The former main rebel group during the Democratic Republic of Congo's civil war are to suspend their participation in the power-sharing government. RCD-Goma leader Azarias Ruberwa, one of Congo's four vice-presidents, said the peace process had "broken down" and needed to be reassessed. The transitional government was set up to end the five-year conflict. But the massacre earlier this month of 160 Congolese refugees in Burundi prompted renewed warnings of war.

Following the massacre of the 160 Congolese refugees in a temporary camp in Burundi, the US Committee for Refugees (USCR) has said that too little is being done to ensure the basic human rights of refugees who are confined to camps or segregated settlements. "Refugees are frequently warehoused in remote, desolate and dangerous border areas in conditions of hopelessness and despair, subject to aggression, sexual exploitation, and risk of attack and murder," said USCR's statement, issued last week.

The risk of wars being fought over water is rising because of explosive global population growth and widespread complacency, scientists said recently. "We have had oil wars," said Professor William Mitsch. "That's happened in our lifetime. Water wars are possible." Scientists at the World Water Week conference, which began on Sunday in Stockholm, said ignorance and complacency were widespread.

According to the Swiss-based anti-racism platform, known as “CRAN”, police brutality and racism against blacks is on the rise across the country. “More and more, we’re seeing young blacks, especially foreigners, being targeted by the authorities as part of a crack-down on drug traffickers,” said CRAN’s secretary general, Kanyana Mutombo. In its annual 2004 report, Amnesty International also condemned the country’s police for using excessive force against foreigners and asylum seekers.

In June 2003, the Refugee Law Project published Working Paper No. 9,"Education of Refugees in Uganda: Relationships Between Setting and Access." This report related the findings from the first year of a longitudinal study that follows the same schools, teachers, pupils, and families over a three-year period.

The UN refugee agency has heard that the continuing insecurity in western Sudan's Darfur region could drive some 30,000 people into Chad, a new influx that could strain UNHCR's ability to care for the refugees in its swelling camps.

New legislation will help the South African government to monitor the entry of asylum seekers into the country, an official told IRIN on Friday. The Immigration Amendment Bill, approved by parliament last Thursday, requires all asylum seekers to report to a refugee reception centre within 14 days of entry, said Mike Ramagoma, a spokesman for the ministry of home affairs. Ramagoma noted that the existing law allowed asylum seekers "as soon as they have received their asylum transit permit at the port of entry to travel anywhere in the country and stay for whatever length of time".

Thousands of Congolese refugees in Burundi are to be relocated away from the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), an official from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Friday. The announcement comes a week after a massacre of 160 refugees last Friday on a transit camp at Gatumba, which is only 1 km from the border.

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni recently asked the International Criminal Court at The Hague to investigate and prosecute rebels and rebel leader Joseph Kony of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). To anyone who is unfamiliar with the war in Northern Uganda that started in 1986 when Museveni had just come to power, Museveni's quest to prosecute Kony might sound like a sound idea coming from a responsible person. However, to those who have suffered through the years and experienced atrocities perpetrated by both the rebels and the Ugandan army, the Uganda People's Defense Forces (UPDF), Museveni is just as criminal as the Kony he is trying to prosecute.

The Senate has approved a request by President Olusegun Obasanjo to send up to 1,500 Nigerian troops to Sudan's troubled Darfur region to serve with an African Union (AU) protection force. Senator Daniel Saror, deputy minority leader of the Senate, told IRIN on Wednesday that the upper chamber of the Federal Parliament had approved Obasanjo’s request, based “on the need to arrest the ugly situation in Sudan which we find absolutely unacceptable.”

Hopes were raised on 18 August last year that Liberia’s protracted human rights crisis would finally end but major challenges remain, Amnesty International says in a new report. "The Comprehensive Peace Agreement signed in Accra augured well for the Liberian people who had suffered more than a decade of appalling human rights abuses. But one year later, despite some major advances, progress towards ensuring protection of human rights is disappointingly slow," the organization said. Harassment, intimidation, extortion, forced labour and looting are reported to continue in Lofa County, still controlled by forces of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD), and in the south-eastern counties of Sinoe, Grand Kru, River Gee and Maryland, where forces of the Movement for Democracy in Liberia (MODEL) still hold sway.

DRC's Orientale province borders Uganda and Sudan, and its Ituri district is arguably the bloodiest corner of the world. From 1999 to April 2003, at least 50,000 civilians perished in the region. All parties committed summary executions, abductions, disappearances, forced labor, extortion, mass rape, sexual slavery and routine conscription of child soldiers. Human Rights Watch reported in a 2003 paper, "Ituri: Covered in Blood": "The war in Ituri is a complex web of local, national and regional conflicts, that developed after a local dispute between Hema and Lendu ethnic groups was exacerbated by Ugandan actors and aggravated by the broader international war in DRC."

The Rwandan government’s pledge that its troops in Darfur will protect civilians should encourage the international community to press Sudan to accept an enlarged African Union mission with a mandate for civilian protection, Human Rights Watch says. The current African Union mandate does not specifically authorize the 154 troops to protect civilians, but Rwandan President Paul Kagame insisted that Rwandan troops would intervene if civilians are threatened. On July 27, the African Union’s Peace and Security Council proposed increasing the current ceasefire monitoring force to more than 2,000 soldiers and expanding its mandate to provide civilian protection. Seven African countries have indicated their willingness to contribute troops to such a mission, but the Sudanese government has so far refused to accept the proposal.

The massacre of 160 Tutsi refugees at the Gutambe camp in western Burundi was the latest in a catalogue of atrocities conducted “in a cycle of impunity”, human rights observers say. Agencies have accused the international community of ignoring evidence of previous human rights violations to secure diplomatic success in Burundi's troubled peace process, and are demanding a thorough investigation and public enquiry into the massacre.

The Foundation for Human Rights Initiative (FHRI) has condemned the highhanded manner in which Bugiri resident district commissioner, Isaac Lulaaba, allegedly broke up a National Freedom Party rally by using firearms at the weekend. The FHRI spokesperson, Wendy Kasujja, said in a statement that the use of force on a peaceful crowd was uncalled for and urged the government to refrain from such practices.

Togo's government has freed some 500 prisoners, after President Gnassingbe Eyadema granted them a pardon. Among those released are seven militants of the opposition Union of Forces for Change (UFC) party. The European Union (EU) has made improvement to human rights and political freedoms conditions to the resumption of aid frozen in 1993.

Salih Booker from Africa Action recently spoke to BlackElectorate.com publisher Cedric Muhammad. "...not only are these identities hardening in Darfur, and I would say throughout Sudan; if you look at the East African press, you will see it happening more broadly now. So yes it is being framed as an Arab-African split, as a racial conflict, and this is gathering momentum in ways that I think (sigh) are troubling."

More than 20 people have died in two days of heavy factional fighting in the Bay region of south-central Somalia, local sources in the regional capital, Baidoa, 240 km southwest of Mogadishu, told IRIN on Monday. About thirty others were wounded. The fighting broke out on Friday between the Dabare and Luway subclans of the larger Digil-Mirifle group. The clashes were concentrated in and around the town of Dinsoor, 90 km west of Baidoa, and in the surrounding villages, according to one source.

Despite bouts of insecurity, including inter-militia fighting over the month of July in parts of Ituri District, northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), there are signs that the situation in the region is improving, a new report indicates. One of the peace indicators is the "steady and noticeable" return of internally displaced persons (IDPs), according to the July edition of "Ituri Watch". Ituri Watch is a monthly report compiled by the Africa Initiative Programme (AIP) in association with the Forum on Early Warning and Early Response-Africa.

With the ongoing International Criminal Court investigations into the massacre of some 3.5 million people in the DRC, some Congolese and Rwandan refugees who witnessed the killings before fleeing to Uganda say they are being hunted down in Kampala by perpetrators who want to hide the evidence. They also accuse the Ugandan authorities of demanding sex and money in exchange for refugee status.