Egypt's foreign minister visits Syria for talks on peace process
Arafat tells Mubarak that talks with Israel "absurd"
Victoria Falls beauty under threat
Car thefts worry Kenyan insurers
Chad president satisfied with summit
Greed fans ethnic flames in Congo war - An analysis of the war in the Congo
UN negotiates with Sudan for release of air crew
Egypt's foreign minister visits Syria for talks on peace process
Cairo (Egypt), 7th February 2000
Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa left for Damascus on Monday to hand a letter from President Hosni Mubarak to Syrian President Hafez Assad on latest developments in the peace process, foreign ministry sources said.
Moussa's visit to Damascus came amid conflicting reports on the possibility of resumption of peace talks in Washington between Syria and Israel, and tension in south Lebanon due to escalation of attacks by Hizbollah against Israeli soldiers in the occupied zone.
The Egyptian minister's visit also comes one day after a meeting between Mubarak and Palestinian Authority President Yassir Arafat in which he provided "a very negative report" on the status of talks with Israel.
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Arafat tells Mubarak that talks with Israel "absurd"
Cairo (Egypt), 7th February 2000
Palestinian Authority President, Yasser Arafat, presented a "very negative report" to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Sunday on the status of talks with Israel, and asked for world pressure on Israel to honour agreements.
Meanwhile, Israeli Foreign Minister, David Levy left Cairo after a short visit in which he attended a meeting with Egyptian, Jordanian and Palestinian counterparts on the fate of "displaced" Palestinians who were forced to leave their land after the 1967 war between the Arabs and Israel.
Arafat arrived in Cairo early Sunday with a number of his top negotiators. After meeting Mubarak, he held talks with Arab League Secretary-General Esmat Abdel-Meguid to ask him for Arab backing in the current difficult negotiations with Israel.
He said after meeting Abdel-Meguid that Palestinian-Israeli talks were going through "a dangerous crisis". Arafat also accused Israel of trying to "escape" from implementing the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement signed by the two sides in early September.
Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa, who took part in the meeting between Mubarak and Arafat, said the Palestinian leader "described the negotiations and contacts which took place between the Palestinian and Israeli sides on all levels as absurd negotiations, and confirmed that the situation cannot continue like this".
Mussa added that "everybody should know that there is a clear Israeli retreat on the Palestinian track.
"We should not believe all the rosy statements made (by Israel) in order to create optimism. We have to start dealing with the existing problems which are dangerous, and would become more dangerous if we did not start quick and immediate movement."
After a meeting between Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak on Thursday, which Palestinians described as a failure, Arafat called for U.S., European and Arab intervention to pressure Israel to implement the Sharm El-Sheikh agreement.
According to the Sharm El-Sheikh deal, the two sides agreed to conclude the framework agreement on February 13 and to conclude final-status talks by September 2000.
As for the "displaced committee" meeting which ended its first meeting in four years in Cairo late Sunday, the foreign ministers of Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Palestinian Authority Planning Minister, Nabil Shaath, agreed to hold a second ministerial meeting in "no later than three months".
Within this period, a technical committee made up of diplomats from the four sides should meet once every two weeks to reach agreement on "the modalities of admission of persons displaced from the West Bank Gaza Strip in 1967".
The first technical meeting will be held "within two weeks from today in Israel", a joint statement issued by the four parties said.
The statement added that the Palestinian side, as well as the other parties, will submit to this technical committee lists of displaced persons for admission. The committee should also agree on the format of the "form of admission" intended to be completed by displaced persons.
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Victoria Falls beauty under threat
Lusaka (Zambia), 7th February 2000
If Zambia is to maintain its tourist name as the 'real Africa', with its untamed and staggering beauty, then there is urgent need, to conserve the bio-diversity of the Victoria Falls, a Zambian government newspaper said Monday, while reporting that the beauty of the falls is under threat.
The Victoria Falls, one of the world natural wonders, is threatened by people, Zambia Daily Mail reported.
A housewife from Lusaka, was found uprooting the natural flowers from the surrounding area of the falls and quoted as saying that "I want to go and plant these flowers at my house. They look nice and I hope they can adapt to the climatic conditions in the city."
"I'm not the first one to do this. My neighbour also came here with her husband during Christmas time and they got many of the flowers," she said.
According to the National Parks and Wildlife Act it is an offence for anyone to get flowers or shrubs out of the falls area or a designated national park.
They do this in utter disregard of the warning inscription which stands out at the entrance of the falls area and reads: "removing flowers or shrubs not permitted. Trading, littering prohibited. Offenders may be fined 40,000 Kwacha (about 16 U.S. dollars) or imprisoned for three years or both."
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Car thefts worry Kenyan insurers
Nairobi (Kenya), 7th February 2000
Increased carjacking and vehicle thefts in Kenya have worried insurance companies as compensation claims pile up, the East African weekly reported Monday.
According to Isaac Kuria, technical manager of the Association of Kenya Insurers, the grave concern to the industry is that the recovery rate of stolen vehicles remains poor as the number of thefts escalates.
Statistics show that in 1998, 800 vehicles were stolen and most were not recovered. However, by June 1999, the insurers had dealt with 850 cases of stolen vehicles.
Kenyan police spokesman Indidis Dola admitted that 305 car were stolen in October last year, 313 in November and 100 in the first half of December, saying over 50 percent of the car thefts took place in the capital Nairobi and its suburbs.
Kuria said in 1998, the insurance industry gave out 6.7 million dollars in compensation payments and the figure is expected to double in the 1999-2000 period.
Dola said the police are winning the war against carjackers as the cartels run a cross border business and stolen vehicles are resold in Uganda, Tanzania and even South Africa, adding that "we have recovered vehicles which were stolen in these countries."
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Chad president satisfied with summit
N'djamena (Chad), 7th February 2000
Chad President Idriss Deby, current chairman of the Economic Community of Sahelo-Saharian States (Comessa), said he was satisfied with the "important" decisions taken at the organisation's second summit held on Friday and Saturday in N'Djamena.
"Our discussions were frank and sincere. I am convinced that we have given a new momentum to this joint venture," he said in a closing speech of the proceedings.
The conference decided to hold its third session next year in Khartoum, Sudan and to hold ministerial sessions on various fields, particularly in energy, rural development, youth and culture, defense, transport and communications.
Deby stressed member states' concern to "cover all activity sectors to widen community co-operation."
The approval in N'Djamena of the "Security Charter is part of the countries' perception of the close interaction existing between peace and stability on one hand, and socio-economic development on the other," he said.
He urged Comessa to adhere to the charter by searching for peace where people are deprived of it.
In this respect, he lauded Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's initiatives for "his efforts for peace and harmony in the community and other African regions torn by conflicts."
Djibouti, The Gambia and Senegal were admitted as new members, joining Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Libya, Mali, Niger, Central Africa Republic, Sudan and Chad as part of the community.
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Greed fans ethnic flames in Congo war - An analysis of the war in the Congo
Nairobi (Kenya), 7th February 2000
As six foreign armies and three rebel groups scramble for a share of Congo's vast natural resources, greed, chaos and political opportunism are stirring up tribal hatred in Africa's third largest country.
Uganda and Rwanda said they entered the Congolese civil war in support of the rebels to prevent a genocide, but in Ugandan-controlled northeastern Congo, aid agencies are reporting massacres on a chilling scale.
United Nations agencies estimate that between 5,000 and 7,000 people have been killed since June in the countryside around the town of Bunia, while another 150,000 are thought to have been displaced by the fighting.
One aid agency has warned that genocide looms in the area, and released a video of burning villages, and dead or dying women and children with horrific machete wounds.
The conflict -- between the cattle-herding Hema and the farming Lendu tribes -- has parallels with that between minority Tutsis and majority Hutus in nearby Rwanda, which exploded into genocide in 1994.
There have long been tensions between the Lendu, who are more numerous in the area but much poorer, and the richer Hema, but never violence on this scale before.
The root of the conflict is competition over land, coffee and gold, -- the first major outbreak of fighting came in June with a Lendu attack on Hemas who they said had stolen their land.
But it is also a conflict about political power in the new, divided Congo, and a story of how a foreign army upset a delicate tribal balance, human rights groups say.
Congo's natural wealth has always been its curse, from the time Belgium's King Leopold created and then raped the country in the 19th century in a frantic quest for rubber and ivory.
Today, civil war in the former Zaire has sucked in foreign armies from Zimbabwe to Rwanda -- and some seem to be there just for a share of the spoils.
Politically, their divide and rule tactics, or plain insensitivity to local rivalries, have often pitted Congolese against Congolese.
When the Ugandans appointed a Hema woman last year as governor of a newly-created Kibali-Ituri province with Bunia as its capital, many Lendu felt hard done by.
"There were some Hemas who decided to try and translate their economic and financial power into a monopoly of political power and then exclude the Lendu," said Jacques Depelchin, a leading rebel official in Bunia.
"Some Ugandan soldiers also got hoodwinked into getting involved... on the side of the Hemas," he told Reuters.
Amnesty International also says Ugandan soldiers took money to fight for or just defend the Hema, and others sold them guns.
But the bulk of the blame, observers say, probably lies with local leaders playing tribal politics for their own ends.
"In all these conflicts in the region, you have a small elite which needs support, and the easiest way to get support is to call on ethnic sentiments," Amnesty's Godfrey Byaruhanga told Reuters from London.
Both sides are guilty of massacres since the conflict began, with the poorer Lendu lending to use traditional weapons like machetes, arrows and spears, and the Hema guns.
"What exacerbates the conflict is the fact the violence is taking place in a quasi-political vacuum," Byaruhanga said.
"Much of the military and political power doesn't have a strong interest in law and order as such -- its main interest is the pursuit of war."
The Hema governor has since been replaced by someone from another tribe, and Depelchin is leading a bid to bring local leaders together to end the conflict. But the fighting flared up again in January, with whole villages burned and looted.
Before the conflict the two tribes lived largely side by side, today communities are strictly Hema or Lendu.
The Hema-Lendu conflict is only one of the many ethnic problems which the Congolese civil war has reignited.
The rebel movement, for example, is itself seen as dominated by Tutsis from the east or abroad. When rebels tried to take the capital in 1997, innocent Tutsis were lynched in the streets of Kinshasa on the basis of their ethnic identity alone.
Although a peace deal was signed in Zambia by the numerous belligerents last year, fighting in Congo's interior continues and the country is still waiting for a promised United Nations peacekeeping force.
The Security Council is working on a resolution to authorise a U.N. force of 5,500 military observers and soldiers for the Congo, but memories of a disastrous intervention in Somalia in 1993 could still delay the deployment of troops.
Congo's degeneration into political anarchy and ethnic warfare may have gone too far for foreign intervention to resolve, while an internal solution is as far away as ever.
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UN negotiates with Sudan for release of air crew
Nairobi (Kenya), 7th February 2000
The United Nations said on Monday it was negotiating with the Sudanese government for the release of a U.N. plane and four crew held by pro-government militia in southern Sudan.
The plane, carrying an American U.N. worker, two Kenyan pilots and a Sudanese relief worker, was seized on Thursday by militia in Old Fangak in the volatile Western Upper Nile province.
"The plane is still being held and the U.N. and the government are negotiating the release," said Gillian Wilcox, spokeswoman for Operation Lifeline Sudan, an umbrella group of U.N. and other aid agencies working in Sudan.
Aid agencies fly daily into southern Sudan to deliver relief supplies to a region devastated by a 17-year-old civil war.
In its broadest terms, the war pits the Islamic government in Khartoum against mainly Christian and animist rebels of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).
But the picture is complicated by inter-factional fighting, especially in oil-rich Western Upper Nile where numerous pro-government and rebel militia leaders are fighting for supremacy.
Militia leader Gabriel Tanginya is believed to be holding the hostages in retaliation for the capture of three of his commanders by rebels after they disembarked from another U.N. plane last month.
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