IRIN-WA Weekly 275 covering 30 April-6 May 2005
CONTENTS:
TOGO: Father-son transition made official as thousands continue to flee
COTE D'IVOIRE: Ethnic fighting leaves 10,000 sleeping out, afraid to go home
SIERRA LEONE: Annan says UN peacekeepers should leave by end of 2005
CHAD-SUDAN: Twelfth camp opened for Darfur refugees
NIGER: Leading anti-slavery activist imprisoned
WEST AFRICA: Taylor will continue to destabilise region until he's tried for war crimes, US prosecutor
TOGO: Father-son transition made official as thousands continue to flee
Togo’s constitutional court officially declared Faure Gnassingbe the winner of a presidential election that the opposition says was rigged, as thousands of people continued to flee the West African nation fearing fresh violence.
“Having won the most votes, Faure Gnassingbe is proclaimed the elected president of the Republic of Togo,” Atsou Koffi Amega, the president of the constitutional court, told the scores of diplomats, cabinet ministers and other VIPs summoned for the announcement on Tuesday.
The 39-year-old was sworn in the next day, succeeding his father, Gnassingbe Eyadema, who died in February after ruling Togo for almost four decades.
With scores dead and hundreds injured during last week's pitched battles between opposition activists and security forces, thousands of Togolese people continued to flock to the safety of neighbouring countries, scared that another wave of riots and military crackdowns might follow Gnassingbe's confirmation. But there were no immediate reports of violence.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said at the end of the week that 22,600 Togolese refugees had been registered in Benin and Ghana.
Full report
COTE D IVOIRE: Ethnic fighting leaves 10,000 sleeping out, afraid to go home
Few of the 10,000 people who fled ethnic violence in this western Cote d'Ivoire town are thinking about going home, with thousands choosing to sleep out in the grounds of a local church even though they are packed together like sardines and there is little to eat.
The trouble in Duekoue erupted last week, when the Guere people in the town refused to join a strike to protest security problems that had been organised by the Dioula ethnic group.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said at least 15 people had died in the fighting that ensued, most from machete wounds, and that 8,000 to 10,000 people had been displaced.
More than 7,000 of those that fled their homes are crammed together in bleak conditions in the grounds of Duekoue's Catholic mission. ”We can’t cope with all these people,” priest Juan Ruiz told IRIN. "When it rains there just isn’t enough room for everyone.”
The cocoa-growing "Wild West" has a history of tit-for-tat killings between immigrant farmers and indigenous landowners, locked in conflict over the right to cultivate the region’s fertile cocoa plantations.
But Cote d’Ivoire’s almost three-year-old civil war, which has left the country split into a rebel-held north and government-controlled south, has exacerbated the tensions, with many landowners using the conflict as a pretext to chase immigrants off their lands.
While much-trumpeted breakthroughs have been achieved in the peace process in recent weeks, few of the displaced people in Duekoue seem to think this will make much difference to their own lives any time soon.
Full report
SIERRA LEONE: Annan says UN peacekeepers should leave by end of 2005
Sierra Leone is now calm enough to allow the UN peacekeeping mission (UNAMSIL) there to be phased out by the end of this year, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has said.
About 3,400 peacekeepers remain in the West African nation, more than three years after the official end to a brutal decade-long civil war, which shocked the world with its images of drugged-up youths hacking the arms, legs, ears and lips off civilians.
In a report published Thursday, Annan called on the UN Security Council to renew the troops' mandate for a final six months.
"The situation in the country since my last report has been calm and stable," he told the 15-nation body. "I... recommend that the draw-down of the UNAMSIL presence commence in mid-August 2005 and be essentially completed by 31 December 2005."
UNAMSIL was created in October 1999 to help restore peace to Sierra Leone. At its height, it boasted 17,000 troops and was the biggest UN peacekeeping operation in the world.
Full report
CHAD-SUDAN: Twelfth camp opened for Darfur refugees
A first group of almost 200 refugees from the fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region moved into a new twelfth camp in eastern Chad this week, that was opened by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) to ease congestion at other sites.
With some of the refugee camps in Chad beginning to run out of water a year and a half after being set up, the new Gaga camp located 60 km from Abeche, the main eastern city, has a plentiful water supply, the UNHCR said.
The camp will also ease overcrowding in the nearby Breidjing and Farchana camps, as well as provide shelter to the hundreds of families of Sudanese refugees who have stayed along the troubled desert border in hopes of a quick return home.
The UNHCR estimates 197,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to camps in the vast desert nation to escape violence in western Sudan, where pro-government forces and militias are fighting non-Arab rebels.
And because the trouble is continuing, many of the families living in isolation outside the camps have now agreed to take shelter inside Gaga camp.
Full report
NIGER: Leading anti-slavery activist imprisoned
Niger's leading anti-slavery campaigner, Ilguilas Weila, has been put in a civilian prison, a member of his family said this week.
Judicial sources said Weila and five of his colleagues had been accused of "propagating false information on slavery and attempting to raise funds illegally" by seeking money from London-based aid group Anti-Slavery International for the rehabilitation of thousands of slaves due to be released in March.
Weila, the head of prominent anti-slavery organisation Timidria, was arrested with his colleagues last week. They were held at a police station in the Niger capital Niamey until Wednesday when four were released and Weila and a colleague were transferred to prison.
"We condemn the Niger Government's treatment of Ilguilas Weila and demand his immediate and unconditional release," Mary Cunneen, the director of Anti-Slavery International, said in a statement.
"Slavery is a significant problem in Niger and we call on the government to work in cooperation with Timidria to achieve an end to this abuse," she said.
Rights groups estimate that there are at least 43,000 people enslaved in Niger, a landlocked West African country with a population of 12 million and rated as the second poorest country in the world by the UN.
Full report
WEST AFRICA: Taylor will continue to destabilise region until he's tried for war crimes, US Prosecutor
Exiled former Liberian president, Charles Taylor, will remain a threat to Guinean President Lansana Conte and the entire West Africa region until he is brought before the UN-backed Special Court in Sierra Leone and tried for war crimes, the court's chief prosecutor said.
"In early January, Charles Taylor ordered the assassination of Guinean President Lansana Conte as revenge for Conte's support of the LURD rebel faction in Liberia ...and... the effort [to kill Conte] would soon be repeated," prosecutor David Crane said in a statement.
Taylor stepped down as president of Liberia in August 2003, as rebel fighters from the main rebel group, the Liberian United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) beat a path to the capital Monrovia.Sensing another bloody siege on the beleaguered ocean capital, the US led intense international pressure for Taylor to step down and take exile in Nigeria.
But according to Crane, Taylor remains a threat to security across West Africa from his luxurious high security mansion in Calabar southeast Nigeria.
"From exile, Charles Taylor remains in contact with his political network in Liberia on a day-to-day basis. He has also mobilised his network of warlords and cronies to keep West Africa in turmoil," the former lawyer with the US Department of Defence said.
Full report
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