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CENTRAL AND EASTERN AFRICA
IRIN-CEA Weekly Round-up 217
6 - 12 March 2004


CONTENTS:

DRC: Gen Nabyolwa recalled to Kinshasa for "consultations"
ROC: Brazzaville rejects rebel leader’s demands
RWANDA: Nine sentenced to death for killing genocide survivor
BURUNDI: Gendarmes arrest teachers' union leaders 
BURUNDI: NGO launches US $5.5 million rehabilitation programme
TANZANIA: Millions face food shortages before end of May
TANZANIA: Police probing protestors' link to opposition party
UGANDA: NGO highlights conditions in IDPs camps
UGANDA: Government to concentrate Lira IDPs into larger camps
UGANDA: EC gives €6 million for northern IDPs
UGANDA: Negotiations on sharing Nile water tough but hopeful
KENYA: Boost for anti-FGM efforts as 200 circumcisers quit


ALSO SEE:

DRC: Focus on rampant rape, despite end of war at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39912

DRC: Interview with Christina Linner, UNHCR Senior Coordinator for Refugee
Children at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39983

CAR: IRIN interview with Ramiro Lopes Da Silva, OCHA Special Humanitarian
Adviser for CAR at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39898

CAR: Focus on disarmed women at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39899

RWANDA: Focus on the struggle to survive in child-headed households at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39950

KENYA: Focus on working conditions in EPZ companies at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39930


DRC: Gen Nabyolwa recalled to Kinshasa for "consultations"
 
The commander of the 10th military region in South Kivu Province of
eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) reported to his superiors
in the capital, Kinshasa, on Monday on the recent fighting in Bukavu.

"There is no need for speculation. Gen Nabyolwa was summoned to hold
consultations with the military leadership," Vital Kamerhe, spokesman for
the transitional national government, told reporters.

The UN Mission in the DRC, known as MONUC, escorted him to Kinshasa.
Nabyolwa had been in hiding since hostilities erupted in the eastern city
of Bukavu three weeks ago when Maj Joseph Kasongo, an officer of the
former rebel Rassemblement congolais pour la democratie, was arrested on
charges of involvement in arms trafficking, and taken to Kinshasa.
Kasongo's arrest sparked fighting between soldiers loyal to him and those
who supported Nabyolwa, during which three people died.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39934 ]


ROC: Brazzaville rejects rebel leader's demands

The government of the Republic of Congo has rejected demands made in late
January by the Ninja rebel leader, the Rev Frederic Bitsangou, alias
Pastor Ntoumi, saying they were above and beyond a 17 March 2003 accord
meant to restore peace to the country's southeastern Pool Department.

The minister of transport and privatisation, responsible for coordination
of government action, Isidore Mvouba, made the announcement on 7 March
during a news conference in the capital, Brazzaville.

The conditions Bitsangou set for his return to Brazzaville include the
installation of a government of national unity, the return of exiled
former political leaders, clarification of his legal status and the
signing of an agreement with the government regarding the number of his
fighters to be integrated into the army, police and gendarmerie.

"According to the peace agreement for the Pool Department reached between
the government and representatives of Pastor Ntoumi, there is no mention
of the formation of a national unity government and the return of exiles,"
Mvouba said. "We call on Pastor Ntoumi to respect his obligations."

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39936 ]


RWANDA: Nine sentenced to death for killing genocide survivor

A Rwandan court has sentenced nine people to death and another one to life
imprisonment for killing a genocide survivor who was due to testify under
the Gacaca justice system, a leader of a genocide survivors’ association
told IRIN on 5 March. The court found the nine guilty of jointly killing
Emile Ntahimana in November 2003 in the southwestern province of
Gikongoro.

Four genocide survivors were reported to have been killed in Gikongoro in
late 2003 by a group of genocide suspects in order to prevent the
survivors from testifying in the Gacaca courts."We are pleased with the
latest ruling of the court," Boniface Nkusi, the Gikongoro head of the
genocide survivor organisation known as Ibuka, said.

The latest convictions bring to 14 the number of people sentenced to death
and three to life imprisonment for killing genocide survivors. Last week,
the court sentenced five people to death and two to life imprisonment for
killing Charles Rutinduka, another potential witness in the Gacaca trials.

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39896 ]


BURUNDI: Gendarmes arrest teachers' union leaders

Gendarmes arrested on Tuesday the leaders of the two main teachers' unions
in the country after they held a meeting with striking teachers in the
capital, Bujumbura, to evaluate the stoppage that began country-wide on 5
January.

The representative of the Union of Burundi Educational Workers, Eulalie
Nibizi, and the leader of the Free Union of Burundi Education, Adolphe
Wakana, were then taken to a jail of the government's intelligence
services, according to Wakana's deputy, Chantal Nahishakiye, told IRIN.

At a meeting on Tuesday with parents, senior officials of the Ministry of
Education and student representatives, President Domitien Ndayizeye
ordered security forces to take action. "We cannot tolerate this, I order
security forces to arrest and put in jail teachers or students who behave
as troublemakers," he said. "I am ready to go before the court to justify
these arrests."

Some 5,000 secondary school teachers went on strike to pressure the
government to honour a promised salary increase. On 9 February, another
15,000 primary school teachers joined the other strikers. The strike has
put at least one million children out of school countrywide.

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39949 ]


BURUNDI: NGO launches US $5.5 million rehabilitation programme

Counterpart International, a non-profit-making human development
organisation, has begun implementing a two-year US $5.5 million community
reintegration and training programme for post-conflict areas in Burundi,
the organisation reported on Wednesday.

The programme, which started in February, is aimed at rebuilding
communities that have been devastated by a decade of civil war.

It said the programme's primary goal to support the momentum of the
ongoing peace process and political transition by promoting reintegration
activities. Accordingly, local and national constituencies for peace would
be established; cooperation among diverse groups of people promoted;
community-level participation in local governance increased; livelihoods
improved; and economic opportunities increased.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39990]


TANZANIA: Millions face food shortages before end of May

About 3.5 million Tanzanians would need food aid before the end of May,
but with the arival of improving rains and the impending harvest, the food
situation was improving in some parts of the country, humanitarian workers
said on Thursday.

The latest figures, made available to IRIN by humanitarian sources, are
from a survey the government carried out in February. The figures have not
been publicly released yet.

Until the latest assessment, the government and humanitarian partners had
been quoting the figure of 1.9 million people in need of aid due to
drought in parts of the country. However, a World Food Programme (WFP)
programme officer, Juvenal Kisanga, said that the rains had come in some
parts of the country and "in a month or so" some people would harvest
their food crops.

He said WFP still had 9,000 mt of food to distribute while the government
would be releasing a further 14,000 mt from its reserves and another
10,000 mt would be arriving in the country from Kenya.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39994 ]


TANZANIA: Police probing protestors' link to opposition party

Police in Zanzibar have begun investigating a possible link between
protestors who clashed with them recently and the main opposition party,
the Civic United Front (CUF), a senior police official told IRIN on
Monday.

"Many protesters were CUF members," Juma Mtumwa Abdallah, the assistant
regional police commander, said on Monday.

He added that the police were also looking into the protestors' possible
links with other anti-Western political parties and terrorist groups. "We
are investigating any link and will be contacting the US embassy [in Dar
es Salaam] with some names of those involved," he said.

Sporadic violence erupted on 5 March on Tanzania's semi-autonomous
archipelago of Zanzibar, as Muslims defied a ban on their proposed
protest. Four people were injured and at least 32 arrested. Police said
there were 300 protesters, among them women and children. Police said they
used "teargas and some reasonable force as the demonstration was illegal".

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39925 ]


UGANDA: NGO highlights conditions in IDPs camps

Camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the north face critical
problems of waste management, inadequate access to safe water, high
disease prevalence and widespread dependency on food hand-outs, an NGO
reported on Monday.

Action Against Hunger USA reported that the camps were mostly made up of
tukuls, huts with thatched roofs. Because families cooked inside the huts,
fumes from the fires had increased the rates of acute respiratory
infections among children.

The NGO said: "Waste management is a problem as latrines have to be built
at the periphery of camps, where utilisation rates drop as people fear
insecurity; refuse pits are very unevenly distributed and inadequate."

According to the NGO, access to water was a major issue because safe water
coverage for Gulu IDPs was about 3.3 litres per person per day - well
below the emergency threshold of 15 litres per day.

"The construction of water infrastructure is hampered by rampant
insecurity and by the sheer size of the displaced population. Another 630
wells are needed to meet emergency threshold levels of water supply," it
said.

The NGO said the health service delivery to the IDPs camps was very low,
yet the IDPs were exposed to malaria, diarrhoea and acute respiratory
infections.

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39954 ]


UGANDA: Government to concentrate Lira IDPs into larger camps
 
The government has announced plans to reduce the number of camps for IDPs
in Lira District and instead concentrate them in larger camps to minimise
their risk of being attacked.

Humanitarian workers, however, fear that the move could worsen the
humanitarian situation in the area, owing to the more grim living
conditions likely to obtain in larger camps.

"There are currently 42 camps scattered throughout Lira District, but we
want to make these 20. The existing camps have 4,000 to 5,000 people. We
will simply put several together to make about 20,000 people each, with
only two camps in each sub-county," the army spokesman, Maj Shaban
Bantariza, told IRIN on Thursday.

The government decision is a response to recent massacres of IDPs by
rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in the northern region.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian affairs
(OCHA) confirmed the move to concentrate the Lira IDPs camps. "The people
in the smaller camps will be joining the larger camps, but the figures
have not yet been defined," Eliane Duthoit, the OCHA head of office in the
capital, Kampala, said on Thursday. "We will be sending someone to Lira to
do an assessment next week."

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39992 ]


UGANDA: EC gives E6 million for northern IDPs

The EC is to provide E6 million (about $7.5 million) for northern, central
and eastern Uganda, where, it says, about 1.4 million people are
displaced, 20,000 child and adult night commuters flee villages to seek
refuge in camps and towns, and 10,000 children have been abducted by the
LRA.

The funding, to be channelled through the EC Humanitarian Aid Office
(ECHO), will be used to fund health and nutrition programmes, immunisation
and vaccination campaigns, HIV/AIDS awareness, food security, water and
sanitation. It will also support provision of shelter, blankets, jerry
cans and tarpaulins, and landmine awareness, child-soldier rehabilitation
and childhood education in a displaced environment.

"The context for the delivery of humanitarian aid remains a highly
volatile one; often access to the population in need is restricted, and
this has encouraged ECHO to develop a ‘window of opportunity’ approach,
whereby the partner reaches beneficiaries when a lull in hostilities
permits," the EC said on Monday.

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39911 ]


UGANDA: Negotiations on sharing Nile water tough but hopeful

Delegates from the 10 states that share the River Nile waters were engaged
in intense negotiations on Tuesday, but said they were confident agreement
could be reached on sharing the river and its potential uses.

The high-level technical experts representing the states were meeting in
Entebbe in an effort to flesh out a treaty regulating the use of the
waters. The talks were organised by the Nile Basin Initiative, an
intergovernmental organisation seeking to achieve sustainable
socioeconomic development and management of Nile Basin water resources.

"This agreement is vital to the security and peace of the region. Security
is no longer just about interstate relations - it is also about the
sharing and preservation of our environment," Siraj al-Din Hamid Yusuf,
the Sudanese ambassador to Uganda and one of the negotiators, told IRIN.

For his part, the Ugandan director of water development, Patrick
Kahangire, said, "We are going through a slow process of negotiations, and
of course these don't start where everything is agreed."

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39937 ]


KENYA: Implement landmine ban, workshop urges governments

A regional workshop to discuss landmines in East Africa has ended in the
Kenyan capital, Nairobi, with an urgent call for renewed commitment by
governments to implement the 1997 Ottawa Convention banning antipersonnel
landmines.

The workshop, organised jointly by the International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) and the Governments of Kenya and Canada, concluded that
although significant progress had been made in ridding the region of
antipersonnel mines, governments needed to increase their efforts to
fulfil the obligations of the Convention, ICRC reported on Monday.

Five years after the entry into force of the 1997 Ottawa Convention of the
Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on
their Destruction, it said, 46 of the 48 nations of sub-Saharan Africa
were now party to the treaty. Yet Africa remained the most mine-affected
continent in the world, according to the meeting, which brought together
defence and foreign affairs officials from 10 African East African
countries, along with envoys from Thailand and Austria.

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39935 ]


KENYA: Boost for anti-FGM efforts as 200 circumcisers quit

Following various seminars conducted by NGOs to mark the 8 March
International Women's Day, 200 female circumcisers from Kenya's Rift
Valley Province have abandoned their tools of trade and vowed to fight the
deeply rooted custom.

Habil Oloo, a programme officer at the Kenya National Focal Point for FGM
(female genital mutilation), which coordinates nationwide activities
against the practice, said the development was the fruit of years of
struggle by Kenyan NGOs against entrenched traditional attitudes among
communities.

"We think a lot is happening on the ground," Oloo told IRIN.

He added that although the problem of FGM had been more highlighted in
Rift Valley Province because of increased activities against it there, FGM
prevalence was in fact highest in the northeastern parts of Kenya. Here,
an estimated 98 percent of girls between five and nine years undergo the
worst form of FGM, known as infibulation.

Oloo told IRIN that the practice was most widespread among the Cushitic
Borana and Somali communities in the northeast, but little work had been
done there to discourage the practice, due to the harsh security situation
in the banditry prone region. While most communities in Kenya circumcised
their girls to mark the passage from childhood to womanhood, those from
the northeastern Kenya did it in the belief that it was a requirement of
their Islamic faith, an argument refuted by many Muslim scholars, Oloo
said.

[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39965 ]


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