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IRIN Africa | West Africa | WEST AFRICA | WEST AFRICA: IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 312 covering 7-13 January 2006 | Children, Democracy, Early Warning, Economy, Education, Environment, Food Security, Gender issues, Health, HIV AIDS, Human Rights, Natural Disasters, Peace Security, Refugees IDPs, Other | Weekly

Tuesday 21 February 2006


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IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 312 covering 7-13 January 2006

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

CONTENTS:

CHAD: Government denounces move to freeze oil account
LIBERIA: Ex-rebel official, Taylor’s former son-in-law to head new parliament
CHAD-SUDAN: Both sides express readiness to talk as tensions linger
NIGERIA-SUDAN: Worsening security, lack of progress bog down Darfur talks
NIGERIA: In overcrowded prisons, survival is a daily battle
COTE D IVOIRE: Burkina Faso nationals arrested, shot dead after attack on barracks

CHAD: Government denounces move to freeze oil account

The Chadian government has reacted angrily to Citibank’s freezing the escrow account for the country’s oil revenues - a move resulting from Chad’s recent changes to poverty reduction laws integral to a loan agreement with the World Bank.

“It is inadmissible that a country be blocked from accessing revenues generated by the sale of its own natural resources,” Chad Finance Minister Abbas Mahamat Tolli said in a communique on Friday.

The World Bank last week halted all new loans to Chad and suspended the disbursement of US $124 million already earmarked for the country, after the government scrapped key parts of a law designed to ensure that oil profits be used to help the poor.

Citibank’s action is the automatic consequence as laid out in Chad’s agreement with the World Bank, Bank spokesperson Marco Mantovanelli said on Friday.

The poverty reduction measures - including a trust fund for future generations - were required by the World Bank for support of the US $3.7-billion oil pipeline that snakes from southern Chad to a mooring buoy in the Atlantic Ocean off Cameroon.

The Chad-Cameroon oil project was touted as a model for ensuring that a country’s oil wealth be used for improving the lives of the poor. In modifying its oil revenue management law, Chad did away with the “future generations fund” and opened the way for funds destined for poverty reduction to go to state security.

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LIBERIA: Ex-rebel official, Taylor’s former son-in-law to head new parliament

Liberia's new bi-cameral legislature on Friday elected key figures from the country's violent past to head the two chambers in the country's first post-war parliament.

Representative Edwin Snowe, former son-in-law of notorious ex-president Charles Taylor was elected as Speaker of the 64-member House of Representatives.

The speaker is the third in rank in the government hierarchy after the president and vice president.

Senator Isaac Nyanebo, a former advisor and Secretary General of the rebel group, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, which battled the government from 1999 to 2003, was elected Senate President Pro Tempore.

Snowe is one of four newly elected parliamentarians who are on a UN Security Council Travel Ban and Asset Freeze List for "on-going ties with Charles Taylor.”

A fortnight ago, the UN enforced the ban on Snowe and three of his colleagues - Taylor’s former wife and two former armed commanders – by stopping them from travelling to Ghana to attend a World Bank-sponsored training session for members of Liberia's new parliament.

Meanwhile, Liberia's exiting transitional parliament last week passed a law enabling the country's incoming elected government to carry out a financial audit of the transitional government, which has been plagued with corruption.

Full report

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CHAD-SUDAN: Both sides express readiness to talk as tensions linger

Sudan joined Chad on Tuesday in offering to open talks to defuse mounting tension along their joint border, but the two sides still appeared far apart.

At the weekend, Chad said it was ready to talk to Sudan but only if Khartoum agreed to a set of conditions, including the disarmament of Chadian rebels N’djamena claims are operating on the Sudanese side of the border.

But Sudan’s Foreign Minister Lam Akol on Tuesday denied the presence of Chadian rebels in his country in an interview on Radio France Internationale. “We don’t have Chadian rebels in Sudan to disarm,” Akol said. “We have been keen to see that there [are] no armed dissidents…that are roaming in Sudan.”

Chad President Idriss Deby has been facing dissension within the armed forces, with some troops deserting to join rebel forces in eastern Chad near Sudan. The government has accused Khartoum of backing the rebels and of joining in attacks.

Akol said Sudan favoured dialogue with Chad to overcome the tension, he said. “We want to sit with them anytime. There is no other way except to solve the problem peacefully.”

With an African Union summit in Khartoum less than two weeks away, African leaders have been working to neutralise lingering hostility. After a meeting at the weekend in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, with Muammar Gaddafi, African Union Commission head Alpha Konare and other regional leaders, Deby set four conditions for peace talks.

He said the Sudanese government must: disarm Chadian deserters and other armed groups in Sudan, hand deserters over to UNHCR, end Sudanese militia incursions into Chad and compensate victims of cross-border attacks by Sudanese militia.

Full report

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NIGERIA-SUDAN: Worsening security, lack of progress bog down Darfur talks

Talks to end the bloody conflict in Darfur have been suspended for a week to respect a Muslim holiday, mediators said on Monday, but there is little sign of progress as the security situation in the western Sudan region worsens and the two sides fail to agree on key aspects of sharing power.

African Union (AU) officials called off the peace negotiations in Abuja on Sunday to allow Muslim delegates from the Sudanese government and two Darfur rebel movements to celebrate the Eid el-Kabir festival. Discussions are set to resume on 15 January.

Mediators had hoped that this seventh round of talks between Khartoum, the Sudanese Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), which began in November, would yield a breakthrough in the conflict which has been raging for three years.

But they admit that the only tangible result so far has been keeping the sides talking.

"We have been here for more than a month now but I can't even report any progress. It's been very slow," one of the senior AU officials, Sam Ibok, told reporters at the weekend.

The Darfur conflict erupted in early 2003 when JEM and SLA/M took up arms against Khartoum to end what they call the neglect and oppression of the mainly black inhabitants of Darfur, a semi-desert region the size of France. The Sudanese government responded by backing Arab militias known as the Janjawid.

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NIGERIA: In overcrowded prisons, survival is a daily battle

As visitors approach the death row block at Kaduna’s central prison in northern Nigeria, a sea of hands waving tin cups automatically jerk through the bars of the dark cells.

“Get back!” shouts the prison guard at the 118 detainees crammed inside a dilapidated building originally meant to house 33. Up to three inmates live in less than four square metres of space. An overpowering stench of urine and mould billows out into the courtyard.

Rights organisations working in Nigerian prisons - and even prison officials themselves - say the conditions of death row inmates do not fulfil even minimum international human rights standards.

In Kaduna prison, death row inmates are locked up all day long, said Festus Okoye, executive director of Human Rights Monitor (HRM), a group based in the northern city. “They are allowed out only rarely, for a few minutes, one by one,” he said. Meanwhile some prisoners collect the buckets used as toilets.

Most of the death row inmates are utterly alone and never receive visitors - their families living too far away and having abandoned them for fear of being associated with their crimes, rights group sources say. Some simply cannot pay the ‘visiting rights’ fee charged by the wardens.

Nigeria countrywide has 548 prisoners awaiting capital punishment - 10 of them women - among a total 40,000 detainees, according to Ernest Ogbozor of Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), Nigeria’s largest prisoners’ rights organisation.

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COTE D IVOIRE: Burkina Faso nationals arrested, shot dead after attack on barracks

In a sign of continued ethnic tension in Cote d’Ivoire, a number of nationals from Burkina Faso were arrested and several shot dead following a mysterious attack against two military camps in Abidjan early this month, diplomats and other sources told IRIN on Friday.

A diplomat at the Burkina Faso embassy said paramilitary gendarmes had detained between 15 and 30 Burkinabe men after the 2 January attack and were holding them in a barracks in Abidjan, the economic capital.

The diplomat also said that the bodies of three Burkinabe men were found shot dead last Friday, three days after the attack against the military camps. The three have been identified.

The three Burkinabe men were killed after residents in a lagoon-side area of Abidjan requested the intervention of a special state security force known as CECOS on the suspicion that the men were “rebels,” the diplomat said.

Cote d’Ivoire has been split in two for more than three years into a rebel-held north and government-controlled south. The Burkina government, as well as the large contingent of Burkinabe migrant workers living in Cote d’Ivoire, are often accused of siding with the insurgents.

Referring to the arrests and shootings, a diplomat said: “This is not new, it's a well-established pattern that the Burkinabe are targeted after attacks."

“But the degree of xenophobia is rising - it doesn't take much anymore before one of our nationals is arrested." He said two more corpses had been found in the last few days but not identified.

The Ivorian army was not available for comment. Neither the government nor the army has yet offered a detailed explanation of the circumstances of the hours-long 2 January assault in which unidentified gunmen attacked two military camps on the eastern outskirts of Abidjan, leaving 10 people dead.

Full report

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[ENDS]

Theme(s)	Children

Other recent WEST AFRICA reports:

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 317 covering 11-17 February 2006, 17/Feb/06

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 316 covering 4-10 February 2006, 10/Feb/06

Africa’s poorest nations fight to ward off deadly bird flu, 9/Feb/06

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 315 covering 28 January – 3 February 2006, 3/Feb/06

IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 314 covering 21-27 January 2006, 27/Jan/06

Other recent Children reports:

IRAQ: Thousands of families still displaced after flooding, 21/Feb/06

SOUTH AFRICA: Govt adopts more focused approach to help orphans, 21/Feb/06

YEMEN: Two killed in flash floods, 21/Feb/06

YEMEN: Measles vaccination campaign launched to prevent children’s deaths, 21/Feb/06

TAJIKISTAN: UN appeal for 2006 launched, 16/Feb/06

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