The United Nations must urgently pass a resolution on Darfur that contains five main points: The condemnation of what has been happening and a demand that it stop; The imposition of an arms embargo, A call for the safe return of displaced persons to their villages of origin; The authorisation of a high level team to investigate the war crimes and an unambiguous warning to Khartoum. This suggestion comes from the International Crisis Group, which calling for major international action to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Darfur, western Sudan. According to USAID, even if the war were to stop immediately, as many as 100,000 people will likely die in Darfur in the coming months due to the desperate humanitarian situation. Visit the ICG's campaign page to find out more about how you can help.

When water affairs ministers from countries along the Nile met recently to discuss the fate of the river, Boutros Boutros-Ghali was not in the room with them. But the lingering memory of his comment that future wars would be fought over water probably was. The former United Nations Secretary-General first made the remark in the 1980s. The notion of potential ‘water wars’ has also been explored in a book of the same title and in numerous reports. In addition, the phrase crops up repeatedly in articles that deal with water scarcity in Africa, and the possibility of conflict amongst communities desperate to ensure access to water.

The number of refugees who have fled to Chad to escape fighting in the Darfur area of western Sudan could be as high as 200,000, nearly double the official estimate of 110,000, Refugees International reports. The sharply higher figure is based on the observations of Refugees International advocates in Chad, as well as informal estimates by the United Nations.

Ntenjeru North MP Kefa Sempangi has submitted a proposal to the Government asking for the transfer of children in the internally displaced people's (IDPs) camps to Kampala until the northern war ends. He said the children should be brought to Kampala to access education, medication and other services that are lacking in the IDP camps.

The number of people in Burundi's camps for the displaced dropped by half between 2002 and 2004, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a preliminary report completed on Monday. The results of the survey, conducted between 10 March and 7 April, from which OCHA's report was produced, shows that the number of the displaced dropped from 281,000 in 2002 to 140,000 today. The survey was conducted with the Ministry for the Rehabilitation and Reintegration of Displaced and Repatriated Persons, as well as the National Commission for the Rehabilitation of Disaster-affected People.

A Zambian lawyer is seeking to abolish the death penalty in a country in which the president and human rights groups are united in their opposition to capital punishment. Kelvin Hang'andu is representing two men on death row at the country's maximum prison in Kabwe, about 150 km north of the capital, Lusaka. They were sentenced in 2000, and since then the Supreme Court has twice rejected his petition.

Peace negotiations between the government of Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) were experiencing "some difficulties" on Tuesday, a rebel spokesman told IRIN. The details of power-sharing in the two of the disputed areas - the Nuba mountains and southern Blue Nile - as well as at national level, had yet to be agreed on, said Yasir Arman, an SPLM/A spokesman.

Riots erupted for a second day on Wednesday in the northern Nigerian city of Kano, where Muslim youths defied a huge security operation and launched attacks on the Christian minority to avenge a massacre of Muslims. Doctors and mortuary personnel at Kano General Hospital confirmed that the death toll had risen to 15, as gangs targeted Christians in reprisal for a May 2 massacre by a Christian ethnic militia on the mainly Muslim market town of Yelwa, in central Nigeria, which left more than 300 dead.

Calling for "African solutions to African problems", a group of religious organisations meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, recommended on Tuesday the use of traditional methods to resolve conflicts in the Great Lakes region. The recommendation was among several made at the end of a two-day workshop organised by the Fellowship of Christian Councils and Churches in the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa, where the group adopted a position paper ahead of a planned UN and African Union (AU) international conference on the Great Lakes.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone on June 3 will begin its trials of individuals accused of crimes committed during the country's 10-year civil war, with a joint trial of three former leaders of Sierra Leone's civilian militia, the Civil Defense Forces, the court announced. Moinina Fofana, Allieu Kondewa and former Internal Affairs Minister Sam Hinga Norman will face eight counts that include unlawful killing, physical violence, mental suffering, terrorizing civilians and using child soldiers.

They say “the truth is the first casualty of war”. But how do we communicate the truth? Whose truth? That of the victor or that of the vanquished? Who wins and who loses? In this era of multi-media revolution there are as many truths as there are terrestrial TV and satellite stations, radio stations, whether analogue, digital or internet based. The print media no longer has a monopoly of the printed word due to saturation coverage of all issues from all kinds of angles on the Internet!

Whichever angle you look at it war is an unpleasant business but the global reach of the media now brings it home to us more graphically. Our choice of sources now depends on how much we can take without vomiting. Consequently, other rivals have broken the sanitised rendition of the breakdown in humanity that war represents brought to us by the previously hegemonic Western media. What the CNN or BBC will not broadcast or air can be brought to you by other means.

Al Jazeera has now become a major source of news for the majority of the world who do not speak Arabic. It goes beyond hypocritical western sensibilities in covering Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other matters concerning its core constituency in the Middle East and, by extension, the Muslim world.

Without Al Jazeera both the US and British governments and their largely loyal media would have continued to cover up the atrocities being committed against Iraqis in the name of freedom, democracy and liberation by the Anglo-American occupying forces.

The same Western governments who considered the arrival of Al Jazeera, a few years ago, as a dawn of a new oasis for freedom of expression, pluralism and democratisation in the despotic Middle East now wish the station would just shut down. That’s why the US forces have bombed its offices in Iraq, and in Afghanistan before that, in calculated 'mistakes'. A number of its journalists have been harassed and some are being held in illegal detentions as Al Qaeda suspects.

The tragedy in Iraq was foretold but the militaristic ‘shock and awe’ lunatic right that have seized power by an electoral coup in Bush's Washington were too convinced of their invincibility to listen to anybody or consider the legality and morality of their mass murdering enterprise. Now that the predicted tragedy is staring them in the face in the most gruesome way, instead of doing the decent thing by saying: ‘We are sorry, we miscalculated and misjudged everything’ and showing some remorse, they are seeking cover up under all kinds of excuses without giving convincing explanations.

Bush managed to talk about the gross abuse of Iraqi prisoners of war without saying sorry, not that it would have amounted to much, but he still could not bring himself to say it. The Emperor cannot be wrong. The British are still investigating and trying to prove that the pictures of its soldiers humiliating Iraqis are fake.

The saga is thanks to the doggedness of The Mirror of London that broke the silence and has valiantly refused to be silenced on the atrocities. The more Blair dodged the issues, the deeper it delved and found that whatever has been revealed so far is the tip of the iceberg of shameful conduct by the two occupying powers, both of whom claim to be lecturers in democracy, human rights and freedom to the rest of the world.

They even tried to brand the publication of the pictures as unpatriotic and endangering the lives of British soldiers! So much for the obligation of journalists to inform, educate and entertain in a democracy.

The British are deluded by their own self-image of being ‘good guys’ who may fight with their American cousins but not like them. Iraq is showing us that this is a distinction without a difference. Despite their history of fighting the Irish, violations of the rights of peoples in the colonies from Africa through Asia to the Middle East, massacre of anti-colonial resistance fighters like the Mau Mau of Kenya and many other atrocities, they still believe that their soldiers do not do bad things!

War dehumanises both victor and vanquished. The violation of the humanity of any person diminishes the humanity in us all. However, Western leaders try to shield their peoples from their cruel acts abroad through sanitised media and doctored vocabulary. So occupation is dressed up as “liberation”, torture is called “abuse” and resistance fighters demonised as “terrorists”, “insurgents” or “foreign fighters” without thinking twice that the Anglo-American occupiers are not Iraqis! They think they own the world and the rest of humanity are interlopers! That is why you hear more about American or British deaths but little about that of the Iraqis.

But more importantly they are careful not to show their people that war is about death, gruesome death. Also, the Western media refrains from showing the irrational violence of war when Western lives are involved. It is all right to show pictures of humiliated Iraqis or the routinely demeaning humanitarian NGO appeals for one African conflict or the other but somehow their audience cannot stomach seeing their kind being brutalised, dying or humiliated.

What kind of peace and security can the world hope to achieve if the destiny of the overwhelming majority of the world who are not Westerners is to be humiliated?

* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General Secretary of the Global Pan African Movement, based in Kampala, Uganda and also Director of Justice Africa, based in London.

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Jere Maluk's fading memories of home are riddled with scars of war. Under the twilight gleaming through the window of his austere Cairo flat, he murmurs how his once serene village of Juba in southern Sudan began to crack under the pressure of civil warfare.One day, it shattered. "The rebels started to circle the town from three directions," he says.

By the time Mandela made way for Thabo Mbeki, the ‘swart gevaar’ of the apartheid government had been transformed into the ‘roi gevaar’ of a capital-friendly ANC government. The spectre of the 'ultra left' all of a sudden loomed large on the horizon of South Africa's new democracy. After an initial spurt of expulsions, a climate of hostility towards any radical critique of ANC policy both within the ANC and the Alliance more generally took hold. A veil of silence and fear descended. As a result of the political crackdown and the accompanying demobilisation of South Africa's previously dynamic civic movement a political vacuum was created. The space was quickly filled by the formation of new social movements as the cumulative effects of neo-liberalism forced the regrouping of poor communities alongside those political activists who remained faithful to the tenets and imagination of the liberation movement.

The displacement of the local population due to mining activities, high poverty and inflation indices and a process of direct capital accumulation by the emerging economic and political ruling class indicates that the East of Angola is being transformed into a zone of potential future conflicts with unimaginable consequences, besides the aggravation of the socio-economic situation. This is according to the conclusion of a report on the region from the Campaign for Democratic Angola.

As government officials and civil society representatives meet in Entebbe, Uganda, on 10 and 11 May to discuss the death penalty in Commonwealth African countries, Amnesty International welcomed positive action across Africa to abolish capital punishment. About half of the countries in Africa no longer execute convicted prisoners. In 1990, only Cape Verde had no provision for capital punishment in its legislation. By 2002, 10 countries in Africa had de jure abolished the death penalty, while 10 others had de facto abolished it.

Despite hopes raised by the ceasefire signed in October 2002, Somalis continue to flee a war which has continued for over ten years. Some 375,000 people are internally displaced, about five per cent of the population of a country which has been in a state of collapse longer than any other. Internally displaced people (IDPs) in Somalia are the most vulnerable of the vulnerable as they have lost all their assets and are subject to multiple human rights violations. They lack access to protection from clan affiliation; the de facto authorities throughout Somalia do not protect them and often divert humanitarian assistance. Most displaced are from southern minority groups and continue to suffer political and economic discrimination.

This study explores how education in situations of post-conflict emergency can be established and maintained as a vital psychological support to children and communities. Specifically, the study investigates how education for refugee children emerged and developed after the genocide in Rwanda caused hundreds of thousands to flee to neighbouring countries. The focus of the study is Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1994 and 1996.

Italian NGO Cooperazione Internationale (COOPI) has embarked on a project to improve the socio-cultural image of a group of the minority Batwa people in the Central African Republic. The coordinator of the project, Ilaria Firmian, said that the EU-funded project was aimed at reinforcing activities to fight discrimination of the Aka - a sub-group of the Batwa community, commonly referred to as "Pygmies" - in the southwestern province of Lobaye.

A total of 7,500 people displaced from their home's following a murderous attack by Christian militiamen on the mainly Muslim town of Yelwa in central Nigeria have been evacuated and put in the care of the Nigerian Red Cross, officials said on Monday. According to the Red Cross, the attack on 2 May by men from the mainly Christian Tarok tribe resulted in the death of more than 600 people. The victims of the massacre and those who fled Yelwa afterwards were mainly people from the Hausa and Fulani ethnic groups with roots in the north of the country.

Sudanese refugees are on the move in two host countries, Chad and Uganda, because of attacks from their enemies or the fear of such attacks, the United Nations refugee agency said. More than 31,000 Sudanese refugees were displaced from their settlements in northern Uganda because of 30 raids in the last three months by rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said. Since 6 May, UNHCR said, it has moved 52,444 refugees from the area of the Chadian border with Sudan to camps further inside Chad, while another 7,000 refugees had arrived at the camps on their own in their flight from Sudan's Janjaweed militia, which has committed massacres, rapes, looting and flattening of villages in the western Darfur region of Sudan.