President Thabo Mbeki was due in Harare this week on his Mission Impossible - to try to find a solution to Zimbabwe's growing crisis. The precise nature of his mission is unclear. A senior South African official said he would try to place "back on track" talks between the ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Long-standing president Jose Eduardo dos Santos is once again firmly established at the helm of Angola's ruling MPLA after he was elected without opposition to the party's presidency. The congress, which ended last week, voted in Dos Santos by acclamation, paving the way for him to run again in national elections he has said will not be held before 2005. "Dos Santos is very firmly in the saddle," said Herman van der Linde, consultant at South Africa-based Executive Research Associates.

Opposition leaders in Sudan have warned against a bilateral peace agreement between the government and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) that does not directly address the grievances of Sudan’s marginalised northern populations. “If the peace process is a bilateral process, it will be a very temporary peace that will unravel very soon,” said Sadiq al Mahdi, leader of the Umma party which enjoys wide popular support in the violence-wracked western Darfur region.

The authorities in Madagascar remained tight-lipped on Wednesday over whether the government would seek to extradite Didier Ratsiraka from France after a court had sentenced the former president to five years in prison for his role in last year's political crisis. Ratsiraka, who fled the country at the height of the political upheaval, did not appear in court at Monday's hearing.

The United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) said on Wednesday it was talking with the authorities in neighbouring countries to prevent Liberian combatants from crossing the border with their weapons to escape disarmament. UNMIL Deputy Force commander Major General Joseph Owonibi told reporters that a delegation from the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) would arrive in Monrovia on Saturday to discuss ways of preventing weapons from crossing the border.

Swaziland's banned political parties and pro-democracy groups are conceding they may have harmed their cause by boycotting recent parliamentary elections. "If you are in the wilderness, you need all opportunities to be heard. All platforms, even government bodies, must be utilised," Ntombi Nkosi, president of the women's league of the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress (NNLC), told IRIN.

West Africa’s HIV-AIDS pandemic has often been overshadowed by the higher infection rates in southern Africa. But the WHO’s latest global HIV-AIDS update warns strongly against complacency. WHO points out that while infection rates have remained broadly stable in Sahelian countries like Mali, The Gambia and Niger, which all have prevalence rates of less than two per cent, the figures are markedly less optimistic in Cote d’Ivoire, where adult prevalence rates have been estimated at between 10 and 12 percent.

The Botswana government has denied claims by a Namibian human rights NGO that a group of Caprivian "refugees" were "abducted" from Botswana to face high treason charges in Namibia. Presidential press secretary Jeff Ramsay told IRIN on Tuesday that the group of eight Caprivians were "de facto illegal aliens" and had been lawfully deported to Namibia on 13 December.

Rival militias battled over barren desert lands in central Somalia on Tuesday in fighting that killed at least 31 people and wounded 50 others, a spokesman for one of the militias said. The violence came as the U.N. Security Council called Tuesday for the creation of a monitoring group to investigate violations of the U.N. arms embargo against Somalia and make recommendations to strengthen it.

The Washington DC-registered Herero People's Reparations Corporation has moved to US courts asking for $4 billion from the German government and several commercial corporations, among them the Deutsche Bank, SAF Marine (Woermann Lin) and Terex Corporation. They are accused of cold-bloodedly employing explicitly-sanctioned extermination, destruction of tribal culture, social organisation, medical experimentation and slavery in order to advance their common financial interests. The commercial corporations and the German colonial government formed a brutal alliance that exterminated 65,000 Hereros between 1904 and 1907.

South Africa's new rugby bosses have cancelled an independent probe into alleged racism within the Springbok team, but said a Government commission would undertake a broader inquiry into "transformation issues". An inquiry was to have been held into alleged racism, including reports that white player Geo Cronje refused to share a room with black player Quinton Davids.

The governments of Rwanda and Mozambique and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) signed a tripartite agreement on the voluntary repatriation of an estimated 900 Rwandan refugees in Mozambique. Most of the Rwandan refugees in Mozambique are women and children. Under the agreement, Rwanda will ensure the security of the refugees, while UNHCR would provide support for travel as well as help with initial resettlement for the returnees.

Fighting in the town of Gambella in western Ethiopia has left at least 21 people dead, after Ethiopian troops moved into the city over the weekend in response to the killing of seven men, including three government officials, on Saturday, allAfrica.com reports. The seven men were allegedly ambushed by members of the Anuak ethnic group. According to Ethiopian officials, the event provoked clashes between Anuak and Nuer, the largest ethnic groups in the area.

Some 300 Rwandan refugees, among them nine former combatants, have returned from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), state-owned Radio Rwanda reported on Sunday. After nearly eight years in exile, the returnees cited poor living conditions in the DRC jungles as one of the major reasons for their return home.

South Africa appears to receive the cream of African refugees seeking safe new homes, but their skills and experience go to waste, says a survey released last Thursday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the Japan International Cooperation Agency. One-third of the 90,000 refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa have some form of tertiary education. Two-thirds have a secondary certificate or equivalent and the same proportion had skilled jobs before coming to South Africa.

Impunity is a major obstacle to human rights in the Republic of Congo (ROC), the NGO l'Association panafricaine Thomas Sankara (APTS) said on Wednesday in a report published in the capital, Brazzaville. According to the report, the Congolese people, having decided in favour of multipartyism, wished to live in a political system founded on the primacy of the law and respect for human rights. However, the establishment of such a state was being prevented by the ever-growing culture of impunity.

Gambia's firebrand opposition leader Lamine Waa Juwara, who is awaiting trial on sedition charges, has been re-arrested after his bail order was revoked by a judge.

Intisar is 12 years old. She has never been to school. She used to leave peacefully on a farm with her mother and 14 siblings in rural Kass, southern Darfur, but then nomad militias arrived and started grazing their camels on her family’s land. Fighting in Darfur between Arab militias and rebel groups, which escalated in March this year, has driven an estimated 670,000 people from their homes, 70,000 of whom have fled across the border into neighbouring Chad.

Members of the Somali leaders' committee attending peace talks in Kenya say they will reject the expansion of a proposed retreat for Somali leaders, one of the leaders told IRIN on Monday. The 10-day retreat is due to begin in Mombasa on 18 December and is expected to bring together most of the Somali leaders "to give them a chance to iron out outstanding issues and chart the way forward", said James Kiboi of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) technical committee, which is steering the talks.

Newly appointed Central African Republic (CAR) Prime Minister Celestin Le Roi Gaoumbale has formed a new transitional government to replace the one of Abel Goumba who was dismissed last Thursday and has since been appointed Vice-President, the minister for communication and government spokesman, Parfait Mbay, announced on Friday on state-owned Radio Centrafrique. The new government comprises 28 ministers, including two women and six military officers.