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 territory—including 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.”
King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi and other tribal leaders in Nigeria’s Ogoniland filed suit in US court against Royal Dutch Shell, charging the oil giant polluted local groundwater with benzene at levels 900 times World Health Organization limits.
The populace of border towns have fled into the bush ahead of feared clashes, as Kenya sends troops into Somalia to hunt down Shabab insurgents. Shabab protested the “affront to Somalia’s sovereignty” and threatened retaliation within Kenya.
Human Rights Watch applauds Obama’s move to send US military advisors to help crush Uganda’s notoriously brutal Lord’s Resistance Army, while Michelle Malkin and other right-wing bloggers decry the intervention.
President Omar al-Bashir announced that Sudan will adopt an Islamic constitution based on sharia law now that the mostly Christian south has seceded. The creation of an Islamic state raises grave concerns the one million southerners living in Sudan.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said in a joint press release that they have evidence the Sudanese army has committed war crimes in the country’s South Kordofan region, with villages coming under aerial bombardment.
