Friday, April 29, 2011
Visit to troops in Mogadishu
The president took the salute from government soldiers stationed at the [former] defence ministry building, which government and AMISOM troops recently seized from Al-Shababa. Speaking to the media at the defense ministry building, President Sharif said that the Somali armed forces had achieved a significant victory for the Somali people. He urges the public to stand with the interim Somali government. The president said Al-Shabab's military strength had diminished, and the army was committed to bringing the war Al-Shabab to an end soon.Thursday, April 28, 2011
Clean and Green in Rwanda
Rwanda Post week 4
U.S. Lawyer Is Barred From Rwanda Tribunal Work
By JOSH KRON
Published: April 27, 2011
KAMPALA, Uganda — An American lawyer who was arrested last year in Rwanda has been barred by the United Nations from working at an international tribunal for Rwanda after refusing to appear in court.
Judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda removed Peter Erlinder, a law professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota, as the defense counsel for a major Rwandan genocide suspect, the tribunal said Wednesday, because Mr. Erlinder had failed to travel to the court, which is based in Tanzania.
Mr. Erlinder said he did not appear because he feared his life would be in danger from the Rwandan government even in Tanzania, nearly 500 miles away.. He was removed from the tribunal last week, with a spokesman for the court calling Mr. Erlinder’s claims an “excuse” and his conduct “unprofessional.”
“He is no longer a counselor in the tribunal here,” said the spokesman, Roland Amoussouga. “He has no standing.”
Mr. Erlinder was arrested last May in Rwanda on charges of denying the country’s 1994 genocide, in which 1 million people were killed, after traveling there to defend an opposition politician.
He was held for three weeks, during which he said he suffered a variety of illnesses and was taken to the hospital four times.
Since he left, Mr. Erlinder has gone on a speaking tour promoting a new collection of evidence on the 1994 genocide. He says that he is a target of the Rwandan government and has even received threats while on tour in the United States.
“I would not be at my best in Arusha,” he said on Wednesday, referring to the Tanzanian city where the tribunal is based.
The United Nations showed support for Mr. Erlinder during his arrest in Rwanda, urging his release, but the tribunal said Wednesday that Mr. Erlinder’s security fears were unwarranted.
“Counsel’s conduct amounts to a failure to act diligently and in good faith and does not demonstrate the highest standards of professional conduct,” judges at the tribunal said in the ruling.
While Mr. Erlinder tried to take part in a trial by video-conference, judges insisted he be physically present in court, the tribunal said, and warned him twice that failure to show could result in sanctions.
“The appeals chamber did not buy any of the argument that he gave,” said the tribunal spokesman, Mr. Amoussouga.
Peter Robinson, a defense lawyer at the tribunal until last year, said he did not share Mr. Erlinder’s fears.
“I never feared for my safety in Arusha,” Mr. Robinson said.
But Chief Charles A. Taku, another lawyer at the tribunal, said he had been the subject of "verbal attacks" from Rwandan authorities.
Defense lawyers at the tribunal protested Mr. Erlinder’s arrest last year, saying that he was being prosecuted specifically for his work in trial at the court, which focused on the downing of a presidential jet in April 1994. Mr. Erlinder has said the evidence he presented in court suggests that members of the current, Tutsi-led Rwandan government — not Hutu extremists — shot down the plane, challenging the conventional narrative of the event that helped set off the genocide.Monday, April 25, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Liberia: Defectors Jailed in Maryland
An Ivorian refugee gets a lift on a motorbike taxi to Zwedru,southeastern Liberia. Defectors Jailed in Maryland
6 April 2011
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Some 85 Ivorian fighters who defected in Maryland County have been taken to prison due to lack of facilities to host them in the County.
Immigration and security officers at border crossing points where the men gave themselves up, along with vehicles and light weapons, said they expect more fighters to seek safety in Liberia as fighting rages in
http://allafrica.com/stories/Glenna%20Gordon/UNHCR
An Ivorian refugee gets a lift on a motorbike taxi to Zwedru,southeastern Liberia.
their country. Officers told this paper that they have stopped receiving new arrivals for now because they have no infrastructure or resources to address their needs
Liberia: Corruption 'Exacerbated'
The State Department 2010 Human Rights Report on Liberia has repeated findings in the 2009 Report, saying 'corruption is widespread and systematic in the Government.
Reacting to the State Department's 2009 Report, the government disagreed, with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf announcing that she would send a protest letter to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton.
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But in its just released 2010 Report, the State Department noted: "The law does not provide criminal penalties for corruption, which remained systemic throughout the government, although criminal penalties do exist for economic sabotage, mismanagement of funds and other corruption-related acts."
It added: "Official corruption and the sense of a culture of impunity were exacerbated by low pay levels for the civil service, lack of job training, and a lack of court convictions. The government dismissed officials for alleged corruption and recommended others for prosecution.
The Liberian Anti-Corruption Commission (LACC) and the Ministry of Justice are responsible for exposing and combating official corruption. The LACC is empowered to prosecute any case that the Ministry of Justice declines to prosecute; however, the Ministry had not declined to prosecute any such cases during the year.
President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
"The LACC, which had a minimal budget and insufficient staff, investigated eight cases and recommended four for prosecution. Included in the recommendations were former Inspector General of Police Beatrice Munah Sieh for irregularities in the appropriation of uniforms and two Ministry of Finance officials for their alleged roles in misappropriating civil service salary checks. The LACC reported 21 additional corruption cases were pending investigation by year's end.
"Former Liberia Telecommunications Authority chair Albert Bropleh was acquitted on a technicality for alleged misuse of $71,022; however, the case was under review by the Supreme Court at year's end.
Liberia: Graft Remains Despite Efforts to Fight It
NEWS — Liberia: Steps to Improve Transparency Noted
NEWS — Liberia: Simeon Freeman Vows to March Against Corruption
"Judges were susceptible to bribes from damages that they awarded in civil cases. Judges sometimes requested bribes to try cases, release detainees from prison, or find defendants not guilty in criminal cases. Defense attorneys and prosecutors sometimes suggested that defendants pay a gratuity to appease judges, prosecutors, jurors, and police officers or to secure favorable rulings from them. Jurors were also susceptible to bribes, and the Ministry of Justice increased its calls to reform the jury system.
"Despite her strong emphasis on decentralization, President Sirleaf froze County Development Funds pending ongoing audits due to evidence of frequent misuse; such funding was intended to support local projects to reduce poverty. The move to recentralize administration of local development projects was widely seen as a result of inadequate local management, which often funneled development funds to support political interests of legislators rather than to reduce poverty."
The Beginning of the Downfall...
Somalia Drought Causing Children to Suffer
Children in Somalia are suffering some of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, says the United Nations as drought continues to affect the country.Friday, April 22, 2011
Zimbabwe: Threat of Waterborne Disease From Unsafe Water
Jennifer Madongonda, 43, shares a seven-roomed house with three other families in the low-income suburb of Budiriro, about 15km southwest of the capital of Zimbabwe, Harare. Seven months ago the municipality cut off water supply because they couldn't pay the bill.
Water supplies to this suburb are very erratic. People get running water at most four times a week for short periods of time.
People used to rely on the boreholes that were set up in 2008 but most of them have broke down and no one has come to repair them. Neighbors don't want to share water because they fear the huge bills also.
Budiriro was regarded as the epicenter of the cholera epidemic that began in August 2008 and lasted for a year. The waterborne disease killed more than 4,000 people and infected nearly 100,000 others, and all water sources wre found to be contaminated.
Many neighborhoods dug shoallow wells aftyer the collapse of water and sanitation infrastructure in Zimbabwe's economic implosion, creating ideal conditions for the proliferation of cholera.
To combat cholera, donor organizations, including the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), drilled scores of boreholes, but many have since fallen into disrepair and at night it is not uncommon to see long queues at the few remaining working boreholes as residents jostle to get water for the next day.
The people cook at all sorts of times - sometimes at midnight or early morning - when they mabnage to get water. They can hardly spare any water to wash clothes because they don't have containers big enough to store it.
There is a stream about 5km away from town that is used for laundry and bathing. Many of the women complain of skin problems abd it is suspected that the water is poluted with sewage and dangerous chemicals dumped in the stream by factories. It seems it will not be long before there is abother cholera outbreak.
UNICEF drilled the boreholes in response to the cholera outbreak of 2008 and handed them over to be maintained by Harare City (municipality). UNICEF trained the staff in the operation and maintenance of these boreholels. UNICEF has recently provided spares and tool kits for the boreholes to the municipality.
In 2010 UNICEF drilled 43 additional boreholes in Harare and is assisting in the rehabilitiation of the capital's main source of water. But the municipality does not have enough money to buy spares.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201104150818.html
Zimbabwe: Pilots Vow to Continue Strike
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Meeting and Dedication Projects
President Sirleaf, in Southeast and Central Liberia, Meets Refugees and Dedicates Projects
Monday, 18th April 2011
President Sirleaf in a meeting with Ivorian regugees in Zwedru, Grand Gedeh county. Photo Credit: Adama B. Thompson/Executive Mansion
Zwedru, Grand Gedeh County - President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf over the weekend visited several districts in Grand Gedeh County that are host to thousands of refugees who fled the political crisis in neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. Accompanied by officials of Liberian and international relief agencies, the President made stops at a Liberia Refugee Repatriation and Resettlement Commission (LRRRC) Compound in Zwedru, home to refugees who have settled there since 2002.
An Executive Mansion dispatch says the President also visited refugee transit centers in the towns of Zai, Zleh and Toe, a major transit point for refugees fleeing the recent unrest in Côte d’Ivoire. Toe Town is hosting the highest number of refugees in Grand Gedeh, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Interacting with refugees at the transit centers, President Sirleaf expressed regret over the situation which forced them to seek refuge in Liberia. She hoped for a speedy return to normalcy, to enable the Ivoirians to return home.
The Liberian leader assured the refugees, mostly women and children, of government’s protection during their stay in the country. She informed them that the government is working with local and international humanitarian agencies to provide more suitable resettlement centers for them, as well as educational facilities for the children, and appealed for understanding and patience while these efforts are being exerted.The President said the government will provide tools and seeds for the refugees to engage in farming activities, adding: “That is the only way you can sustain yourselves and achieve self-dependency.” The Liberian leader presented the refugees with relief and other basic items, including clothing, a gesture they described as loving and unprecedented.
They lauded the President for the visit and the concern she has demonstrated for their well-being, and hoped that UNHCR will move swiftly in responding to their needs. They complained of inadequate food, accommodation, health and nutritional supplies. More than 22,000 Ivoirians have fled to Grand Gedeh since the political crisis erupted in their country, and the county has hosted nearly 2,500 refugees since 2002.Meanwhile, the President is now in Bong County, dedicating and inspecting development projects in the area. After an overnight stay in Ganta, Nimba County, the President arrived in Gbarnga Saturday afternoon to a rousing welcome by Bong County residents. Following arrival ceremonies, President Sirleaf inspected the future sites of a police barracks and the Gboveh Community College, where construction has commenced. She traveled to Jorquelleh and Kokoyay Districts Sunday and dedicated projects that included two clinics and a public school. More activities continue Monday in Sanoyea Town and Fuamah District, where the President will dedicate the Kelebah clinic and later hold a Town Hall meeting in the area.
Girls in the Spotlight: A Lesson from Rwanda
Girls in the Spotlight: A Lesson from Rwanda
By JOSH RUXIN
Mike McCausland/Rwanda Girls Initiative School girls at the Gashora Girls Academy, which opened in March, 2011.When I try to get people interested in the education cause in Rwanda, they often tell me that they’re up to their eyeballs in work on public or charter schools in their own neighborhoods – Upper West Side, Noe Valley, wherever. Some people, though, have a broad definition of “neighborhood.”
A couple of years back, two women from Seattle approached me about the possibility of establishing a girls’ school here in Rwanda. I’ve grown accustomed to receiving countless entrepreneurial inquiries from well-meaning people and seeing little come of them, so I must admit that my first reaction was skepticism.
Luckily, Soozi McGill and Shal Foster defied my initial doubts and have followed through on their plans with aplomb. While training together for a marathon in the United States, the two long-time friends found themselves discussing the high-quality education that their own children were receiving. From there, they started to form a vision to help children who had not been born so lucky.
By the time Soozi and Shal began dreaming about a school for girls in Rwanda, they were all too familiar with the statistics that should drive more people to take action: universal secondary education for girls in sub-Saharan Africa could save the lives of as many as 1.8 million children under five annually. One year of female schooling reduces fertility by 10 percent, and each additional year of schooling per 1,000 women helps prevent two maternal deaths.
In Rwanda, however, less than 13 percent of girls attend secondary school. Tired of simply reading the statistics from halfway around the world, Soozi and Shal decided to do something about them – and so began the Rwanda Girls Initiative (RGI).
For three years, Soozi and Shalhave collaborated with a dynamic group of education, business and civic leaders to create a new school in the dusty rural area of Gashora, on a 26-acre swath of land overlooking Lake Milayi. This month, the Gashora Girls Academy opened its doors to its first class of 90 boarding students.
The campus bustles with girls from all over the country, many of whom enjoy scholarships from individual and corporate sponsors from both inside and outside of Rwanda. Each girl pulls a mosquito net over her bunk bed at night, walks just a few minutes to each class in the morning, and benefits from the guidance of teachers and dorm parents who live and work with her day in and day out.
The Gashora Girls Academy has unique support on local and global levels. The Rwandan government – which has committed 17 percent of its total budget to education – offered funding to purchase some of the land for the academy and pay teachers’ salaries. Architectural experts from around the world designed the open-air classrooms, which stand in stark contrast to so many other Rwandan classrooms with slatted windows and stuffy interiors. A sparkling white rock pathway leads down the hill to a demonstration farm, which will enable the school to grow much of its own food while also introducing best agricultural practices to local farmers. At the center of the school’s grounds is a vast community center – complete with a computer kiosk – that will be shared with local residents and used for town meetings and school functions.
Mike McCausland/Rwanda Girls Initiative The Gashora Girls Academy, which opened in March, 2011, in Rwanda.The Gashora Girls Academy is a college preparatory school with a mission: each student should graduate with a sense of economic empowerment and a renewed commitment to her community. The academy will focus on science and technology, with an eye for equipping its girls with the knowledge and skills they need to participate in this vital growing sector of Rwanda’s economy. While so many young people around the world – especially girls – are denied the very basic right to education, the Gashora Girls Academy is a model for what it means to invest in a better future.
An idea that began as a pipe dream in Seattle has become a major investment in the young people of a nation brimming with promise.
Josh Ruxin is the founder and director of Rwanda Works and a Columbia University expert on public health. He is also the director of the Access Project and Access’s Neglected Tropical Disease Control Program. Dr. Ruxin has extensive experience operating at the intersection of public health, business and international development. He lives in Kigali, Rwanda, with his wife and two daughters.
Rugby Player Tackles Social Needs in Zimbabwe
Ethiopian support of Eritrean Rebels
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Treaties and Trade
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Iraqi Youths' Political Rise Is Stunted by Elites
Iraqi Youths’ Political Rise Is Stunted by Elites
By TIM ARANGO
Published: April 13, 2011
BAGHDAD — Inspired by the democratic uprisings around the Arab world to push for change, young lawmakers in Parliament are running up against an ossified political elite still dominated by the exiles who followed American tanks into Iraq to establish a fragile, violence-scarred democracy.
Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
Ali al-Jaff, 23, protested in Baghdad. Iraq's demographics skew even younger than in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
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Ayman Oghanna for The New York Times
Hussein al-Najar is a member of a group of young Iraqis that used Facebook to organize protests. Nearly 40 percent of Iraq's population is 14 or under.
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On the streets, the voices of young demonstrators and journalists have been muted by the batons and bullets of elite security units that answer only to a prime minister who officials say personally sends orders by text message.
An Iraq spring it is not.
In a country where the demographics skew even younger than in places like Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, the wave of political change in the region has laid bare a generation gap here split by old resentments nurtured by dictatorship and war and a youthful grasping for a stake in the new Iraq. “The younger generation is ready to go forward; they are carrying less resentments,” said Rawaz M. Khoshnaw, 32, a Kurdish member of Parliament, in a recent interview.
But the forces of youth are blunted by the same forces that have robbed Iraqi society of so much for so long — violence, a stagnant economy, zero-sum politics and sectarianism — and that have prevented a new political class from emerging to take Iraq into a new democratic future.
A common sentiment from nearly three dozen interviews with young Iraqis around the country recently is a persistent disenchantment with both their political leaders and the way democracy has played out here. “The youth is the excluded class in the Iraqi community,” said Swash Ahmed, a 19-year-old law student in Kirkuk. “So they’ve started to unify through Facebook or the Internet or through demonstrations and evenings in cafes, symposiums and in universities. But they don’t have power.”
Iraq’s unity government is showing increased signs of splintering over an American-backed power-sharing agreement. If the government fractures and a narrow majority of Shiite parties led by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a former exile, takes control, the result would be more divisiveness and potentially more violence.
For the young, it would be another sign of the difficulty in gaining a voice in Iraq’s democracy, and a counternarrative to the grand new history being written elsewhere in the Middle East.
In Basra, Salah Mahmod, 18, said politicians here were “in love with power.”
“We don’t have democracy, and the politicians have no idea what it means.”
But it is a measure of progress that these students can speak out freely and join in street protests. One small result is that bars reopened in Baghdad after being closed in January. “I do not want to be so negative about it,” said Shereen Ahmed, 19, who is studying to be a teacher in Anbar Province. “Yes, we are witnessing a small part of democracy now from what we see from the protests in Iraq. When Saddam was here, not even one Iraqi could go out in protest because he would be killed.”
Talal al-Zubai, 41, a lawmaker from the Iraqiya bloc — the coalition led by Ayad Allawi, who was handpicked by the Americans to be prime minister in 2005 and was once attacked in exile by ax-wielding assassins sent by Saddam Hussein — decided to form a youth bloc of Parliament members after witnessing the protests in the region and here.
He said that six had joined, and that 20 others had privately told him of their interest but were fearful of going public because “right now they are afraid of their leaders.”
Mr. Zubai, a Sunni politician who recounts with pride the number of assassination attempts he has survived — three: by car bomb, roadside bomb and pistol — has no such fear, and he spoke openly about his disdain for the political elite during an interview in the foyer of Iraqiya’s office in Parliament.
“The problem is, those leaders have more power than we do,” said Mr. Zubai, who is working on his graduate studies at a college in Baghdad. “They have more money to use in elections. They have more power to use the army and police to consolidate power.”
In Iraq, the demographic trends that have underpinned the wave of democratic uprisings and altered the dynamics of power across the Middle East are more pronounced than in other countries. The median age in the country is 21, according to the C.I.A. World Factbook. In Egypt it is 24, and in Tunisia it is 30. Nearly 40 percent of the population here is 14 or under, compared with 33 percent in Egypt and Libya and 23 percent in Tunisia. The comparisons are similar for Bahrain and Syria.
Recently, a group of young Iraqis who used Facebook to organize protests in February to demand improved services gathered in Baghdad near a church where more than 60 Christians were killed late last year. The organizers spoke of being detained and beaten by security forces after the protests, of being called homosexuals and Baathists.
Ali Abdul Zahra, a journalist, told of seeing his friend beaten as the officer asked, “Are you the Facebook guy?” The officer continued, according to Mr. Zahra: “You want freedom, huh? I’ll show you freedom.”
Here, violence and politics are still intertwined — eight years after the American invasion, six years after ratifying a Constitution, and after several national and local elections, all ratified by international groups as free and fair. A brutal attack recently on the seat of local government in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s hometown, left nearly 60 people dead, including three members of the provincial council.
That stubborn insurgency creates a space for leaders like Mr. Maliki to centralize power, especially over the security forces, critics say. For example, Mr. Allawi said in an interview that as part of the power-sharing agreement to form the government last year, it was “agreed that the units which are attached to the prime minister should be disengaged.” That has not happened.
“There is no power sharing,” he said. “There is no democracy.”
Mr. Khoshnaw, the Kurdish lawmaker, explained the gap between the generations of leaders this way: The older generation that suffered under Mr. Hussein and struggled against him in exile is “defined by the resentments inside themselves.”
“They have a hard time letting go,” he said.
“People are fed up by the faces they have seen on television for the last eight years.”
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Zimbabwe's Economic Challenge
