Talk Elections

Nigeria religious riots 'kill scores' in Jos

At least 149 people have been killed during two days of violence between Christian and Muslim gangs in the Nigerian city of Jos, officials say.

Mosque workers and Muslim clerics told reporters of the deaths as they prepared for a mass burial.

The death toll has not been verified independently and it is not known how many Christians have died.

The clashes broke out on Sunday and have continued since, with reports of gunfire and burning buildings.

A 24-hour curfew has been enforced in the area, which has seen several bouts of deadly violence in recent years.

At least 200 people were killed in an outbreak of fighting between Muslims and Christians in 2008, while some 1,000 died in a riot in 2001.

Violence spreading

The current violence has forced at least 3,000 people from their homes.

 Balarabe Dawud, head of the Central Mosque in Jos, told AFP news agency he had counted 192 bodies since Sunday.

Muhammad Tanko sh**ttu, a mosque worker who was helping to prepare mass burials, told Reuters he had counted 149 bodies.

"On Sunday evening we buried 19 corpses, and 52 yesterday. As of right now, there are 78 at the mosque yet to be buried," he said.

Anglican Archbishop of Jos Benjamin Kwashi told the BBC that the situation was improving in the city centre, where security forces have been deployed.

But the violence spread beyond the city boundaries on Tuesday to neighbouring areas.

Jos is in Nigeria's volatile Middle Belt - between the mainly Muslim north and the south where the majority is Christian or follows traditional religions.

Correspondents say such clashes in Nigeria are often blamed on sectarianism.

However poverty and access to resources such as land often lie at the root of the violence.

It is unclear what the trigger was for the latest bout of violence.

Plateau State spokesman Dan Manjang told the BBC's Network Africa programme there were reports that it may have started after a football match.

But he said it would be surprising if football was the reason.

Reuters quoted residents as saying the violence started after an argument over the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the 2008 clashes.

How a tiny West African country became the world's first narco state

It is the world's fifth poorest nation with no prisons and few police. Now this small west African failed state has been targeted by Colombian drug cartels, turning it into a transit hub for the cocaine trade out of Latin America and into Europe. Grant Ferrett and Ed Vulliamy tell the remarkable story of how the cocaine cavalry arrived three years ago and transformed the life of Guinea-Bissau

    * Ed Vulliamy
    * The Observer, Sunday 9 March 2008

The roads outside the X Club nightspot in Bissau, capital of the world's fifth poorest country, are cracked and pot-holed. They have not been repaired since they were torn up by the tracks of military vehicles during Guinea-Bissau's civil war of the late 1990s. But the cars that are parked outside - Porsche and Audi four-wheel drives - wouldn't look out of place in the wealthiest quarters of London.

Inside, the music is thumping Europop, a beer costs more than twice the average daily income of a dollar a day. Many of the clubbers, though, are knocking back the imported whisky, which costs up to $80 a bottle. One of the regulars points out the people who represent the various stages of the cocaine supply chain from South America via Guinea-Bissau in West Africa to the UK and the rest of Europe. 'He's a pretty big dealer, and that's one of his security guys. That guy there thinks he's big news but he's just small-time. That woman is a mule. She's been to Europe a couple of times.

Down a street of elaborate colonial-style buildings is Ana's restaurant. Beneath red-tiled roofs, giant candles flicker in the gentle, humid evening breeze - it could be mistaken for an exotic tourist destination. But 'the only visitors we get are the Colombians', sighs Ana, 'this country is being destroyed by drugs. They're everywhere. A few weeks ago, the man who used to be my gardener knocked at the door and offered to sell me 7kg of cocaine.'

Among the destitute locals are scores of wealthy, gaudy Colombian drug barons in their immodest cars, flaunting their hi-tech luxury lifestyle, with beautiful women on their arms. Outside Bissau city are exclusive Hispanic-style haciendas with wide verandahs, turquoise swimming pools and gates patrolled by armed guards.

By day, Guinea-Bissau looks like the impoverished country it is. Most people cannot afford a bus fare, never mind a four-wheel drive. There is no mains electricity. Water supplies are restricted to the wealthy few, and landmark buildings such as the presidential palace remain wrecked nine years after the end of the war. But this wreck of a country is what the UN - which declared war last week on celebrity cocaine culture - calls the continent's 'first narco-state'. West Africa has become the hub of a flow of cocaine from South America into Europe, now that other routes have become tough for the traffickers.

US drug enforcement agents report that the old cocaine channels through the Caribbean, markedly Jamaica and Panama, have become more intensively policed, forcing the Colombians to develop new routes to traffic cocaine. The increasing might of Mexico's powerful drug cartels has forced the South Americans to search for trafficking routes to Europe across the Atlantic rather than through Central America.

Moreover, the West African coast can be reached across the shortest transatlantic crossing from South America: either by plane from Colombia, with a re-fuelling stop in Brazil; or by ship from Brazil or Venezuela. The boats leaving South America travel only by night, remaining motionless by day, covered in blue tarpaulins to avoid detection from the air. The journey can be completed in four to five nights travelling this way.

Once ravaged by the transatlantic slave trade, the West African coast is again 'under attack', says the Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, who calls the impact on Africa of Europe's cocaine habit an echo of that of slavery. 'In the 19th century, Europe's hunger for slaves devastated West Africa. Two hundred years later, its growing appetite for cocaine could do the same.'

The seizure of West Africa by Colombian and other drug cartels has happened with lightning speed. Since 2003, 99 per cent of all drugs seized in Africa have been found in West Africa. Between 1998 and 2003, the total quantity of cocaine seized each year in Africa was around 600kg. But by 2006, the figure had risen five-fold and during the first nine months of last year had already reached 5.6 tonnes. The latest seizure, from a Liberian ship - Blue Atlantic - intercepted by the French navy last month, was 2.4 tonnes of pure cocaine.

But while seizure rates globally are estimated to be 46 per cent of total traffic, the amounts found in West Africa are 'the tip of the iceberg', says UNODC. Even though one recent raid in Guinea-Bissau netted 635kg of cocaine, the traffickers were thought to have still made off with a further two tonnes.

The street value of the drugs trafficked far exceeds gross national product. A quarter of all cocaine consumed in Western Europe is trafficked through West Africa, according to UNOCD, for a local wholesale value of $1.8bn and a retail value of 10 times that in Europe.

Nigerian drug gangs have always been an energetic presence on the global trafficking scene, but the target of the South American traffickers have been the 'failed states' along the Gold Coast, where poverty is extreme, where society has been ravaged by war and the institutions of state can be easily bought off - so that instead of enforcement, there is collusion. And no more so than Guinea-Bissau, whose weakness makes it a trafficker's dream prey.

In Guinea-Bissau, says the UNODC, the value of the drugs trade is greater than the national income. 'The fact of the matter,' says the Consultancy Africa Intelligence agency, is that without assistance, Guinea-Bissau is at the mercy of wealthy, well-armed and technologically advanced narcotics traffickers.'

Guinea Bissau, with a population of 1.5 million, is ranked fifth from bottom in the UN's world development index. Even its recent history is one of torment: after 13 years of bloody guerrilla conflict, it won independence from Portugal, spent the first years under a Marxist Leninist dictatorship, then 18 under João Bernardo Vieira, until he was ousted by a military rebellion. Successive crises, two wars and economic collapse brought Vieira back in 2005, with a purge of the army and deceptive stability.

The White House has singled out Guinea-Bissau as 'a warehouse refuge and transit hub for cocaine traffickers from Latin America, transporting cocaine to Western Europe. Costa says: 'When I went to Guinea-Bissau, the drug wealth was everywhere. From the air, you can see the Spanish hacienda villas, and the obligatory black four-wheel-drives are everywhere, with the obligatory scantily-clad girl, James Bond style. There were certain hotels I was advised not to stay in.'

A senior official at the US's Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) with a long record of fighting transatlantic drug trafficking, explained how and why the capture of Guinea-Bissau took place, and the trail to Europe. 'Geographically, West Africa makes sense. The logical things is for the cartels to take the shortest crossing over the ocean to West Africa, by plane - to one of the many airstrips left behind by decades of war, or by drop into the thousands of little bays - or by boat all the way. A ship can drop anchor in waters completely unmonitored, while fleets of smaller craft take the contraband ashore.

'A place like Guinea Bissau is a failed state anyway, so it's like moving into an empty house.' There is no prison in Guinea-Bissau, he says. One rusty ship patrols a coastline of 350km, and an archipelago of 82 islands. The airspace is un-patrolled. The police have few cars, no petrol, no radios, handcuffs or phones.

'You walk in, buy the services you need from the government, army and people, and take over. The cocaine can then be stored safely and shipped to Europe, either by ship to Spain or Portugal, across land via Morocco on the old cannabis trail, or directly by air using "mules".' One single flight into Amsterdam in December 2006 was carrying 32 mules carrying cocaine from Guinea-Bissau.

The official admitted 'this has happened quickly, and the response has been tardy. They're ahead of the game.' And it didn't help that most Western diplomatic presence had left Bissau during the fighting, preferring to operate from neighbouring Senegal. The US and Britain shut up shop in Bissau in 1998, the Americans only last July reopening a diplomatic office in response to the cocaine raids.

*Article stops here due to character limit*

Although much of the cocaine goes directly to Spain and Portugal, London is becoming an increasingly prominent final destination, says the official - because of the street prices the drug commands - yet Britain also has no permanent diplomatic presence in Bissau, and has not joined the Iberian countries and the EU in contributing to the latest UN plans to help the country. According to the UNODC, the UK and Spain have now overtaken America in the consumption of cocaine per head.

Guinea Bissau's cocaine Calvary began three years ago when fishermen on one island found packages of white powder washed up on the beach. They had no idea what the mysterious substance was. 'At first, they took the drug and they put it on their bodies during traditional ceremonies," recalls local journalist Alberto Dabo. 'Then they put it on their crops. All their crops died because of that drug. They even used it to mark out a football pitch'.

The real moment of truth came when two Latin Americans arrived by chartered plane, armed with $1 million in 'buyback' cash, which the locals gleefully accepted. The two men were apprehended by police, but released. 'When people found that it was cocaine and they could sell it,' says Dabo, 'some of those fishermen bought cars and built houses.'

As well as the favourable location, in Guinea Bissau the cocaine gangs have found a country where the rule of law barely exists. 'It's an easy country to be active if you're an organised crime lord,' says the deputy regional head of UNODC, Amado Philip de Andres. 'Law enforcement has literally no control for two reasons: there is no capacity and there is no equipment'.

A further development highlighted by the DEA and UNODC is that Guinea Bissau and other West African countries are being targeted by Asian and African cartels trafficking heroin across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, to the US. Last year, the DEA and police in Chicago tracked nine West Africans who had moved heroin originating in South-east Asia through various West African countries, markedly Guinea-Bissau, to the central US.

Estimates vary as to the cogency of the Colombian presence, but one observer suggests there are as many as 60 Colombian drugs traffickers in Guinea-Bissau. Colombians have bought local businesses, including factories and warehouses, and built themselves large homes protected by armed guards. They and their local hired help flaunt their liberty to operate - and the money they make from doing so.

'We can see these people walking in complete freedom. They are parading their wealth. They're showing it completely openly,' says Jamel Handem, of a coalition of civic groups called Platform GB.

Guinea-Bissau's armed forces and some politicians are thought to be deeply involved in the drugs trade. Last year, two military personnel were detained along with a civilian in a vehicle carrying 635kg of cocaine. The army secured the soldiers' release and so far there is no sign that they will face charges.

In his large, carpeted, air-conditioned office, a refrigerator humming quietly in the corner, the army spokesman, Colonel Arsenio Balde, brushes aside suggestions the incident proves the army's complicity in the drugs trade. He says the soldiers were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: 'They were on the road hitching a ride and they saw this car driving by. They asked for a ride and then this guy stopped, and later on this car was stopped and they were arrested. You don't have any evidence of high-level involvement. Just please, bring the evidence. That's what we're asking for.'

Government spokesman Pedro da Costa gives a similar response when asked if the government is involved in the drugs trade. 'I don't have any information on that,' he says, curtly. He insists the authorities are keen to tackle drugs traffickers, but don't have the resources. Like many others in Guinea-Bissau, though, he's worried that disputes over control of the trade could break out, pushing the country back to civil war. 'We're worried, of course. We're all concerned. If it's going to bring consequences to our people similar to the war of 1998-99, I think today the motivation would be different. But of course, there is a danger for the country.'

Parliamentary elections, originally scheduled for this month, have been postponed until the end of the year. The campaign could lead to heightened tension between political groups, and provide more scope for corruption. 'One of the risks now is that they will have a deep penetration of dirty money into politics that will overturn everything in the country,' says Fafali Kudawo, rector of the country's first university, 'because this country is very, very fragile, and he who has money can do whatever he wants. You do not know at any given moment what will change the situation or lead the country to war or to violence'.

The UNOCD Office has drawn up a detailed plan to help Guinea-Bissau. In 2006 it suggested a possible budget of several hundred million dollars to potential donors. They refused to pay. Last year the agency came up with a far more modest programme concentrating on reform of the security services, boosting the judicial police, and building a jail. The estimated cost was $19 million. In December a donor conference in Lisbon produced pledges of $6.5m.

As though the suffocation of society by the cartels were not enough, Guinea-Bissau inevitably suffers from a proliferation of addiction among its own people. 'Foot soldiers are paid in kind,' says Antonio Maria Costa, 'and whatever is left behind is sold domestically.' With addicts hidden away in villages, many still believe that their hallucinations are the result of evil spirits.

When United Nations workers went to the country's only excuse for a rehabilitation unit in a mangrove swamp 30km from the capital, they found a man called Bubacar Gano, who calls himself 'the first man to smoke pedra' - as crack cocaine is known in the country. He recalls the fishing boat that lost its load in the sea in 2005, saying: 'Most of the locals who found the packages had no idea what it was or what to do with it. But I knew. After a while I became crazy and aggressive. But it is a difficult thing to stop smoking pedra.'

· Grant Ferrett is a BBC corrrespondent who has worked extensively in Africa.
Guinea-Bissau factfile

· Sandwiched between Senegal and Guinea-Conakry, Guinea-Bissau is a tiny wedge of land, largely composed of mangrove swamps and islets, and an archipelago of 90 islands.

· Colonised in the 16th century, it broke away from Portuguese control in 1974 after a 12-year struggle for independence. During the Eighties and Nineties, the presidency of João Bernardo Vieira brought a measure of stability to the country but little development.

· The capital, Bissau, remains hazardous. Unexploded ordnance continues to be found, even though it was declared a 'mine-free' zone in 2006. New mines were laid recently by rebels fighting over the Casamance area to the north.

· Guinea-Bissau's roaring drugs trade sees an estimated one tonne of pure Colombian cocaine a day leave the country, most of it en route to Europe.

Thursday, July 23, 2009
Guinea-Bissau as Narco-State
On any other continent, the tit-for-tat killings of the president and head of the military in what is suspected to be a rivalry over revenues from drug trafficking would have captured the world's imagination. But when the country in question is Guinea-Bissau -- a tiny, obscure, former Portugese colony on the west coast of Africa -- those remarkable events barely raise an eyebrow.

Yesterday, the International Crisis Group called for international support and intervention to help the political elites in Guinea-Bissau stand up to the military and return to the path of democracy. Just prior to the March 2009 killings of President João Bernardo Vieira and Gen. Tagme Na Waie, the country conducted a successful round of parliamentary elections. But as the ICG points out, "the democratic process cannot cope with the rule of the gun."

Furthermore:


Since the return to multi-party rule in 1994, no president has successfully completed the constitutionally mandated five-year term. Gen. Tagme is the third chief of defense staff to be assassinated in nine years.

Given that Guinea-Bissau has no natural resources to speak of and makes most of its foreign exchange from exporting ground nuts, one would wonder what all the rivalry is about. In a word: cocaine.

Although the ICG's report glosses over the involvement of Guinea-Bissau in the international drug trade, other reports detail how Colombian traffickers have moved in en masse, transforming the landscape with a string of coastal McMansions, fleets of expensive cars, flashy nightclubs and of course, a lot of high-caliber firepower. (See Joe Kirschke's WPR series, The Coke Coast: Part I here, Part II here.)

The U.K.'s Guardian quoted a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Agency as saying:

"A place like Guinea Bissau is a failed state anyway, so it's like moving into an empty house." There is no prison in Guinea-Bissau, he says. One rusty ship patrols a coastline of 350km, and an archipelago of 82 islands. The airspace is un-patrolled. The police have few cars, no petrol, no radios, handcuffs or phones.

"You walk in, buy the services you need from the government, army and people, and take over. The cocaine can then be stored safely and shipped to Europe, either by ship to Spain or Portugal, across land via Morocco on the old cannabis trail, or directly by air using 'mules.'" One single flight into Amsterdam in December 2006 was carrying 32 mules carrying cocaine from Guinea-Bissau.

Aside from cocaine traffickers, a place like Guinea-Bissau also attracts groups with ties to militants and terrorists. It is suspected that al-Qaida took advantage of the chaos in Liberia in the late 1990s to launder money and trade in diamonds, in order to raise cash for the 2001 attacks in the United States. Likewise there is evidence, as suggested in this remarkable report from Marco Vernaschi, that drug profits from West Africa are being used to support current Hezbollah and al-Qaida operations throughout the world.

As new Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Johnnie Carson casts about for interesting projects on the continent, he might consider looking into Guinea-Bissau. The problem is that in order for a country to ask for help, someone needs to be in charge. But for the traffickers, smugglers and money-launderers, the current situation of near-anarchy fits them to a tee.

Human cost of mining in DR Congo

  By Karen Allen
BBC News, South Kivu

It was midnight when Elise and her husband were woken by armed men in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Soldiers of DR Congo's National Army burst into their shack, sent the husband into another room, and then raped the mother of five at gunpoint.

"They put their guns on my chest and said: 'Don't talk, don't cry, don't complain'… then they started to rape me," she said.

The perpetrators were not the feared militia of the FDLR, who are currently the focus of a major military operation in South Kivu.

They were from the FARDC - the National Army that now controls this area in eastern DR Congo.

It is an area carpeted with minerals such as coltan and cassiterite, which are used in the production of consumer durables and gadgets sold in the rich world.

But people are now beginning to ask: what is the human cost of a mobile phone?

Scarred for life

In Shabunda territory, where Elise was attacked, there have been 112 rapes reported since April, when the military operation started.

These official figures are almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg, because most sexual crimes go unreported here.

Since 2006 there have been 2,883 recorded rapes in the Shabunda territory.

Many of the women have not only been sexually violated but physically scarred for life.

And Shabunda is just one territory out of eight in the province of South Kivu - a tiny pin-prick in this vast country.

"Sexual attacks peak when there's fighting," said Shabunda-based human rights activist Papy Bwalinga Kashama.

"The reason the military and militia are fighting is to control the mines," he said.

Civilians get caught in the middle. Control the men with guns who guard and earn tax from the mines, he argued, and you reduce the terrible violations endured by women.

It may sound simplistic, but he has a point.

Predatory militias

In the mining area of Nyabembe, rusting pieces of mining machinery poke out from a thick layer of grass.

They reflect a time in the mid-1970s, when commercial mining was carried out in this area - a two-and-a-half hour motorbike ride from the town of Lulingu.

Five years of civil war, followed by protracted skirmishes with the militia, saw those operations move out and freelance miners move in.

These men are now exposed to predatory militias and also the military who demand a cut from what they dig.

When they are not exacting local taxes, the gunmen move into the village and terrify the local population - stealing, killing and raping.

"They take what they want, even our women, and there is nothing we can do about it," sighed Simon, a young teacher who has swapped his school books for a shovel, because it is the only way to make a living.

Blood on their hands?

Global electronics and metals giants now face uncomfortable questions: Are they inadvertently fuelling the conflict in eastern DR Congo? Are they buttressing a market by sourcing supplies from militarised zones (a practice that is not illegal but ethically questionable)?

"There is nowhere and no-one we won't buy from," said Masumbuko Moari, who represents middlemen who supply to the big exporters.

He laughed when I suggested they might have blood on their hands as a result of buying from the men with guns.

"That's a political issue," he said, and our conversation ended.

With mining being the only game in town, radical change is bound to be resisted.

And that is the argument that international purchasers of minerals use, to justify their trade: so many jobs depend on it.

'Abnormal situation'

During a recent visit to South Kivu, DR Congo's Prime Minister Adolphe Muzito admitted to the BBC that there was a genuine problem about militarised mining.

"We want people and companies to be able to work in good conditions," he said. "Once the environment improves, the army won't be in a position to exploit the mines.

"It's an abnormal situation at the moment because the government doesn't have full control."

The Congolese government faces international pressure to address military exploitation of DR Congo's mines.

It claims to control 80% of the mines but if you are prepared to ride by motorbike for a few hours, or trek through the forests on foot, it is not hard to find mines in the hands of men with guns.

Under the wire

During US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent visit to the country, grand statements were made to get the military out of the mines, but change requires clear political will.

"We have to destroy the commercial circus of the mines, by reasserting the control of the state," said Mabolia Yenga, a mines trouble-shooter who advises DR Congo's ministry of mines.

Commercialising the mining sector is not a magic bullet, but it might be a start if the big operators are closely watched.

Mr Yenga believes that for minerals like coltan and cassiterite, a process of certification to ensure the mining does not fund violence - such as with the Kimberley process for diamonds - is long overdue.

But such a process would require input from DR Congo's neighbours, which act as transit points for illicit exports.

Neighbours such as Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda have long been accused of benefiting from DR Congo's mines, operating "under the wire" and gaining from the country's instability.

The Congolese government wants to invite mining companies back in and use the tax revenues from mining to rebuild this shattered country.

It is a hard message to sell to a population which has seen virtually no infrastructural growth from its mineral riches - simply war.

But it may be a small step to making mining more transparent in DR Congo. It may also help to ensure that some of the 1.8bn mobile phones in the world are a little "cleaner".

Cell phone minerals fuel deadly Congo conflict
Sales of coltan, used in cell phones, fund rebel groups that continue brutalizing eastern Congo.

GOMA, eastern Congo and NAIROBI, Kenya — Last year was a terrible one for the people of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as it was marked — once again — by murder, rape, violence and abuse on a horrific scale.

In that respect it was much like the year before, and the one before that. Some aid groups (International Rescue Committee to be precise) estimate that over 5 million people have died since 1998, mostly from disease and malnutrition.

The seemingly endless and faraway nature of the wars in Congo make them easy to ignore.

Until, that is, you realize that the internet-enabled smart phone beeping in your pocket, or the handheld games console that whiles away dull hours contain inside them little pieces of eastern Congo.

Coltan is one of the minerals, including tin, gold and diamonds, dug from the muddy hillsides of eastern Congo by miners working in slave-like conditions.

Profits from the sale of Congo's minerals not only fuel the fight, they may be the reason for the continuing conflict, according to the U.S.-based advocacy group Enough, in a report published this month.

“Contrary to critics who argue that the militarization of mining in eastern Congo is purely symptomatic of a dysfunctional security sector and poor governance, conflict minerals are both a cause and consequence of Congo’s dilapidated state apparatus,” wrote researchers David Sullivan and Noel Atama.

Last year a United Nations-backed offensive was launched to clear out a brutal Hutu rebel group, the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), some of whose leaders are blamed for Rwanda's 1994 genocide.

The offensive, called Kimia II, has not succeeded and this month Enough warned that, “the pursuit of mineral resources by armed elements on all sides of the conflict has only accelerated.”

Late last year a U.N. group of experts revealed just how the international minerals trade fueled the fighting in eastern Congo but human rights abuse and resource exploitation in Congo have gone hand in hand for hundreds of years. In the 19th century, Belgium’s King Leopold annexed the entire country to steal its ivory and rubber and brutalized the people in the process. His emissaries would kill reluctant workers and hack off their hands to prove bullets weren't being wasted.

With the abrupt end of colonialism half a century ago, the foreign white exploiters were replaced by a rapacious black elite. For decades President Mobutu Sese Seko funded his dictatorship by treating the country’s treasure trove of raw materials as a personal piggy bank. When his rule imploded, a fight for resources erupted that continues, fragmented and confusing, to this day.

The Enough report sums up eastern Congo's reality simply: “With only a few guns and shovels, local warlords can establish themselves as a group that must be reckoned with, financing their own growth into a militia powerful enough to demand a seat at the table in negotiations and eventually a position in the army — from where they can continue to profit from the minerals trade.”

Integration into the national army (the Armed Forces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, or FARDC) is the aim of many of the rebels because as government soldiers they can continue their activities with virtual impunity.

When rebel leader Laurent Nkunda was arrested last January, thousands of his fighters simply got new uniforms and carried on as before. In fact Nkunda's former rebels of the National Congress for the Defence of the People (CNDP) since their integration into the Congo army have expanded their control over minerals and resources, according to the Enough report, U.N. experts and observers on the ground in eastern Congo.

“They didn’t integrate into the army, they took it over and now control huge parts of [the region],” a former diplomat told GlobalPost during a recent visit to Goma.

As dawn breaks in eastern Congo, clunky childlike wooden bicycles called "chukudus" careen down a dirt road one after the other loaded with sacks of "makala" (charcoal).

Their riders grin at their breakneck speed as they hurtle towards the city of Goma and the coal dust-covered market where the sacks sell for up to $35 each.

Charcoal sales bring in an estimated $30 million a year for armed groups that control the trade (including both the rebel FDLR and the national army) profiting from the exploitation of Congo’s impressive forests. That translates into a lot of guns and bullets and is reason
enough to keep fighting.

Another day and another misty Congolese dawn breaks over a landscape of muddy pits and stony hillsides where scores of men in ragged clothes, clutching little sacks pick through rocks by hand looking for lumps of dull gray coltan. The men who control the mine stand watch, AK47 rifles in hand, highlighting the coercive nature of the trade.

Dirty sacks full of the mineral are transported to towns such as Goma where "comptoirs" or trading houses prepare the minerals for sale to regional middlemen. From there the coltan enters the world market with multinational companies turning a blind eye to question marks over the minerals’ origins.

Charcoal finds its market among the benighted people themselves: The poorest have no option but to use this cheap fuel to cook food and boil water. At least that was the case until recently when the rangers in charge of protecting the wildlife of Virunga National Park introduced biomass briquettes as an alternative in a bid to remove the market.

But no one pretends that gold, tin or coltan finds its end users in Congo. Instead these minerals are worth fighting, killing, enslaving and raping for because rich foreign consumers want them.

As a recent review of a decade of resource exploitation in Congo published by Global Witness stated: “The illicit exploitation of natural resources in [Congo], and the accompanying serious human rights abuses, would not have taken place on such a large scale if there had not been customers willing to trade in these resources.”

And, of course, Western consumers eager to buy cell phones and other electronic gadgets that are made with the resources from them.

Violence Grips South Sudan as Vote Nears

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: December 11, 2009

DUK PADIET, Sudan — The word went out on a Friday. Chibetek was coming, with warriors and a grudge to settle.

The whole village sprang into battle mode. Boys grabbed rusty rifles, women ran to the river to hide in the water, old men stood sentry on the village outskirts, training their yellow, rheumy eyes on the vast savannahs and malarial swamps that have kept this region cut off for decades.

And when the warriors did come, the villagers said, there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, pouring through the chest-high elephant grass with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, dressed in crisp new uniforms that implied a level of military organization never seen before.

“This was no cattle raid,” said Majak Piok, a village elder.

Southern Sudan, one of the least developed and most war-haunted parts of Africa, is at a critical point, gearing up for a vote on independence that is likely to break an already volatile Sudan in two. It is the culmination of decades of civil war and an American-backed peace treaty to end it, but as the long-savored day approaches, many south Sudanese fear another devastating war is on the horizon.

More than 2,000 people have been killed this year in ethnically driven battles like the recent one in Duk Padiet. “Tribal war” is what the villagers here call it, but southern Sudanese leaders and some United Nations diplomats suspect these are not simply local grievances playing out at gunpoint.

Instead, they point to a recent influx of weapons in the area, saying it suggests that northern Sudanese officials are arming various factions — much as they have done before — in a plot to plunge the south into chaos so that the independence referendum, scheduled for 2011, will be delayed or even called off.

The northern politicians, who control the country, ardently deny these accusations, and there is no concrete proof of meddling. But the stability of Sudan, the largest country in Africa at nearly one million square miles, could be at stake.

More than two million people died during the civil war that ended with the 2005 peace agreement, and if a new north-south conflict were to erupt again it could drag in militants from Darfur, the Nuba mountains, eastern Sudan and other corners of the country.

This time, the center might not hold, many analysts say, given how combustible Sudan’s politics have become. The president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been indicted for war crimes; the nation is bracing for a contentious election in April; huge supplies of weapons continue to flow in; and militaries in the north and south are on high alert, especially in unresolved border areas.

Already in the south, villages are getting razed, children abducted and thousands of destitute civilians are streaming into refugee camps in scenes reminiscent of the Darfur conflict, which, after years of raging, is comparatively quiet. “This,” said David Gressly, the top United Nations official in southern Sudan, “is the cockpit” of violence.

He swept his hand across a map showing Jonglei State, where Duk Padiet was attacked by a renegade commander named Chibetek. Several other recent massacres have occurred in the area as well.

Cattle rustling and small-scale skirmishes have gone on for ages, Mr. Gressly said, but this year there was an unusual “ease and availability of ammunition.”

The north has a well-documented history of funneling arms to southern Sudan and pitting southerners against each other, typically along ethnic lines. And there are billions of dollars of oil in the south, which the north clearly does not want to lose.

But the Arab-dominated north is also a convenient scapegoat, and northern officials complain of being portrayed as “the bogeyman.”

Since southern Sudan was granted some autonomy in 2005, its leaders have disappointed their people in many ways, with bungled disarmament schemes and staggering corruption. Recently, $200 million earmarked for grain vanished from the south’s Finance Ministry at a time when drought and conflict-related displacement have driven more than one million southerners to the brink of famine.

The land here is unforgiving, and in places looks like a junkyard of war, with burned-out tanks and shot-down jet fighters sinking into the weeds. During the colonial period, the British carved the area into zones of influence for the few European missionaries willing to brave the rampant malaria, typhoid and unyielding heat.

The people here are strikingly different from their countrymen in the Islamic north. Most are animist or Christian, extremely tall — it’s not uncommon to meet seven-foot men — and wedded to a life revolving so closely around cows that people name children after them.

Even before Sudan was granted independence in 1956, southerners were chafing for their own country. War broke out several times, and in the late 1980s, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army emerged as the strongest, multi-ethnic guerrilla force.

But just as the S.P.L.A. was about to capture major cities, the rebels — instigated by northern politicians — violently split. Some of the worst atrocities during the civil war were south-on-south violence, like the so-called Bor Massacre in 1991, when Nuer warriors slaughtered 2,000 Dinka. It was essentially a civil war within a civil war.

Many people here say it is beginning to feel like that now.

In Duk Padiet, the ground is scarred by rings of ash from huts burned down during the attack in September. The people here are Dinka. The well-armed attackers were Nuer.

More than 160 people were killed, including local policemen, women, children, and a Somali trader and Darfurian shopkeeper buried in the same shallow grave because no one knew exactly where they were from.

Nuer leaders do not deny that Nuer warriors killed dozens. But they say the Dinka-led local government was blockading a road into Nuer areas and not allowing the Nuer access to the river.

“The Nuer felt the government was ignoring them,” said Solomon Pur, a Nuer youth leader.

In the past, these rivalries occasionally became violent, with maybe a few warriors killed on each side. But the recent attacks seem more like infantry maneuvers. In one massacre this March, 17 villages were besieged and more than 700 people killed, according to United Nations officials.

Diing Akol Diing, a county commissioner near Duk Padiet, keeps pictures of victims on his computer: Children with bullet holes in their chest. Old women curled up in pools of blood. Emaciated militia fighters in smart new camouflage.

“This is madness,” he says.

He clicks on a photograph of a dozen people wrapped in blankets, buried in a ditch.

“Mass graves?” he says. “We’ve never had mass graves.”

Guinea-Bissau leaders held in apparent coup

Army officers in Guinea-Bissau have detained their army chief and briefly arrested Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Junior, in an apparent coup attempt.

Hundreds of people poured out on to the streets to demand Mr Gomes Junior be freed. Witnesses say he was released and is now under house arrest.

Rebellion leader Gen Antonio Indjai threatened to kill the prime minister if the protests did not end.

But he later said the day's events had been a military problem, not a coup.

Portugal and France have condemned what they termed a coup, with Lisbon calling for a return to constitutional order in its former colony.

Since gaining independence from Portugal in 1974, Guinea-Bissau has suffered several coups - and last year, army officers assassinated President Joao Bernardo Vieira.

Mr Lungu confirmed Mr Scott's appointment on Wednesday: "Dr Scott will act as president of the Republic of Zambia until the country goes for a presidential by election".

Under a clause in the constitution which dictates that only those whose parents were born in Zambia can be president, Mr Scott's promotion is expected to last no longer than 90 days. "I won't run for the presidency at the election because constitutionally, I can't," he said.

At least 46 students have been killed by a suicide bomber at a school assembly in the north-eastern Nigerian town of Potiskum, police have said.

A suicide bomber dressed as a student is believed to have caused the blast at the boys' school in Yobe state .

Police suggested the militant group Boko Haram carried out the attack.

Yobe state's governor has shut all public schools around Potiskum and criticised the government for not tackling the group.

In a statement governor Ibrahim Gaidam said: "Urgent action must be taken right now to restore a fast-waning public confidence by doing whatever it takes to stop the escalating violence."

Boko Haram has targeted schools during a deadly five-year insurgency aimed at establishing an Islamic state.

Uganda plans to introduce a new anti-gay law that will withstand any legal challenge, a government minister has told the BBC.

It will not explicitly refer to homosexuality, but will rely on the penal code which prescribes a life sentence for "unnatural acts", he said.

Activists say the plan is more draconian than anti-gay legislation annulled by the courts in August.

The US and other donors cut funding to Uganda in protest against the law.

Uganda is a deeply conservative society where homosexual acts are already illegal.

New legislation against gay people will increase the government's popularity, says the BBC's Catherine Byaruhanga in the capital, Kampala.

BEIJING — When Chinese President Xi Jinping took a large government and business delegation to Tanzania on his inaugural trip abroad in March 2013, he took pains to emphasize that his country’s growing ties with Africa would benefit the people of the continent.

But even as he spoke in glowing terms about unity and cooperation, his entourage was busy buying up thousands of kilograms of illegal ivory, using the cover afforded by their official status to smuggle it home, an investigative report released Thursday alleges.

Such was the scale of the purchases that local prices in one market in the commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, doubled to $318 per pound during the president’s visit, according to “Vanishing Point: Criminality, Corruption and the Devastation of Tanzania’s Elephants,” released by the London-based Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The report says the African country has emerged as the center of a resurgent elephant poaching industry, in large part because of fast-growing demand from China, where rising wealth and corruption have fueled the illegal trade in ivory.

Tanzania, according to the report, has lost half its elephants in the past five years. Last year alone, it says, about 10,000 were killed, or nearly 30 a day.

Anti-terror measures:

    Bans publishing or broadcasting of "insulting, threatening, or inciting material", images of dead or injured people "likely to cause fear" and information that undermines security operations (this covers social media). Punishable by a fine of $55,000, a three-year jail term or both
    Terror suspects can be held for questioning for 360 days
    Limits number of refugees and asylum seekers to 150,000 - those applying for refugee status not allowed to leave camps
    Sets up National Counter-Terrorism Centre to co-ordinate security agencies' efforts
    Public officials found guilty issuing irregular IDs or allowing irregular entry into the country liable to a minimum of 15 years in jail
    Person in charge of a premises where weapons recovered may face up to 30 years in prison
    Person promoting ideology based on violence to advance political, religious or social change may face up to 14 years in jail

Anti-stripping measure:

    Person who forcibly strips someone is liable to a minimum of 10 years in prison

Moise Katumbi has two of the biggest jobs in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is the governor of Katanga, a mineral-rich province of 5.6m people roughly the size of Spain. He is chairman of TP Mazembe, one of the best-run football clubs in sub-Saharan Africa, a role that has made him very popular. And now many expect the wealthy and charismatic 50-year-old to seek an even bigger title: president.

Populous Katanga, with support from Mr Katumbi, delivered Mr Kabila his victory in 2011, but it remains a stronghold for Mr Katumbi. While he has built a national profile with his football club, Mr Katumbi has also built roads in a country infamous for its appalling infrastructure and boosted wealth for his province.

But his popularity, as well as his wealth and links to mining investors who have invested billions of dollars in the country, could make Mr Katumbi either kingmaker, or king.

“I think he’d be a good president,” says a foreign investor with operations in Katanga. He sees Mr Katumbi as a political pragmatist and can-do businessman who already has good relations with foreign and local businesses and is keen to be seen to deliver for his people.

“From an economic perspective a move towards Katumbi [as president] would be seen as positive,” says Mr Hoebeke. “If it’s a complete outsider [who took over] it would be very dangerous because you don’t really have a functioning state — it would create a huge risk for serious violence.”

Some Eritrean news outlets have reported about a military style operation in Besha Eritrea’s only profitable mining pit and a key military depot near Asmara.

[...]

The reason we think it may be Ethiopia that carried this operation is because the operation seems to be targeted to military and key regime institutions. The operation is clearly designed not to harm civilians since it was targeted on key regime sustaining economic and military targets.

The likely culprit for such operation is probably a neighboring state and Ethiopia cannot be excluded. The Eritrean regime is harboring known terrorists and Ethiopian opposition groups who are hell bent to cause destruction in Ethiopia. Besides harboring and training armed Ethiopian opposition groups the regime also holds an Ethiopian air force military hardware in its hands which it has refused to return so far.

Ethiopia has also been lobbying the United Nation to strengthen the sanction against the Eritrean regime but to no avail so far. Therefore in our analysis the precise military operation may be carried out by Ethiopia and may signal a clear policy shift when it comes to dealing with the Eritrean regime.

[...]

The Ethiopian government also is not happy with current UN passed sanction as it has no teeth at all.  Ethiopia is expecting the UN to pass a meaningful sanction before it is too late.

From what we are hearing Ethiopia’s patience may be thin enough where it has reached the breaking point if it is stretched further.

HONG KONG —It could be the beginning of the end for the illicit trade in ivory.

Last month, on a state visit to Washington, Chinese President Xi Jinping promised to stop the commercial trade in ivory in his country but gave few details about the timing and extent of such a move.

Now, a senior U.S. government official says that the Chinese ban could be in place within a year or so, with very narrow exceptions, describing it as a “huge” deal.

Such a move, conservationists say, would be a major step toward ending the poaching crisis that is decimating Africa’s elephant herds.

“This commitment goes all the way up to President Xi,” Catherine Novelli, U.S. undersecretary for economic growth, energy and the environment in the State Department, said in a telephone interview. “They have made it very clear this is what they want to do.”

But even as optimism mounts, the spotlight is turning to Hong Kong, a former British enclave that has long been a center of the global trade in wildlife trafficking.

There, authorities’ reluctance to clamp down on legal ivory traders has allowed a much larger illegal trade to flourish, conservationists say, and has established the territory as a key transit point in the smuggling of ivory from Africa into China.