adjacent camps that are now three times their initial capacity, with thousands more people continuing to arrive each month.

Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe announced on Friday he had invited rival Morgan Tsvangirai to be sworn-in as prime minister in a shared government, but expressed doubt whether he would accept. Opposition leader Tsvangirai, meanwhile, threatened to ask for a suspension of power-sharing talks if the government did not stop what he called the persecution of political opponents.

Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) has emerged as a pre-eminent tool for states emerging from intra-state conflict. Much research on the subject has focused on the specifics of ‘DDR design’ and its applicability as part of wider ‘political’ processes - the authors of this paper claim there is little recognition of their potential value as implementers of the process. Surely NGOs, as representatives of civil society, are ideally placed to play a vital role in post-conflict soc...read more

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