[Prec. per data] [Succ. per data] [Prec. per argomento] [Succ. per argomento] [Indice per data] [Indice per argomento]

Weekly anb08234.txt #7

_____________________________________________________________
WEEKLY NEWS ISSUE of: 23-08-2001      PART #4/7
* Guinée-Bissau. Groupe islamique expulsé - Le 20 août, le président Yala a donné l'ordre au groupe islamique Ahmadiyya de quitter la Guinée-Bissau dans les 48 heures, l'accusant de créer de "sérieux malentendus" au sein de la communauté musulmane, qui forme près de la moitié de la population du pays, a rapporté l'agence portugaise Lusa. A l'occasion d'un rassemblement de 500 chefs musulmans, il a indiqué que l'Amhadiyya interférait dans la vie politique du pays. Selon Lusa, l'Ahmadiyya, qui existe en Guinée-Bissau depuis 1995, est considérée comme non orthodoxe et est inacceptable pour la majorité musulmane. (IRIN, Abidjan, 21 août 2001)
* Equatorial Guinea. Oil boom - A new gas discovery in Equatorial Guinea has renewed discussions about how the country's oil wealth should be shared out. Equatorial Guinea has become one of the world's fastest growing economies. Just last month, the government forecast that the economy would grow 72.5% this year, in a continuation of a boom spurred by the discovery of oil in the early 1990s. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) believes that the economy will grow 52.7% this year. But as Texan oil company CMS Energy discovers a significant new off-shore gas field, questions remains as to when the country's poor will see the benefits of a booming economy. Equatorial Guinea is a tiny country, nestled between Cameroon and Gabon on the West Coast of Africa. Since the discovery of large oil and gas deposits off Bioko in the mid-1990s, the country has experienced an economic boom, with US companies investing about $5bn over the past five years. Currently, Equatorial Guinea produces between 200,000 and 250,000 barrels of oil a day, making it the third biggest producer in Africa, following Nigeria and Angola. (ANB-BIA, Brussels, 18 August 2001)
* Eritrea. Students die in Eritrea detention camp - 20 August: A second student held in a desert detention camp in Eritrea for refusing to comply with the government's holiday work programme has died. The president of Asmara University, Woldeab Issak, said the student, Yemane Tekee, died at the Halibet hospital on 19 August morning where he had been receiving medical treatment for heat stroke. On 16 August, the French news agency AFP reported the death, also from sun stroke, of another student in the camp. The dead students were among those taken to the site at Wia, about 30 kilometres from the port city of Massawa. Massawa is known for its scorching temperatures sometimes reaching as high as 49C (120F) at this time of year. The agency says some students, released to write their exams, said about 2,000 of them were being held with very little food and in poor accommodation. They were arrested a week ago in dormitories and at the High Court where they had expected to see the appearance in court of their student union president. The student leader, Semere Kesete, was arrested in July for making a speech attacking the compulsory work scheme, government's interference in the university's affairs and inadequate support for the institution. 21 August: The Eritrean government has denied reports that it has been holding 2,000 university students at a desert detention camp for the past week because they refused to take part in a compulsory summer work project. The government said police had detained about 400 students who had agitated against the work programme. They'd been sent to a project centre at Wia south of Massawa to start a newly-arranged project and were joined there voluntarily by another seventeen-hundred students. The government said Asmara University had made it clear that there would be penalties at registration when the university re-opened in September for those who boycotted the summer programme. They also confirmed that two students on the programme had died, but denied this was due to poor living conditions. (BBC News, UK, 22 August 2001)
* Kenya. Chute d'un minibus: 23 morts - Le 15 août au soir, 23 personnes, dont 10 enfants, ont été tuées et 15 blessées après la chute d'un minibus dans une rivière, près de la ville de Machakos (sud du Kenya). Le minibus a heurté une pierre sur la route et a plongé dans la rivière Mwania. D'une capacité de 23 passagers, le véhicule transportait 58 personnes quand l'accident s'est produit. (Le Soir, Belgique, 17 août 2001)
* Libéria. Appel de l'Onu - Le Conseil de sécurité de l'Onu, préoccupé par la poursuite des combats au Libéria, a demandé aux parties impliquées de faire preuve de modération et de chercher une solution par le dialogue. Le président du Conseil a dit dans un communiqué rendu public le 16 août, que les combats entre le gouvernement et les rebelles étaient à l'origine de graves problèmes humanitaires. Il a invité fermement le gouvernement du Libéria à permettre un accès aux agences humanitaires afin que les secours puissent être acheminés vers les réfugiés et personnes déplacées. (PANA, Sénégal, 18 août 2001)
* Liberia. Liberia fights "ghost soldiers" - Liberia has discovered that some 2,000 soldiers out of its 14,000 strong army do not exist. All of these so-called "ghost soldiers" have now been removed from the payroll in an attempt to cut fraud. Defence Ministry spokesman Philibert Brown told Reuters news agency that some senior officers had been regularly receiving salaries on behalf of people who do not exist. Philibert Brown, Defence Ministry Correspondents say that there may still be thousands more "ghost soldiers" in Liberia. It is thought that only around half of Liberia's official military strength of 12,000 is still in service -- the rest were killed or deserted during the country's long 1990s civil war. For the past year, Liberia has been rocked by serious fighting in the areas which border Guinea and Sierra Leone. "Our exercise is intended to identify only ghost names and I must tell you that there will be no trouble because a ghost does not exist," said Mr Brown. (ANB-BIA, Brussels, 18 August 2001)
* Liberia. Fighting flares - Fresh fighting has erupted between rebels and government troops in northern Liberia, the Liberian defence ministry says. A ministry statement said rebels had burned down the town of Kpatazu in Lofa County on the border with Guinea. Liberian defence ministry Officials said the two sides were fighting for control of the town and that clashes had also broken out in the town of Kolahun. The reports of renewed violence came as ministers from Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone prepared to meet to discuss ways of curbing armed groups active in the region. "Our troops are presently engaged in a series of running battles with dissident forces and are thwarting any further advance into other parts of Lofa County," the statement said. The ministry did not say when the clashes broke out and there has been no independent confirmation of the fighting. (BBC News, UK, 22 August 2001)
* Maroc. Ahmed Boukhari en prison - Ahmed Boukhari, ex-agent des services secrets marocains qui, depuis la fin juin, a multiplié les révélations sur l'affaire Ben Barka et le fonctionnement de la police politique du royaume durant les "années de plomb" a été envoyé en prison pour "émission de chèques sans provision". Il est poursuivi pour quatre chèques en bois d'un montant global de 125.000 FF, dont deux (portant sur les trois quarts de la somme) datent de 1992. Le quotidien marocain indépendant L'Economiste dénonce, le 15 août, "un véritable assassinat de l'Etat de droit", estimant que le ministère public, au lieu de poursuivre l'ex-agent, aurait dû se saisir de ses révélations pour ouvrir une instruction. On espère que l'arrestation d'Ahmed Boukhari ne sera pas un obstacle à sa déposition devant la justice française, qui a convoqué ce témoin capital pour le 7 septembre. (Ndlr.: Le 22 août, un tribunal de Casablanca a décidé le maintien de Boukhari en prison et le renvoi du procès au 28 août. Boukhari a décidé d'entreprendre une grève de la faim). (Le Monde, France, 17 août 2001)
* Morocco. Launching a "war on slums" - Morocco's King Mohammed VI has ordered his government to tackle worsening poverty in an attempt to curb the growing shanty towns around the country's main cities. In a speech televised live to the nation, the king called for a supreme jihad or holy war aimed at eradicating the social conditions that had created the shanty towns -- and laws to stop the slums spreading. The king said some two million impoverished citizens are now concentrated in the coastal belt that takes in Casablanca and Rabat. Another two million are on the Mediterranean coastline near Tangiers and at Oujda near the border with Algeria. Despite the existence of an elected parliament and government in Morocco, it is the monarch and his advisers who hold the main decision-making powers. The fact that King Mohammed has personally highlighted this issue indicates the seriousness with which it is being taken. What Moroccans probably fear most is the kind of social and political degeneration that has taken place since the 1980s in neighbouring Algeria. The shanty towns are breeding-grounds for the cause of political Islam, which has been relatively dormant so far in Morocco but lies just beneath the surface. The rural Berber community is now also beginning to stand up for further rights, and in a previous speech last month the king promised to address Berber demands. (BBC News, UK, 21 August 2001)
* Maroc. Lutte contre l'habitat insalubre - Le 20 août, le roi Mohammed VI a appelé à l'élaboration d'un plan national pour la lutte contre l'habitat insalubre. Il a essentiellement mis l'accent sur les collectivités locales, mettant en garde contre l'octroi à des fins "clientélistes et électoralistes" de permis de construire illégaux "encourageant implicitement l'habitat insalubre". Selon les chiffres avancés par le roi, plus de quatre millions de Marocains vivent dans des bidonvilles en progression annuelle de 70%. (AP, 21 août 2001)
* Namibia. Black farmers urge land reform - Black communal farmers in Namibia have urged the 4,000 mainly-white commercial farmers to speed up land reform to avoid what they called Zimbabwe-style farm invasions. The Namibian National Farmers' Union said the government's willing-seller, willing-buyer policy had failed to address the land imbalance in Namibia because white commercial farmers were unwilling to sell. The union's leader, Pintile Davids, has warned that the slow pace of land reform could produce another Zimbabwe, where hundreds of white-owned farms have been seized by self-styled liberation war veterans with the support of President Robert Mugabe's government. Only some 35,000 Namibians have been resettled on commercial farmland since independence from South Africa in 1990. (BBC News, UK, 21 August 2001)
* Nigeria. Lutte contre le corruption - Le 15 août, le gouvernement nigérian a approuvé l'octroi de nouveaux pouvoirs au président Obasanjo pour lui permettre de limoger les hauts responsables corrompus, a informé le quotidien The Guardian. M. Obasanjo sera ainsi en mesure de congédier sommairement des fonctionnaires soupçonnés de corruption, après avoir consulté et reçu l'approbation du pouvoir législatif, au lieu de passer par l'actuelle procédure plus lente et plus longue. Cet amendement intervient dans un climat de critiques contre le gouvernement pour son laxisme dans la lutte contre la corruption. (IRIN, Abidjan, 16 août 2001)
* Nigeria. Milices et vigiles - Des membres de l'Odua People's Congress (OPC), sous la coupe d'une interdiction, ont continué cette semaine à tuer des voleurs présumés dans l'Etat de Lagos. Le 16 août, l'OPC a décapité quatre hommes, puis mis le feu à leurs cadavres, a rapporté The Guardian. L'un des suspects a été cloué sur une planche en forme de crucifix. Le gouvernement fédéral, les forces de l'ordre et des groupes de la société civile s'opposent aux méthodes macabres des milices telles que l'OPC et à leurs pratiques de justiciers. Cependant, certaines ont l'appui des gouverneurs et des habitants, qui soutiennent que les groupes se sont révélés efficaces dans la lutte contre le crime. L'OPC fut interdit en 1999 après avoir provoqué des émeutes ayant fait des centaines de morts. Dans l'Etat d'Abia, l'ONG Public and Private Rights Watch a appelé à mettre hors service les Bakassi Boys, un groupe de vigiles opérant à Abia et dans d'autres Etats du sud-est. (IRIN, Abidjan, 17 août 2001) 

WEEKLY anb0823.txt - #4/7