"The International Community, in short, needs to continue to actively engage in the region. Among the UN staff in Liberia today, the talk is that Guinea is the next flashpoint, and some opportunistic staffers are already learning French for a future posting to Guinea. Peacekeeping in West Africa, in other words, is becoming a growth industry. This should not be allowed to happen," writes Lansana Gberie in this feature on www.zmag.org

Mauritania has foiled a plot to overthrow the country's president, its defence minister has said. Between 20 and 30 members of the army are reported to have been arrested for the alleged coup attempt. Defence Minister Baba Ould Sidi said the plotters were "the very same people who led the aborted putsch in June last year".

Algeria has been a case study in how not to deal with Islamist activism. Its experience dwarfs that of its neighbours in both scale of violence - over 100,000 deaths since 1991 - and number of Islamic organisations disputing the religious, political and military fields. But there is now an opportunity to turn this tragic page, says a report from the International Crisis Group. "Seizing it requires a skilful blend of political, security, legal and diplomatic measures to eliminate remaining armed groups. But Algeria's political class also must recast debate around a new agenda of practical reform. Europe needs to help more, and the U.S. to be more sophisticated in its handling of an over-played al-Qaeda factor."

Four leaders of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) have been released on bail after a short court appearance on Monday, the labour body reported. The four - secretary-general Wellington Chibebe and colleagues Lucia Matibenga, Sam Machinda, and Timothy Kondo - were arrested on 5 August under the Public Order and Security Act (POSA) in Gweru, south of the capital, Harare, while attending a workshop on the impact of taxation and HIV/AIDS on workers.

U.N. human rights experts accused all armed groups in Congo's troubled northeastern Ituri province of war crimes and said Rwanda, Uganda, and the former Congolese government contributed to “the massive abuses,” according to a report. At least 8,000 civilians were deliberately killed or were victims of the indiscriminate use of force in Ituri in 2002 and 2003 and more than 600,000 civilians were forced to flee their homes, according to investigations by the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo and other human rights groups.

Education does not end with exile. In fact, it starts in exile for many of the over 65,000 primary school-aged refugee children in northern Uganda. Even after they have been displaced by Uganda's own civil conflict, these refugee kids are given access to free primary education alongside local students.

Concerns over security in some parts of rural Liberia and the battered state of the country's infrastructure will limit the number of refugees able to return home from neighbouring West African countries later this year, the UN refugee agency UNHCR has warned. "We do not want a situation where more (refugees) than we planned return because most of them would end up in internally displaced camps since the facilities are not adequate to receive large numbers of people," Golam Abbas, the deputy head of UNHCR in Liberia told IRIN.

A survey conducted for the South African Institute of Race Relations three years ago had shown most people saw unemployment and crime as the biggest problems facing SA. Racism was far lower on the list. It also pointed out there now seemed to be less inclination on the part of top leadership "to play the race card". President Thabo Mbeki once dismissed critics of his stances on Zimbabwe and other issues as racist.

About 60% of the 42 000 Liberian refugees mostly residing in the Buduburam Refugee Camp in the Central Region will now have the opportunity to undergo training in Information Communication Technology, the Vice President for the Association for the Reconstruction of Liberia, an Accra-based NGO, Mr. James B. Kollie Snr said. This is in addition to 1000 refugees who are expected to enrol in Ghanaian Universities and Polytechnics throughout the country.

At its emergency meeting on Sunday to discuss the situation in Darfur, the Arab League should firmly condemn the gross human rights violations by Sudanese government forces and the government-backed Janjaweed militias in this western region of Sudan, Human Rights Watch said. The pan-Arab group should also make public the report of its May fact-finding mission to the region. At the request of the Sudanese government, foreign ministers of the Arab League-a regional grouping of 22 countries including Sudan-will meet in Cairo to discuss and state a common Arab position on the Darfur conflict.

While other parts of Europe have seen a rise in tension between races, Italy, with its close proximity to North Africa, is a prime gateway for the wave of immigrants entering the Continent. Now a fresh debate over the place of these newcomers is igniting in a country that has long been more accustomed to emigrating than hosting foreigners.

The UN refugee agency has begun relocating some of the 20,000 refugees who fled fighting in the South Kivu region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in June. They are currently crammed in three transit centres along Burundi's volatile Cibitoke border. "We are relocating the bulk of these new arrivals to a better and safer location away from the DRC border once we have agreed with the Burundi government on a suitable site," said UNHCR spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis at a briefing in Geneva.

More than a year after the coup of March 2003, which followed six months of intense fighting, insecurity and small-scale displacement persist. The UN estimates that there are 200,000 internally displaced people as of June 2004, but the absence of IDP camps and the intermittent nature of the current displacements make it hard to establish figures accurately.

At the height of the 1998-2000 border war with Ethiopia there were 1.1 million internally displaced people (IDPs) in Eritrea. This number has fallen sharply but there are still some 59,000 people who cannot return home because of the tensions that persist around the border demarcation process.

Angolan security forces are again arresting and expelling illegal Congolese and West African diamond traffickers but there have been few signs of a repeat of the violence seen earlier this year, according to aid and humanitarian workers. "It is clear the operations started again on 16 July in Uige, Malanje and Lunda-Norte. At the moment we have not received any allegations of human rights violations," one senior humanitarian officer told IRIN.

In its investigation in Northern Uganda, the International Criminal Court must ensure protection for witnesses and victims, Human Rights Watch has said. The court needs to investigate serious crimes committed by all sides to the conflict in order to ensure justice and promote sustainable peace. This follows an announcement by the ICC Office of the Prosecutor that it will initiate an investigation in Uganda. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni had referred the situation in Northern Uganda to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in January.

"The Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum, (the Human Rights Forum) takes grave exception to the behavior of the Zimbabwe Government at the recent meeting of the Executive Council of the African Union [AU], as well as the plethora of comments by the state-controlled media concerning this meeting. At this meeting, the Minister of Foreign Affairs conveyed the impression that his Government was ignorant of the report on human rights observance submitted to the Executive Council by the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. At least, the Minister had been poorly prepared for this meeting, and, at worst, the Minister was misleading his august colleagues."

Burundian government troops have succeeded in repelling an unknown number of Rwandan militiamen who crossed into Burundi from neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo, army spokesman Maj Adolphe Manirakiza said on Tuesday. Thousands of Interahamwe militiamen, and Rwandan government soldiers now known as the ex-FAR, fled their country in 1994 fearing prosecution for their involvement in the genocide in which, according to the most recent government statistics, 937,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed.

A long-running power struggle for the leadership of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel movement has spilled over into violence on the streets of the capital Monrovia, forcing UN peacekeeping forces to send in tanks and step up street patrols. Jacques Klein, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative in Liberia, warned both sides on Wednesday that the UN peacekeeping force would not allow them to undermine the country's peace process.

The government of Zimbabwe is on the verge of promulgating a bill titled Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) Bill into law to provide for the "operations, monitoring and regulation of all non-governmental organisations." The government argues that the proposed law is meant to protect public interest by ensuring that NGOs are governed and administered properly and use donor and public funds for the objects for which they were established. An analysis of the draft bill will show on the contrary that this is a political gimmick that is meant to administratively create criminals out of human rights defenders and NGOs so as to provide excuses for intrusion, clamp down and closures of NGOs.