Africa

Citing a lack of progress on the peace process in Mali, the United Nations peacekeeping chief today warned that the UN mission there would not be able to fully carry out its mandate as long as the signatories to the peace agreement do not resolutely engage in its implementation.

Militant Islamist group al-Shabab says it was behind the attack which killed at least six people and wounded one in north-eastern Kenya.

Deploring continued loss of life due to migrant smuggling and human trafficking off the coast of Libya, the United Nations Security Council this morning extended its authorization for Member States to intercept vessels on the high seas suspected of being used for those illicit activities, for a further period of one year.

Expressing deep concern over the plight of civilians caught in the cross-fight in a Benghazi neighbourhood, a senior United Nations official in Libya has called for a humanitarian pause to allow aid to reach those in urgent need and as well as a safe passage for those who wish to leave.

Following a visit to Madagascar, the Executive Director of the United Nations’ food relief agency has announced plans to scale up humanitarian operations in response to rising levels of hunger and malnutrition as a third consecutive year of drought deepens the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people in the south of the island nation.

South Africa complete the second-highest run chase in one-day international history as they beat Australia by four wickets in Durban.

October 5, 2016 (CAIRO) - Sudanese President Omer al-Bashir and Egypt's President Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi on Wednesday have signed a number of agreements besides a document for a comprehensive strategic partnership between the two nations.

Sudanese president Omer Hassan al-Bashir (L) shakes hands with his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, during a news conference after their meeting in Cairo on 19 October 2014 (Photo: Reuters)

A two-day Presidential Summit of the Egyptian-Sudanese Higher Committee (ESHC) has begun on Wednesday in Cairo.

In his address before the summit meeting, al-Bashir called for activating and strengthening the joint mechanisms for cooperation between Sudan and Egypt, vowing to promote the distinctive and unique ties between the two countries.

He called for transforming cooperation agreements and protocols into a tangible reality, stressing his determination to confront the political and economic challenges facing the two nations through joint cooperation.

The Sudanese president further congratulated Egyptian leadership and people on the 43rd anniversary of the 6th of October war victory against Israel, describing it as a victory for the Sudanese people and the whole Arab nation.

For his part, al-Sisi said the two countries have taken practical moves to promote bilateral ties, pointing to the opening of Qastal and Arqin border crossings.

He stressed that efforts would be continued to build a brighter future for the two peoples and overcome any obstacles in order to maintain the historic relationship between the two countries.

Al-Sisi called for the need to achieve full liberalization of trade and allow free movement of goods and products between the two countries, saying fulfillment of development objectives must become the top priority of the joint cooperation.

He urged al-Bashir to launch a comprehensive strategic partnership to reflect the historic and strong ties between the two nations and draw the necessary framework to achieve progress and prosperity in the various fields of bilateral relations.

The Egyptian president further pointed to the regional and international challenges facing the two nations, calling for sincere cooperation to combat extremism, promote peace efforts and resolve conflicts to achieve regional and international stability.

He added that Egypt supports all efforts exerted by the Sudanese government to achieve stability, saying his country denounces any foreign intervention in Sudan's domestic affairs.

Relations between Sudan and Egypt have been frosty over the past few years, but they've recently begun to thaw thanks to a series of conciliatory diplomatic gestures.

In October 2014, presidents of the two countries upgraded representation in a joint committee aimed at strengthening bilateral ties.

SECURITY OF SAUDI ARABIA “REDLINE”

Meanwhile, al-Bashir said the security of Saudi Arabia is a redline stressing they wouldn't allow anybody to harm the Kingdom.

In his address before the ESHC summit meeting, al-Bashir said nobody could downplay the significant role played by Saudi Arabia, underscoring that “stability and security of the Kingdom is our collective responsibility”.

He added that his country underlines importance of cooperation among the neighboring countries to resolve the crises in Libya, Syria and Yemen, expressing support to the legitimate government in the latter.

Al-Bashir also called for the need to combat terrorism through addressing the root causes of the phenomenon, saying his country seeks to promote peace and stability in the African continent.

(ST)

October 5, 2016 (KHARTOUM) - A delegation led by the U.S. Chargé d'Affaires Ervin Massinga and Sudan Mission Director for the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Jeffrey Ashley, completed a visit to Darfur from 3 to 4 October, said the U.S. embassy in Khartoum on Wednesday.

Deputy Chief of Mission Ervin Massinga (U.S. Embassy Sudan Photo)

In a press note extended to Sudan Tribune, the U.S. embassy pointed the delegation met with a wide range of individuals and organizations in North Darfur capital, El-Fasher including government officials, representatives from the United Nations, international humanitarian organizations and civil society, members from hybrid peacekeeping mission in Darfur (UNAMID), community leaders and IDPs.

According to the press note “the delegation had open discussions on a number of topics including regional security, humanitarian access, food security, health, education, and development programmes”.

“The delegation also visited an IDP camp to observe and better understand how humanitarian assistance and food aid from the American people, provided through USAID, is benefiting displaced people in Darfur” said the embassy.

The United States of America remains the single largest donor of humanitarian assistance in Darfur, providing over $230 million in humanitarian assistance in 2016, targeting over 2.5 million people.

The press note stressed that the U.S.'s commitment to the Sudanese people and people of Darfur “remains steadfast and strong”, saying the US will continue to work toward lasting peace in Sudan.

It further thanked efforts of many international partners “such as the UN World Food Program, for the humanitarian and development assistance delivered to people in need”.

UN agencies estimate that over 300,000 people were killed in Darfur conflict since 2003, and over 2.5 million were displaced.

(ST)

October 5, 2016 (JUBA) - Top United States officials gave South Sudan's first vice president, Taban Deng Gai a warn reception, in what is largely seen as a significant shift in seemingly strained bilateral ties between the two nations since conflict erupted in South Sudan in December 2013.

Taban Deng Gai addresses delegates after he was sworn-in as South Sudan FVP inside the Presidential Palace in the capital of Juba, July 26, 2016 (Photo Reuters/ Jok Solomun)

Gai led a high powered government delegation to the United Nations in September, but used the visit as an opportunity to meet and hold sideline meetings with different world leaders, particularly officials in the U.S administration who showed their support for implementation of the reforms and governance championed by former first vice president, Riek Machar.

Gai was accompanied by high profile government officials, whose views are widely seen and assessed in the context of "anti-peace elements” and “war traders” at the expense of reforms and democracy. They included, defence minister, Kuol Manyang Juuk, former foreign affairs minister, Deng Alor Kuol, the minister in the president's office, Mayiik Deng and several other low and high level diplomatic and civil servants.

The team also included the petroleum and mining minister, Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth, a former envoy to the U.S who played key roles in the armed opposition movement.

South Sudan's presidential spokesman, Ateny Wek Ateny said all programs and itineraries were arranged by officials at South Sudanese embassy in Washington.

Gai, according to Gordon Buay, one of the senior diplomats in the U.S, said the former had successfully concluded meetings according to the prearranged plan and was now travelling in the train returning to the headquarters of the United Nations in New York, where he and his accompanying delegation will return to South Sudan.

The visit of the first vice president Gen. Taban Deng Gai has been successful. He met and held successfully meetings with different South Sudanese communities.

"He met Luka Biong on Wednesday, Pagan Amum on Thursday. And on Tuesday he was scheduled to meet Susan Rice who extended him invitation. She is one of the top US officials in the white house. Her acceptance to meet with the vice president represents a significant step towards strengthening our relations with the US and our friends and allies in the west, in the region and in the world", Buay said Tuesday.

It was not immediately clear whether Gai had eventually succeeded to hold meetings with officials at the white house and whether or not the delegation representing Machar succeeded to meet top US officials in different capacities to explain their side of the story, about the conflict and the way forward.

Meanwhile the U.S security advisor, ambassador, Susan Rice expressed grave concern over the prevailing humanitarian conditions and continued fighting in South Sudan.

Rice, who met the South Sudanese first vice president, affirmed the U.S government's strong commitment to the people of the world's youngest nation.

The U.S. official, however, deplored South Sudan government's role in obstructing the United Nations Mission in South Sudan's operations and stressed the need for a rapid deployment of the regional protection force.

(ST)

A Chinese-built electric train service from Ethiopia's capital, Addis Ababa, to the Red Sea port in Djibouti opens with a test run for passengers.

Sixty-year-old Safiyo Jama Gayre tells the BBC why she was motivated to study law in Somalia.

By Abdul Wahid Mohammed Ahmed Al- Nur

To make war on its own citizens, to burn the villages and people of Darfur, the Sudanese Air Force has a marked preference for attacking at dawn. The Antonov transport planes converted into makeshift but nonetheless lethal bombers, now become the ubiquitous symbol of the Khartoum regime's brutality; often arrive with the first light of day, drowning out birdsong with the roar of their engines soon followed by the shriek of the barrel bombs they disgorge to rain down death from high explosive and shrapnel. But since January when the Islamist dictatorship in Khartoum launched its largest military offensive in years in the mountains and plains of the Jebel Mara Mountain, there is a new dimension to the horror endured by the people of Darfur, in an ongoing genocide the world has all but forgotten, the spectre of chemical warfare.

Thus Sudanese President Omar al Bashir, the only sitting head of state on earth indicted by the International Criminal Court for War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, now joins an exclusive murderous fraternity alongside Iraq's late Saddam Hussein and contemporary Syria's Bashar al Assad as the third national leader in modern history to use chemical weapons bombardments against his own civilian population.

The hard evidence of the Sudanese dictatorship's use of chemical warfare gathered through eight months of painstaking investigation by Amnesty International in its groundbreaking report on the subject is incontrovertible. The burden of proof is a sickening catalog of humanity's inhumanity to itself, revealed in the extensive eyewitness testimony of survivors, together with the graphic visual confirmation of the disfiguring wounds sustained by the victims who died in agonizing pain, the majority of them children. It cannot be readily dismissed by the usual denials issued by Khartoum. What has emerged in the light of day for all to see may not be buried in obfuscation. Nothing leaves the signature of chemical warfare except chemical warfare in the hideous manner that gas and chemical agents intended for offensive use ravage flesh and internal organs, burning, choking, blistering and smothering until death is a deliverance from unspeakable suffering. This is the truth of the latest war crime in a litany of war crimes inflicted on the people of Darfur, surely among the most forlorn anywhere on earth in the collective consciousness of the community of nations. Will this new threshold of horror at last bring resolute action by the outside world to end the misery of Darfur and hold the Sudanese regime accountable or will the international community simply avert its eyes again as it has done for far too many years?

If chemical warfare implemented against unarmed civilians fails to provoke an unequivocal response by the world's leading democracies, what hope is there for the people of Darfur to obtain justice, secure their freedom and see an end to a policy of deliberate extermination, where they may once more live without fear in peace, dignity and security? More than Five hundred thousand dead since the nightmare began in 2003, twenty thousand villages wiped off the map in an unceasing scorched earth campaign and four million refugees and internally displaced people, living in the most abject conditions on the edge of survival, tens of thousands women and minors gang-raped have all thus far been insufficient to bring forth a greater outcry and meaningful change.

So where is the voice of the West? The United States which correctly first decried events in Darfur as genocide, is conspicuously silent now, a position defined by the State Department as the de-coupling of Sudan's egregious human rights record and long patronage of Salafist terror groups in exchange for cooperation in intelligence gathering on the same extremist Islamist groups operating in the Middle East, North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Omar al Bashkir's hope is that crippling sanctions will ultimately be lifted and Washington in time will be persuaded to remove Khartoum from its blacklist of terrorist sponsoring nations, restoring its international reputation. The ironic, counter-intuitive reality of this rapprochement is that Khartoum has not ceased its patronage and alliance with extremist Islam in any respect true to the duplicitous and opportunistic nature of Omar al Bashir's regime. It is the worst possible form of Real politic, not merely cynical but equally ineffective. Washington's aims in its legitimate efforts to contain and defeat Islamist terror will not be advanced by sacrificing the people of Darfur.

This understated process of rehabilitating the Sudanese dictatorship is concurrently also underway in the European Union. Most glaringly as the latest Sudanese offensive began in January, the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin fully aware of events on the ground in Darfur, hosted a delegation from Khartoum. Meanwhile the British government has been quietly training members of the Sudanese security services, in particular officers in military intelligence who figure prominently as henchmen in Darfur. But nothing is more staggering than the funding which may surpass 145 million Euros openly awarded by the European Union to Khartoum to stem the flow of refugees from the African continent to European shores, where the same soldiers, policemen, border guards and partner militias who regularly perpetrate massacres, extra-judicial executions torture and rape en masse in Darfur serve as gatekeepers for the EU.

US Ambassador to the UN Samatha Powers recently eloquently condemned the Russian aerial bombing campaign over Aleppo as barbarism, the same Samantha powers who was once so vocal over the plight of Darfur, just as now outgoing President Barak Obama, whom as a candidate had once pledged to end the stain on our conscience of Darfur, is today himself just as reticent on the subject.

The Sudan Liberation Movement in its struggle to uplift its people from oppression and build a secular, non-sectarian, non-tribal, pluralistic democratic Sudan, free from authoritarianism, extremism and terror, where human rights and a free society may one day flourish, implores the United States to restore its moral leadership in Darfur and abide by the humanistic and democratic values it upholds. The SLM therefore calls on President Barak Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and UN Ambassador Samantha Power to demand that the international community forthwith establish a no fly zone over Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile State, a commission be established to oversee the dismantling of Sudanese chemical weapons stocks, the embargo imposed by Khartoum on humanitarian supplies be lifted , Khartoum's Janjaweed and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militias be disarmed and that Sudanese government troops and their partner militias cease attacking civilian population centers.

The author is the Chairman of Sudan Liberation Movement. he can be reached at
tibotoum@gmail.com

An American woman dies in Ethiopia after the van she was travelling in was hit by stones during anti-government protests.

Nigeria is selling two of its presidential jets in bid to "cut down on waste", as the country suffers from its worst economic crisis in years.

Former Ghana coach Fred Osam Duodu, who won the 1978 Africa Cup of Nations, dies after a short illness, aged 78.

Former Cameroon international Rigobert Song is flown from Cameroon to France for further treatment after coming out of a two-day coma.

October 4, 2016 (KHARTOUM) - Sudan's National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) on Tuesday has confiscated print runs of Al-Jareeda daily newspaper from the printing house without giving any reasons.

A Sudanese woman reads a local newspaper in Khartoum in 2010 (AFP PHOTOS)

The independent daily has been one of the most newspapers in Sudan subject to suspension and confiscation.

Chief-Editor of Al-Jareeda Ashraf Abdel-Aziz told Sudan Tribune that 10,200 copies of the newspaper were seized, saying the NISS didn't inform them of the reason for the confiscation.

It is noteworthy that the NISS has ordered the newspapers not to publish any reports about the doctors' strike which was announced on Monday in protest against the continued attacks on the medical staff in the emergency rooms.

Journalists in Sudan frequently complain from NISS's continuous interference in their work to prevent publishing certain items or even deciding what makes it to the front page.

The seizure of Al-Jareeda comes one day after the NISS confiscated print runs of Al-Saiha newspaper from the printing house without stating any reasons.

The NISS uses seizures of print copies of newspapers, not only to censor the media but also to weaken them economically.

Last July, Al-Taghyeer newspaper decided to suspend publishing and started to lay off its staff following the large financial loss it incurred due to repeated confiscations.

The state-run Sudanese National Council for Press and Publications (NCPP) rarely interferes to stop the security punishments although it is the official body responsible for running the work of newspapers in the Sudan.

(ST)

October 5, 2016 (JUBA) – The United States security advisor, ambassador, Susan Rice has expressed grave concern about the prevailing humanitarian conditions and continued fighting in many parts of war-torn South Sudan.

US national security advisor Susan Rice (Photo: Craig Ruttle/AP)

Rice, who met South Sudan's first vice president, Taban Deng on Tuesday, affirmed her administration's strong commitment to the people of South Sudan.

The U.S. official deplored South Sudan government's role in obstructing the United Nations Mission in South Sudan's operations and stressed the need for a rapid deployment of the regional protection force.

A statement from the U.S. embassy in Juba said Rice briefed Deng on how Washington was deeply concerned about the alleged participation of government forces in attacks against humanitarian workers at the Terrain Compound in Juba on 11 July, stressing that the perpetrators of the attack must be identified and held accountable and that an investigation with international support is urgently needed.

“Ambassador Rice underscored the need for the South Sudanese Government to engage opposition groups in dialogue and ensure that it governs inclusively, with strong participation by women and without domination by a single ethnic group or political party,” it adds.

Meanwhile, a section of the armed opposition faction (SPLM-IO) claimed Deng was shunned by South Sudanese communities during his recent visit to Washington.

Deng had reportedly attempted to meet with South Sudanese communities, predominantly the Nuer, to solicit for political support.

Reath Muoch Tang, SPLM-IO's representative in the U.S., claimed Gai was only relying on his team from South Sudan and embassy staff which he turned into an audience for his boycotted meetings.

“The purpose of the huge government delegations headed by Taban Deng Gai, is to fake an audience in North America,” he posted on Facebook.

“As Taban Deng Gai has been publicly disowned and denounced by all the South Sudanese communities, in North America, Europe, Australia, Canada and Africa, he Taban, now [relies] only on his huge delegations which composed of more than 50 personnel to fake meetings, in New Jersey and Washington D.C.,” he added.

South Sudanese officials, including the spokesperson for the presidency and its representatives in the U.S, have dismissed the armed opposition's account of Deng's visits to Washington, describing it as a success.

(ST)

October 4, 2016 (KHARTOUM) - Sudanese and Chadian military officials will begin Wednesday annual meeting in Khartoum to assess the six-year experience of the border joint force.

Chadian Defence Minister Bichara Issa Djadallah, received by his his Sudanese counterpart Awad Ibn Ouf in Khartoum on 4 October 2016 (SUNA Photo)

The recently reappointed Chadian Defence Minister Bichara Issa Djadallah, who had been the defence minister until July 2012, met yesterday his Sudanese counterpart Awad Ibn Ouf and discussed ways to develop the bilateral cooperation between the two neighbouring countries.

"The two sides expressed their desire to expand bilateral cooperation in all fields, especially education and training, capacity building and stand together, side by side as well as enhancing relationship beyond emotional dimension to achieve the interests of the two countries and the two brotherly peoples," said the official news agency SUNA.

Recently the two countries said they would extend the mandate of the joint force to include the fight against terrorism. Also, they agreed with the new Central African government to redeploy tripartite force on the border with the troubled country.

Djadallah in the past fought the Chadian rebel groups that were based in Sudan's Darfur region. His comeback to the defence ministry coincides with rise of unconfirmed reports saying that Chadian rebels have rallied a Sudanese rebel group of Justice and Equality Movement.

The Chadian army recently received logistical support and training from western powers as it is playing a key role in the anti-terrorist fighting in the region.

(ST)