Human Rights Watch assailed the Ethiopian government’s forcible relocation of 70,000 indigenous peasants from the western Gambella regionāamid massive government land-leasing to corporate ag-biz interests.
After a week of “Occupation” protests paralyzed the country’s cities, Nigeria’s government slashed fuel prices. But protest leaders demand prices be restored to the level before President Goodluck Jonathan dropped subsidies.
The Oromo Support Group reports that authorities in the de facto state of Somaliland are forcibly repatriating asylum-seekers from the oppressed Oromo and Ogadeni ethnic groups to Ethiopia, where they face persecution.
Deadly ethnic clashes in Nigeria and a state of emergency in response to Boko Haram attacks come amid a massive oil spill in the Delta regionāand government plans to drop fuel subsidies, leading to calls for a general strike.
South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir arrived in Washington to meet with Hillary Clinton, World Bank president Robert Zoellick and international investorsāas biofuel and resource industries scramble for the new nation’s lands.
Media accounts widely differ on an offer apparently being extended by Seychelles for naval forces of the People’s Republic of China to have access to the African island nation to police the region against pirates operating out of Somalia.
Tutsi rebels who control army units in Congo’s east may take up arms again if Joseph Kabila does not prevail in the contested presidential elections. Corporate designs on eastern Congo’s vast mineral resources continue to fuel the conflict.
The newly independent South Sudan accused Khartoum’s armed forces of bombing targets in its territoryāincluding a refugee camp at Yida in oil-rich Unity state, where reports indicate at least 12 dead. Khartoum denies responsibility.
At least 63 were killed in bombings and armed attacks by the Islamist movement Boko Haram in two northeast Nigerian towns. The attacks come days after the Yobe police commissioner denied that Boko Haram had any presence in the state.
China’s embassy in Zambia denied charges in a new Human Rights Watch report of oppressive health and safety conditions and anti-uinion practices at Chinese-owned copper mines in the southern African country.
Tanzania’s last remaining hunter-gatherer tribe won an unprecedented victory over development interests who claimed they were extinct, acquiring a certificate of “customary rights of occupancy” to their communal lands in the Great Rift Valley.
As the Kenyan military and Shabab rebels accuse each other of killing civilians in southern Somalia, a BBC report suggests Nairobi hopes to carve a separatist enclave to be called “Azania” out of Somalia as a military-controlled “buffer zone.”
