"Darfur is likely to occur again because of the inability of African leaders and Western governments to develop and implement specific safeguards against ethnic cleansing and genocide. Ten years after the Rwanda genocide, the inability of African and Western leaders to develop and enforce safeguards against future ethnic cleansing and genocide have come full circle." This is according to an editorial by Chinua Akukwe, Worldpress.org contributing editor.

Psychosocial rehabilitation and reintegration programmes for youth who have escaped or were released from the Lord's Resistance Army have been established since 1994 and are reasonably well integrated locally, both with communities and as part of the Government’s overall demobilisation and amnesty programme. In spite of the culture of peace and discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation within recipient communities, there are real tensions around reintegration and reconciliation surrounding the return of ex-abductees.

Thousands of Angolan refugees returning home from Zambia face food shortages and get only half rations, a United Nations official said Wednesday. The World Food Programme, which has been feeding refugees in camps and handing out supplies to those returning home, said rations were small especially on the Angolan side, WFP spokesman Mike Huggins told AFP. "Resources for this exercise are extremely tight, especially on the Angolan side where rations have had to be reduced by up to 50 percent," said Huggins.

Following the discovery of another mass grave last Thursday, Amnesty International has called upon the Algerian authorities to fully investigate the site and to treat previously unearthed graves similarly. According to Algerian security sources, the grave contains more than a dozen bodies of victims of killings committed by an armed group during the mid-1990s. In recent months, Amnesty International has repeatedly expressed concern about the failure of the Algerian authorities to investigate mass grave sites in line with international standards, raising fears that evidence of grave human rights abuses has been lost.

In a recent report, the United Nations has called upon Namibia to consider establishing an independent body which would have access to all places of detention and conduct investigations into violations of rights and abuses in prison. Other areas of concern noted by the report were the high number of customary marriages that continued to be unregistered, depriving women and children of their rights as a consequence, and the fact that torture was still considered a common law offence to be charged as assult or criminal injury and was not defined in domestic criminal law.

Local Somalian campaigners, backed by Amnesty International, have demanded that Somalia's new government, which is expected to be set up in weeks, formulate measures to ensure that warlords who have violated human rights since the fall of the Siad Barre in 1991 are brought to justice. One proposed measure is the formation of a South Africa-like truth commission.

In a newly published report entitled, 'Swaziland: human rights at risk in a climate of political and legal uncertainty' Amnesty International has called upon the Government of King Mswati III to resolve the constitutional and human rights crisis that has left the country without a Court of Appeal since 2002 and undermines the Government's new international human rights obligations. Amongst the abuses alleged in the report are a failure to investigate and prosecute those responsible for torture and deaths in custody and a denial of the rights of freedom of association and peaceful assembly to those perceived as government critics.

The Centre for the Victims of Extra-Judicial Killings and Torture (CUEKT AFRICA) has deplored the rising rate of policy brutality and exploitation of innocent citizens in the Enugu region. The group this week accused the police of 'deliberately framing and arresting residents to extort money from them before they are set free.'

Twenty-eight Burundian political and ex-militia leaders are due to resume meetings again on Wednesday in a bid to finalise the country's post-transitional power-sharing agreement. The two-day meeting will be held in Pretoria, South Africa, at the invitation of the facilitator of the Burundi peace process, South African Deputy-President Jacob Zuma. He has invited all 17 political parties that signed the Arusha Agreement, three former rebel movements that signed the ceasefire accords, and eight newly approved political parties in an effort to resolve the power-sharing issue that has blocked the development of a post-transitional constitution.

The UN has described Darfur as 'the world's worst humanitarian crisis'. On 23 July, the US Congress described it as 'genocide'. Characterising the Darfur war as 'Arabs' versus 'Africans' 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.

Coordinated by the Transcend Peace University, this training course will aim to introduce students to peace journalism and how it differs from war journalism.

The UN refugee agency is reaching out to some 13,000 Angolans living in South Africa, many of whom are highly educated, to offer help for them to return home, a spokeswoman said Monday. Contrary to other countries in the region where hundreds of thousands of Angolans took refuge during the 27-year civil war, South Africa does not have refugee camps for the Angolans, most of whom live in Cape Town, said Melita Sunjic, spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Contrary to Sudanese government assertions that the security situation in the troubled western Darfur region has improved, civilians displaced by the conflict insist that violence perpetrated by Janjawid militias is continuing, a United Nations official said. Francis Deng, the UN Secretary-General’s representative on internally displaced persons (IDPs), visited Darfur last week accompanied by Sudanese officials. He said the IDPs talked of "persistent insecurity and human rights violations", including "many accounts" of rape of women outside their camps.

Did you know that of the world's 12 million refugees, more than 7 million have been "warehoused"-confined to camps or segregated settlements or otherwise deprived of basic rights-in situations lasting 10 years or more? Check it out at http://www.refugees.org/warehousing. Refugee protection and assistance does not have to involve spatial confinement and enforced idleness.

Two weeks ago, in the early morning hours of July 12, hell descended upon the village of Donki Dereisa in South Darfur. Shortly before sunrise, Fatima Ibrahim, a 28-year old woman of noble features and simple ways, awoke from her sleep to the deafening sound of exploding ordnance falling from the sky and the rattle of automatic weapons fire. As she emerged from her mud hut with her ten year old daughter, she saw fires blazing all around and scores of heavily armed men on horseback attacking the village from every direction.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court have opened an investigation into war crimes in northern Uganda, where government forces have been battling an 18-year rebellion by the shadowy Lord's Resistance Army. The LRA is notorious for raiding villages, stealing food and abducting children for use as soldiers, workers and sex slaves (Associated Press, July 29). In February the group struck the Barloonyo camp for internally displaced persons, killing more than 200 people, many of whom were burned alive in their huts.

As dictated by canons of police ethics, which instruct officers to respect the constitutional rights of all people to liberty, equality, and justice, law enforcement officers are supposed to be the leading human rights protectors and promoters everywhere in the world. Unfortunately, due to lack of training and discipline, poor leadership, and political manipulation, law enforcement personnel often engage in unprofessional conduct that leads to abuses of human rights.

Investigators from the International Criminal Court have arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo to begin their first probe into allegations of serious violations of international law in the country over the last two years, UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said on Tuesday. The investigators are expected to hold closed door meetings with representatives of the Congolese government, civil society, as well as international organisations, she told reporters in New York.

Somalia's proposed transitional government must be committed to respecting human rights, ending abuses and bringing to book perpetrators of past crimes in a country wracked by factional warfare for more than a decade, Amnesty International (AI) said on Wednesday. The human rights watchdog's appeal came as the Somali National Reconciliation Conference drew close to creating a transitional federal government that is expected to end 13 years of anarchy and violence that have plagued Somalia since the collapse of the regime of former president Mohamed Siyad Barre in 1991.

The United Nations has poured 15,000 peacekeepers into Liberia and more than 54,000 former combatants have been disarmed, but UN officials admit that not everyone is handing in a weapon and vast tracts of the West African country remain inaccessible to UN patrols. Officially the news is very upbeat. According to figures collated by the UN Mission in Liberia, (UNMIL), 54,525 combatants had been disarmed by 12 July. However, only 17,906 weapons were collected from them- an average of one rifle, rocket launcher, pistol or mortar round for every three fighters.