Weekly Round-Up - IRINWA-308: 16-Dec-05
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 Round-Up 308
10 - 16 December 2005
CONTENTS:
SIERRA LEONE: Blue helmets quit, but "peace elusive"
NIGERIA: Plane crash kills 107, mainly children, in southern city
LIBERIA: Riots erupt as Weah claims presidency
CHAD: Top brass defectors protest Deby rule
BENIN: Amid dispute on funding elections, govt buys new fleet of cars
BENIN-TOGO: Some refugees return, but 19,000 remain
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Waiting for the oil boom
NIGERIA: Fugitive governor to face UK money laundering charges
SIERRA LEONE: Blue helmets quit, but "peace elusive"
The largest UN peacekeeping operation in its time is about to wind up
but despite the broad successes of the mission, war battered Sierra
Leone is still at the beginning of the long road to recovery.
"If you imagine that UNAMSIL was spread over the country like a
beautiful carpet, well now the time has come to roll that carpet back,
and what you might find underneath may not be very good," said Daudi
Ngelautwa Mwakawago, head of the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone,
UNAMSIL.
In the village of Goderich, on the outskirts of the capital Freetown,
blue helmets are packing up for UNAMSIL's end of December departure
after successfully restoring peace to a country wracked by a decade of
the most brutal civil warfare in West Africa.
"Peace has come," beamed Captain Parvez Chowdhury, of the fifth
Battalion of Bangladeshi peacekeepers among some 8,000 Bangladeshi
troops rotated through Sierra Leone.
"We were worried there may be some incidents such as looting when we
started pulling out, but no such thing has happened, even in remote
places," he said as behind him troops dismantled the temporary
structures they erected five years ago.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50685&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=SIERRA_LEONE
See also:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50725&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=SIERRA_LEONE
NIGERIA: Plane crash kills 107, mainly children, in southern city
In the second air disaster in Nigeria in less than two months, an
airplane crashed while landing in a storm this weekend in the southern
oil industry centre of Port Harcourt, killing 107 people, most of them
secondary school pupils from the capital, Abuja.
The DC-9 Sosoliso Airline jet with 110 people on board was on a flight
from Abuja to Port Harcourt on Saturday afternoon, with a brief stop in
the southeastern city of Enugu. At the crash scene in Port Harcourt 103
people were confirmed dead immediately; four of the seven survivors died
later in hospital.
It was the second major air accident in the country in under two months.
A Bellview airliner crashed on 22 October soon after taking off from
Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, killing all 117 people on board.
The Roman Catholic Bishop of Abuja, John Onaiyekan, said 71 pupils of
the church-run Ignatius Loyola Jesuit College died in the Sosoliso
crash, of the 75 who boarded. Four of the students disembarked in Enugu.
The international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said two of
its aid workers, one from France, the other from the United States, also
died in the crash.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50616&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=NIGERIA
See also
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50676&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=NIGERIA
LIBERIA: Riots erupt as Weah claims presidency
Former football superstar and loser of Liberia's first post-war
elections, George Weah, claimed the presidency this weekend in a series
of rabble-rousing speeches that sparked rioting in the battered capital
Monrovia.
Several policemen were reported to be badly hurt and at least 40
arrested in the trouble on Sunday.
Weah's verbal onslaught began as soon as he was off a plane, fresh from
visiting presidents John Kufuor of Ghana and Thabo Mbeki of South
Africa, who have been urging the onetime FIFA world footballer of the
year to concede defeat gracefully.
"I am President of this country, whether you like it or not, it will not
change. I told President Mbeki this. I repeat that I was cheated in the
elections," Weah told reporters on Sunday afternoon.
Weah lost to Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in the second round run-off of
Liberia's first post-war presidential elections on the 8 November but
has refused to accept her victory claiming large scale rigging and fraud
in the UN-organised poll.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50636&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=LIBERIA
See also:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50741&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=LIBERIA
CHAD: Top brass defectors protest Deby rule
Chad President Idriss Deby marked 15 years at the helm of the vast arid
nation this weekend amid reports of new defections by members of his
inner circle as well as the military.
Army and government sources on Monday said key local government
officials as well as several officers had deserted their posts at the
weekend, swelling the ranks of rebel forces hiding out in the sandy
eastern stretches of the oil-producing nation.
And in a written statement handed to the media, two of his nephews and
ex senior aides, Tom and Timane Erdimi, who respectively held top jobs
in the country's oil and cotton sectors, said they were joining those
bent on evicting Deby from office.
"Today many Chadians are struggling in various ways and means against
the Deby regime, we join them without regret," they said in the
statement.
For the past two months a group of anti-Deby soldiers-turned-rebels has
operated in the volatile region bordering Sudan's Western Darfur under
the name of SCUD, which stands for "Platform for Change, National Unity
and Democracy".
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50640&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=CHAD
BENIN: Amid dispute on funding elections, govt buys new fleet of cars
After announcing a shortage of funds in state coffers to finance next
year's presidential election in Benin, the government has said it
nonetheless plans to purchase of a new fleet of 237 luxury vehicles.
The head of the Finance Ministry's equipment and logistics service,
Roland Zinzindohoue, said last week that the new tax-free vehicles -
Mitsubishis, four-wheel drive Pajeros and Peugeots - were being
purchased at 80 percent of cost as they had been used during the
France-Africa summit that took place in the Malian capital Bamako, 2 to
4 December.
The almost-factory-new fleet would thus cost Benin 2.89 billion CFA
francs (US $5.3 million), allowing the government to partially update
its fleet of 1,650 vehicles at a saving of 621 million CFA francs (US
$1.1 million).
In comparison, presidential elections scheduled to take place in March
2006 are expected to cost the country 32.5 billion CFA francs (US $59
million), an amount Benin simply does not have, according to a statement
in parliament last month by Finance Minister Cosme Sehlin.
Sehlin said the country was in the red due to a lingering economic
crisis aggravated by hiking oil prices, a fall in cotton prices, the
country's main export, and the burden of caring for more than 20,000
refugees from political tension in neighbouring Togo.
But in a rare development on Wednesday this week, staff at the Finance
Ministry countered the minister's claim of empty coffers, saying that
although the year had not ended, 80 percent of government revenues had
been collected.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50702&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=BENIN
BENIN-TOGO: Some refugees return, but 19,000 remain
While some of the refugees who streamed across the border from Togo into
Benin by the thousands last April have finally gone home, more than
19,000 are still in exile, according to the UN refugee agency.
The UNHCR, which is updating data on the refugee situation in Benin,
said 10,960 people were registered in its Come and Agame refugee camps,
while 8,130 refugees from this year's eruption of political tension in
Togo were living in the capital Cotonou, or elsewhere in the country.
The agency estimated last August that a total 24,500 refugees had fled
east from Togo into Benin following unrest triggered by a disputed
presidential poll on 24 April. A further 15,000 went west into Ghana.
The government of newly-elected President Faure Gnassingbe has
repeatedly called on the refugees to return in the name of national
reconciliation.
Floods of people thronged across the tiny country's borders late April
as violence degenerated into urban warfare in the capital, Lome, when
Gnassingbe was declared winner of a poll the opposition claimed was
rigged.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50678&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=BENIN-TOGO
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE: Waiting for the oil boom
Beatriz Azevedo points to a woman carrying a plastic bowl of fish on her
head as she wades chest deep through a river where it flows into the
sea.
This river separates the coastal village of Sao Joao dos Angolares from
a nearby beach where fishermen beach their canoes.
"Two men were drowned in recent months while trying to carry their
outboard motors across this river, says Azevedo, the head of the local
women's association.
"When the oil money comes in we are going to build a bridge here."
Everyone in Sao Tome and Principe is convinced that this small island
state tucked away in the Gulf of Guinea is on the verge of an oil boom.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50653&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=SAO_TOME_AND_PRINCIPE
See also:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50699&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=SAO_TOME_AND_PRINCIPE
NIGERIA: Fugitive governor to face UK money laundering charges
President Olusegun Obasanjo said Nigeria will comply with the UK
authorities and hand over a prominent state governor charged with money
laundering who evaded British police disguised as a woman.
"As a member of Interpol-Nigeria will take the appropriate action as
required by the British authorities on this matter," Obasanjo said on
Saturday.
Nigerian police arrested the governor of oil-rich Bayelsa State,
Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, at his office on Friday after state legislators
voted by a two-thirds majority to oust him for corruption and abuse of
position.
Alamieyeseigha's impeachment effectively ended his immunity from
prosecution as a state governor and cleared the way for the armed
Nigerian officers who had surrounded his offices to make an arrest.
British Police originally arrested Alamieyeseigha at Heathrow Airport in
September while en route to Nigeria from Germany and charged him with
laundering 1.8 million British pounds (over US $3 million) found in his
London home.
But Alamieyeseigha skipped bail and, donning a dress and wig, used a
false passport to board a plane back to Nigeria.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=50631&SelectRegion=West_Africa&SelectCountry=NIGERIA
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