Africa News Round Up, September, Tuesday 10, 2013 We start off this mornings news round up with news from Kenya where Deputy President William Ruto is at The Hague to stand trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC), BBC reports. Mr Ruto and President Uhuru Kenyatta have been charged with crimes against humanity, which they deny. The ICC said their trials would not clash, after Mr Kenyatta warned that the constitution prevented the two men from being abroad at the same time. Mr Kenyatta is due to go on trial in November. The defence and prosecution have been arguing about how the trials of Mr Ruto and Mr Kenyatta should proceed ICC judges have indicated that their trials would not run simultaneously to avoid “potential confusions”, an ICC statement said. Instead, the trials would take place in alternating periods with minimum block of four weeks exclusively devoted to one case, before passing to another block devoted to the other case, the statement added. Mr Ruto’s lawyer Karim Khan described the prosecution’s case as “a lamentable shambles” and “parody of justice”. Chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said there had been an “ongoing” and “organised” campaign to intimidate witnesses, it reports. “Those who are committing these crimes are going to great lengths to cover their identity,” Ms Bensouda is quoted as saying. On Saturday, Mr Kenyatta said all camps still accommodating families displaced by the violence would be closed by 20 September. In the Central African Republic at least 55 people have been killed in fighting between the forces of the new Central African Republic (CAR) president and those loyal to deposed leader Francois Bozize, Aljazeera reports. Bozize’s forces infiltrated villages around Bossangoa, 250km northwest of the capital Bangui, destroying bridges and other infrastructure and “taking revenge against the Muslim population”, Guy-Simplice Kodegue, spokesman for the office of President Michel Djotodia, said on Monday. Bossangoa is the main town of the Ouham district where General Bozize was born. Former rebels of the Seleka coalition ended Bozize’s 10-year rule on March 24 and their leader, Djotodia, then became head of state. These clashes caused some 10 deaths on Sunday in Bossangoa, including two employees of the humanitarian organisation ACTED, another military source said. At least four fighters from Seleka were also killed, the presidential office’s spokesman said. Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that thousands of people had been displaced and at least eight villages were razed to the ground during recent violence in the north of the country, which has long been a lawless territory outside the towns. The fighting on Saturday and Sunday comes after a UN warning that the country is on the brink of collapse. Since Seleka seized power, the security situation has remained chaotic, and Djotodia’s regime faces a major challenge in restoring order and disarming ex-combatants, despite the presence of a regional military peacekeeping force in Bangui. Elsewhere in Africa, Aljazeera reports investigators have called on the UN to reopen an inquiry into the 1961 death of Dag Hammarskjold, the then UN chief, citing “persuasive evidence” that his aircraft was shot down. The inquiry on Monday called on the US National Security Agency (NSA) to release cockpit recordings from the time to confirm whether a mercenary fighter jet may have shot down the aircraft. Hammarskjold, the UN’s second secretary-general, died in mysterious circumstances in September 1961 while on a peace mission to the newly independent Congo, when his plane crashed shortly before it was scheduled to land at the Ndola airport in Zambia [then Northern Rhodesia]. The mineral-rich province of Katanga was at the time fighting to secede from Congo, with the backing of the West and their commercial interests in the region. “There is persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat as it circled to land at Ndola,” said the 61-page report released in The Hague by a privately appointed commission consisting of prominent international judges and diplomats. Fifteen people including Hammarskjold died when the DC-6, known as the Albertina, crashed into the ground near Ndola as it came in to land in advance of a meeting between him and Moise Tshombe, the Katangan leader. “We … consider the possibility that the plane was in fact forced into its descent by some form of hostile action is supported by sufficient evidence to merit further enquiry,” the report said. The commission cited new witnesses who claimed to have seen a second aircraft shooting at the Albertina on the night of the crash almost 52 years ago. Several witnesses, interviewed by two commission members in May, told how they saw two planes in the sky over Ndola, the larger one on fire. Until now, the commission has run into a stone wall at the NSA, being told that because they were classified as “top secret”, two of three documents requested “appeared to be exempt from disclosure”. “An appeal against the continued classification of these documents, which the Commission understands to be subject to a qualified 50-year rule, has been lodged,” the report noted. The commission called on the UN General Assembly to take the investigation further, starting with obtaining the cockpit recordings from the NSA. In Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo’s M23 rebels said on Monday they were waiting for a government delegation to arrive to resume peace talks, in line with an ultimatum set by regional leaders, News24 reports. Leaders of Africa’s Great Lakes region on Thursday set a three-day deadline for the resumption of talks between the M23 army mutineers and Kinshasa aimed to broker an end to a recent upsurge in fighting in the resource-rich east of DR Congo. The talks, to be held once again in the Ugandan capital Kampala, should be concluded within 14 days. “All our delegation members are here,” M23 delegation chief Rene Abandi told AFP on Monday. “We are waiting for the arrival of the government side and we resume the talks.” Talks between the two sides were suspended in May, and the agreement to reopen them follows a recent upsurge in violence in the country, where Congolese troops backed by a special United Nations force launched a fresh assault against the rebels late last month. Previous rounds of talks were repeatedly delayed, and it was not clear if talks would actually begin Monday. However, both sides have committed to restarting the slow moving talks. “We want peace talks and we are ready for them,” Abandi said. Officials in the office of the Ugandan mediator, defence minister Crispus Kiyonga, said they were expecting the imminent arrival of Kinshasha’s team, but could not say when talks would actually begin.
Posted on: Tue, 10 Sep 2013 13:52:35 +0000
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