This study from the Berghof Research Center for Constructive Conflict Management examines youth in war-to-peace transitions and the response of international organisations to them. It specifically asks what approaches have international organisations developed regarding youth? On which assumptions about youth and their role in violent conflicts are they based? How do the different approaches affect programme development and are they are compatible?

The Coalition to Stop the use of Child Soldiers has now launched its psycho-social web page. It can be found on www.child-soldiers.org. The purpose of the web page is to promote a constructive inter and intra-disciplinary dialogue on relevant psycho-social issues in the area of children and armed conflict. We have invited leading experts in the field to contribute to the page by writing a series of articles offering up to date perspectives on a number of relevant 'themes'. The web page is launched with an article by Dr. Elizabeth Jareg reflecting on lessons learned during her twenty years of working with children affected by armed conflict whilst a programme advisor to Save the Children, Norway. Any comments on the articles on the page, or any suggestions for further articles can be sent to [email protected]

Thousands of young men and boys, many of whom have committed atrocities while fighting in West Africa's brutal civil wars, face re-recruitment into the region’s emerging conflicts, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released this week. International efforts to disarm these fighters must provide them with alternatives to war. Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea, two countries marked by growing political instability, are the current theaters into which these young fighters are being drawn, according to Human Rights Watch.

Like millions of working mothers around the world, Ruth Ojiambo Ochieng never has enough time. She constantly struggles to balance the demands of family and her job. But 49 year old Ruth also has a mission: to involve women in bringing peace to African countries. And she is doing this in Uganda — a country that has been plagued by violent conflict for much of its history since gaining independence from the British in the 1960s.

The Security Council’s referral of the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC) has been hailed as a giant step in the history of international humanitarian law. It has also been criticised for applying double standards by exempting the United States from the ICC’s jurisdiction, reports the International Justice Tribune, an newsletter on international criminal justice. "Washington had little choice but to vote [by abstention] for the referral as it was one of the first countries to label the violence in Darfur ‘genocide’. Had the US taken a principled stance against ICC jurisdiction over Sudan, it might have found itself branded an accomplice to genocide. In the end, America turned this delicate situation to its advantage."

The peace process aimed at ending the eighteen-year old conflict in Northern Uganda is in critical condition because neither the Ugandan government nor the insurgent Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) appears fully committed to a negotiated solution, says the International Crisis Group in its latest briefing. "After the LRA increased its atrocities against civilians in February 2005 and ignored a request to demonstrate its good will, the government decided not to extend its unilateral, limited ceasefire and re-focused on a military solution. The mediator, former Ugandan State Minister Betty Bigombe, needs to obtain a new, more comprehensive government proposal and then test the rebels' willingness for peace by travelling to southern Sudan to put it directly to their leader, Joseph Kony, if the chance to end an extraordinarily brutal conflict is not to be lost. Neither is likely to happen without more international engagement."

Convening to put financial backbone in an accord ending two decades of war in southern Sudan, yet meeting under the shadow of ongoing conflict in the country’s western Darfur region, an international donors’ conference opened with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan appealing for $2.6 billion to fan the flames of peace. “If ever there was a time for donors to get off the fence, it is surely today,” he told the gathering in Oslo, Norway, summoned to fund rehabilitation, with a massive shortfall already evident, after a peace agreement in January ended a civil war that killed 2 million people and drove more than 4.5 million other southerners from their homes.

The International Court of Justice at The Hague has begun hearing a complaint filed by the Democratic Republic of Congo against Uganda. The DRC accuses its neighbour of invading its territory, committing human rights violations and massacring Congolese civilians. It is also demanding reparations for destruction and looting allegedly carried out by Ugandan troops. Uganda denies the claims and accuses the DRC of acts of aggression.

Zimbabwe is not the only country in Africa where the issue of land is of crucial importance. Across Africa, conflicts over land have been at the heart of centuries-old political struggles. In Kenya, resistance against colonial rule was crystallised through struggles over land, writes Odenda Lumumba. The Giriama, the Maasai, the Kikuyu, the Nandi and the Luhya and Pokot reacted violently to colonial land dispossessions and the struggle over land continues to this day.

The manner in which individuals or groups in Kenya hold, use, occupy, possess or have access to land since colonial rule to the present is a history of how land lies at the heart of many potential and violent conflicts. This assertion is based on the fact that the word conflict as used in this paper is very fluid: referring to debate, contest, disagreement, argument, dispute or quarrel; a struggle, battle or confrontation; a state of unrest, turmoil or chaos over land. Going by this definition I submit that land related conflicts in Kenya are a common, everyday occurrence. Indeed, land-related conflicts in Kenya stem from colonialism, which not only imposed alien land tenure relations in Kenya, but also introduced conceptual, legal and sociological confusion in the traditional tenure systems then prevailing in traditional Kenyan society before the advent of colonialism.

The colonial regime in Kenya proceeded from a land-related conflict assumption that customary land tenure systems were inimical to modern imperatives of agricultural development or indeed to the then colonial settler economy. Henceforth, colonialism embarked on three events i.e. expropriation of land through a process of alienating large tracts of land and dispossessing indigenous people of their land, imposition of English common property law and transformation of customary land law and tenure. These three processes are the beginning of the land-related conflicts that Kenya has experienced to date.

Precisely, the land-related conflicts became prominent when Kenyans of African origin were crammed into native reserves from 1926 and were exacerbated when the process of individualization of tenure in the reserves in the mid-1950s started with a deliberate aim to completely transform African communal tenure relations into individualized land holdings. When the colonial regime realized that individualization alone could not solve the land-related conflicts, it enacted the Registered Lands Act, whose purpose was to provide the legal framework for the extinction of claims to individualized land based on African customary land law. The land-related conflicts in Kenya continue to be pronounced because both the economic and legal frameworks upon which the relegation or intended extinction of customary land rights was based have failed the test of time. Land relations in many parts of the country are still actualized on the basis of customary law, even where such land is registered under Registered Land Act. Communal tenure systems are still very much part and parcel of the social and economic fabric between and within ethnic societies in Kenya.

Thus, the land-related conflicts are prevalent due to the fact that the instrumentality of English/Common law has failed to socially engineer an irreversible movement from communal tenure to individual tenure. Neither has the jurisprudence developed by the courts of law succeeded in extinguishing customary land rights. The bottom line, therefore, is that land-related conflicts in Kenya are a persistent issue that must be comprehensively addressed by the ongoing National Land Policy Formulation Process. For there are many problematic aspects to it that require clear discussion from a policy point of view. The land policy will, however need to address practical aspects of the nature and effects of land-related conflicts as opposed to purely theoretical or academic perspectives.

The land policy shall have to clarify the many legal questions that have gone begging in this regard. And in so doing the wide structural inequities between the 'land-haves' and the 'land-have-nots' as a major cause of land-related conflicts shall have to be addressed. This aspect is paramount as long as agriculture remains Kenya's economic mainstay. Especially remembering that, of the total land area of 587,900 square kilometres that comprise Kenya's landmass, 17.2 per cent is of high and medium potential while the remaining over 80 per cent is arid and semi-arid.

Land and conflict: actors and processes involved

The land developments discussed above were to have far-reaching implications for the African natives in Kenya. Land being at the centre of Africans' survival and a major force of production to white colonial settler economy, it sparked off sharp social, economic and political inequalities, which in turn led to numerous land-related conflicts, of which the Mau Mau independence struggle was the main one.

Many Kenyan communities starting with the Giriama at the Coast, the Maasai in the sprawling savanna land of Kenya, the Kikuyu in the Central highlands, the Nandi in the Nandi escarpment and the Luhya and Pokot in the western highlands reacted violently to the colonial land dispossessions. Underlying alienation of land was a policy of exploitation and oppression against the colonized communities who were 'herded' in reserves to create room for intensification of agriculture by the settlers using forced native labour. These policies generated land-related conflicts that have an indelible mark on the future of Kenya.

The result of 'herding' African communities in the reserves was massive landlessness, especially in those parts of the country that were in settler agricultural and other allied economic activities. Landlessness, quite understandably, led to poverty, discontent and eventually open land-related conflict. That is how organized political dissent by Africans against whites and white rule started to loom. The essence of this dissension was the deterioration of life due to mounting land pressure, overstocking and soil degradation in the reserves, which spurred the whole country into the liberation struggle (the land and freedom struggle).

At independence, the government was faced with the land-related conflict of how to settle the landless and displaced people. Obviously, people wanted the land for which they fought; yet the government was faced with the need to sustain the economic development then, which was a predominantly settler economy. The conflict situation was exacerbated by the fact that the government did not abrogate the colonial legacy but instead retained policies and laws inherited from the colonial regime with regard to land ownership and use. The land settlement schemes further generated land related conflicts in Kenya because most communities did not get back their land, given that in granting independence, the British government made sure that the rights and interests of the settlers who opted to stay in Kenya were safeguarded.

Secondly, even the lands that were availed for redistribution to the landless Africans were at the market place under the policy of "willing buyer, willing seller." This arrangement only aggravated land-related conflicts because those communities who lost their land under the then communal/customary tenure further witnessed their customary land at independence being individualized to those who could afford it at the market place. This was a further entrenchment of land-related conflicts which forty years after independence still manifest in the form of land clashes of 1990s and the current simmering land-related conflicts in form of historical land claims throughout the country.

Resettling the landless through settlement schemes or process has further generated land-related conflicts because since the 1970s the government reverted to a system of Settlement Fund Trustees, which due to corruption and mismanagement has generated further conflicts in settlement schemes where the squatter problem has been used to settle the politically correct individuals leaving squatters conflicting over the very lands that was meant for their settlement. Since the settlement schemes were not sufficiently addressing the landless problem the government encouraged purchase of land through the land-buying companies and farming cooperatives by the landless pooling resources together. The land-buying companies and farming cooperatives have increasingly contributed to land-related conflicts because they have been badly abused by politicians as a means of swindling land-hungry peasants. This process was supposed to facilitate the subdivision of the purchased land among the members in accordance with their respective shares. But more often than not the contributors towards the intended purchase have been cheated out of their money, hence massive land-related conflicts. The government intervention to cause subdivision of land among members and the issuance of title deeds has dragged on, leading to further land conflicts.

The land-related conflicts have involved all manner of actors at different times, at around independence and immediately after independence in the 1960s the land issues activated the ethno-regional conflicts that saw the polarization of politics between Kenya African National Union (KANU) and Kenya African Democratic Union (KADU) and later Kenya Peoples Union (KPU). These land-related conflicts reemerged in the early 1990s as Kenyans pushed for multi-partyism and continue to simmer during the constitutional debate. Indeed land-related conflicts and the stalemate over concluding the constitutional review process is a conspicuous feature of the country's failure to address the land question, which lingers on in the executive and devolution provisions in the new draft constitution.

The other important link to land-related conflicts is the mortgage institution and how it relates to rights of access to land. In Kenya individualization of land was and is meant to enable the registered proprietor to offer his title to a financial institution in return for credit. Thus, lenders stretching from banks, finance houses, and building societies have been forced into land-related conflicts with defaulters in the effort of realizing their security upon default. The rural people are engaged in protracted land related conflicts with financial institutions resisting being disinherited because they argue that the policy of the mortgage institutions was ill-conceived from the very outset in that the peasants whose land was offered as security did not have any entrepreneurial skills or experience in credit management to guarantee the possibility of the mortgage institution realizing their security upon default. So serious is the land-related conflicts out of the land mortgages that the state has been forced to intervene to stem the obvious effects on social order, but up to now the state legislative and administrative actions have failed to resolve the problem.

The other land-related conflicts in Kenya manifest themselves through what is commonly known as the human-wildlife conflicts. Kenya adopted an ambitious wildlife management and conservation arrangement through gazettement of large tracts of community lands as national parks, national game reserves and conservancy sanctuaries. In the process. communities are excluded from such lands, which are managed as public trust lands under the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). But given that most of these lands have eaten into grazing rangelands of pastoralist communities and agricultural lands of crop agricultural communities, permanent and potential land related conflicts occur between communities contingent to wildlife areas and the KWS as an agent and directly between human beings and wildlife. The use of ecologically sensitive areas such as forests and riparian reserves is emerging as another major cause of land-related conflicts between conservationists and beneficiaries of illegal and irregular allocation of such lands for political patronage.

The other land-related conflicts arise and concern the extraction and mining of mineral resources in varied areas of the country the major ones being experienced are from the coast - the salt mining, titanium mining, ruby mining and further inland the gold mining, sapphire mining, fluorspar mining, and limestone mining up in the hinterland. The conflicts are mainly because the government has excluded legislatively mineral resources from land rights of communities contingent to mining areas. This deplorable scenario does not answer the concerns of sharing of benefits from mining and mineral resources.

Away from natural resource utilization and benefit sharing land-related conflicts there are also numerous land-related conflicts arising from land dispute resolution mechanisms. In Kenya our courts are clogged by land conflict related cases, which have held back development endeavours. Land Dispute Tribunals are also clogged up with land-related conflicts, which are waiting arbitration.

The latest land-related conflicts arise from the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into Illegal and Irregular Allocation of Public Land ('Ndung'u Commission'). The commission in question was set up to inquire into corruption surrounding public land dealings from I962 as a cut-off date selected by the Commission up to December 31, 2002 when the appointing NARC government came to power. The Commission, which took nine months to investigate into the scams, inquired into protected lands for environmental, conservancy and security reasons i.e. covering forestlands, national parks, national game reserves, sanctuaries, wetlands, marine parks, protect security lands for police, prison, military and state houses and lodges; public lands for settlement schemes; public lands in townships, municipalities and cities; and public lands held and set aside for use and carrying out the mandates of State Statutory Bodies (Parastatals) ranging from provision of all manner of infrastructure, research and development public purposes. The land-related conflicts arising from the exercise of this Commission are first and foremost the government's belated release of the Commission report under suspicion of an effort to doctor the report.

In a nutshell the actors in the land-related conflicts in Kenya are the public sector, private sector, civil society and the community sector. Thus in a number of highlighted land-related conflicts all interface as victims and perpetrators. In terms of processes they range from legal, policy and institutional frameworks put in place for economic, political and social development, which appear to have failed the test of time.

The conclusion flowing from this discussion of land and conflicts in Kenya are that:
- The land tenure regimes inherited from colonial rule are still a major source of land-related conflicts which need to be revisited in order to address cases of historical injustices that manifest themselves in the form of squatters, absentee landlordism, land clashes and all manner of lingering land claims.
- Building capitalism on the basis of disputed land rights in Kenya is a major drawback because while we have succeeded in integrating 10% of Kenya economic and political elites into western type of ownership of property we have failed to address the plight of the majority Kenyans who live below poverty in an assumed pool of labour, both actual and reserve labour. The Kenyan example of going through land conflicts occasioned by individualization of land ownership is a pointer to other African countries that individualization of tenure per se does not produce miracles to development and eradication of poverty. So much reflection is required to overcome this quandary of spurring economic growth and development.
- Vesting land rights through the law does not resolve land-related conflicts or historical injustices and obstacles to development simply because the law is in place to protect what was unfairly and illegally taken away from Africans by colonialists and even fellow Africans at independence.
- Customary land rights cannot be transformed into individual land rights successfully by simple adjudication of land rights as a legal and political process without appraisal of ecological and traditional land use system in varied areas of the country.
- New land dispute resolution mechanisms need to be thought-out to address too many land disputes to ameliorate future land-related conflicts, without resorting to multiplicity of land law systems that are in themselves an obstacle to development.

* Odenda Lumumba is National Co-ordinator for the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA)

* This is an extract from a paper 'Land-related conflicts in Kenya: policy and legal implications', presented at a conference in December 2004. The African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) has just released proceedings of the conference on "Land Tenure & Conflict in Africa: Prevention, Mitigation, and Reconstruction", held in December 2004 which is available on the web at It includes papers on Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe, as well as overview papers on customary land tenure, Oxfam GB's work on land rights in Africa, human security-centred approaches, and the work of UN-Habitat and UNEP.

Tajudeen Abdul Raheem says the appointment of Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathai to the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC) of the African Union represents a dangerous conflict of interest as she is already a Kenyan government minister. Wangari should either quit as a government minister or reject the ECOSOCC position, he argues.

Many of us who are optimistic about the African Union do so not because of some naïve utopianism that ignores both the objective and subjective realities of Africa that may militate against the realisation of the renewal of faith in the noble ideals of Pan Africanism. We also do so not just as a defensive impulse against the more fashionable industry of Afro-pessimism. Our optimism is based on the concrete reality of our lived experiences and the brutal reality of the condition of many Africans today, both on the continent and in the Diaspora. These have made Pan-Africanism a precondition for our survival instead of it just being a dream. And some of us will even go further to assert that we need our dreams and we need to accelerate the process of their realisation because those who have no dreams to live for and work towards will suffer nightmares. And Africa has suffered enough nightmares!

The African Union did not emerge from a vacuum. It is the result of a critique and audit of our performance or lack of it in the four decades of the existence of the Organisation of African Union (OAU). The organisation was useful in building African consensus and mobilising our peoples against colonialism all over Africa and also in fighting Apartheid and settler colonialism in Southern Africa. Sometimes our frustrations at the way colonialism metamorphosed into neo-colonialism and dictatorships in many countries make us forget some of the positive contributions of the OAU towards our collective good, including it being the single most important diplomatic and political forum for all of Africa. Only Morocco has ever left it.

The Constitutive Act of the AU sought to correct some of the mistakes of the OAU charter in order to make the new Union more responsive to the needs and challenges of our time. It is different from the OAU in many important respects. It is potentially a more people-friendly Union. The OAU was an organisation of leaders and operated as such for most of its existence even when the leaders no longer represented anybody but themselves and their yes men or women.

The AU now seeks to be people driven and it has institutions to guarantee that. For instance, the Commission of the African Union is unique among all Multi-lateral institutions today in not only guaranteeing full participation of both men and women but in enforcing it. It has gender parity of five women and five men as its members. Of course the battle will not stop there because this practice is yet to percolate the whole of the emerging institutions of the AU. However since the principle is guaranteed and enforced at the highest level, hopefully it will only be a matter of time before this good example spreads downwards.

By far the most potentially democratic and democratising institutions of the Union are the Pan African Parliament and the Economic, Social and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC). The Parliament offers an historic opportunity for Pan-Africanism to stop being the exclusive preserve of the Presidents but a matter for all of us with a prospect for popular accountability through elected representatives. Unfortunately for the first five years it will only operate as an advisory body. The hope is that after this interim period the need to have a more permanent and powerful parliament with real overseeing powers and an effective check on the executive will recommend itself. One important area of reform when the protocol comes up for review could be the way in which the MPs are chosen. They should not be elected by indirect elections in national parliaments but should be elected directly by all Africans in all the countries they may be. This may transform all Africans into effective political players and no longer 'aliens', as is the practice at the moment.

The other institution which should be complementary to the Parliament in guaranteeing people power in the AU, with even bigger potential, is the ECOSOCC. In the past it was difficult for civil society organisations, NGOs, private sector groups, professional associations, etc to have access to the OAU. But the ECOSOCC envisages that most organisations and even individuals will have equal access to the AU and contribute their quota to the development of Africa. Like the Parliament it is also advisory for the time being.

The interim General Assembly of the ECOSOCC was launched in Addis Ababa last week. The Nobel Laureate, Wangari Mathai, was elected as the President of the Assembly along with other officials. She is a very popular person with an unflinching commitment to democracy and the ordinary peoples of Africa.

As an admirer of Mama Wangari I should be jubilating at her appointment but I am not because there is a potential for conflict of interest in her appointment that will undermine the credibility of the ECOSOCC. She is a minister in the NARC government of Kenya. It is not correct that a serving minister is put at the head of an institution that is supposed to be a people's forum. I can see the argument of visibility, clout and personal influence that may have weighed heavily on the minds of those who orchestrated her nomination, in absentia. But it is a wrong precedence. It sends wrong signals about the readiness of the AU to embrace civil society as an independent partner. We should not keep quiet because she is a much-loved 'one of us'.

Tomorrow it could be any other minister or government person and what would we say then? When governments manipulate elections, public opinion, and so on, we rightly shout and we should not maintain culpable silences because some of our own friends and colleagues are the direct or indirect perpetrators.

The AU bureaucrats have had an undue influence on the process of establishing the ECOSOCC, which risks making the institution a mere adjunct to the AU.

Another issue that shows the unwillingness of the AU to deal straight has to do with the role of the diaspora. The mission, vision, and strategic plan of the AU recognises the diaspora as the 6th region of Africa in addition to the five regions on the continent itself.

The Chairperson, Alpha Konare, is particularly focused on this yet in the ECOSOCC process the Diaspora has been represented by those chosen by the whim of the AU officials. Even at the launch of the General Assembly the few diaspora persons there were mere observers. This is partly due to the unresolved political intrigues around an acceptable definition of 'diaspora'. Some people want it to mean the historically dispersed Africans across the world especially North America, the Caribbean and Europe. Others focus on the more contemporary dispora of Africans directly from the continent, relative new immigrants in the diaspora. A sensible compromise should not be an either or debate but an inclusive arrangement that recognises the claims of all Africans and people of African origin wherever they may be. The AU should not dictate to Africans whether in Africa or in the diaspora.

Self organisation is the hallmark of civil society. A situation whereby the AU decides who the leaders of ECOSOC will be through manipulation of delegates and representation does not augur well for a union that wants the people to be involved as legitimate stakeholders. The Shenanigans at the launch of the ECOSOCC General Assembly would have made the former Stalinist countries very proudly nostalgic that their methods of 'democracy from above' continues to have appeal even without the need for a political party and cadres!

If the AU and its collaborators, co-conspirators and power worshippers in civil society who have brought about this unnecessary situation cannot see their opportunism one hopes that personal integrity and political consistency would dictate to Mama Wangari to either quit her government post or reject the ECOSOCC position. I have no doubt that she truly wants to help galvanise support for the fledgling ECOSOCC and the AU but all things considered I do not see how She can do both with good conscience.

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa

* Please send comments to

If civil society groups have their way, a guideline drafted by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights should hold cabinet ministers accountable for their actions while in office. Maina Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR), says they are planning a series of public meetings to create awareness on how to hold civil servants accountable, and demand for their resignation in case of any wrongdoings.

Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA), a network of elected legislators from 110 countries from all regions of the world, welcomes the adoption of the first United Nations Security Council resolution referring a situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Resolution 1593 (2005) of March 31, 2005 on the situation in Darfur, Sudan, was adopted with 11 votes in favour and 4 abstentions. The measure had been under active discussion in the Security Council since January 25, 2005, when the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur recommended the referral to the ICC under Chapter VII of the UN Charter and article 13.b of the Rome Statute of the ICC. Over two months, the United States opposed the referral, which it saw as conferring a 'legitimizing' effect on the Court. Only when the resolution was tabled for a vote by France and the United Kingdom, resolution 1593 (2005), did the majority of Council's Members prevail over this US resistance.

Visit the Stop Genocide Now website and find out how you can help fight crimes against humanity.

Rebels and the Ivory Coast government have agreed to end hostilities after four days of talks in South Africa. Tension has risen in recent weeks, prompting fears of renewed war in the world's biggest cocoa producer. A ceasefire agreed in France two years ago failed to end conflict in the country which remains divided in two.

The continuing stalemate between Ethiopia and Eritrea could lead to another war, a senior Eritrean government official said on Friday, noting that under international law, Ethiopia continued to occupy Eritrean territory. Under the Algiers Peace Agreement of December 2000 – which ended a two-year war between the two countries - they agreed to accept the decision of an independent boundary commission on where the border between them should be.

The recent shooting death of an off-duty game ranger by poachers has reminded Southern African conservationists that the ''animal wars'' that peaked during the 1990s are far from over a decade later. "It's all about the natural wealth of the land, from wild game to water rights to the land itself - who uses it and who owns it,'' Ted Reilly, founder of the Big Game Parks system of Swaziland, told IPS.

As nations from around the world scramble to secure lucrative contracts to develop southern Sudan following the signing of a peace deal in January, one of the war-torn country's minority groups is preparing for a fresh battle. During the 21-year conflict between the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), the Nuba people were anomalies: Muslim camel keepers who fought side by side with the black, largely Christian, cattle herders of southern Sudan against the repressive Islamic rulers in Khartoum.

Some 5,500 Burundian refugees in Tanzania will be relocated to another camp towards the end of this month as part of plans to consolidate camps amid the ongoing Burundi repatriation operation. A tripartite agreement between the United Republic of Tanzania, Burundi and UNHCR states that all Tanzanian camps with a refugee population of under 10,000 will be closed. This is an attempt to consolidate camps that empty out with the departure of Burundian refugees for home.

In a country where access to justice remains elusive for many, the equality courts provide a forum for the poor and marginalised to assert their rights and seek redress. They also provide a wonderful opportunity for the judiciary — currently experiencing its own difficulties — to make a contribution to the advancement of equality and the eradication of discrimination. While court cases are essentially about facts and the law, they nevertheless serve as powerful tools of advocacy and education, and their pronouncements can begin to shape and influence social behaviour.

The people of Rwanda will mark the 11th anniversary of the 1994 genocide on 7 April with a national day of mourning. The deaths of more than a million people were a loss for Rwanda and for humanity. For genocide survivors this is a traumatic, but extremely important occasion, when they may publicly express the grief they still feel. For other Rwandese, and outsiders, it is an appropriate moment to demonstrate compassion, sorrow and regret. All at African Rights share in the sorrow of the commemoration. Through our work we have all learned of the deaths of countless men, women and children. In memory of the victims, we emphasize, once again, the need to prioritise justice and to offer support to genocide survivors.