Twice a year, COPA holds a 5-week training workshop. This course covers diverse aspects of conflict transformation and peace building, and is aimed at building the capacity of participants, mostly from the African continent, working in related fields. The next course is scheduled for 10th May 2004 to 11th June 2004 and will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa. The purpose of this course is to assist men and women working for development, human rights, peace and justice.

Tension between regional Somali leaders may scuttle the peace talks in Kenya, mediators have warned as fighting continues in central Somalia. Some 13 people were killed and several others injured after inter-clan fighting over land and water in Hiirran region at the weekend.

Western powers are stepping up mediation to end a simmering border row between Eritrea and key American ally Ethiopia less than four years after the Horn of Africa neighbours fought a brutal border war. The latest official to ask the former foes to cool months of angry rhetoric is Britain's Minister for Africa Chris Mullin, who met Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in Addis Ababa late on Friday after talks in Eritrea and Djibouti.

As the peace process enters its final stage, the challenge on the Sudanese parties and external mediators is to prepare for a successful interim period. The final peace agreement should contain a clause committing the Government of Sudan and SPLM to peaceful resolution of the conflict in Darfur. Human rights guarantees and accountability for past human rights violations must be addressed in the peace agreement. The Sudanese must rally behind the peace process. The peace agreement will have its short-comings but signing should be regarded as just the beginning of political and civic mobilisation in Sudan. This is according to a December briefing from Justice Africa.

A large number of animals came close to extinction during the Angolan civil war. The once abundant wildlife is still under severe threat, poaching is common, laws are not enforced and there are just a few areas where the animals are secure. "Angola may lose all of its once rich biodiversity very soon if urgent action is not taken to preserve the protected areas and the endangered species. First, I was worried about the loss as a result of the war, and now as a result of the peace," Tamar Ron, UN Development Programme advisor to the Ministry of Urban Affairs and Environment, told IRIN.

In a world seemingly gone mad, it is ironic that one of the most sane and reasonable actions to come out of the Middle East recently has emanated from the government of Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan dictator long recognized as an international outlaw, says a new commentary from Foreign Policy in Focus. Libya's stunning announcement that it is giving up its nascent biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs and accepting international assistance and verification of its disarmament efforts is a small but important positive step in the struggle to curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). It would be a big mistake, however, to accept claims by the Bush administration and its supporters that it was the invasion of Iraq and other threatened uses of force against so-called "rogue states" which pursue WMD programs that led to Libya's decision to end its WMD programs.

At least 10 people died when ethnic Ijaw militants traded gunfire with government troops in Bomadi, a small town in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger delta, residents said on Friday. The clash occurred last Thursday when soldiers trailing a group of Ijaw militants surrounded the town and engaged the armed youths in a gun battle, the residents told IRIN.

Two years after the Government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations (UN) signed an agreement to establish the Special Court for Sierra Leone, Amnesty International is calling on the international community not to waver in its support for the Special Court. "16 January 2002 marked a historic development towards ending impunity for a decade of atrocities against the people of Sierra Leone," Amnesty International said. "The Special Court was established at the initiative of an African state, Sierra Leone, in agreement with the UN, to act on behalf of the entire international community to provide justice to victims of crimes against humanity and war crimes."

The purpose of Remembering Rwanda is to commemorate and learn from an event that most of the world has all but forgotten. Beginning on the morning of April 7, 1994, and for the next 100 days, a small clique of power-hungry extremists organized the systematic slaughter of three-quarters of all Rwanda's Tutsi and many thousands of its moderate Hutu. It was one of the classic genocides of the past century. Yet outside of Rwanda itself, only a small number of diaspora Rwandans and their friends seem to care if the memory of the genocide is allowed to fade away, its lessons ignored. To supporters of Remembering Rwanda, this is the world's second betrayal of Rwanda. First the world deliberately chose to abandon Rwanda to its terrible fate. Then the world chose to suppress the memory of what it had done - or failed to do - and of the hundreds of thousands of innocents who paid the price of that failure. Among all the terrible crimes that humankind seems determined to inflict on itself, the crime of genocide is the most terrible. But this crime is compounded when it is then ignored, when the memories of the victims, the survivors, the perpetrators and the betrayers, are all allowed to disappear into thin air. Remembering Rwanda is a widespread international network whose goal is to promote the commemoration in April 2004 of the 10th anniversary of the genocide so that it will not be buried again and that its lessons will not be ignored. Please click on the link below for more information, and for a Remembering Rwanda International Progress Report for December 2003.

The country's largest human rights group, the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), has been clamouring for the death penalty to be abolished for several years. Chuma Ubani, who heads the group, says this is essential to prevent further miscarriages of justice. "One of the arguments we have against the death penalty is that once the punishment is inflicted, it is final. Even if at the end of the day it is found that it was done in error, there can be no remedy," he told IPS. After coming under pressure from European parliamentarians to do away with capital punishment, the Nigerian government has initiated a countrywide debate to gauge national opinion on this matter.

A lengthy disarmament programme has wrapped up in Sierra Leone, with organisers giving themselves a pat on the back: "I think that the disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration of ex-combatants have been a success," says Francis Kaikai, Executive Secretary of the programme. Amidst the backslapping, however, there was growing discontent amongst some of the former combatants, who have been taught skills like tailoring, carpentry and masonry. They say they have not been given the specialised tools that will allow them to ply their trade. Even for those who have everything they need to earn a living, jobs are scarce.

The United Nations is meeting stiff resistance in its appointment of a special envoy to help end a border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Late last month, Lloyd Axworthy - formerly Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs - was appointed to the post with the blessing of the international community. But while Ethiopia said it was keen to work with the former minister, Eritrea rejected Axworthy on the grounds that his appointment could open the door to revisiting decisions by an independent boundary commission.

Twelve Burundians were killed when a large group of gunmen singing "Alleluia" launched a night raid on a village outside the capital, a government official said on Monday. The latest killings underscored the persistence of violence in Burundi during a visit by President Domitien Ndayizeye to Europe in search of donor funds to reward progress in ending more than a decade of civil war.

The French peacekeeping force in Cote d'Ivoire urged the government army and police to send reinforcements to help it maintain order in the troubled west of the country on Tuesday after reporting that 18 people had been killed there in two weeks of ethnic clashes. Colonel Georges Peillon, the official spokesman of the 4,000-strong French peacekeeping force, said tension was rising in villages around the town of Bangolo, 600 km northwest of the capital Abidjan, where French soldiers had found the bodies of 18 people killed in ethnic fighting since 29 December.

A group of international Non-Governmental Organisations has launched a Joint Declaration calling on the United Nations to monitor the impact on human rights of the fight against terrorism. Practices such as torture, detention without judicial review, unfair trial, criminalisation of acts in exercise of fundamental rights, and suppression of the right to association have been sharply on the rise as a result of measures taken in the fight against terrorism. The Declaration calls on the UN Commission on Human Rights at its 60th session in March/April 2004 to establish as a matter of utmost priority an independent mechanism on the question of human rights and counter-terrorism.

The United States is expanding anti-terror efforts to the remote reaches of West Africa's Sahara borders, dispatching U.S. troops and contractors to help seal the predominantly Islamic region to al-Qaida and its allies. A U.S. anti-terror team arrived Saturday in the arid, Arab-dominated Islamic republic of Mauritania, U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of State Pamela Bridgewater told reporters late Sunday during a visit here. The small team will be followed in coming months by U.S. Army experts and defence contractors, under a $100 million Bush administration anti-terror initiative for the Saharan nations of Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Niger.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, the Netherlands, has started gathering evidence of atrocities committed by LRA rebels for a possible indictment of rebel leader Joseph Kony. In what appears to be the first heavy step by the international community, the ICC is seeking documentary evidence on the 18-year long insurgency in northern Uganda.

"Saturday morning, after a night of hell under bombs, rockets and hails of bullets, I manage to get to the airport. I meet a long column of soldiers. A whole battalion, it seems to me, goes up to the front at Gikungu, East of Bujumbura. God, how young they are! Teenagers. Sad. Drawn faces. Without the fighters’ banter that is seen with other soldiers in wartime," writes Chris Harahagazwe in the latest edition of the Peace and Conflict Monitor, after spending some time in Bujumbura in July last year.

Thousands of migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa are braving cold and wet nights in Moroccan forests in the hope of getting to Europe. The forests near Rahrah are only about 30 kilometres (19 miles) from Spain and when the weather is clear, the European mainland can easily be seen from the top of a hill. But trips across the rough Mediterranean sea aboard inflatable boats are very risky. Some 4,000 migrants have drowned in the past five years trying to get into Spain.

Up to 15,000 displaced people are expected to return to their home villages in Senegal's southern Casamance province this year as a low-level insurgency that has gone on for two decades peters out, but little is being done by the international community to assist them, Refugees International said on Friday. The New York-base pressure group said over 50,000 people had been displaced from their homes as a result of a rebellion by separatist guerrillas in the narrow strip of swampy forested land bounded to the north by Gambia and to the south by Guinea-Bissau.