Archive for the ‘AFRICA’ Category
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010
(Aug. 23) — As many as 200 women were systematically gang-raped by Rwandan and Congolese rebels over a four-day period last month less than 20 miles from a U.N. peacekeeping base in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the United Nations and aid groups reported.
The Associated Press reported that four baby boys were also raped in the attacks that began in a key mining district on July 30. U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky told reporters today the rebels blocked a key road during the raping and looting spree.
The eastern Congo is known as the “rape capital of the world” where savage mobs use sexual violence to subdue the population and vie for control of the “conflict minerals” used to make cell phones and laptops around the world.
Posted in AFRICA, Congo, Corporate (ir)responsibility, GENDER HATE, GENOCIDE, Genocide Denial, Hate Crimes, Human Rights Abuses, Human Trafficking, Rwanda, Terrorisim, United Nations, War Crimes | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
BY MIMI WHITEFIELD
Samuel Dusengiyumva, the son of a pastor and a nurse, was 13 years old in the spring of 1994, when more than 800,000 Rwandans were slaughtered in a 100-day killing spree of unthinkable proportions. His family — mother, father, siblings — was wiped out by the Rwandan genocide.
Dusengiyumva recalls being stopped with a younger brother at one of the roadblocks set up around the country.
“I tried to run with my brother but he couldn’t make it,” he says. “And they took him and killed him. I had aunties and grandfathers and they were all killed.”
Afterward, he spent a long time thinking about whether he would be “a useless person,” kill himself or “try to lead a real life.”
Dusengiyumva chose to put his life back together through education — finishing school and studying to become a lawyer — and that decision led him to his current role: country manager for a computer program that aims to put a laptop in the hands of every school-age child in Rwanda.
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Posted in AFRICA, GENOCIDE, Genocide survivors, Rwanda | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
ROBERT GERWARTH
HISTORY: The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism By David Olusoga and CasperW Erichsen Faber and Faber, 379pp. £20
IN AUGUST 2004, the German Minister for Development Aid, Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul, travelled to Namibia to apologise on behalf of the German government for a genocidal massacre that had been committed 100 years earlier.
Following the 1904 Herero uprising against colonial rule in what was then German South-West Africa, the local military commander, General Lothar von Trotha, defeated the rebellious Herero in the Battle of Waterberg and forced the several thousand survivors into the desert of Omaheke, where most of them died of starvation or thirst. A few months later, a second indigenous people, the Nama, suffered a similar fate. Over the following three years, “suspicious” Herero and Nama were interned in a concentration camp on Shark Island, where conscious neglect led to horrific death figures among the inmates. In total, up to 75,000 men and women, roughly half of the Herero and Nama populations, perished in what some historians consider the first genocide of the 20th century.
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Posted in AFRICA, BOOKS, GENOCIDE, War Crimes | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
The United Nations Security Council has extended its peacekeeping mission in Sudan’s western Darfur region for another year [until July 31, 2011].
The 15-nation council agreed unanimously on Friday to the mission’s extension, telling Unamid, the joint African Union/UN peacekeeping force, to focus primarily on protecting civilians and aid deliveries.
It also condemned a recent surge of violence in Darfur and called on the Sudanese government to stop hindering the work of Unamid.
more
Posted in AFRICA, Darfur, GENOCIDE, Human Rights Abuses, Preventing Genocide, Sudan, United Nations | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
By REUTERS
Published: July 30, 2010
A South African court ordered four white former students on Friday to pay a fine of $2,720 each for a video they made humiliating black university employees. The case has prompted bitter protests that racism remains entrenched in South Africa more than a decade after the end of apartheid-era rule. The court also imposed a six-month jail term suspended on the condition of good behavior for five years. The men had pleaded guilty to charges of illegally and deliberately injuring another person’s dignity.
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Posted in AFRICA, Hate Crimes, Hate Speech, Racism, words that wound | No Comments »
Friday, August 20th, 2010
By Sandy Williams Thursday, July 29, 2010
Bettina Peter, CNN, edition.cnn.com
United Nations (CNN)—The security situation in war-ravaged Darfur shows no sign of improvement as fighting has intensified between rebel groups and the Sudanese government, the United Nations Security Council was told Tuesday.
“We are alarmed,” U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice said after hearing the report. “This deteriorating security situation is unacceptable and it needs to be effectively addressed.”
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pointed out in his latest report that incidents of violence over recent months have surpassed bloodshed in the same time period last year by far.
more.
Posted in AFRICA, Darfur, GENOCIDE, Sudan, United Nations, War Crimes | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Bec Hamilton writes a very important dispatch from Sudan where she reports that Sudanese authorities are heavily censoring what journalists may write about South Sudan’s looming independence.
Before the elections, journalists say that the government’s main “red lines” were the publication of articles on the International Criminal Court’s case against the Sudanese president, and on the conflict in Darfur. Now though, the government has a bigger concern – the unity of the Sudanese state.
In January next year, the people of southern Sudan will have a referendum on whether they want to become an independent nation. The right to self-determination was granted to southerners in a 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the NCP and the main southern political party, the SPLM. In theory, both parties were supposed to spend the six years until the referendum making unity an attractive option.
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Posted in AFRICA, Analysis and Opinion, Bullying, Civil Rights, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Sudan, journalism | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
By REUTERS
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir returned to Sudan on Friday after defying an International Criminal Court indictment for genocide by visiting Chad, a party to the International Criminal Court and so in theory obliged to arrest him. But Chad’s president, Idriss Deby, welcomed Mr. Bashir instead, exposing the court’s key weakness: It lacks a mechanism to arrest war crimes suspects. The African Union
has told member states not to cooperate with the court, accusing it of singling out the continent for human rights violations.
Posted in AFRICA, Darfur, GENOCIDE, Sudan, War Crimes Trials | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
Written By:Hallyghan Agade/Margaret Kalekye , Posted: Thu, Jul 29, 2010
With 6 days to the referendum, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) has launched a Referendum Campaigns Monitoring Report which exposes hate mongers and use of state resources during referendum campaigns.
The report contains the findings of the KNCHR which were compiled during the campaign rallies between the 22nd May and 29th of this month where various politicians have been captured on video fanning hate speech in their campaign rallies.
MPs Bare Duale, Cyrus Jirongo and COTU secretary General Francis Atwoli are among those implicated in hate speech.
Releasing the report, KNCHR Chairperson Florence Jaoko said there was growing tension in various parts of the country in the run to the referendum.
The commission monitored over 80 referendum related events in all the regions countrywide and noted persistent issuance of threats in parts of Rift Valley and Nyanza provinces. The report identifies the most affected areas as Kuria, Molo, Aldai, Tinderet, Muhoroni, North Mugirango (Sotik/Borabu border), Kwanza and Eldoret West.
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Posted in AFRICA, Analysis and Opinion, FREEDOM OF SPEECH, Hate Speech, POLITICS | No Comments »
Saturday, July 31st, 2010
- by Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
WINDHOEK – Dr Larisa Förster’s book launch last Tuesday here invited mixed reactions as well as invoking a spontaneous discussion regarding the Ovaherero-German war of 1904-8, and reconciliation between descendants of Ovaherero victims of the wars and their German-speaking counterparts.
The book titled: Postcolonial Landscapes of Memory, How Germans and Hereros in Namibia Remember the War of 1904, which earned Forster a doctoral degree at the University of Cologne in the Federal Republic of Germany, was launched at the National Archives, attracting a decent crowd, including those campaigning for reparations from the Government of the Federal Republic Germany; historians like Dr Zed Ngavirue; German Ambassador to Namibia Egon Koschanke as well as German-speaking Namibians. Förster retraced her research trips, taking the audience along with her in this journey for about an hour, highlighting in the process the essence and content of the book, for the benefit of non-German readers as it is written in German, as well as the oral evidence she gathered during her research and the results of the research.
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Posted in AFRICA, Analysis and Opinion, BOOKS, Commemorations, GENOCIDE, History | No Comments »