U N I T E D   N A T I O N S
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Integrated Regional Information Network for Central and Eastern Africa

Tel: +254 2 622147
Fax: +254 2 622129
e-mail: irin@ocha.unon.org


HORN OF AFRICA
IRIN-HOA Weekly Round-up 176
17 - 23 January 2004


CONTENTS:

ERITREA: Humanitarian crisis far from over, UN warns
ERITREA-ETHIOPIA: End the impasse, British envoy urges 
ETHIOPIA: Government bans journalists' association
ETHIOPIA-SUDAN: 5,000 Anyuak flee instability
SUDAN: Chief justice suspends flogging of girl
SUDAN: Thousands homeless as Khartoum IDP camps are demolished
SUDAN: Western and eastern rebels forge alliance
SUDAN: Rafters to help organisations reach out to communities on the Nile
SOMALIA: Annan expresses concern over mounting tension in the north


ALSO SEE:

ETHIOPIA: IRIN interview with leading paleanthropologist Tim White at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39062]

ERITREA: Humanitarian crisis far from over, UN warns
 
About 1.9 million war-affected Eritreans, including internally displaced
persons (IDPs) and their hosts, returning refugees and expellees, need
humanitarian assistance this year, Simon Nhongo, the United Nations
Humanitarian Coordinator in Eritrea said. The main requirement, Nhongo
added, was food assistance following the recent arrival of the delayed
short rains which did not have a significant impact. Presently, only 22
percent of the country's annual 612,000 mt of cereal requirements was
available.

"Due mainly to failure in rain in 2003, Eritrea [will be] heavily
dependent on timely and adequate food aid in 2004," he said. "Unless
responses come forth quickly and in adequate quantities, a difficult
condition is anticipated to set in early in 2004."

Nhongo and other UN officials, who met donors in Geneva on Wednesday
following a tour of several Nordic countries to update them on the
prevailing humanitarian situation in Eritrea, appealed for a timely
response to a US $147-million appeal for Eritrea. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39074]


ERITREA-ETHIOPIA: End the impasse, British envoy urges

Ethiopia and Eritrea have been warned that the international community is
gradually running out of patience with their stalled three-year-old peace
process. Speaking at a news conference on Monday in the Ethiopian capital,
Addis Ababa, Chris Mullin, the UK's foreign minister for Africa, warned
the two countries that the West had not ruled out sanctions as a means of
compelling them to implement their peace deal.

He said it would take "an act of statesmanship" on the part of Ethiopian
Prime Minister Meles Zenawi to break the current deadlock deal. "You have
to start compromising and moving towards the bigger picture," he added,
saying that the US $180 million a year the international community was
paying for the 4,200 UN peacekeepers who patrol the border could not go on
being disbursed indefinitely. "Just a little bit of impatience is
beginning to occur on the part of those who are funding this arrangement,"
he revealed. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39033]


ETHIOPIA: Government bans journalists' association

ADDIS ABABA, 19 Jan 2004 (IRIN) - The government came under fire on Monday
for banning the country’s sole independent journalists' association and
urging its members to appoint a new leadership. The ban has been imposed
amid rising tension and a growing war of words between the Ethiopian Free
Press Journalists' Association (EFPJA) and the government over the
former's exact role.

"This action by the ministry is undemocratic and has no legal basis," said
Kifle Mulat, who has been the president of the EFPJA for eight years. He
added that the EFPJA "totally denounces" the move, because it "violates
the rights to freedom of expression, international conventions and the
rights of citizenship".

However, the justice ministry said a meeting it had convened at its
headquarters in Addis Ababa on 18 January had voted in favour of a new
executive committee to run the EFPJA. Mekonnen Worke, a spokesman for the
ministry, dismissed claims that the meeting of EFPJA members had been
undemocratic, and told IRIN that its decision would stand. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=38998]


ETHIOPIA-SUDAN: 5,000 Anyuak flee instability

Since a spate of killings in mid-December, about 5,000 Sudanese and
Ethiopian Anyuaks, including about 100 unaccompanied children, have fled
from western Ethiopia to Pachala in southern Sudan, according to the UN
and aid agencies.

"Residents say some 100 to 200 people are arriving daily," Ron Redmond, a
spokesman for the Office of the United High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR), told IRIN. "They report walking for a week or more to reach the
border and appear to be in reasonably good health. However, they are
arriving with no possessions, not even to carry water [in]," he said,
noting that most of them were young men aged between 14 and 25.

Violence erupted in the Gambella region in mid-December after eight
people, including three government officials, were murdered when a United
Nations-plated vehicle they were travelling in was ambushed. The Anyuak, a
local tribe, was blamed for the attack, and this sparked a wave of
reprisal killings and the looting and burning of Anyuak homes. The Anyuak
themselves asserted that they had been forced to flee because of a
reprisal by the Ethiopian army. However, the government has dismissed the
allegations as unfounded. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39000]

For his part, the president of the Ethiopian Human Rights Council (ERCHO),
Prof Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, told reporters that in the run-up to being
attacked, 5,000 Anyuaks had sought refuge in one of the town's churches,
because soldiers had blocked the roads leading out of the town. "The mob,
in collaboration with members of the [government] defence forces,
continued to attack those who could not find anywhere to hide. Many were
killed or sustained severe and light injures," he said. According to the
ERCHO, at least 93 Anyuaks were killed after the ambush on the UN vehicle,
possibly even as many as 300.

Meanwhile, Okelo Akuai, the ethnic Anyuak president of Gambella Regional
State, has vanished and is believed to have fled to Sudan along with his
driver and two bodyguards, thereby fuelling further instability. [Full
story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39000]


SUDAN: Chief justice suspends flogging of girl

The London-based human rights organisation Amnesty International has
welcomed the suspension of a flogging sentence against a 16-year-old girl
convicted last year of adultery, but urged the Sudanese authorities to
treat the case in accordance to their obligations under international
human rights law.

Sudan's chief justice on Wednesday suspended the sentence against Intisar
Bakri Abd al-Qadir, pending her appeal against it. She was to have
received 100 lashes, with the punishment due to be carried out on Friday.

Intisar's lawyer Ghazi Sulayman, who is also a human rights activist, told
IRIN on Thursday that he had appealed against the sentence on the grounds
that she was not only a Christian, and therefore not bound by Shari'ah,
but also that she was still was a minor.  "The chief justice of Sudan
ordered a stay of execution and promised to look at my appeal," Sulayman
told IRIN from Khartoum. "I am very optimistic that the high court of
Sudan will dismiss the case against her," he added. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39090]


SUDAN: Thousands homeless as Khartoum IDP camps are demolished
 
A replanning project in camps around the capital, Khartoum, has left
thousands of IDPs homeless, according to humanitarian sources. Under the
scheme, the government is "re-zoning" the camps where many of the city's
two million IDPs live to enable them to buy their own plots of land and
legitimately stay where they are.

But a series of problems have dogged the process from the beginning, say
observers. "This is what you call unplanned planning," one source told
IRIN on Wednesday.

In the Wad al-Bashir camp on the edge of Omdurman, bulldozers had reduced
about 7,000 homes to rubble, while only 2,200 families would be allocated
a plot of land each, said one source. "People are scrambling to deal with
what has happened to them. They are camped under bits of plastic and
cardboard, at times metres away from their original homes," he said. The
demolition process has also started in Khartoum's other camps, namely
Omdurman al-Salam and Mayo Farms. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39058]

Meanwhile, authorities in Nyala, southern Darfur, closed two camps housing
10,000 IDPs on 15 January, following a failed attempt to relocate them to
new camps without their consent, according to Medecins Sans Frontieres
(MSF). The new camps were located about 20 km outside of Nyala "in an area
considered unsafe" due to ongoing fighting, difficult to access for
humanitarian workers, and where there were neither shelter, food, nor
sufficient access to water and latrines, said MSF.

On Wednesday, the authorities had arrived at the camps and begun the
"forced transfer" of people by trucks to the new sites, the agency
reported, after which a number of the IDPs fled in panic. Some of these
families have severely malnourished children. By the morning of 16
January, when police and other authorities arrived in the camps, they were
up to 90 percent empty, most of the population having fled. [Full story
at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=38962]


SUDAN: Western and eastern rebels forge alliance

A rebel movement in the Darfur region of western Sudan, the Sudan
Liberation Army (SLA), forged an alliance this week with an eastern rebel
group, the Beja Congress.

A joint declaration signed on Tuesday said both parties would "continue
their struggle together until they get rid of marginalisation, poverty,
ignorance and backwardness," Ali al-Safi, a member of the Central
Committee of the Beja Congress, told IRIN from the Eritrean capital,
Asmara. "The struggle will continue using all the tools [available] and
with close coordination between the two parties," he said. "It was quiet
[in the east], because people were expecting to be included in the
Naivasha [Kenya peace] talks," he said. "But from now it will not be
quiet. One can expect an escalation of fighting in the east, because the
government is seeking a partial solution [to Sudan's problems] with the
Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army [SPLM/A]."

A member of the SLA in Darfur, Adam Ali Shogar, confirmed the agreement,
saying that both groups were "joining in the struggle against the
government", and that they were both seeking "peace and equality in
Sudan". He said their problems concerned the whole of Sudan and they would
fight together if no settlement was reached. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=38974]


SUDAN: Rafters to help organisations reach out to communities on the Nile

An expedition to navigate the whole length of the White Nile was launched
on 18 January, as the seven-strong team of rafters, sponsored by the
humanitarian organisation CARE International, set off from the Nile’s
source at Lake Victoria, Uganda. "We’re hoping this will bring publicity
to communities living along the banks of the Nile and to some of the
challenges they face, particularly in northern Uganda and southern Sudan,"
CARE Uganda's country director, Phil Vernon, told IRIN.

The trip is the first such attempt for over 30 years and, if successful,
will be the first time ever that anyone has completed the 6,690-km journey
down the world’s longest river to the Mediterranean. The crew plan plan to
"meet the people who live along the river and depend on it. The explorers
will learn of the communities’ challenges and what they are doing to
improve their quality of life", according to a CARE press statement.

Vernon told IRIN that CARE already had outposts along the river and that
much of its work involved improving the communities' access to health
care, with the provision of essentials like mosquito nets and basic
medicines. The outposts would now serve to help support the Nile
expedition with food and fuel supplies. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39002]


SOMALIA: Annan expresses concern over mounting tension in the north

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan has expressed deep concern
over rising tension in northern Somalia between the self-declared republic
of Somaliland and the self-declared autonomous region of Puntland over the
disputed region of Sool.

A statement read by the Secretary-General's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said:
"The Secretary-General is deeply concerned by the increased tension
between the administrations of 'Puntland' and 'Somaliland' over Las Anod
in Sool Region, which threatens the outbreak of hostilities at a critical
time in the Somali peace process." The statement went to say that Annan
was calling on the two sides "to exercise utmost restraint and to refrain
from the use of force", and urging them to seek solutions through
dialogue.

Both Somaliland and Puntland claim the regions of Sool and Sanaag as
theirs, and there have been reports of troop build-ups and preparations
for conflict. Tension has been rising between the two sides ever since
Puntland forces took control of the Sool regional capital, Las Anod, late
last month. Sool and Sanaag fall geographically within the borders of
pre-independence British Somaliland, but most of the clans there are
associated with clans in Puntland. Awad Ahmad Ashara, Puntland's
spokesman, told IRIN that armed conflict seemed imminent. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39043]

Meanwhile, the Puntland authorities accused the Republic of Djibouti of
arming Somaliland to enable the latter to attack and destabilise Puntland.
Abdullahi Yusuf, the president of Puntland, told a news conference in the
Kenyan capital, Nairobi, that Djibouti was not only arming Somaliland but
also encouraging it to attack Puntland to create instability in the
region.

Djibouti Foreign Minister Ali Abdi Farah, who is also in Nairobi for the
peace talks, told IRIN: "Djibouti has always supported efforts to resolve
Somali disputes peacefully. We will never be involved in any action that
will lead to the shedding of Somali blood, and to accuse it of instigating
conflict is nonsense." [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=39056]


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