Coalition For Peace in Africa (COPA), a regional membership organization with a secretariat in Nairobi Kenya will in the month of November 2004 offer a one-week training to organizational leaders and programme managers seeking to develop their organization's capacities to address conflict. Specifically, the training will run from 15th to 19th Nov 2004 at the Corat Training Centre in Nairobi. The training is ideal for practitioners serving in the fields of Human Rights, Relief & Development, Religious organizations, and also personnel from other fields operating in or around conflict areas.

Sudan has agreed to consider the asylum claims of 76 Eritreans who forced a Libyan plane to land in Sudan because they feared returning home, a U.N. official said on Saturday. Libya had denied the Eritreans refugee status. The Libyan military transport plane took off from the town of Khufrah and was heading for the Eritrean capital Asmara when some of the angry deportees moved into the cockpit and forced the plane to land.

The UN Security Council should consider and act on the recommendations of United Nations reports on economic exploitation and arms flow and place particular emphasis on isolating the armed groups in Ituri and applying pressure on neighbouring governments to cooperate in the elimination of such activities from within their borders in accordance with existing UN Security Council Resolutions. This is according to an International Crisis Group report 'Maintaining Momentum in the Congo: The Ituri Problem', which notes that the "international community is slowly awakening to the grim realisation that collapse of the Congo peace process and return to war are real prospects."

The government of Mauritania has accused Libya and Burkina Faso of backing an attempt to topple President Maaouiya Ould Taya earlier this month and has announced the arrest of 31 military officers in connection with the alleged putsch. The first news of a fresh attempt to topple Ould Taya emerged on August 9, when military and political sources reported a new wave of arrests within the armed forces.

When Agade Busaka came to Australia to study in 1998, he was excited. Now the 25-year-old cannot wait to leave, and alert his friends to the racism he has experienced. He and his colleagues are so concerned, some have called for warnings about racism to be placed in literature advertising courses.

Four days after officially suspending his participation in the coalition transitional government of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Azarias Ruberwa, one of the four Congolese vice-presidents and leader of the Rassemblement Congolais pour la democratie (RCD-Goma) has announced he will return to the capital, Kinshasa. "The vice-president [Ruberwa] will return to his usual duties tomorrow, [Saturday]" Francis Bedi Mabele, the RCD-Goma secretary-general, told IRIN on Friday. Ruberwa is also scheduled to meet with South African President and mediator of the DRC crises, Thabo Mbeki.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Uganda have agreed to disarm groups operating in their territories within a year as a way to pacify the region and attend to an issue that has been source of disagreements between the three countries. At a tripartite meeting held on Wednesday in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, and mediated by the US government, the three countries also agreed to establish a permanent commission to implement the disarmament process that was agreed upon in a 1999 agreement that was meant to end a war in the DRC as well as to address fears of neighbouring countries.

When the United Nations (UN) Security Council passed a July 30 resolution on Sudan demanding that the Khartoum Government halt killings in Darfur within one month or face economic and diplomatic action, aid agencies slammed the decision as providing more time for killings and rape by militias known as the Janjaweed. Nearly one month later figures indicate that there are currently 2.2 million conflict-affected people in Darfur and Eastern Chad. And as the UN deadline to the Khartoum government rolls to a close on August 30, activity by the Janjaweed is reportedly on the increase in West Darfur.

It now appears unlikely that strong UN action will be taken against Khartoum and that instead support will be given to the African Union’s efforts to solve the crisis. Sudanese government and rebel leaders are currently meeting under AU auspices in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, in an attempt to reach a political settlement and end the violence. The AU already has 80 observers in Darfur, protected by 150 Rwandan troops. However, an AU plan to send nearly 2,000 peacekeepers to monitor the region was rejected on Monday by a senior Sudanese official.

It may be that intervention under the auspices of the AU will be the favoured approach, because broader international action in Darfur through the UN is more complicated than it seems. One reason for this is that although Darfur is a charged topic in the United States ahead of the elections in that country, the most powerful member of the UN Security Council has been stung by its intervention in Iraq. It is unlikely that the US, even driven by the prospects of lucrative oil contracts, would risk an intervention in Sudan while it is embroiled in a disastrous occupation in Iraq. In any case, a “humanitarian intervention” in Sudan led by the US would be farcical while more than 100 000 of their troops are terrorising Iraq.

The US position is further complicated by the contention that the US has only become interested in the Darfur crisis because it threatens a peace deal between the Government of Sudan and the Southern People’s Liberation Army that would have opened up Washington’s access to Sudan’s plentiful oil supplies in the south of the country. Lastly, theories are circulating that the US supports the Darfur rebels against the Khartoum government because it is not sufficiently pro-American. All these factors leave the US hopelessly compromised with regards their credibility in leading an international intervention that is purely aimed at ending the conflict and does not contain insidious connotations related to political and economic ambitions. That this complicates an international response is to say nothing of other factors that might impact on the UN Security Council, such as the largely supportive role that the Arab League has lent Khartoum.

But whatever the UN decision on August 30, criticism remains as to the inadequacy of efforts to date. Part of the reason why it seems like attempts to end the crisis have been half-hearted is that genocide inevitable develops its own myths. The result is that it appears as if a particular situation has spun out of control and is too complicated for immediate action. In this scenario, the various parties are doing all that they can to rescue a seemingly irredeemable situation. But it is important to engage in an unmasking of myths because often they serve to perpetuate genocide.

The first myth to uncover is an obvious one. This is that the increased media attention of the last few months mirrors the timeline of the crisis and that therefore the time for response has been too short to yield results. In fact, the Darfur crisis played itself out throughout last year, so that in October, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) noted that tens of thousands of people who had fled from Darfur in western Sudan to neighbouring Chad were “invisible” to the humanitarian community, receiving practically no assistance.

The myth that the Darfur conflict is a crisis of the last few months is central to the failure of the international community because it shows that the early warning signs were ignored - or that at the time the conflict did not carry the political relevancy needed for international action. What has been opted for now is a kind of genocide crisis management, with a strong sense that more time is needed and that diplomatic ventures must be allowed to run their course. But both the international community and the Government of Sudan have known about the crisis in Darfur for far longer than it has been in the media spotlight. How much more time exactly would they like? How many more people must die?

This is linked to the idea that genocide somehow ‘just happens’. In reality, genocide has its own social, economic and political aspects. It has been argued that in Africa, the legacy of colonialism, economic problems and inequalities mean that governments or powerful groups can promote differences and conflict as a mechanism of power rather than addressing the root causes of desperation.

Another area that needs to be challenged is that of the “peace process”. There is a sense that once a “peace process” is underway or the perpetrators engaged in diplomacy, then whatever crisis that is underway is about to be solved. But this, as the organisation Genocide Watch points out, often obscures the fact that genocide is not conflict but rather one-sided violence of one group against another. Therefore it is the “genocidal nature of the government in Khartoum” that needs to be confronted. A peace process will not necessary result in a solution. Often, the “peace process” - and this would also apply to other diplomatic efforts - can work to distract attention from genocide or result in the international community being more lenient towards a perpetrating regime.

Often, genocide is characterised as an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. In Sudan, it has been argued that what is happening there is a result of a kind of clash of civilisations between ‘Africans’ and ‘Arabs’. But as Alex de Waal has pointed out, this obscures a “complicated reality”. “Darfur's Arabs are black, indigenous, African and Muslim, just like Darfur's non-Arabs, hailing from the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa and many smaller tribes.”

The ‘African’ versus ‘Arab’ theory may act to obscure the original causes of the conflict such as conflicts over resources, especially water and land. It may also work to obscure the historical causes of conflict, such as the fact that Sudan was a colonial construct arbitrarily created, in which the British entrenched divisions between a wealthy North and the rest of the country. Understanding complicated historical and political factors is important in understanding why the Darfur crisis has developed and is crucial in any solution.

In conclusion, the shameful response of the international community to the Rwandan genocide should have resulted in lessons being learnt on how to deal with similar crisis situations. But not even the obvious reminders presented by the commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Rwanda genocide in April helped to move the world from genocide crisis management to genocide prevention. That these lessons have not been learnt indicates that those institutions responsible for protecting international human rights standards have not been made accountable for the decisions that they make with regards the lives of those who suffer as a result of inaction, nor have they been able to move towards clear decision-making that is based not on the interests of the powerful but in the interests of ordinary people who suffer most at the hands of violence.

* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu. Please send comments to

Reference URLs:
http://www.usaid.gov/locations/sub-saharan_africa/sudan/darfur.html

http://www.genocidewatch.org/Never%20Again.htm
http://allafrica.com/stories/200408021131.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/foreignaffairs/comment/0,11538,1285443,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-4449674,00.html

A move to outlaw the death penalty in Senegal has ignited a debate about capital punishment in the country. "It is my point of view and my opinion that only God has the right to take someone’s life," said President Abdoulaye Wade during his July 15 announcement of a bill to ban the death penalty.

Talks aimed at bringing peace to Darfur teetered back from the brink of collapse on Wednesday, as rebel leaders temporarily shelved their objection to discussing the confinement of all fighting forces to designated bases, an African Union (AU) spokesman said. "We have finally agreed on the agenda," spokesman Assane Ba told IRIN after three days of preliminary wranglings at the AU-sponsored talks in the Nigerian capital, Abuja.

Fourteen foreigners went on trial in the tiny oil-rich state of Equatorial Guinea on Monday, charged with plotting a mercenary invasion to overthrow President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, a government official in the capital Malabo said. The eight South Africans and six Armenians were arrested in Malabo on 6 March. They were charged with conniving with 70 South African mercenaries who were arrested 24 hours later in Zimbabwe as they were allegedly on their way to Equatorial Guinea to mount an invasion.

The Union of Kenya Civil Servants has announced its intention to sue the Government for allegedly flouting the Labour Act and violating their human rights. Announcing the move, the deputy national organising secretary, Mr Mbuthia, said that the Labour minister Newton Kulundu and the Directorate of Personnel Management Simon Njau had flouted labour laws by under-paying workers in seven job groups. The union is demanding they reimburse the salary differences.

The Zimbabwean government this week defended its controversial NGO bill which would ban foreign NGOs concerned with "issues of governance" and deny registration to NGOs receiving foreign funding for "promotion and protection of human rights". In a statement issued by the Ministry of Labour and placed in all Sunday Newspapers, the Government described the organisations as a "threat to national security" and accused donors of employing "local puppets to champion foreign values."

The South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) is to launch an inquiry into the alleged mistreatment of members of the Khomani San community of the Northern Cape Province. Announcing the inquiry, an official of SAHRC said that: "There have been claims and accusations that the community...had been routinely mistreated by the police...and after the death of Optel Rooi (a master tracker) it was decided that an inquiry should be conducted."

Speaking at the Nigerian Bar Association's conference, the chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Mallam Ribadu told delegates that "the principal reason for the failure of our law enforcement agencies is corruption, and that invariably there was no law because those that are supposed to enforce the law became the worst culprits of breaking the law."

Liberians impatient to return home after 14 years of civil war are finding out that it takes more than resilience to begin a new life in the face of so much destruction, lack of income-earning opportunities and insecurity in some places. Juliet Massaquoi, a 24-year-old mother of four children, came back to Ganta in northern Liberia's Nimba county two weeks ago.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan has sent a report to the Security Council showing that Côte d'Ivoire's Government has made progress in following the path to peace and unity, a United Nations spokesman said. Three opposition cabinet ministers have been reinstated and President Laurent Gbagbo has turned over some responsibilities to Prime Minister Seydou Diarra, according to the report of the tripartite Monitoring Group, made up of representatives of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union (AU) and the UN Mission in Cote d'Ivoire.

Mark Thatcher, the son of the former UK prime minister, has been arrested at his home in Cape Town. He has been detained by police investigating an alleged coup attempt in Equatorial Guinea. A spokesman for South Africa's National Prosecuting Authority said he was held on suspicion of providing funding and logistical assistance.

The Angolan government should listen to civil society, be more open to humanitarian workers and quickly rebuild its judicial system if it wants to improve its human rights record, the UN special representative for human rights defenders said on Sunday. Approaching the end of a 10-day visit to the country, including a two-day trip to Cabinda, Hina Jilani said it was vital to see more concrete action. "For me it's very important to see things happening on the ground. Unless measures are in reality in existence, human rights work is difficult and human rights defenders remain vulnerable," she told IRIN in an interview.

Africa's latest effort to resolve an 18-month-old conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region hit an immediate bump on Monday when the Sudanese government rejected a proposal for African Union (AU) troops to disarm rebel groups while Khartoum dealt with the pro-government Janjawid militia. Nigerian President and current chairman of the African Union, Olusegun Obasanjo, had floated the idea ahead of the latest round of AU-sponsored peace talks which opened in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Monday.