Rwandan President Paul Kagame has accused the international community of failing to learn from the genocide. He said calls for the UN-backed court in Arusha to investigate his own troops were a deliberate confusion of issues by people employing double standards.

The signing of a wealth-sharing agreement earlier this month between Sudanese officials and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army was hailed an important step towards peace in that country. Now, hopes are growing that the accord might also spell the end of another conflict: that in northern Uganda. Since 1986, this region has been plagued by fighting between government forces and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Headed by Joseph Kony, the group says it wants to establish a new government in Uganda based on the Biblical ten commandments.

UPDF soldiers have been named among the people who are raping girls in internally displaced people's (IDPs) camps in Kitgum district, Northern Uganda. The claims were made by a group of MPs following a fact-finding visit to the district last week.They said reports showed that girls were raped by their peers, men from the camps, rebels and UPDF soldiers. However, Army spokesman Maj. Shaban Bantariza said that the report needed to be looked at critically.

As fighting and displacement of civilians intensifies in Darfur, western Sudan, Amnesty International has requested all parties to the conflict to respect international human rights and humanitarian law at all times. Massive abuses of human rights in the region are documented in a new 43-page report entitled: Sudan: Darfur: "Too many people killed for no reason". In an attempt to end the escalating armed conflict in Darfur, Sudanese government forces and government-aligned militia (the "Janjawid") are threatening the lives, liberty and property of hundreds of thousands of civilians through indiscriminate bombings, killings, torture, including rape of women and girls, arrests, abductions and forced displacement.

Since colonial times and throughout Angola's 27-year civil war, the Angolan San have been invisible, forgotten and abused suffering social exclusion, discrimination and social exploitation. The hunter-gatherer San are the original inhabitants of Southern Africa. Some 4,000 years ago they began losing land to Bantu people migrating from the north. The arrival of white settlers in the 17th century was accompanied by their dispossession, enslavement and slaughter. Today the San number roughly 100,000 across Southern Africa.

A row has broken out between the army and residents of Uganda's biggest Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) settlement, Pabbo camp, in the northern Gulu District, with the army claiming that the camp harbours rebel collaborators and the IDPs accusing the army of starting a fire which destroyed much of the camp during an operation to arrest suspects. Pabbo houses over 62,000 people fleeing Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) operations in northern Uganda. They are part of at least 1.2 million Ugandans who have been forced to take refuge in camps.

The South African Council of Churches (SACC) and apartheid victims' groups have come out in support of Archbishop Desmond Tutu's last-minute appeal to an American court to allow apartheid victims' litigation for compensation against foreign companies to go ahead. But government chief spokesperson Joel Netshitenzhe was dismissive of Tutu's appeal who said that not settling the matter (of apartheid victims) inside South Africa would have "profound implications for the future of the country, for instance for the assessment of the country risk profile, and for investment and job creation."

Zimbabwe captain Heath Streak, while urging Australia to tour his country in May to guarantee the continued success of cricket there, denied the claims of yet another former teammate who said virulent racism was entrenched in Zimbabwe's cricket structure. Writing in Wisden Cricketer magazine this month, former fast bowler Bryan Strang said Zimbabwean children were "learning first hand from coaches and policy-makers that skin colour matters" and that many in the cricket community disagreed with the "politicisation and racialisation of cricket in Zimbabwe".

There is a direct relationship between armed conflicts and the world’s 35 million displaced people. The overwhelming majority of displaced people have been forced from their homes and countries due to the direct and indirect impacts of war and conflict. Many times, it is the actual gunfire and imminent threat of death that drives them away. All too often, it is the indirect consequences of conflict, such as fear of atrocities, kidnappings, rapes, looting and other human rights violations that force them to seek refuge. And if these are not enough, conflict can result in a lack of food, health care, sanitation, education and the ability to work and provide for families, driving people to leave and seek opportunities that no longer exist in their villages and countries.

A Rwandan rebel movement based in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Forces democratiques de liberation du Rwanda (FDLR), has dismissed as unfounded reports that it had prevented some 3,000 former combatants and civilians from returning to Rwanda. "The FDLR has always supported the right of any Rwandan refugee to return freely to his homeland," Augustin Dukuze, the FDLR spokesman, said on Saturday.

Peace groups and officials from the government’s Amnesty Commission have warned that the impending probe by the International Criminal Court (ICC) into war crimes committed by Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels could make a peaceful settlement of the 18-year conflict impossible. "Certainly, this is going to make it very difficult for the LRA to stop doing what they are doing. They have already been branded ‘terrorists’, which isn’t going [to help] to easily persuade them to come," the Amnesty Commission spokesman, Moses Saku, told IRIN.

An international advocacy group has criticised Ethiopia for its continuing human rights abuses and condemned foreign donors for failing to help prevent them. Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the government "continues to deny" its citizens their basic human rights while the international community takes no action. In its 2004 World Report, the New York-based group said foreign donors who were pouring about US $1 billion into Ethiopia each year were focused on other issues.

The first intergovernmental conference on genocide to be held since 1948 ended this week in Stockholm with political fireworks when the United States was sharply criticized by an Australian diplomat. Before representatives from 55 nations, former Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans said U.S. officials had been using the conference to lobby against the International Criminal Court (ICC), the very body created to try crimes against humanity - like genocide. The United States has withdrawn from the Rome Treaty of 1998 that created the ICC. "I'm distressed to hear that the same old squeeze has been put on the national delegations all over again at this conference," Evans said. "And in the otherwise admirable declaration we have emerging from it there is no mention of the International Criminal Court...this is just indefensible."

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has taken an important step toward opening its first investigation, the Coalition for an International Criminal Court (Coalition) has said. Following the referral by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni of the situation concerning the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo announced that there is sufficient basis to "start planning for the first investigation." Several steps are required for a formal investigation to be launched. "Today's announcement by Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo is extremely important; it is now the duty of the Prosecutor to search for the truth about atrocities committed in northern Uganda," said David Donat Cattin, Legal Advisor for the International Law and Human Rights program at Parliamentarians for Global Action. "Other states facing similar situations should follow Uganda's precedent in welcoming ICC proceedings," he said.

African regional institutions are taking increasing responsibility for peacekeeping as well as for diplomatic initiatives. But both African and UN officials note that implementing fragile peace agreements will require more not less support from rich countries and from the UN system. Last week's issue of the AfricaFocus Bulletin examines this issue with a variety of background material and references to UN and African Union (AU) documents, including excerpts from recent statements and data on the current status of peacekeeping operations and plans.

Sudanese government forces bombed the Chadian side of the border town of Tine last week, killing two people as they fought rebels for control of the Sudanese half of the city, News24.com reported. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, seven explosions rocked an area close to where Sudanese refugees had been gathering. The blasts killed a man and his daughter and left 15 others injured.

Particular types of security challenges faced by states create specific opportunities for abusing the rights of citizens before the final slide into conflict, argues a paper from African Security Dialogue & Research, based in Accra, Ghana. The paper, Human Rights Abuses in Unstable States, argues that it is critical that the abuse of human rights should be contextualised in different ways to capture the different functions that such abuses play in conflict and post-conflict transitional situations.

From miles around they come, pushing wheelbarrows in the relentless heat to collect sacks of maize meal, beans and cooking oil from the U.N. food agency. The worst drought in more than a decade is sweeping through southern Africa, destroying crops, driving up food prices and leaving millions hungry - even as foreign assistance dries up, governments and humanitarian agencies say. "The current drought could be disastrous for southern Africa," Richard Lee, regional spokesman for the World Food Program, said Tuesday.

Congo's human rights minister said last Thursday that the new International Criminal Court has had "a pronounced deterrent effect" on armed groups in Congo's strife-torn northeast since prosecutors said last year that the militias could be the court's first target for a war crimes investigation.

The international community must compel leaders of the transition government to place political will behind the transition agenda, and hold Rwanda and Uganda to their commitments to support peace in Congo. In addition, a regime of individually-targeted sanctions should be developed and implemented by donor countries against Congolese political leaders and others who violate peace accords or continue participating in the plunder of Congo’s resources. These are two recommendations of a report by a delegation of human rights and peacekeeping experts from American non-governmental organisations that visited the DRC from July 25 to August 4, 2003. The report found that Congo’s transition process is complicated by: widespread impunity for atrocities perpetrated during the war; the continuing violence - and prospect of violence - in Ituri and the Kivu provinces; the flow of arms and military support that sustains militias; and the continuing presence of Congolese and foreign armed groups, primarily in the east.