The fighting in North Kivu threatens both next year's promised elections and Congo's fragile peace. President Joseph Kabila's cheerleaders in Kinshasa blame Rwandan aggression for the latest clashes,...
Somebody fired katyusha rockets into Rwerere village in Rwanda's northern Gisenyi province, on 15 November. Three people were hurt. A similar attack followed in Ruhengeri province. President Paul...
The NIF keeps killing; the West offers aid and debt relief
The failure of the West's policy on Sudan - and in particular its failure to respond to the suffering in Darfur - was clear in the lead up...
The future of the official investigation into the US$600 million Goldenberg export fraud is in doubt. Africa Confidential has learned that several deadlines for its completion have been...
Kigali's muscular foreign policy has won a grudging respect
A decade after, most of the regime's diplomatic responses are still conditioned by the genocide and the failure of the United Nations and Western states to help stop...
After declaring the Islamic African Relief Agency and five senior officials 'Specially Designated Global Terrorists' on 13 October, the United States may now ask the United Nations Sanctions...
Politicians scramble for power as the transition's end draws near
The transitional government is due to step down on 1 November and - unless swift action is taken - a dangerous power vacuum looms. The 20 October referendum...
Nerves were calmed in the coalition government on 24 September when the International Monetary Fund agreed to release the second part of a US$36 million loan. The cash...
As Western governments fumble for a policy, the NIF keeps up the dissembling
As Sudan government attacks on civilians continue in Darfur and as Washington at last calls the slaughter 'genocide', United States' and British diplomats argue perversely that for the...
Chad lives precariously, even without the Darfur crisis on its eastern border (AC Vol 45 No 18). That disaster has turned President Idriss Déby against Khartoum, as he...
Museveni wants many parties, as long as his own provides the president
Months after it was due, a new phase of Ugandan politics began on 21 September, when Hajat Janat Mukwaya, Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, set out the...
The United Nations Security Council looks set to fail another critical test: whether it has the will to protect civilians in Darfur from being slaughtered by their own...
Without international peacekeepers the massacres will continue
In a few weeks, the direction of the Darfur crisis should be clearer: if the pressure for an international peacekeeping force and sustained pressure on the National Islamic...
The Darfur massacres have finally put the NIF government back
on the international watchlist - but it believes it can evade
more serious sanctions
The Darfur war is intensifying on two fronts - on the scorched scrublands of western Sudan, where more than 50,000 civilians have been killed already, and on the...
Diplomatic failures are hampering efforts to hold the militias
and their masters to account
Bureaucratic squabbles and diplomatic evasions are derailing plans for a peacekeeping force to protect civilians or even ceasefire monitors in Darfur. No interested government has called the National...
By squeezing the delegates, mediators hope to get a faction
leaders' parliament
Somalia is about to be endowed with a parliament, say mediators at the reconciliation conference in Nairobi. They have been squeezing the delegates. In May, the foreign ministers...
Pressure is mounting on the government to speed its probe into the Anglo Leasing affair and act against the Kenyan and foreign traders involved in it. The company...
Vol 45 No 15 |
- KENYA
- BRITAIN
Whitehall's envoy breaks with eumphemism and talks straight on graft
British High Commissioner Edward Clay's poetic excursion into corruption busting has sparked an expected political storm. Less predictable has been the rapid unravelling of more corrupt deals set...
Vol 45 No 15 |
- SUDAN
- RUSSIA
With a deft sense of timing, Russia's MiG aircraft company has announced that is about to complete the supply of 12 MiG-29 Fulcrum fighters to Sudan.
This week's military agreement between Rwanda and South Africa may be touted as African Union cooperation and regional peace-building. But some in Pretoria fear that if Kigali continues...
With perhaps 1,000 people now dying every day in Darfur, Khartoum is still defying even the mild demands made last week by Colin Powell and Kofi Annan. ...
In our article entitled 'Fighting Mighty Magendo', published 28 May 2004 . . .
As United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan is taking the heat for UN inaction on the Darfur genocide, Washington is under mounting pressure to act. Worried about 'another...
The Khartoum government's genocide in Darfur overshadows the North-South peace deal
The Naivasha peace deal of 26 May was signed under the dark shadow of the National Islamic Front regime's genocide in Darfur (AC Vol 45 Nos 9, 10...
Three documents were signed on 26 May in Kenya by the National Islamic Front regime and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army. The protocols were: On Power Sharing, On...
Between Kass and El Geneina, there was not one village that had not been burnt. Between Zalingei and Geneina, Africa Confidential counted 18 villages destroyed, some of them...
After 18 months in power, the government faces some critical tests in its anti-corruption struggle
'Anti-corruption campaigns are good politics they're popular with the voters!' a smiling senior official told Africa Confidential last week. That's true only if the campaigns work: Kenyan...
An emerging elite of business people and politicians is jockeying for influence and contracts
The business and political sands have shifted since President Mwai Kibaki took office in January 2003. Some loyal business retainers of the Daniel arap Moi era have been...
President Museveni's third term bid is splitting the governing party he so patiently built
The desire to stay in power for a third term could prove the chink in President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's well-maintained armour. It has divided his National Resistance Movement...
After a brief rest, the Lord's Resistance Army under Joseph Kony has slaughtered more defenceless civilians in displaced camps in northern Uganda. In Pagak on 16 May, the...
The day-long delay in signing the latest protocol between the National Islamic Front governmentment and the Sudan People's Liberation Army in Kenya on 26 May points to disagreements...
The government continues to block humanitarian aid and a third of a million lives are at risk
It was an operation typical of the one-two punch used in Darfur by the government's regular forces, hand in glove with the irregular forces known as Janjaweed. The...
The commander of the Sudan Liberation Army's Messalit forces, Khamis Abdullah Abaker, was one of the first villagers to organise self-defence units. He described how in 1998-2003, he...
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who on the anniversary of the start of Rwanda's genocide raised the possibility of military intervention in Darfur, has been trying to galvanise...
Despite his retirement from the army, President Museveni is closer to the military than ever
When President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni retired from the army on 6 April, 18 years after his National Resistance Army seized power, his promotion to full general that day...
Ten years after Rwanda's genocide, the NIF regime kills and displaces tens of thousands of civilians in Darfur – with impunity
Civilians in Darfur continue to die as a result of the National Islamic Front regime's ethnic cleansing and in the absence of serious diplomatic pressure. United Nations Secretary...
Late last month, an Ilyushin-76 aircraft with clear Algerian air force markings unloaded ten tonnes of ammunition at Abéché airport, 170 kilometres from Chad's border with Sudan, say...
As the nation drifts quietly towards the polls, trouble looms offshore
As Tanzania this week celebrates 40 years of Union between the mainland and the islands of Zanzibar, the race to succeed President Benjamin Mkapa after next year's elections...
The President has to take some tough decisions to rescue the coalition government
The next six months will be critical for President Mwai Kibaki and for the future of his National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) government. After almost 18 months of power,...
Military might and economic rigour have sustained Kigali's
recovery
Ten years after Rwanda's genocide, its economic growth is fast but much faster for some sectors and for some people than for others. The government depends heavily on...
The outpouring of grief and horrific memories ten years after Rwanda's genocide has been accompanied by a less dignified round of finger-pointing among governments, diplomats and journalists. It...
Darfur burns as the US deadline for a peace deal for the South
draws near
The National Islamic Front claims to have foiled a coup attempt but its arrest of senior military officers and NIF founder Hassan Abdullah el Turabi owes more to...
A candid 250-page statement from businessman Kamlesh Pattni, the man accused of launching the billion dollar Goldenberg export scam, listing 13 prominent members of ex-President Daniel arap Moi's...
Kigali rejects French claims that its fighters shot down President
Habyarimana's plane
Diplomatic relations between Paris and Kigali have sunk to their lowest level for a decade in a new row over Rwanda's genocide. On 16 March, President Paul Kagame...
Massacres near the Sudan border show the problems of ethnic
provinces - and oil
In December 2003, more than 400 Anyuak people were killed in a single day in Gambella, western Ethiopia. The massacre set off a wave of other murders and...
Rebel massacres and party activists are shaking the National Resistance Movement's political dominance
As pressure mounts on President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni to leave power by 2006 at the end of his second elected term, both the military war in the north...
The row over the constitution is splitting the government and blocking reform
'The one certainty is that this won't last', insist Nairobi's political veterans. Few believe the governing National Rainbow Coalition (Narc) can survive much past the middle of the...
This week, another former senior civil servant, Finance Ministry Permanent Secretary Wilfred Koinange, accused ex-President Daniel arap Moi of ordering an illegal transfer of US$76 million of state...
The regime prepares to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the genocide
Six months after his Front Patriotique Rwandais swept the board at last year's presidential and parliamentary elections, President Paul Kagame is still putting his regime in order (AC...
The military threat from abroad is at last diminishing. Tension with Uganda is subsiding in the wake of the most recent meeting between President Paul Kagame and President...
Peace hopes are rising again after the 19-20 January talks at the Hague between President Domitien Ndayizéyé and Agathon Rwasa, leader of the only militia still fighting, the...
An offer of aid may tempt the last rebel movement in from the cold
The Bujumbura government and the international donors in the Forum for Burundi may have put the cart before the horse. In Brussels on 13-14 January, they put together...
Belgian-based Groupe George Forrest has energetically rejected reports by a United Nations panel of experts and international human rights groups criticising its mining operations in Congo-Kinshasa as exploitative...
In 1984 BBC journalist Michael Buerk made a powerful television film of Ethiopia's 'biblical famine'. In an anniversary film this month, Buerk concluded things had not improved ...
Khartoum's surprise announcement of a month's break in the peace talks worries Washington. It had expected a peace deal for President George Bush to celebrate in his State...