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 West Africa

Tel: +225 22-40-4440
Fax: +225 22-41-9339
e-mail: irin-wa@irin.ci


WEST AFRICA
IRIN-WA Weekly Roundup 118
06 - 12 April 2002


CONTENTS:

LIBERIA: Taylor taking advantage of state of emergency, Amnesty says
SIERRA LEONE: RUF nominates presidential candidate
SIERRA LEONE: Update on returnees
NIGERIA: Obasanjo proposes law to ban ethnic militias
GUINEA-BISSAU: President threatens former PM with prison
BURKINA FASO: Meningitis death toll over 1,000
GABON: Recent Ebola cases were from contact with gorilla
WEST AFRICA: New FAO project to tackle illegal fishing
CENTRAL-WEST AFRICA: Conference on children affected by AIDS

LIBERIA: Taylor taking advantage of state of emergency, Amnesty says

President Charles Taylor has taken advantage of a recently imposed state
of emergency to curtail the rights of Liberians, ranging from the right to
life to the right of freedom of expression, Amnesty International (AI)
said on Tuesday.

The state of emergency was declared on 8 February after claims by the
Liberia government that armed fighters of the Liberians United for
Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) group, were moving close to the
capital, Monrovia, with the intention of overthrowing Taylor.

AI said that government restrictions on freedom of expression and the
ill-treatment and arbitrary arrests of government critics, journalists and
human rights activists had increased under the state of emergency. The
report said that there was "general confusion about the current situation
and the exact nature of the perceived threat by the LURD due the fact that
there are few independent and impartial sources of information".

The report called on the United Nations Peace-building Support Office in
Liberia to make the protection of human rights a priority. It also urged
the international community to take concrete steps to protect civilians
and to put pressure on the Guinean government to influence LURD and other
armed political groups to prevent rights abuses.

Liberia and Guinea have in the past accused each other of harbouring
dissident groups within their territories.

   [The full report is available at www.amnesty.org]

Meanwhile the foreign ministers from the three Mano River Union (MRU)
countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone met in the Moroccan capital,
Rabat, on 5 April to review progress towards ensuring peace in the
subregion and to plan a heads of states summit. The three presidents,
Ahmad Tejan Kabbah of Sierra Leone, Charles Taylor of Liberia and Lansana
Conte of Guinea last met in Rabat in late February.

The MRU was set up in 1970 to promote economic and trade activity between
the three countries but it has been inactive in recent years.

In a related development , the international environmental watchdog,
Global Witness, appealed on Monday in an open letter to a Danish company,
DLH Nordisk, to stop buying 'conflict timber' from Liberian companies.

Global Witness said that Liberia's logging industry was being used by
Taylor, "as a platform to prolong regional violence, traffic arms, and
reap significant extrabudgetary income while destroying the country's
forests and redirecting funds that should be going to the Liberian
people."

Global Witness, a British based NGO, focuses on the links between
environmental and human rights abuses, especially the impact of natural
resource exploitation on countries and people.

[For more details go to www.globalwitness.org]

SIERRA LEONE: RUF nominates presidential candidate

The Revolutionary United Front Party (RUFP) has nominated
secretary-general Pallo Bangura as its presidential candidate in the 14
May elections, the National Electoral Commission (NEC) told IRIN on
Tuesday.

The RUFP's nomination came almost a week after the official deadline for
submission of presidential nomination papers to the NEC, expired. Chief
Electoral Commissioner Walter Nicol told IRIN that national legislation
had allowed the NEC to extend the deadline again and it had accepted the
RUFP's late nomination of Bangura and his running mate, Peter Vandy.

Bangura served as minister of energy and power in a short-lived unity
cabinet following the signing of the July 1999 Lome Peace Accord by
President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and rebel leader Foday Sankoh. Vandy was
minister of lands, housing, country planning and the environment.

The late nominations follow a period of uncertainty and division within
the RUFP over who should stand in forthcoming elections. It had originally
chosen Sankoh but the NEC barred him from standing because he was not a
registered voter, which, under Sierra Leonean law, made him ineligible.

Sankoh is in prison on murder charges relating to an incident outside his
house in the capital, Freetown in May 2000 which resulted in the deaths of
over 20 people. He was detained shortly after the event and was not seen
in public again until his first court appearance on 4 March.

Following Sankoh's barring, the RUFP was unable to reach a consensus and
subsequently failed to nominate a presidential candidate by the already
extended 3 April deadline. Tuesday's nomination means that Bangura will
join seven other presidential hopefuls in the elections.

The 10-year civil war between the RUF and successive governments
officially ended in January.

Meanwhile, the UN Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) launched publications
on Wednesday entitled 'Elections and Human Rights' designed to help police
officers uphold human rights issues during the upcoming elections.

SIERRA LEONE: Update on returnees

The Sierra Leone government has approved the gradual transformation of
sites built for returning refugees, into settlements for Liberians fleeing
fighting in their country, UNHCR said in its weekly update 5-11 April.

It said 3,352 Liberian refugees were relocated from the Sierra Leonean
border village of Jendema to four settlements, including facilities
originally built for Sierra Leonean refugees returning from Liberia. UNHCR
also assisted 2,023 Sierra Leonean spontaneous returnees.

UNHCR has been running three convoys a week from camps in Sinje and
Monrovia, in Liberia. In Sierra Leone, the agency operates three convoys
weekly for spontaneous returnees and Liberian refugees from Jendema, where
it said some 2,000 refugees and 800 returnees were still waiting to be
transported to new sites.

UNHRC is continuing to transport home or to temporary settlements the 500
Sierra Leonean refugees returning from Guinea each week. The agency said
it would begin road repatriations once the Guinea-Sierra Leonean border at
Pamelap, some 84 km north of the capital Freetown, was officially opened.
UNHCR said together with the International Organisation for Migration, it
had repatriated 35,718 Sierra Leoneans from the Guinean capital, Conakry,
since September 2000.

NIGERIA: Obasanjo proposes law to ban ethnic militias

Nigeria's president, Olusegun Obasanjo, sent a bill to the federal
legislature this week, which, if passed, would give him powers to ban
ethnic militias, officials at the National Assembly said on Thursday.

The bill proposed as 'The Prohibition of Certain Associations Act 2002'
would also allow the president to prohibit any group from undertaking
military training or displaying "physical force or coercion in order to
promote any political objective or interest".

Targets of the bill include organisations led by prominent politicians,
which purport to defend the interests of ethnic groups or sections of the
country. Obasanjo has accused three such groups of being catalysts of
ethnic conflicts. They are Arewa Consultative Forum, Afenifere and
Ohaneze, which respectively champion the interests of the biggest ethnic
groupings, the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba and Igbo.

Nigeria has been wracked by ethnic and religious unrest since Obasanjo was
elected in 1999, ending more than 15 years of military rule.

Meanwhile Amnesty International called on the governor of Anambra State,
southeastern Nigeria, on Wednesday to end human rights abuses committed by
its Vigilante Service, also known as the 'Bakassi Boys'. The appeal
followed a recent visit to the state by an AI delegation where they
witnessed an attempted summary execution of a 50-year-old man by the armed
men.

The full report is available on http://www.amnesty.org/

GUINEA-BISSAU: President threatens former PM with prison

Guinea-Bissau's president Kumba Yala has said that former prime minister
Faustino Imbali could to prison if he did not return funds he allegedly
misappropriated last year, humanitarian sources in the capital Bissau told
IRIN on Monday.

Imbali, who was sacked in December 2001, following a presidential decree
that strongly criticised his government, has denied any wrongdoing. Yala
accused Imbali of diverting some 2.5 million euros (US $2 million) which
had been intended for the armed forces "to ease some problems", the
Portuguese news agency, Lusa reported.

Since his election in early 2000 that ended a brief period of military
civilian rule, relations between Yala and the military have been strained.
There were reports of a failed coup in December 2001, while in November
2000 the late junta leader, General Ansumane Mane, staged an aborted
attempt to regain control over the armed forces. Mane was killed by
loyalist forces shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile attorney general Caetano Intchama ordered all media
organisations, last week, to stop publishing information from the Liga
Guineense dos Direitos Humanos (LGDH - Guinean League of Human Rights).
The "imposition of censorship was another step by the attorney general,
Caetano Intchama, to silence the LGDH," Lusa reported the vice-president
of the rights body, Joao Vaz Mane, as saying.

BURKINA FASO: Meningitis death toll over 1,000

A meningitis outbreak has killed 1,059 people out of 8,846 cases since
January, the Ministry of Health reported in a communiqué on Thursday. It
said that the situation was "preoccupying" as the number of victims
continued to rise.

Most new cases are infected with a third strain of meningitis, W135,
believed to have been introduced into Burkina Faso in 2000 by Muslim
pilgrims returning from Mecca, Saudi Arabia.

The authorities announced on Wednesday that they were suspending a planned
large-scale vaccination campaign against two other strains of meningitis
and instead concentrate on treating victims with chloramphenicol, a drug
that can cure all three forms of meningitis.

GABON: Recent Ebola cases were from contact with gorilla

The recent cases of Ebola fever in Gabon resulted from contact with a
gorilla whose remains were found to be positive for the virus, the World
Health Organisation (WHO) reported on Tuesday.

WHO said the cases were reported in villages north of Mekambo, 600 km east
of the capital, Libreville, in the northern Ogooue-Invindo Province. No
cases had been reported in the area since February. So far, 53 deaths out
of 65 confirmed cases have been reported by the Gabonese Ministry of
Health since the current outbreak began in December 2001. As at 29 March,
the Republic of Congo authorities had registered the deaths of 43 people
in districts close to the border with Gabon.

Ebola is a haemorrhagic fever transmitted through direct contact with body
fluids of infected persons or other primates. There is no cure and between
50 percent and 90 percent of victims die.

WEST AFRICA: New FAO project to tackle illegal fishing

A programme to combat fish poaching implemented by the Food and
Agriculture Programme, is to target illegal trawling in West African
countries including Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone, the
United Nations agency reported on Friday.

Vessels from Europe, FAO said, trawl off the coasts of West African
countries taking advantage of lack of surveillance aircraft. Poachers work
with industrial-scale vessels, enabling them to catch vast numbers of
fish. The catch is sold in supermarkets in wealthy countries to consumers
who do not realise that they are buying food stolen from regions such as
West Africa where fish is the most common source of protein, FAO said.

According to the UN agency, abusive fishing practices take 30 percent of
the catch in some important fisheries and in some areas even larger
proportions of the catch may be going unreported.

Meanwhile, thousands of tons of fish were being dumped overboard by large
EU fishing vessels trawling off the West African coast, the Kenya-based
The EastAfrican newspaper, reported on Monday. The unwanted fish some of
which is too small is caught using industrialised trawling techniques, it
added.

CENTRAL-WEST AFRICA: Workshop on children affected by AIDS

A week-long workshop focusing on the growing numbers of children affected
by AIDS closed on Friday in Cote d'Ivoire's capital, Yamoussoukro.

The meeting, attended by representatives from the UN, governments, NGOs
and partner organisations from over 20 countries in West and Central
Africa, aimed to offer a forum to participants to learn from each other
and "build the capacity of governments and civil society to respond to the
looming crisis", UNICEF's regional office said. Issues covered during the
conference included community capacity development, policy, paediatric
care and vulnerable children in armed conflicts.

According to UNICEF, more than 10 million children under 15 years had lost
at least one of their parents to the disease by 2001. Most of them live in
Sub-Sahara Africa, an area most hit by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Losing
parents, the UN agency added, was a traumatic experience which could lead
to several conditions including economic hardship, withdrawal from school,
psychological distress and increased risk of abuse and of HIV/AIDS.

The conference was organised by UNAIDS/UNICEF, USAID, Family Health
International and the International Save the Children Alliance.


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