by tyler | Jun 2, 2023 | africa, CNN
The leader of a Christian cult who has been accused of encouraging his followers to starve themselves appeared in court in Mombasa, Kenya on Friday, telling CNN afterwards that the hearing is a “matter of intimidation” and time-wasting.
Paul Nthenge Mackenzie was arrested last month after police received a tipoff that his land on the Shakahola forest in the Kilifi County of eastern Kenya contained mass graves.
According to court documents, investigators have so far found 249 bodies and at least 10 mass graves in the Shakahola forest area.
Mackenzie who appeared before the magistrate’s court in Mombasa, told CNN’s David McKenzie that he had “never seen anybody starving” when asked about accusations that followers of his group had starved their children following his instructions.
In court documents dated Friday, the state prosecutor said it would seek to extend the respondents’ custody period by a further 60 days.
The prosecutor has maintained that the “extended period of 60 days is the least period possible within which investigations are to be completed under the prevailing circumstances.”
The prosecutor is also arguing that there are “compelling reasons” to deny the respondents bail, including evidence gathered thus far which “demonstrates a high likelihood of serious charges against the accused.”
by tyler | Jun 1, 2023 | africa, CNN
Senegal’s opposition leader Ousmane Sonko has been sentenced to two years in prison for “corrupting youth,” according to state media.
The conviction means Sonko, who has a large youth following and is the leader of the PASTEF party (Patriots of Senegal for Ethics, Work and Fraternity), will not be eligible to stand for the country’s upcoming 2024 elections.
The court cleared Sonko of other charges, including rape, Radio Television Senegalaise said.
Sonko previously said that the rape allegation was politically motivated by President Macky Sall’s government.
This is a breaking news story. More details soon…
by tyler | May 25, 2023 | africa, CNN
Mastiura Ishakh Yousouff is only 22 but has been internally displaced in Sudan’s Darfur region for most of her life. But this is new territory even for someone who hasn’t known a permanent home – a refugee camp in eastern Chad, one of the world’s most destitute countries.
She was forced to cross the border after fighting intensified in West Darfur, bringing only her infant and the few personal items she could carry.
“I’m worried about all the people left behind, especially my mother who could not cross the border because she’s too frail to make the trip. I keep asking myself how I can get her to Chad,” she told CNN at the Gaga Refugee Camp in the Ouaddaï region of the central African country.
Hundreds of people have died in West Darfur, as fighting escalated between the country’s two rival military factions locked in a deadly power struggle. At least 60,000 Sudanese have crossed into Chad since fighting broke out in mid-April, UN figures show.
Even before the fighting intensified, years of political instability meant Sudan had several millions of people internally displaced; the country also hosted 1.13 million refugees from other conflict-ridden countries, including South Sudan, Eritrea and Syria, according to UNHCR data.
The new outbreak of violence forced nearly 850,000 more civilians so far to leave their homes and move elsewhere in Sudan, UNHCR data shows.
Chad is feeling the strain of the displacement on its resources and was already home to 400,000 Sudanese refugees before this latest conflict.
The current surge has humanitarian workers scrambling to provide services to new arrivals, relocate them away from border towns and deliver aid to mushrooming refugee cities in a remote part of a poor nation that has its own security challenges.
Money is tight to take care of all of them but the people keep coming, afraid that they will be killed if they stay in Sudan.
Close to 90% of the new arrivals at the Gaga Camp are women and children, UNHCR, the United Nations’ Refugee Agency, told CNN.
“The young and the men told us to take the children and cross the border for now so that they can stay behind to defend themselves and our property, if necessary,” Yousouff explained.
They may have escaped the conflict back home, but some are so traumatized that even the guns that police and security carry around the camp trigger painful memories, humanitarian workers say. They’re scared of men in military fatigues, a reminder of the horrors they witnessed back home.
CNN traveled to eastern Chad with USAID Administrator Samantha Power, who announced $103 million to support the over 1 million people who have been displaced in Sudan and neighboring countries since the conflict broke out.
It was a full-circle moment for the US official, who is a former journalist who reported from Chad in 2004 as Sudanese civilians fled from the Janjaweed Arab militias who were accused of major human rights violations and atrocities in Darfur.
On this latest trip, she heard harrowing stories from refugees who were forced to cross over into Chad in the face of unprecedented violence.
One group of nearly 200 families left at 3 a.m. as they feared that they would get attacked imminently.
“You talk to them, you feel like you’re in a time warp, because they’re describing Janjaweed coming in with their knives and their machetes, killing people, raping women. We met one woman whose eye had been gouged basically, with somebody just attacking her,” Power told CNN.
General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, was a commander of the Janjaweed during the bloody years of the Darfur conflict.
Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the violence two decades ago by Janjaweed fighters who murdered, raped and tortured the people of Darfur in what is widely recognized as a genocide.
Hemedti now leads the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group battling the Sudanese Armed Forces in this latest conflict. Their representatives signed a seven-day humanitarian ceasefire agreement in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, over the weekend that begins on Monday night local time. But the two sides have violated each of the previous truces they agreed to since they started fighting on April 15.
“Nowhere in the world, is there a humanitarian solution for a political problem. Nowhere in the world, is there a humanitarian fix for generals who are willing to destroy their country in the interests of seizing power, or consolidating power,” Power told CNN.
As she spoke, some children gathered behind her, curious about the scene and likely bored in a newly built camp with no recreational facilities.
Countries that “might be tempted” to support one faction or the other should keep their faces in mind, she said. The ambassador wants the generals isolated and pressured to end the conflict.
Koubra Abdallah, 23, told CNN she left Geneina in West Darfur so suddenly that she got separated from her young son, who got lost in the chaos.
“My brother is still back there, I heard he was injured. I was forced to come to Chad to seek safety,” she said as she sorted vegetables for lunch in the Gaga camp. She stressed that she wouldn’t go back to Sudan except to bring her son and brother back to safety.
“There has been too much insecurity for too long,” she said in a mixture of the Masalit and Arabic dialects spoken in western Sudan.
Like Yousouff, many of the refugees were already internally displaced thanks to decades of conflict in Sudan. “Some of them have been in a cycle of displacement,” explained Patrice Ahouansou, the Deputy Representative in Chad of the UNHCR.
“So they were living in Internally Displaced Persons camps in Sudan and have now crossed into Chad to seek asylum.”
Chadian law requires refugees to be housed at reasonable distances from border towns, the UN official says. So they are moved to camps like Gaga further away from the border to begin the difficult process of figuring out the rest of their lives.
About 1,000 people had been relocated when CNN visited. Tens of small one-room iron sheet structures wrapped in UNHCR logos had sprung out of the desert.
The women and their toddlers sat or slept under trees to escape the 45 degree heat while some children played near a tap as water flowed. It’s basic, no piped water or power in the dwellings that host one family each, but they feel safe in this refugee city.
The people crossing into Chad are the poorest, most vulnerable victims of Sudan’s instability.
They’re mostly farmers, village folk with simple lives who yearn for the chance to build a safe future. Unlike the thousands who have been evacuated through Port Sudan or flown out of the country, they don’t have dual nationalities or foreign visas. “I’ll go back for any leader that brings peace to Sudan,” one of the men told USAID’s Power.
They don’t care about which general wins in this power struggle.
“What’s sad is that while there was hope for a civilian-led transitional government, and while there was hope for a time that the military and these militia would recede, for many of these individuals, it’s just proof that the militia will never go away in their minds,” she told CNN.
by tyler | May 25, 2023 | africa, CNN
The most wanted fugitive in the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has been arrested in Paarl, South Africa after decades on the run.
Fulgence Kayishema is accused of orchestrating the killing of more than 2,000 Tutsi refugees – women, men, children and the elderly – at Nyange Catholic Church during the genocide. He has been on the run since 2001.
He was captured Wednesday in a joint operation between the South African authorities and UN investigators.
When he was arrested, Kayishema initially denied his identity, according to a statement from the UN team. But by the end of the evening he told them: “I have been waiting a long time to be arrested.”
Investigators said he used multiple identities and forged documents to evade detection.
“The arrest was the culmination of an intense, thorough and rigorous investigation,” a senior official at the prosecutor’s office involved in the case told CNN.
“Family members and known associates were exhaustively investigated. That ultimately led to identifying the right location to search and finding the critical intelligence that was needed.”
“Fulgence Kayishema was a fugitive for more than 20 years. His arrest ensures that he will finally face justice for his alleged crimes,” said Chief Prosecutor Serge Brammertz of the United Nations’ International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT).
“Genocide is the most serious crime known to humankind. The international community has committed to ensure that its perpetrators will be prosecuted and punished. This arrest is a tangible demonstration that this commitment does not fade and that justice will be done, no matter how long it takes,” Brammertz said.
At the end of the genocide in July 1994, Kayishema fled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with his wife, children and brother-in-law. After relocating to other African countries, he moved to South Africa in 1999 and claimed asylum in Cape Town, using a false name.
According to prosecutors, since his arrival in South Africa he was able to rely on a tight support network including former Rwandan military members which went to extreme lengths to conceal his activities and whereabouts.
In recent years, the IRMCT prosecutor has complained about the lack of cooperation from South African authorities and there have been a series of near misses capturing Kayishema. A report describes a failure to arrest Kayishema three years ago.
But on Thursday, Brammertz lauded the cooperation and support of the South African government.
The events in Nyanga, Rwanda, were one of the most brutal of the genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus were killed over the period of 90 days.
The tribunal alleges that Kayishema directly participated in the “planning and execution of this massacre.” The indictment says he bought and distributed petrol to burn down the church while refugees were inside. Kayishema and others are also accused of using a bulldozer to collapse the church following the fire, while refugees were still inside.
The former priest at the church, Athanase Seromba, was convicted over the massacre in 2006 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, which was later increased to a life sentence on appeal.
Kayishema is due to be arraigned on Friday in a Cape Town court.
A reward of up to $5,000,000 was offered by the US War Crimes Rewards Program for information on Kayishema and the other fugitives wanted for perpetrating the Rwandan genocide.
With the arrest of Kayishema, the UN is still seeking three more prominent suspects.
In 2020, another fugitive was captured in a Paris suburb after more than 20 years on the run.
Félicien Kabuga, “one of the world’s most wanted fugitives,” who is alleged to have been a leading figure in the genocide, was arrested in a joint operation with French authorities.
The Rwandan genocide saw Hutu militias and civilians alike murder vast numbers of members of the Tutsi ethnic minority: men, women and children, many of whom had been their neighbors before the conflict began.
The killings finally came to an end 100 days later, when Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops, led by Paul Kagame, defeated the Hutu rebels and took control of the country.
by tyler | May 18, 2023 | africa, CNN
Floods have caused almost a quarter of a million people to flee their homes after the Shabelle river in central Somalia broke its banks and submerged the town of Beledweyne, even as the country faces its most severe drought in four decades, according to the government.
Aid agencies and scientists have warned climate change is among the key factors accelerating humanitarian emergencies, while those impacted are some of the least responsible for CO2 emissions.
Seasonal rains in Somalia and upstream in the Ethiopian highlands triggered flash floods that washed away homes, crops, and livestock, and temporarily closed schools and hospitals in Beledweyne, the capital of Hiraan region, local residents said.
“At once the entire city was underwater. Beledweyne itself became like an ocean,” said shopkeeper Ahmed Nur, whose business was washed away.
“Only the roofs of the houses could be seen. We used small boats and tractors to rescue people,” he said.
Nur has been staying with relatives on the edge of the city which, just weeks earlier, had been celebrating the end of the crippling drought.
“Rain came, we were happy. People planted their crops,” he said.
The drought, coupled with violence and a spike in food prices caused by the war in Ukraine, killed as many as 43,000 people last year, according to United Nations figures.
Since mid-March the floods have affected more 460,000 nationwide and killed 22, according to the U.N. humanitarian office (OCHA).
The Somali Disaster Management Agency said the floods in Beledweyne alone have caused the displacement of more than 245,000 people.
“Recovery from six consecutive seasons of poor rainfall performance will take time,” OCHA said in a May 14 report.
The rains are recharging water sources and enabling vegetation to regenerate, however, it will take much more rainfall to effectively alleviate the impact of the recent drought, OCHA said in a report.
After back-to-back disasters, at least one resident of Beledweyne, Halima Abdullahi, said she had seen enough, making her one of the 216 million people the World Bank predicts could be compelled to move within their own country by 2050 because of climate stress.
“We shall move to villages far away,” said the mother of two children. “Beledweyne no longer exists.”
by tyler | May 18, 2023 | africa, CNN
Rescuers have recovered six more bodies from a river in southern Malawi days after a boat carrying about 37 people was capsized by a hippo on Monday.
Police spokesperson Agnes Zalakoma said the bodies were recovered Wednesday from the Shire River in Malawi’s Nsanje district, bringing the death toll to seven.
Thirteen people were earlier rescued but 17 are still unaccounted for and on Monday, the body of a one-year-old toddler was pulled out of the river, which Zalakoma said was infested with crocodiles and hippos.
Those found dead were aged between 17 and 51, she added.
A lawmaker for the Nsanje district, Gladys Ganda, said the villagers were crossing the Shire River to get to their farms at the Malawian border with Mozambique when the boat they were traveling in was struck by the hippo.
Police spokeswoman Zalakoma earlier told CNN that accidents are common on the river.
“It is too dangerous because it (the Shire River) is too shallow and in this river, there are crocodiles that most of the time attack people and also hippopotamus that cause incidents like the one we’re dealing with,” she said.
She added that rescuers are continuing the search for those missing.
The area has seen previous tragic boat accidents. In January, a canoe carrying 15 people capsized in the Shire River after hitting a tree trunk, leaving one person dead and six others missing and feared dead, Zalakoma told CNN.
