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WEST AFRICA: IRIN-WA Weekly Round-up 25 covering the period 19-25 June 1999
SIERRA LEONE: UN Commissioner draws attention to abuses
Sierra Leone requires urgent international attention if it is to overcome its recent history of horrendous human rights abuses, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, said on Friday in Freetown.
Ending a two-day visit to the war-torn country, Robinson said she was "deeply shocked" by the extent and cruelty of the violence against civilians, committed mostly by members of the RUF during a January assault on the Sierra Leonean capital.
On Friday, Robinson visited victims of that incursion and of other attacks carried out during the country's eight-year-old armed conflict.
"Having seen the suffering of so many women and girls held as virtual sex slaves, of children and men young and old who have lost limbs as a result of a deliberate policy of amputation, I am more determined than ever to ensure that we focus international concern and attention on Sierra Leone," she said.
Robinson said that with peace talks in Lome at a crucial stage, such international support was vital. Measures that could be taken in the short term, she said, included international assistance to document human rights violations in the country as a step towards establishing accountability, increasing the number of human rights monitors in the country, and working with the government and society to create a "human rights infrastructure in the country".
She hailed the signing on Thursday - in which she participated - of the "Human Rights Manifesto of Sierra Leone", which expresses the commitment of the government and civil society "to the unwavering and non-discriminatory promotion of all human rights for present and future generations in Sierra Leone".
It also contains provisions on the establishment of an independent national human rights institution and of a "Truth and Reconciliation Commission."
Meanwhile, a working group representing humanitarian agencies in Sierra Leone is scheduled to go early next week to Pendembu, an RUF stronghold in the eastern district of Kailahun, to discuss the logistics and modalities for humanitarian access with local RUF field commanders.
In Lome, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sierra Leone Kingsley Amaning met on Thursday with RUF leader Foday Sankoh and his aides to discuss access to RUF-held areas. The meeting was held "to work out concrete arrangements whereby collaboration in the field could be established," Amaning told IRIN.
MALI: UNHCR wraps up its operations in the north
The UNHCR has ended its repatriation and resettlement programme for people who fled northern Mali after a Tuareg rebellion broke out in 1990, the UNHCR announced on Friday in Bamako.
The four-year programme, from which some 305,000 refugees and displaced persons benefited, cost more than 24 billion CFA francs (about US $240 million), according to Arnauld-Antoine Akodjenou, UNHCR's representative in Mali.
It included the establishment of 638 resettlement points in Gao, Kidal, Mopti, Segou and Timbuktu.
UNHCR's operations will now be limited to a liaison office that will cater mainly for the some 2,000 urban refugees in Mali. Most are from Sierra Leone and Liberia, while there are also a number of asylum-seekers from the Great Lakes region.
NIGERIA: Senate approves 42 of 49 ministerial nominees
Nigeria's Senate approved on Wednesday 42 of the 49 ministerial nominees of President Olusegun Obasanjo and 12 of his 15 special advisers, the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) reported.
Rejected nominees included Theophilus Danjuma, tipped as defence minister, who served as Obasanjo's army chief when he was military ruler from 1976-1979.
Anti-corruption bill presented to legislature
NTA also reported that Obasanjo on Wednesday presented to the National Assembly a draft anti-corruption act, his first bill, which sets penalties for officials found to be corrupt.
Obasanjo has also approved the establishment of a committee to investigate all transactions between January 1994 and 27 May 1999 involving government property, NTA reported. The panel will identify all federal landed property, decide which ones have been or are in danger of being sold, leased, given away and "determine the propriety of such transactions".
The body, which has 90 days to complete its business, is to be inaugurated on 28 June, one week after the establishment of a panel that has been given nine months to review projects left uncompleted between January 1976 and December 1998.
Teachers suspend two-month long strike
Meanwhile, the Nigerian Union of Teachers has suspended its two-month-long strike following payment of a new minimum wage for public sector workers and a government promise that the teachers' demands would be met, Radio Nigeria reported on Tuesday. The new minimum wage is 3,000 naira (US $32) a month.
TEXACO suspends production
The US oil giant Texaco suspended production in the Niger Delta after armed youths demanding compensation for a 1998 oil spill in Bayelsa State boarded two oil rigs, news reports said on Tuesday.
The firm shut down six offshore platforms which, together, produce 50,000 barrels a day and informed buyers that it could not meet scheduled deliveries, Reuters reported.
Five killed in renewed clashes
Five more people have died in renewed fighting in the troubled Niger Delta region of Nigeria, AFP reported. Quoting newspaper reports on Monday, it said armed Ijaw youths attacked the Itsekiri town of Kantu, near Warri, on 19 June.
According to Samie Ihejirika of Strategic Empowerment and Mediation Agency, a Nigerian non-governmental organisation, "Thirty-one prominent communal conflict areas have developed in Nigeria in the last 10 years". The main cause, he said, was rivalry over distribution of resources, which may manifest itself as disputes over land, money, titles or chieftaincy.
Bandits kill dozens of people
Heavily armed bandits, thought to be ex-rebels from Chad and Niger, attacked four communities in the northern state of Taraba at the end of last week, killing dozens of people, a news source told IRIN. The affected districts are Kareem-Lamido, Ardo-Kola, Gassol and Bali.
Cholera
Parts of northern Nigeria are threatened by a major outbreak of cholera which has claimed at least 60 lives since the beginning of June, local health officials said. The worst affected areas include the north central state of Kaduna
LIBERIA: Government denies ethnic cleansing
Deputy Information Minister Milton Teahjay has denied an allegation by opposition politician Alhaji Kromah that the Liberian government has been perpetrating ethnic cleansing in Lofa County in northwest Liberia, Star radio reported.
Kromah had alleged that the government was arming some people to persecute others of Muslim background in Lofa, which has been wracked this year by clashes between the mainly Muslim Mandingos and other ethnic groups.
GUINEA BISSAU: Refugees
The security situation in Guinea Bissau has improved and conditions are now in place for the voluntary repatriation of refugees to that country, according to UNHCR, which has signed tripartite agreements to that effect with the governments of Guinea Bissau and the various countries of asylum.
Delivery of humanitarian aid
Trucks transporting humanitarian supplies from Senegal to Guinea Bissau have to pay 15,000 CFA (about US $25) on entering the country, OCHA reported from Bissau. They also have to make unauthorised payments to the police at each checkpoint on the road from the border to Bissau, OCHA said.
TAP to resume flights to Bissau
Portugal's state-owned airline, TAP, plans to resume flights to Guinea Bissau by the end of June, a TAP spokesman told Lusa in Lisbon last weekend.
SENEGAL: Casamance separatists meet to heal rifts
Senegal's separatist Mouvement des forces democratique de Casamance (MFDC), which is riven by internal differences, met this week in The Gambia to prepare a joint position for possible peace negotiations with the government in Dakar.
GAMBIA: Cuba sends 150 doctors
Some 150 Cuban doctors, the largest contingent of foreign doctors to serve in The Gambia, arrived in Banjul on 16 June, the state-owned newspaper, `The Gambia Daily' has reported. They will serve there for three years.
BURKINA FASO: Three presidential guards arrested
Police in Burkina Faso have arrested three presidential guards for their suspected involvement in the torture and killing of David Ouedraogo, a driver of the president's brother, in January 1998, after a committee of elders mandated to review unpunished political crimes called for their arrest.
President Blaise Compaore set up the committee, which includes three former presidents, in June following street protests in reaction to the murder of Norbert Zongo, an investigative journalist who had been campaigning for the arrest of the president's brother, Francois Compaore, in connection with Ouedraogo's murder.
NIGER: Parties reach consensus on constitutional arrangements
Niger's political parties have agreed on a compromise system that balances the powers of the president, prime minister and parliament, media organisations reported last weekend.
A new draft constitution under which power would have been shared between a president and a prime minister had been rejected by two main parties.
The Gabon-based Africa No. 1 radio station quotes Moumouni Adamou Djermakoye, head of the Alliance nigerienne pour la Democratie et le Progres, as saying that under the compromise, political parties "agreed to innovate in two areas".
Djermakoye said they agreed that a new Consultative Assembly - "a crisis prevention and resolution body" - would be set up and that the next administration will be a government of national unity including all political tendencies.
GHANA: Cholera
Some 55 cholera cases have been reported this month in Accra, Ghana, according to information relayed to IRIN by the WHO.
The Health Ministry's Disease Control Unit said "55 cases of cholera, with three deaths, were reported to the polyclinic at Korle-Bu (an Accra neighbourhood)" on 1-21 June and "two specimens confirmed cholera", a source in the WHO office in Accra told IRIN.
IMF gold sales worry Accra
Ghana's government said on Wednesday that the decision by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to sell 10 percent of its gold stocks to provide more aid to poor nations could have a crippling effect on gold-producing countries, PANA reported.
Minister of Energy and Mines Fred Ohene Kena said "the proposal must be stopped entirely" since most gold producing economies were already reeling under a recent depreciation in gold prices and could not afford to experience another price fall.
The World Gold Council (WGC) has also criticised the move. It said the ensuing price collapse had already caused developing nations to lose over US $150 million in annual export earnings.
TOGO: Human rights activists freed
Four human rights activists who were jailed in May for their role in a report on the country by Amnesty International, have been released provisionally, media organisations have reported.
State radio in Lome said the men had been granted freedom pending police investigations into their role in the report, which claimed hundreds of opposition activists were killed in 1998 during and after the re-election of President Gnassingbe Eyadema.
WESTERN SAHARA: WFP food for Sahrawi refugees
The World Food Programme (WFP) is to help refugees from Western Sahara in south-western Algeria up to the end of March 2000 under a proposed Protracted Relief and Recovery Operation (PRRO).
The main aims of the operation, expected to cost just under US $3.5 million, include providing 80,000 vulnerable people in refugee camps in Tindouf with the basic food requirements, WFP said.
SAHEL: Weather and crop situation
The rainy season started under generally favourable conditions this year in the Sahel but reduced rains in June threaten seedlings in parts of the subregion, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) says in a just released report.
Abidjan, 25 June 1999, 17:35 GMT
[ENDS]
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Item: irin-english-1107
[This item is delivered in the "irin-english" service of the UN's IRIN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations. For further information or free subscriptions, or to change your keywords, contact e-mail: irin@ocha.unon.org or fax: +254 2 622129 or Web: http://www.reliefweb.int/IRIN . If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer.]
Copyright (c) UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 1999
Editor: Ali B. Ali-Dinar
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