Month: November 2022

Kampala, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has extended a quarantine placed on two districts that are the epicentre of the country’s Ebola outbreak by 21 days, adding that his government’s response to the disease was succeeding.

Movement into and out of Mubende and Kassanda districts in central Uganda will be restricted up to December 17, the presidency said late on Saturday. It was originally imposed for 21 days on October 15, then extended for the same period on November 5, Reuters reported.

The extension were “to further sustain the gains in control of Ebola that we have made, and to protect the rest of the country from continued exposure.”

The government’s anti-Ebola efforts were succeeding with two districts now going for roughly two weeks without new cases, the president said.

“It may be too early to celebrate any successes, but overall, I have been briefed that the picture is good,” he said in a statement.

The East African nation has so far recorded 141 infections. Fifty-five people have died since the outbreak of the deadly hemorrhagic fever was declared on September 20th.

Although the outbreak was gradually being brought under control, the “situation is still fragile,” Museveni said, adding that the country’s weak health system and circulation of misinformation about the disease were still a challenge.

The Ebola virus circulating in Uganda is the Sudan strain, for which there is no proven vaccine, unlike the more common Zaire strain, which spread during recent outbreaks in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

Source: Bahrain News Agency

Four people were killed in a failed coup attempt on Sao Tome and Principe, the state news agency STP-Press said Sunday reporting a toll from the armed forces chief of staff.

The military, which Friday thwarted a coup bid in the tiny Portuguese-speaking archipelago off central Africa considered a beacon of democracy, announced “four human lives were lost” after “exchanges of fire” at a military site.

Prime Minister Patrice Trovoada told STP-Press that “four citizens” and 12 soldiers and fighters from South Africa’s officially disbanded Buffalo Battalion were involved in the attempted overnight putsch.

The army said Sunday 12 active-duty soldiers were involved.

They were “neutralized and captured” after trying to storm military sites and three of them died from their wounds despite the army’s efforts to preserve their lives by taking them to the hospital, Trovoada added.

One of the victims was Arlecio Costa, who once served as a mercenary in apartheid South Africa’s Buffalo Battalion, disbanded in 1993. Trovoada accused him of being one of the ringleaders.

The army said Costa — also held in 2009 over accusations of plotting a coup — died following his arrest Friday after he “jumped from a vehicle,” without giving further details.

Trovoada said the former president of the outgoing National Assembly Delfim Neves was also one of several people arrested after the attack on army headquarters, in a Friday video message confirmed by the justice minister.

A judicial source told AFP two inquiries had been launched to investigate the alleged attack on a military barracks in Sao Tome and the “torture” and “murder” of four suspects.

The government on Sunday condemned what it called a “violent attempt to subvert the constitutional order,” saying the deaths and the coup attempt would be investigated.

It added that an international team was coming to the archipelago to support investigators and called on the hospital services to look after the victims’ bodies.

A resident speaking to AFP anonymously by phone said she had heard “automatic and heavy weapons fire, as well as explosions, for two hours inside the army headquarters” in the nation’s capital.

In the video message, authenticated and sent to AFP by the press office of Sao Tome’s prime minister, Trovoada is seen sitting at a desk saying he wants to “reassure” the population and “the international community.”

Trovoada initially said a soldier had been “taken hostage” and wounded but “would be able to resume his activities in a few days.”

A former Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea, the nation of some 215,000 people is deeply poor and depends on international aid but is also praised for its political stability and parliamentary democracy.

Source: Voice of America

UNITED NATIONS, The United Nations (UN) on Saturday strongly condemned an attack on an airfield in southeastern Central African Republic (CAR) which left a Moroccan peacekeeper dead.

The attack against UN peacekeepers at the Obo airfield on Thursday happened during a UN-led operation to secure the perimeter of the airfield to allow planes to land.

In his statement released via his spokesperson’s office, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres strongly condemned the attack and expressed his deepest condolences to the family of the fallen peacekeeper and to the kingdom and people of Morocco.

He said that such attacks “may constitute war crimes under international law” and called on the CAR government “to spare no effort in identifying the perpetrators of this tragedy so that they can be brought to justice swiftly.”

The Security Council issued a statement late on Friday, condemning the attack “in the strongest terms,” stressing that anybody found to be involved in the planning, direction or sponsoring of such attacks could be sanctioned.

One of the poorest countries in the world, CAR is beset by violence between feuding domestic groups, ethnic tension and raids by international armed groups.

Source: Nam News Network

M23 rebels were still fighting and advancing on one front of their offensive in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday as a cease-fire came into force, civilian and military sources said.

Clashes continued after the 1700 GMT deadline to cease fire near Bwiza, about 40 kilometers north of the provincial capital, Goma, local people told AFP by telephone.

“M23 is at Bwiza,” an administrative source said, adding that the rebels had taken over several villages in the area.

AFP was unable to independently confirm the account.

Bwiza was the stronghold of former Congolese Tutsi rebel leader Laurent Nkunda, who operated there in the 2000s.

Fighting also took place during the day between the M23 and a Hutu militia in Bambo, 70 kilometers from Goma.

“Heavy weapons fire can be heard. People are in a panic,” a civil society representative told AFP.

A security source confirmed fighting between the M23 and soldiers from the Democratic Forces for the Liberation Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu faction present in the DRC since the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda.

Calm seemed to have returned to Bambo as evening fell.

The situation appeared more settled 20 kilometers north of Goma, where a front line has formed during the last two weeks close to the town of Kibumba on national Highway 2.

DRC’s President Felix Tshisekedi and Rwandan Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta met in Angola on Wednesday, agreeing to a deal on the cessation of hostilities in eastern DRC starting Friday evening local time.

M23 rebels were to withdraw from “occupied zones,” and if they did not, the East African regional force would intervene.

But the rebels, a largely Congolese Tutsi militia, said Thursday that the cease-fire “doesn’t really concern us” and called for direct talks with DRC’s government.

“Normally when there is a cease-fire it is between the two warring sides,” a spokesman for the rebels added.

On Friday, Bertrand Bisimwa, president of the M23, put out a statement in English saying that his group “accepts the cease-fire as recommended” by the Luanda summit. But he called on Kinshasa “to respect said cease-fire. Otherwise the M23 reserves itself the full right to defend itself.”

The March 23 group had been dormant for years but took up arms again late last year.

The DRC accuses Rwanda of supporting the rebels, a charge Kigali denies.

The rebels have recently seized swaths of mountainous Rutshuru territory north of Goma, a city of 1 million that they briefly captured 10 years ago.

Kinshasa has refused to engage with the M23, which it calls a terrorist movement, as long as it occupies territory in the DRC.

The M23 is one of scores of armed groups that have turned eastern DRC into one of Africa’s most violent regions.

Many such armed groups are legacies of two wars before the turn of the century that sucked in countries from the region and left millions dead.

Source: Voice of America

Jihadists aligned with the Islamic State group are advancing in northeastern Mali, prompting terrified citizens to flee their homes, sources there say.

The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS) launched an offensive in the Gao and Menaka regions in March, triggering heavy fighting with local armed groups and rival jihadists.

“If nothing is done, the whole region will be occupied” by jihadis, a human rights campaigner, contacted by AFP on WhatsApp, said on the condition of anonymity.

Witnesses and other sources contacted by AFP confirmed the sustained ISGS push in this remote and dangerous area, and rights campaigners say civilians have been massacred.

The strategic towns of Gao and Menaka have long been in the forefront of Mali’s decadelong jihadi crisis.

Since 2012, thousands have died and hundreds of thousands have fled their homes, in an insurgency that has spread to neighboring Niger and Burkina Faso.

Despair at the toll prompted Malian army officers to mount a coup in 2020.

The junta has brought in Russian paramilitaries — a move that prompted France to pull out troops who had been battling jihadists for nine years.

Massacres

Outside the two towns, the region is largely desert, populated mainly by nomads.

They bore the brunt of clashes between pro-independence Tuaregs and the Malian army between 2012 and 2015. They are now caught in the crossfire between the ISGS on the one side and a motley array of armed groups on the other.

The latter comprise al-Qaida jihadis; pro-independence fighters who signed up to a peace deal with the government in 2015; and pro-government Tuareg combatants who had previously fought the pro-independence groups.

The U.N. and NGOs have reported repeated attacks against communities accused of abetting the enemy or refusing to join the jihadists.

Hundreds of villagers have died in massacres by ISGS fighters, Human Rights Watch said last month.

Eleven were killed Monday in a raid by gunmen on motorbikes on a camp for displaced people at Kadji, just outside Gao, local officials and humanitarian workers told AFP.

Moussa Ag Acharatoumane, head of the loyalist Movement for the Safety of Azawad, said a “climate of terror” prevailed.

“All economic life has come to a halt. The roads have been destroyed,” he said.

“[It’s] an unprecedented humanitarian crisis,” he said, adding that the town of Menaka was being swamped by displaced people.

A mayor in the Menaka administrative region said that in his district, “there’s nobody left.”

A U.N. document issued this month said that in the town of Gao, nearly 60,000 people had arrived.

Several sources said that the jihadis had moved into a vacuum left when France pulled its forces out of the region.

The border with neighboring Niger marks the limit of the fighting.

Niger’s army is being supported in the air and on the ground by foreign forces, including France’s Barkhane mission.

On the Malian side, the army has holed up in the town of Menaka, a tactic that leaves “the way open” for the jihadis, a local elected official — who has fled to Bamako — told AFP.

Stoning

He and others painted a gruesome picture of life in areas under jihadi control.

“If you’re not with them, you’re against them,” the official said.

Villages seized by the militants must pay an Islamic tax and submit to a brutal interpretation of Islamic law.

An aid worker in Ansongo said that in the village of Tin-Hama, an unmarried couple aged 50 and 36 were stoned to death in September.

“They dug a hole on weekly market day and placed [them] … in it up to their hips and then threw rocks at them,” the source said.

Pro-government forces are trying to muster outside help for their cause, a security source in Niger said.

One idea is to forge an alliance with the former rebels of the Coordination of Azawad Movements and the Support Group for Islam and Muslims (GSIM), a shadowy group led by an al-Qaida-linked Tuareg, Iyad Ag Ghali.

But the chances of creating a joint front are low, an African diplomat in Bamako said.

“Politically, it would seem quite a stretch for people to team up openly with al-Qaida today,” the diplomat said.

Source: Voice of America