Jihadists have killed around 20 people in attacks in three villages in northern Burkina Faso, the epicentre of a five-year-old jihadist insurgency, government officials said on Thursday.

The attacks took place on Wednesday in the villages of Demniol, Bombofa and Peteguerse in Seno province, government spokesman Remis Fulgance Dandjinou said in a statement.

“The provisional count of these attacks perpetrated in markets and villages shows about 20 victims, as well as wounded and missing persons,” he said.

Regional governor Salfo Kabore confirmed the attack in another statement.

An area resident told AFP at least 24 people were killed in the attacks.

“Wednesday is the day of the weekly market in the area,” said the resident, adding that the toll could be much higher as many people were still missing.

“The government condemns these cowardly and barbaric attacks against the peaceful civilian population,” said Dandjinou, adding that security forces have been deployed to the three villages.

Burkina Faso, one of the world’s poorest countries, is being battered by a jihadist insurgency that came in from neighbouring Mali in 2015.

Hundreds have been killed in dozens of attacks on civilians this year.

Earlier this month 25 civilians, most of them people displaced by jihadist violence, were killed in an ambush in the central-north of the country, according to the UN’s refugee agency.

According to UN figures, around 4,000 people died from violence in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso last year.

Source: AFP

Three men suspected of involvement in the 1994 Rwanda genocide have been arrested and charged in Belgium with serious abuse of human rights, the prosecutor’s office said Saturday.

The office gave no details about the three but said their identities had been established with the help of witness testimony collected in Rwanda by a Belgian investigation.

“Two were arrested Tuesday in Brussels and the third Wednesday in Hainault (province),” said Eric Van Duyse, spokesman for the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office.

“All three have been charged with serious human rights abuses,” the spokesman said, confirming a report in the weekly publication Vif/L’Express.

One of the men has been put under electronic surveillance while the two others are in detention, he said.

Whether the men face trial will be “decided in the end by the dossier compiled by the investigating magistrate and the prosecutor’s office,” Van Duyse said.

The 1994 genocide claimed 800,000 lives, mostly Tutsis but also moderate Hutus.

Belgium has held five trials since 2001 of Rwandans implicated in the killings, with four that year — including two nuns — sentenced to terms of up to 20 years for handing over Tutsis in their shelter to Hutu militants.

Last December, former senior Rwandan official Fabien Neretse was found guilty of genocide and sentenced to 25 years prison.

Source: AFP

Hoping to escape the war, death and destitution rampant in their home countries, thousands of African workers embark every year on a grueling journey to the affluent Persian Gulf countries looking for employment.

The more fortunate ones will end up doing backbreaking manual labor earning a pittance, barely enough to make ends meet.

Should they be unlucky, a fate worse than death awaits them, as the thousands of Ethiopian workers stranded in Saudi Arabia in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic can attest.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, has absolutely no excuse for its treatment of the Ethiopians, nor the terrible conditions they are forced to live under.

Far from the inquisitive public eye, the Saudis have been keeping thousands of African workers in squalid places under deplorable conditions. Given the Saudis’ mistreatment of African labor, Black Lives seem to be that last issue to matter in the Saudi kingdom.

We are humans

Every year thousands of African workers go on a grueling journey to the rich Persian Gulf countries in the hope of escaping war, death, and destitution. With luck on their side, they might end up in finding hard manual labour with meager wages just to continue their hand-to-mouth existence.

Inhumane living conditions

A shocking expose was published by The Sunday Telegraph in August. It disclosed that thousands of African workers were locked in detention centers across the country under inhumane, unsanitary conditions. With their smuggled mobile phones, some of the migrants gave the newspaper a snapshot of life – or to be blunt, death – in these hellish centers.

According to Adam Coogle of Human Rights Watch, “Photos emerging from detention centers in southern Saudi Arabia show that authorities there are subjecting Horn of Africa migrants to squalid, crowded, and dehumanizing conditions with no regard for their safety or dignity.”

“Lots of people gone to Saudi Arabia know just how dreadful the treatment of émigrés and refugees and actual workers are and this thing about the Ethiopians is just consistent with all the terrible things they do to third-country nationals.”  William Spring, Peace Campaigner and Political Commentator

Source: Presstv

After 33 years in exile, El Sadig Mohamed gave up the easy life in Canada to return to help rebuild Sudan as it emerges from three decades of autocratic rule.

“After the revolution… I thought it’s the right time to come back… despite the luxury people enjoy in the West,” said Mohamed, who now heads the Sudanese Mineral Resources Company’s health and environment department.

“It’s my country and I have to do it.”

The SMRC supervises exploration, production and taxation of Sudan’s mining sector, notably its star asset, the gold mines.

Ousted president Omar al-Bashir ruled the country with an iron fist for 30 years until his overthrow in April 2019 after months of youth-led street demonstrations.

“The Bashir regime, for 30 years, destroyed everything,” said the 55-year-old civil engineer and ex-University of Calgary professor, who came home in November, six month’s after Bashir was toppled.

“I believe it is my duty to take part in… building a new Sudan.”

The expert help is needed.

Sudan’s economy is in crisis, laid low by long years of civil war under Bashir’s rule, US sanctions and the 2011 secession of the oil-rich south.

SMRC’s director general, Mubarak Ardol, was in exile for eight years.

His home in Sudan’s southern Nuba Mountains was attacked by government forces, and Ardol had led rebel forces against them.

– ‘Proud’ –

He fled to Uganda in 2011.

“I thought the regime would not last long. We worked with all our might to overthrow the regime,” said 38-year-old Ardol.

“I felt certain I would return home very soon.”

So when Bashir was forced out, Ardol returned from Kampala as quickly as he could.

“I came back immediately,” he said. “I was the head of the first armed group which arrived in Khartoum on May 10, 2019.”

He was appointed by Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok — a fellow returnee, who has made striking peace with the rebels who fought Bashir a priority.

Ardol aims to boost the revenues of SMRC, the African country’s top moneymaker.

“We far exceeded our targets,” he said.

Among the hundreds of exiles streaming in from around the world since last year, Mohammed Abdulhamid said he is “happy and proud” to have come back to take the reins at the state news agency SUNA.

“We knew it was a big challenge… I’m back home because I wanted to return, because I feel I can be a part of what is happening,” said the 64-year-old journalist, in the agency’s Khartoum offices.

– ‘Very diplomatic’ –

Abdulhamid lived in Yemen before moving to the Netherlands where he launched Arabic-language radio and television broadcasts.

“It was not a matter of money… I used to earn around $3,000 a month… Now I earn 80,000 Sudanese pounds, which is $180,” he said.

“I am proud of what I am doing, and I never regretted my decision.”

But the return of exiles from the US, Britain and the Gulf to fill government posts and succeed figures in Bashir’s Islamist regime at the head of state enterprises has not been universally welcomed.

“They’ve come to reap the rewards of victory, but it was us who suffered,” grumbled Amine Bashir, a 32-year-old entrepreneur and activist.

Adeeb Youssef, a Darfur provincial governor who lived six years in the United States after having served time in jail and escaped assassination, had advice for both sides in the new Sudan.

“This kind of jealousy doesn’t help,” said Youssef. “People who’ve lived abroad can bring this experience and knowledge… they see problems and issues in Sudan better than people who lived here.”

Mohamed said that returnees have to be “very diplomatic”.

“Until now they have welcomed us. But if they see anyone acting arrogant, they take it badly,” he said.

“The challenge for people coming from outside is that they are used to working in a system where everything is organised.”

Source:  AFP

South Africa’s State Security Agency says it has found no evidence to support US media claims that Iran was planning to assassinate American Ambassador to Pretoria Lana Marks.

In a statement released on Friday, the agency spokesman Mava Scott said that South African officials had met with their US counterparts to request additional information.

“At present, the information provided is not sufficient to sustain the allegation that there is a credible threat against the United States Ambassador to South Africa,” Scott said.

The remarks came days after the Politico news magazine alleged that Tehran was planning to kill Marks before the US presidential election to avenge Washington’s assassination of top Iranian anti-terror commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani in Iraq early this year.

The article claimed to be based on US intelligence reports, purportedly seen by a US government official and another official familiar with the documents, noting that Marks had likely been chosen due to her closeness to US President Donald Trump.

Iran’s Foreign Ministry categorically rejected the “baseless” allegations as part of American officials’ “hackneyed and outworn methods to create Iranophobic atmosphere on the international arena.”

Trump, however, cited the report to threaten an attack “1,000 times greater in magnitude” against Iran.

Scott stressed that South Africa had heightened security to protect the US diplomatic mission and personnel, saying, “Such plots of assassination against diplomats are viewed in a very serious light and Her Excellency, Ambassador Marks has been assured of our commitment in this regard.”

Additionally on Friday, South African Minister of International Relations Naledi Pandor said her country is “as surprised as its Iranian friends” after learning about the alleged assassination plot.

“I find it surprising, why would Iran being a very good friend of South Africa come and commit a horrendous act in a country which has been a good friend to Iran, and of such a nature?” she said in an interview with SABC News. “I can only describe it as bizarre and let me stop there.”

Tensions have been running high between Tehran and Washington since May 2018, when Trump pulled the US out of a multilateral nuclear deal and unleashed a tough campaign of sanctions as part of his ‘maximum pressure’ policy and military threats against the Islamic Republic.

The two sides appeared to be on the brink of direct confrontation after General Soleimani was assassinated in the US drone strike near the Baghdad International Airport on January 3.

Source: Presstv

Two French soldiers were killed on Saturday in a military operation in Mali’s northeastern Kidal region, the Élysée Palace announced.

The two soldiers died after their armoured vehicle hit an improvised explosive device on September 5. A third soldier was wounded in the explosion.

French President Emmanuel Macron expresses his “deep respect” for the soldiers’ “sacrifice” and sends his “sincere condolences to their families and loved ones”, the presidential office said.

France started its military operations in the country in 2013, after Mali asked it to help regain territory seized by Islamist extremists who had hijacked a Touareg rebellion in the country’s northern desert regions the previous year.

The French military succeeded in this initial task – but the jihadist insurgency has since spread throughout Mali and across the border to Niger and Burkina Faso.

Earlier on Saturday, Mali’s military junta began talks with opposition groups on Saturday on its promise to hand power back to civilians, after mounting pressure from neighbouring countries since the coup in August.

The West African country has long been plagued by instability, a simmering jihadist revolt, ethnic violence and endemic corruption, prompting a clique of rebel soldiers to detain president Ibrahim Boubacar Keita last month.

In its statement announcing the death of the two French soldiers, the president’s office reiterated France’s calls for a swift transition of power to civilian rule in Mali.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)

Soldiers in Niger executed dozens of civilians during the counterinsurgency campaign against jihadists in the country’s troubled Tillaberi region earlier this year, a probe into the deaths reported.

The West African nation has suffered years of conflict with Islamic militants operating in the vast and inhospitable Sahel desert, with thousands of soldiers and civilians killed to date.

The national armies of Niger and its neighbours Mali and Burkina Faso have been accused of war crimes in their response operations, including forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings.

Niger’s National Commission on Human Rights was investigating reports by Amnesty International and other rights groups that 102 civilians had gone missing in the western province between March 27 and April 2 after an army operation.

“There have indeed been executions of unarmed civilians and the mission discovered at least 71 bodies in six mass graves,” said Abdoulaye Seydou, the president of the Pan-African Network for Peace, Democracy and Development, which participated in the probe, on Friday.

“It is elements of the Defence and Security Forces (FDS) which are responsible for these summary and extrajudicial executions,” he added, saying those killed were attacked with bladed weapons and small arms.

But he said the investigation was unable to establish whether senior levels of the military hierarchy were responsible for the deaths.

Jihadist violence resulted in 4,000 deaths in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso last year, the United Nations has said.

The UN has condemned what it said was a spike in criminal acts by national armies in the Sahel at the beginning of this year, including more than 100 extrajudicial executions by the Malian army between January and March.

Amnesty International reported in June that the armies of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso had been responsible for nearly 200 disappearances in the space of a few months.

Source:  AFP

The former deputy chairman of Rwanda’s ruling party during the 1994 genocide has died in a Senegalese prison, where he was serving a life sentence for his role in the slaughter.

Edouard Karemera, the deputy of Rwanda’s then-ruling National Revolutionary Movement for Development, was jailed by a UN-backed special tribunal in 2011 for genocide and crimes against humanity.

“I confirm the death of Edouard Karemera in Senegal. The cause is as yet unknown,” said Ousman Njikam, spokesman for the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), which took over from the special tribunal when it formally closed in 2015.

A former Rwandan minister who was acquitted by the international tribunal told AFP that Karemera had been “sick for several days” and died on Tuesday morning aged 69.

He was transferred from Arusha, Tanzania, where the court was based, to Senegal in 2017, where he was held in the Sebikotane prison outside Dakar.

Karemera was also Rwanda’s interior minister in 1994.

He was convicted alongside former ruling party chief Matthieu Ngirumpatse.

After decades of tensions between Rwanda’s Hutu ethnic majority and the minority Tutsi, a killing spree erupted in April 1994 after a plane carrying Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot down.

Over the next 100 days, some 800,000 people — mainly Tutsis but also moderate Hutus — were killed.

The international tribunal was set up to try those who bore the greatest responsibility, while thousands of others were judged by Rwandan courts and grassroots tribunals known as “gacaca” that were set up to deal with the sheer number of cases.

After one of the key remaining fugitives, alleged genocide financier Felicien Kabuga, was caught in France in May, only six key suspects remain on the run.

A top French appeals court said on Wednesday that it would rule on September 30 whether Kabuga, who is 84 according to officials, will stand trial in France or before the UN tribunal in Tanzania.

(Source: Agencies)

French anti-jihadist troops in Mali killed a civilian Tuesday and injured two others after a bus refused to slow down in a volatile area despite their orders, the French army command said.

The incident occurred about 50 kilometres (31 miles) from the city of Gao in Mali’s troubled north.

The French soldiers fired warning shots in the ground but two bullets bounced off and hit the windscreen, wounding three people, including one fatally, the French army command said.

“The seriously wounded person was evacuated by helicopter to the hospital of the (French) Barkhane force in Gao, but died of his injuries,” it said.

“All steps have been taken to ascertain the exact sequence of events,” it said, expressing its “sincere condolences to the family of the deceased.”

Mali is now under the control of a junta which seized power in a putsch two weeks ago.

Swathes of its territory are outside of the control of central authorities and years of fighting have failed to halt an Islamist insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives since emerging in 2012.

France has deployed over 5,000 troops serving in its Barkhane anti-jihadist force in West Africa.

A key part of French strategy to combat terrorism in the turbulent region lies with the so-called G5 Sahel force — a scheme to create a 5,000-man joint force gathering Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Mali and Niger.

But the force lacks equipment, training and funds.

Source: AFP

At least two people were killed in ethnic clashes in Ivory Coast following President Alassane Ouattara’s controversial announcement he would run for a third term, a hospital source and local residents said Sunday.

Young opposition supporters on Saturday took to the streets to voice loud and violent protest in several major cities, especially the southern cocoa growing hub of Divo, after Ouattara accepted his party’s nomination for the October poll.

“One person evacuated to the regional hospital succumbed to their injuries and died this morning,” said a hospital source in Divo, adding that “several were badly wounded with machetes”.

Several local people also said they had seen the body of a teenager killed in a fire in a local bar.

Ouattara was officially anointed as candidate by his ruling RHDP despite having already served two terms — the maximum permitted under the constitution — since 2010.

He had planned to hand the reins to prime minister Amadou Gon Coulibaly, but his presumed successor died of a heart attack in July.

Six people had already died in violence following Ouattara’s August 6 announcement that he would run again, while 100 were hurt.

The president and his supporters say a 2016 constitutional tweak has reset the clock on the two-term limit.

“Going back on my decision was not easy” but “there is nothing preventing me from standing,” Ouattara said Saturday.

‘Armed with machetes and clubs’

Saturday’s violence in Divo saw a bus station, bars and shops set on fire and looted, MP Famoussa Coulibay told AFP, while barricades were set up and tyres burned in former president Laurent Gbagbo’s hometown of Gagnoa.

Election authorities on Friday rejected an appeal by Gbagbo as well as former rebel leader Guillaume Soro to be allowed to run in October.

In Divo, there were clashes between the local Dida tribe and Dioula people from northern Ivory Coast who back Ouattara.

“It was very violent. The young men were armed with machetes and clubs. A lot of people were hurt and I saw a young man being beaten. He lost consciousness and had to be taken away,” said one witness who asked not to be named.

Coulibay said that by the time he toured the city Sunday, “calm had been restored. There were a lot of police”.

He said 21 people had been wounded including eight seriously.

(AFP)