This year is the 10th Anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda. An international campaign is underway to mobilise to mark this anniversary - "REMEMBERING RWANDA". As our contribution to this campaign, we will be featuring this special section called Remembering Rwanda. We will also be publishing a special issue on Rwanda in April 2004 that will contain originally commissioned editorials covering key issues relating to Rwanda and the genocide.

Get involved! Organise an event in your institution, town, village or city. Send us information ([email protected]) about what you are doing to commemorate the anniversary and to provide solidarity to the rebuilding of Rwanda.

Declaring it is not enough to focus solely on the humanitarian dimension of refugee problems, UN refugee agency chief Ruud Lubbers outlined a range of initiatives aimed at finding lasting solutions for the world's displaced. Ensuring a more comprehensive, predictable and effective response to refugee situations requires that their economic, social and political dimensions also be considered. UNHCR and a host of other partners – including the UN Development Programme and the World Bank – have developed a "Framework for Durable Solutions" which is already being implemented through specific projects in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Zambia.

In Johannesburg, the Anti-War Coalition (AWC) will be joining masses of people across the world by holding a march against wars and occupations and a “Festival of life against wars and occupation”. The gathering will take place on March 20. More information is available through the link below.

A proposed Refugees Bill envisages to accord refugees a right to employment in Kenya, Vice-President Moody Awori said. Awori said if the Bill is enacted into law, refugees will be guaranteed access to housing, health care and education. The V-P was speaking in Kericho during the opening of an international conference on debt burden cancellation and the plight of refugees in developing countries. The V-P said solutions to the refugee crisis lay in the restoration of peace and stability in war-torn countries.

An African contingent will join an anti-war march in London on 20 March. Click on the link for more information.

The trafficking and the illicit trade in small arms has marred Africa for decades. Various national, regional and international organisations are working hard to halt this problem. The United Nations estimates that there are more than 500 million light weapons in circulation around the world. This is surely a serious cause for concern as peace and security are the fundamental prerequisites for social and economic prosperity. Millions of people in Africa have been killed while multitudes have become refugees and internally displaced, writes Khulani Qoma.

"The government of Sudan has made no progress to ensure the protection of civilians caught up in the conflict in Darfur," Amnesty International said this week. Scores of civilians have reportedly been killed and dozens of villages burnt by the government-backed Janjiwid militias over the last few weeks.
"This is not a situation where the central government has lost control. Men, women and children are being killed and villages are burnt and looted because the central government is allowing militias aligned to it to pursue what amounts to a strategy of forced displacement through the destruction of homes and livelihood of the farming populations of the region," Amnesty International said.

Chadian troops have successfully crossed into Darfur, western Sudan, to rescue cattle stolen by Sudanese militias known as Janjawid, according to UN sources. In the last couple of days, Chadian soldiers had crossed into Gogei, Western Darfur, to collect the cattle, following an agreement signed last week between presidents Idriss Deby of Chad and Umar al-Bashir of Sudan, sources told IRIN. The agreement allowed Chadian soldiers to cross into Sudanese territory to chase away "rebels", but was being used to chase away Janjawid militias, IRIN was told. On both sides of the largely unguarded 1,350-km border between the two countries, the military presence has reportedly increased in recent days.

Political tension in Ivory Coast has intensified after the ruling party accused opposition forces of plotting a coup with rebels. But a senior official of the opposition Democratic Party (PDCI) has firmly denied the allegations.

Lack of confidence in Rwanda's Gacaca criminal justice system is holding back more than 20,000 refugees who fled the country 10 years ago from returning home. Gacaca is the traditional justice system that was reactivated by the Rwanda government to cope with the huge numbers of people accused of involvement in the 1994 genocide in which an estimated 800,000 people were killed.

When the new Pan-African Parliament is inaugurated in Ethiopia next week, it will confront a host of challenging issues - not least the role of mercenaries in Africa. “Mercenaries are now topical. They are in the news,” Frene Ginwala, the Speaker of South Africa's National Assembly, told journalists in Johannesburg on Friday. Ginwala was referring to the 79 suspected mercenaries who were arrested in Zimbabwe and the oil-rich West African nation of Equatorial Guinea this week. Along with four of her colleagues in the legislature, the speaker will represent South Africa in the Pan-African Parliament (PAP), which is to hold its first session from March 15 to 20 in Addis Ababa.

The author is a political historian and Ethiopian diplomat who was actively involved in the mediation processes in Somalia. Here he has written a comprehensive study of the disintegration of the central organs of the Somali state, which led to Somalia commonly being referred to as a 'failed state'; and the civil strife and the search for peace between 1990 and 2001.

While a United Nations-backed war crimes court opened with much fanfare in Sierra Leone last week, human rights activists in Liberia are calling for their own war crimes tribunal. The two conflicts, which both saw many child soldiers involved, were intertwined, and former Liberian President Charles Taylor has been indicted by the court in Sierra Leone. But Nigeria, where he is living in exile, has refused to hand him over, saying it offered him a safe haven to stop the bloodshed.

Nigerian troops have denied a claim by an activist group that they opened fire last week on unarmed villagers near the southern oil town of Warri, killing at least 51 people, hours after a soldier was killed in a clash with an armed gang. The Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC) group said in a statement on Saturday that 10 women, 19 children and 20 men were initially counted dead in the alleged 9 March dawn attack on Fenegbene by members of a special military task force stationed in the volatile region.

Lawmakers in the East African Legislative Assembly have called on government to abide by Parliament's resolution, which declared the northern Uganda a disaster area. Addressing a news briefing on Friday at Parliament, the Legislators from Uganda read a statement signed by their counterparts from Kenya and Tanzania. They said that declaring the areas that have borne the brunt of the Kony-led insurgency since 1988 would lead to intervention from the international community.

The successful candidate will work with the project head on a research project aimed at contributing towards the implementation of the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (Palermo Convention) in the SADC region and at supporting SADC with the implementation of the SADC Protocol against Corruption through applied policy research.

The Ugandan government has announced plans to reduce the number of camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the northern district of Lira and instead concentrate the people in larger camps to minimise their risk of being attacked by rebels. Humanitarian workers, however, fear that the move could worsen the humanitarian situation in the area, owing to the more grim living conditions that are likely to be found in larger camps.

After years of civil war, thousands of West Africa's refugees are now streaming home through a recently-opened route between western Liberia and southern Sierra Leone to embrace peace prospects in their homelands. At a meeting on voluntary repatriation and sustainable reintegration in Africa earlier this week, UNHCR identified Liberia and Sierra Leone as two West African countries where large-scale refugee returns have been or could soon be taking place, in view of ongoing peace initiatives.

Since the 1980s, the conflict ravaging Sudan has generated the world's largest internally displaced population. An estimated four million people have fled their homes to escape fighting between government troops, the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and several smaller militia groups. While peace talks between the two main warring parties have progressed since they started in July 2002, one of the worst crises in Africa has been unfolding in Darfur, western Sudan.

After more than 30 years in exile, an estimated 1,700 Eritrean refugees left their camps in eastern Sudan to return home to Eritrea this week, in the biggest return convoy this year. On Wednesday, a convoy of 58 passenger buses and more than 30 luggage trucks carrying 1,770 refugees and their belongings crossed into Eritrea under the escort of officials from Sudan and the UN refugee agency (UNHCR).