Press freedom in Sierra Leone faces continued pressure, even under the government of President Julius Maada Bio. Credit: CC By 2.0/Alan & Flora Botting

By Lahai J. Samboma
LONDON, May 2 2019 (IPS)

Ibrahim Samura, erstwhile editor and publisher of New Age, an independent Freetown newspaper, was beaten up with “heavy-duty metal chains and sticks” during Sierra Leone’s presidential run-off election in March 2018—in front of the police and army. He died from his injuries three months later. But more than a year since the assault the perpetrators are yet to be brought to book.

The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) has called on the government of President Julius Maada Bio for the immediate prosecution of all those who physically assaulted a newspaper editor last year.

The attack on Samura and at least two other reporters occurred in full view of security personnel, as the journalists covered the elections no more than 50 feet from the police station in the Freetown suburb of Lumley.

“The continuing delay in bringing them to justice is breeding a culture of impunity,” Ahmed Sahid Nasralla, the national secretary general of SLAJ, told IPS. “We are calling on the police and on the government to take action. The investigation has been done. It’s up to the authorities to now prosecute. We will continue to put pressure on them to do so.”

According to SLAJ, Samura’s death is directly related to the beating he received, which caused the intracerebral haemorrhage the autopsy determined caused his death. Further, medical experts say if Samura did not suffer “similar blunt force trauma about the head” from the time of that merciless beating to the time of his death, then it is “very safe” to conclude that those who beat him in March caused his demise.

The five perpetrators, so-called “high-powered hooligans”, comprise: a former deputy minister from the then ruling All Peoples Congress party (the APC), Ibrahim Washingai Mansaray;

the former Mayor of Freetown, Herbert George Williams;

the chairman of a local football club who was vying for the presidency of the national football association, Sanusi Kargbo;

Abubakarr Daramy, an APC government spokesman;

and, last but not least, Dankay Koroma, who happens to be the daughter of then President Ernest Bai Koroma.

Ten months after the journalist’s death, none of the infamous “Samura Five” have been arrested. This is despite the fact that police say the necessary warrants had been issued. Some reporters have attributed this to the fact that before his death Samura had publicly accepted an “apology” from the APC, in effect offering “pre-emptive forgiveness” to those who some see as his murderers.

But, as the publisher of Sierra Express Media, Adeyemi Paul, said: “He may have forgiven them, but a crime is a crime. The role of the police and the courts is to arrest and prosecute criminals, not to offer forgiveness.” Not unexpectedly, most journalists share this view. Amara Samura (no relation), editor of The Vision newspaper, said: “Those who beat Ibrahim Samura should be brought to justice, because that beating caused his death – apology or not.”

Fayia Amara Fayia of the Standard Times newspaper, said there were rumours Samura had accepted “compensation” from ex-President Koroma, whose daughter was one the alleged attackers. “Journalists should not enter into such arrangements with their abusers, because it will lead to impunity,” he said.

Many journalists who had hoped the election of Bio as president augured well for press freedom in Sierra Leone have been disappointed. The harassment, intimidation and beatings of journalists has continued under the rule of his Sierra Leone People’s Party (the SLPP). Barely a month after Bio assumed office, SLPP supporters assaulted Yusuf Bangura, a radio reporter for the Sierra Leone Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC). His attackers said it was “payback” for his “negative reporting” of the SLPP and Bio in the run up to the elections.

Then last September, Fayia Amara Fayia was arrested at the television studio of AYV Media during a live broadcast. His arrest was ordered by the deputy information minister, who claimed the reporter had libelled the president in one of his articles. Fayia was later released without charge. That same month several journalists were attacked and their equipment damaged by alleged SLPP thugs while covering a bye election in the northern Kambia district.

In January of this year the editor of Sierra Express media, Alusine Bangura, was beaten up at his office by men who, he says, not only identified themselves as supporters of the SLPP, but were also wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the ruling party’s emblem. He suffered serious injuries to his head and torso from the beating the group dished out to him. Three of his colleagues had been lucky to escape.

“I recognised one of the men, a hefty bloke, a popular thug for the SLPP,” Bangura told IPS. “There were about 13 of them. Had it not been for the guys in the area, who came to assist me, I might have been killed.”

According to Bangura, this was the second attack on their offices. The first one happened in April 2018, just after Bio took office. “They attack us because they say we are too critical of the government,” he continued. “They also said we criticised them when they were in opposition. But that is our duty, to keep the politicians on their toes. We are always critical of government, any government.”

These attacks against journalists going about their lawful business can be seen as evidence of a culture of impunity which the continuing failure to prosecute the alleged killers of Samura has fuelled in Sierra Leone. Many believe that if a precedent is set, where people are punished for attacking journalists, it would serve as a deterrent to these almost pedestrian assaults on journalists who are simply doing their jobs. As Bangura said, “I myself could have easily been killed in January by those thugs.”

It will be recalled that Harry Yansaneh, the acting editor of For Di People newspaper, was killed in 2005 after an SLPP MP, Fatmata Hassan, sent her children and assorted thugs to beat him up. In this case, which is eerily similar to Samura’s, the killers got-off scot-free. It can even be argued that Samura might be alive today, or that Bangura might not have sustained those serious injuries, if Yansaneh’s alleged killers had been convicted back in 2005 of even the lesser charge of manslaughter or, at worst, aggravated assault.

In a cruel twist of fate, Yansaneh had become acting editor of For Di People after substantive editor Paul Kamara was jailed for two years for allegedly libelling President Ahmed Tejan Kabbah, whose SLPP government invoked draconian criminal libel legislation to convict the journalist.

Perhaps one reason why the present SLPP government is reluctant to prosecute Samura’s killers is because it will mean not only that they would have to also prosecute their own supporters who routinely beat up journalists, as we have seen, but also those who killed Yansaneh in 2005, there being no statute of limitation for murder.

But the president would do well to recall his words to members of the SLAJ when he addressed them last December. Bio had said: “I would like us to remember the heroism of someone who is not here with us tonight – Ibrahim Samura… Never again should we have a government or politicians who abdicate their duty to protect journalists and become the perpetrators of violence against journalists.”

A month after the president said this, thugs severely beat up the editor of Sierra Express Media. They then ran away—and live to assault another journalist another day.
As SLAJ calls on the government of President Bio for action against the so-called “Samura Five”, its members are also looking to the government to fulfil their manifesto promise to repeal criminal libel laws, which previous governments have used to muzzle the press and to punish outspoken journalists like Kamara.

Speaking to IPS from South Africa, Angela Quintal, Africa Programme Coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), said: “President Bio must move swiftly to ensure that the law on criminal and seditious libel is finally repealed, something that he committed to when he came into power last year.”

Quintal added: “A message must also be sent that attacks on journalists will not be condoned by authorities and the only way to ensure this is to ensure that those responsible [for Samura’s death] are held accountable through prosecution. President Bio has publicly committed to upholding press freedom and this is one way to show that his sentiments are not mere rhetoric.”

Excerpt:

By Lahai J. Samboma
LONDON, Apr 23 2019 (IPS)

When former footballer George Weah became president of Liberia in 2018, media practitioners felt they had in him a democrat who would champion media freedoms. “But we were mistaken,” journalist Henry Costa told IPS.

Any objective assessment of the relationship between West Africa governments and media organisations will conclude that, but for a few exceptions, the outlook for press freedom in the sub-region is a bleak one.

From Cameroon and Ghana, to Nigeria, Liberia and Senegal, journalists and media organisations are being attacked for simply doing their jobs. The fact that these attacks emanate from mostly state actors, who as a rule remain unpunished, points to a culture of impunity.

Liberia is a case in point.
“The president does not like criticism,” said Costa, owner of Roots FM and host of the station’s popular Costa Show. “And because we are critical of some policies, our offices have been attacked on two occasions by armed men and our equipment damaged and some stolen.”

Some would say Costa was lucky, for the corpse of another journalist, Tyron Brown, was dumped outside his home last year by a mysterious black jeep. A man has confessed to killing the journalist in self-defence but his colleagues are not convinced. They believe the murder was a message – mind your words or you could be next.

This climate of fear was heightened when Weah accused a BBC correspondent being against his government. Then Front Page Africa, a newspaper that has been critical of successive governments, was fined 1.8 million dollars in a civil defamation lawsuit brought by a friend of the president.

Mae Azango, a senior Front Page Africa reporter, said the government’s new tactic was to “strangulate the free press” by refusing to pay tens of thousands owed for media advertisements. “One minister said since the media does not write anything good about the government, it won’t pay debt owed, which will compel some media outlets to shut down,” she said. “Some media houses have not paid staff for up to eight months.”

In Ghana, once Africa’s top-ranked media-friendly country, things have deteriorated to the level where a sitting politician openly called on supporters to attack a journalist whose documentary on corruption in Ghanaian football exposed him. Ahmed Divela was subsequently shot dead last January. In 2015 another journalist, George Abanga, was also shot dead on assignment.

In March 2018 Latif Iddrisu, a young reporter, was covering a story when he was dragged into the Accra headquarters of the police and given a merciless beating which left him with a fractured skull.
Iddrisu told IPS by phone: “Journalists are being threatened with assault and death by politicians and people in power because they feel threatened by our exposés.” He doubts whether the passage of freedom of information (FOI) legislation will improve matters.

This position is borne out in Nigeria where the passing of FOI laws has not deterred officials from denying journalists access to information they need to carry out their jobs. According to Dapo Olorunyomi, the Central Bank and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (the NNPC) are the “most opaque institutions” in the country. Olorunyomi, editor-in-chief of Premium Times Newspaper, added: “So you are allowed to write what you want, but if you get it wrong you suffer the consequences.” He and journalists working for him have been arrested on several occasions to get them to reveal their sources.

The case of Jones Abiri is instructive. The journalist was incarcerated for two years without trial. And physical attacks on reporters have increased four-fold in recent times. Figures show that attacks on journalists and the press quadrupled in 2015-2019, compared to the preceding five year period.

Media academic Dr Chinenye Nwabueze maintains that the violence heightens during elections. “In the ‘season’ of elections, a journalist operates like a car parked – at owner’s risk,” he told IPS. “You could end up in the crossfire between opposing parties or thugs.”

The same story of violence and intimidation against journalists is replicated in francophone countries like Cameroon, Senegal, Cote d’Ivoire and Mali. The most serious of them is Cameroon, where the government continues to prosecute media critics in military or special courts. As Angela Quintal, Africa Program Coordinator of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) told IPS, “Cameroon is the second-worst jailer of journalists in sub-Saharan Africa, and the second in the world for jailing journalists on false news charges.”

Sierra Leone and the Gambia are the two countries that emerge relatively blemish-free in our survey of the landscape of press freedom in West Africa. Both have relatively new governments that have promised repeal criminal libel laws that their predecessors had used to clamp down on the media. From Sierra Leone, reporter Amadu Lamrana Bah of AYV Media told IPS: “The president says he is committed to repealing [criminal libel laws] and the process is on.”

His statement echoes that of Sheriff Bojang Jr, president of the Gambia Press Union, who said: “We no longer work in a fearful or repressive environment, but our major problem is the lack of information coming out of government, the total lack of transparency. But the government have promised to make changes.”

This is a reference to the absence of FOI legislation in the country, which the government has promised to “deal with in due course”. But the Gambians only have to look to similarly “blemish-free” Sierra Leone, to realise that FOI will count for nought if the authorities are not prepared to honour its provisions – as this reporter discovered while researching a story on sexual violence against Sierra Leonean women and another on diamond mining.

The Ministries of Justice, Mines, and Information in Freetown refused to provide the information we requested, even though they had initially promised they would. That recent experience came to mind when, during his interview for this piece, Liberian reporter Henry Costa said the Weah government “were pretending to be tolerant” but “would go to their old tricks” when economic hardships trigger anti-government protests and the media begin to report on them.

Since Sierra Leone and the Gambia are currently implementing International Monetary Fund policies, it is only a matter of time before those policies begin to bite the people. If the “Costa equation” is correct, then it is likewise only a matter of time before we find out whether the “blemish-free” authorities in Freetown and Banjul are as toxic to press freedom as their counterparts in Cameroon and Ghana, or indeed, their immediate predecessors.

“Journalists do essential work to keep the public informed, often in difficult circumstances in West and Central Africa,” Sadibou Marong, the Regional Media Manager for Amnesty’s West and Central Africa Office, told IPS.  “They must be protected to do their work freely, and without fear of attacks or threats. Governments in the region should promote media freedom and protect media workers and organisations.”

Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio. Courtesy: The Commonwealth

By Lahai J. Samboma
LONDON, Apr 1 2019 (IPS)

If the government of Sierra Leone’s President Julius Maada Bio were to be graded on their first year’s performance in office, it is likely that their report card would read, “promising start, which they must surpass in the years ahead”.

Since taking office after his successful election last year, this retired brigadier general has made a promising start, beginning with a massive investigation into corruption and mismanagement under the All Peoples Congress (the APC) government of ex-President Ernest Bai Koroma.

On the recommendations of that investigation, a judge-led public inquiry is now examining corruption allegations against former officials. Early scalps in this veritable war on graft include those of ex-Vice President Victor Bockarie Foh and former minister Minkailu Mansaray; they have both offered to return money they stole.

The issue of corruption hits a raw nerve here, a country that is desperately poor despite its wealth of natural resources and fertile lands, which in a parallel universe would guarantee a decent standard of life for every one of its 7.5 million citizens. Former government officials are also widely believed to have stolen resources meant for the victims of the Ebola and mudslide disasters which laid waste to thousands a few years back.

Freetown resident Levi Fofana captures the public mood when he says Bio came at the “right time”. “The people of Sierra Leone were lied to by the roguish APC, which created a bankrupt state in which swindlers dressed in suits and African robes abused power with impunity,” he said.

Although ex-President Koroma has called the anti-corruption drive a “witch-hunt”, ordinary people are enthused, urging the government on. They hope Koroma will find himself in the dock one day soon; they want to know how the former president and his close family and associates became “overnight millionaires”.

Bio was the leader of the former military junta who handed power to a democratically-elected government after organising elections in 1996. He has brought renewed hope to this coastal West African nation which suffered a devastating civil war in the 1990s that killed tens of thousands and devastated the economy – and which had to endure a decade-long APC hegemony characterised by corruption, economic decline, and drift.

He inherited state liabilities of 3.7 billion dollars. Simultaneously as he drove forward his anti-corruption campaign, the new President upon taking office established a consolidated account for all government revenues. The goal was to plug any potential “leakages” in his own administration.

According to T J Lamina, Sierra Leone’s High Commissioner to London, the policy has been a success, and is still in place. Revenues collected have gone towards servicing the domestic debt and paying civil servants, who are now getting paid on time and without the government having to borrow.

Ambassador Lamina told IPS: “It’s not like Sierra Leone is not generating revenue; the revenue is there but it was going into private pockets.”

Bio’s stewardship of the economy has won plaudits from the IMF, who have approved a new two-year support programme worth 172 million dollars. The World Bank has chimed in with support to the tune of 325 million dollars. Both Bretton Woods institutions’ relationship with the previous administration had been “increasingly difficult”, which saw the IMF suspending their programme in 2017. President Bio has said both institutions were “necessary evils”.

His ambitious, five-year National Development Plan, costed at 8 billion dollars, was unveiled in February and has been endorsed by the Bretton Woods double act. Its key pillars include the development of human capital and infrastructure, and increasing agricultural production, especially of the staple food, rice – which the country used to export up till the 1970s, but which now sucks up valuable foreign exchange to import.

Inevitably with report cards, you eventually get to the bits that cause embarrassment or feelings of regret in the subject. In this case one of these has to be the alarming rates of gender-based violence against women and young girls. The available figures paint the story in vivid technicolour.

According to police statistics, there were 632 cases of rapes or sexual assaults in 2012. That figure rose to an astronomical 8,505 for last year alone. Over 70 percent of victims were girls under 15 years old. Although the government declared the crisis a state of emergency and speedily passed legislation making the “sexual penetration of minors” punishable with an automatic life sentence, it remains to be seen how effective this will be.

“Our commitment [to solving this problem] is beyond mere words and beyond mere acknowledgement of an obligation,” President Bio has said. “The protection and empowerment of our women and girls is critical to our existence and progress as a nation.”

While it is true that they inherited the problem, it would be a harsh indictment of President Bio’s “new direction” if, by this time next year, the incidence of egregious sexual violence remains at unacceptably-high levels.

Observers also expressed concern over last year’s arrest by police of a man who led a demonstration against the removal of subsidies from petrol and kerosene. He was later released without charge. Rights groups subsequently called on the government to respect the right of peaceful protest.

“The price of our fuel was hiked because the IMF told government to do it,” said protester Fatmata Bangura, adding that the move would put “more strain on a budget already under a lot of pressure”.

From an appraisal of the first year of President Bio’s government, two things are clear. The first is that he has entered into a marriage of convenience with the IMF and the World Bank; the second is that, if his government’s promising start is to be surpassed, or even sustained, he will need the skills of a master magician to keep his people, as well as his “marriage partners”, happy.

The international community must move swiftly to create a regional political framework to tackle continuing civil strife in Zaire before it spreads a wider conflagration across the entire Great Lakes region, experts here say.

According to Jim Whitman, a fellow at Cambridge University’s Global Security Programme, the issue is no longer to save Zaire from itself, but to reach a speedy political settlement to the crisis to prevent it spilling over into neighbouring countries.

“There should be a bigger agenda here, and that is for the international community to help build a broad, regional political framework for the stabilisation of the whole Great Lakes region,” he said. “We’re not just talking about Zaire here.”

About 1,000 U.S., Belgian, British and French soldiers are now in the Congolese capital of Brazzaville ready to evacuate the remaining 3,000 western expatriates still in Zaire, most of them in Kinshasa, just across the Zaire river from Brazzaville.

On Wednesday a summit on Zaire is to be held by the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Lome, Togo on Wednesday. Both government and rebels will be represented, but so far the rebels have declined to agree to negotiate.

And a joint Franco-U.S. initiative is being run by the two’s ambassadors in some 20 African countries to push for a ceasefire and talks between the weakened Kinshasa regime and rebel leader Laurent-Desire Kabila.

But most aid agencies say any agreement must followed up by funds and backing from the West for a long term regional solution — resources which the West, according to Ian Bray, an analyst with the Oxfam aid agency, may not be willing to provide.

“We need a long term regional political solution as soon as possible,” says Bray. “This should take into account all the players in the region and the international community to provide the necessary resources. But there is no real political willingness by the major Western nations to play their part.”

With high expectations of eventual victory for the rebel Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, some observers believe the best solution would be to simply wait for the ousting of Zairean ‘President for life’ Mobutu Sese Seko.

But while Whitman accepts that the Zairean leader is “not widely revered,” he cautions against waiting out the crisis, and rejects another widely held view — that a political settlement in place of a outright rebel takeover, would automatically leave Mobutu in a position of political influence.

This is why he backs talks between both sides, whether through U.S.-French auspices or the United Nations. “A negotiated settlement doesn’t mean a 50/50 split,” Whitman said. “You can have a political settlement which does not mean Mobutu holding on to power.

“If he knows his position is untenable, he will negotiate for what he can get… This would be preferable to fighting. It is ordinary people, not professional soldiers, who are suffering now. The longer it goes on, the more it is likely to spread.”

His view is generally endorsed by London-based international relief organisations, many of whom have ferried their staff from around front line areas to safer towns like Goma and Bukavu, near the Rwanda border in the east, and Kinshasa, the capital, in the west, which is still under government control.

Upwards of 160,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees – some of whom played a direct part in the 1994 genocide of Rwandan Tutsis – split into two groups when they fled their base in Tingi Tingi as the rebels closed in.

One group, say reports, headed for Kinshasa, the other made for the hills and jungles in fear of the mainly ethnic Tutsi rebel alliance, supposedly bolstered by Rwandan Tutsi forces, who the refugees believe will exact brutal vengeance for the 1994 genocide.

The mass movements of refugees that could be expected to follow further rebel gains, could see a substantial proportion of the refugees cross into either neighbouring Congo or Angola, or both, leading to an exacerbation of the region’s refugee crisis.

Although Kabila has rubbished reports of human rights violations by his troops, human rights groups say that both fleeing Zairean soldiers and arriving rebels are committing abuses. They believe that abuses by both sides will not stop until there is an end to the conflict.

“If the fighting can be stopped somehow, then the atrocities can be stopped,” said Godfrey Byaruhanga, a spokesman for international human rights watchdog Amnesty International. “But, as you know, human rights abuses can continue to be committed even in a situation where there is no active fighting as such.”

Despite the international clamour for a speedy negotiated settlement, the omens bode ill. Kabila has Kinshasa in his reach and has stipulated that he will only agree to a ceasefire if Mobutu, just back in the country, offers to step down. He refuses to go to Wednesday’s Lome session.

“What is needed now is a huge international commitment to the Great Lakes on a scale never seen before,” said Whitman, “except perhaps in Bosnia — but one, sadly, which we are unlikely to see.”

An Amnesty International spokeswoman has condemned plans by the Sierra Leone government to grant a South Africa-style blanket amnesty for human rights violations committed during the years of bloody civil strife.

The worldwide human rights pressure group says the mandate of the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission should be expanded to investigate and if possible prosecute perpetrators of rights abuses.

The Commission was set up by the government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah to investigate cases of human rights abuses and recommend ways of compensating victims — and also grant amnesty to those responsible.

“This is wrong,” said Tessa Kordeczka, an Amnesty International spokesperson in London. “Human rights abuses, by government soldiers and rebel forces, must be thoroughly investigated by the commission and perpetrators made to account for their crimes against humanity.

“We are strongly against the government’s plans to grant immunity to people who may be guilty of gross human rights abuses. The most important thing for national reconciliation is to establish the truth of what happened and to bring rights violators to justice.”

Although the current ceasefire between the government and the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF) — signed in Cote d’Ivoire in March — has seen an effective end to fighting between the armed groups, the forces have instead turned their guns on aid stores and, says Amnesty, serious abuses continue to be committed against unarmed civilians by both sides.

These seemingly random attacks in the south and east of the country, which campaigners say have increased dramatically since May, include the killing by soldiers of up to 100 civilians in Gondama, some of whom were decapitated.

Victims have been forced to carry looted goods and subsequently killed. Women and young girls have been gang-raped and there was an especially brutal series of sexual assaults during an attack on Monseneh in the Mano chiefdom, according to reports from the country.

Amnesty welcomes the inclusion of several important provisions for the respect and protection of human rights in the draft peace agreement as a positive development. But it maintains that action to stop torture, killings, ‘disappearances’ and other abuses cannot wait for the implementation of a final agreement.

It is calling on the RUF and the Kabbah government — which assumed power from the military National Provisional Ruling Council (NPRC) in March after internationally-monitored democratic elections the preceding month — to establish a specific sub- commission to oversee immediate implementation of mechanisms for the protection of human rights set by the draft peace agreement.

Official Sierra Leone sources declined to comment on allegations that government troops have been responsible for blatant rights abuses against innocent civilians.

“I am afraid we have nothing to say about these recent claims by Amnesty International,” said Gibril Samura, information attaché at the Sierra Leone embassy in London. “All we can say is that the peace negotiations with the RUF are on course and that the government is doing everything in its power to foster peace in the country.”

The international human rights body is also urging the government to either amend or repeal NPRC Decree No.6 (Indemnity and Transition 1996), passed during the tail-end of NPRC rule which virtually exempted the NPRC members or appointees from prosecution for “any act, matter or thing done” during military rule.

“We are very much against this decree,” Kordeczka said. “‘Any act, matter or thing done’, without further definition, could be interpreted to include massive and systematic human rights violations committed by government soldiers during the conflict.

“Decree No.6 must be amended or repealed and those responsible for abuses brought to justice.”

All observers are agreed that long-term peace and respect for human rights will continue to elude the mineral-rich nation until there is a cessation of hostilities between the government and RUF forces. This, however, does not seem to be imminent – no matter what assorted spokespersons form both sides say.

The peace process has effectively reached an impasse, with the RUF refusing to disarm and rejoin civil society if foreign troops do not leave Sierra Leone soil.

The government is adamant that the latter — the West African soldiers and troops of the Executive Outcomes mercenary army — will remain in the country until the RUF demobilises.

Given that the assistance of foreign troops has so far played the main part in ensuring that the rebels are prevented from taking — the capital Freetown, most analysts accept that the Sierra Leone authorities will not agree to the withdrawal of the mercenaries.

Therefore, many observers believe, the stalemate is bound to last for the foreseeable future, unless the RUF gives quarter, drops its insistence on foreign troops withdrawal and disarms its fighters.

However, there are some positive lights. “The ceasefire is holding, there is no full-scale war as before, so there is a willingness on both sides to reach agreement,” says Lawrence Spicer, of International Alert, the London-based NGO which has been trying to facilitate contacts between the government and the rebels.

Civil war erupted in Sierra Leone in March 1991 when the RUF launched an offensive from neighbouring Liberia in a bid to remove the one-party All Peoples Congress (APC) government from power. A year later the APC government was toppled in a coup by the young army officers of the NPRC who handed over power last March to a democratically-elected civilian government.

Almost six years of internecine bloodletting has devastated the economy and resulted in over 50,000 deaths.

More than a quarter of the country’s pre-war population of four million are either internally displaced or have sought refuge in neighbouring countries. People continue to flee to relative safety in Guinea and Liberia.

Tall and slim and smartly-dressed, with a bushy head of hair and equally bushy beard, all that remained for Ibrahima Njie to look the part of a griot — or traditional West African praise-singer — was a long, flowing African dress.

But unlike the famed griots of West African folklore, he is not retained by any chief or political leader. He is a London-based Gambian exile who would like to say — and do — quite a few unprintable things to his country’s military rulers.

“The problem with the Gambia, even the whole of Africa, is that these people feel that because they have guns they have a God- given right to rule over you, to overturn democracy, kill and imprison you and drive into exile people who love their country and their people,” says the 30-year-old former marketing executive.

The ruling Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC), formed by Captain Yahya Jammeh, who became head of state in a military coup that ousted president Dawda Jawara in July 1994, was one of four parties that said Tuesday they would register to participate in forthcoming elections in Gambia.

Four parties plan to sign up to contest the votes; the National Reconciliation Party (NRP), led by Amath Bah; the People’s Democratic Organisation for Independence and Socialism (PDOIS), headed by Sidia Jatta; and the United Democratic Party (UDP) of Ousainou Dabo. All four are expected to register their candidacies at the polls on Thursday.

The main challenge is expected to come from the UDP, which Monday called a rally at Birkama, about 40 kilometres from the capital Banjul that drew an estimated 100,000 people — said to be the biggest rally ever seen in Gambia.

Most of the crowd were thought to be supporters of three banned parties: the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), the National Convention Party (NCP) and the Gambian People’s Party (GPP).

The APRC has come under persistent international censure for banning the opposition parties and other violations of basic human rights such as the freedom of expression and of association.

Various instances of torture and arbitrary arrests and imprisonment — of politicians, activists and journalists — and at least 15 extrajudicial executions, have been recorded by international human rights organisations.

Amnesty International and other human rights groups have made frequent representations to the junta for the release of at least 35 politicians and alleged supporters of the former government held since October 1995.

Although a court ordered their release on bail last January, they were rearrested later that same day, Jan. 12, when the junta issued a decree with retroactive force. Many others continue to be held without any formal reference to any decree, while some seem to have “disappeared”.

Caroline Norris, Gambia researcher at Amnesty International, said: “These cases are particularly worrying, since these are people who should be released so they can participate in the political process. Their basic human rights — freedom of association and expression — are being violated.”

Despite stern criticism by the Gambian community for allegedly “being soft” on the Jammeh-led junta, the Commonwealth Secretariat has threatened to “reconsider” their position towards the Gambia — and possibly suspend the country’s membership — should the APRC continue with its plan to exclude bona fide politicians from the elections.

Gambia’s national electoral commission has ruled that members of banned parties can form new ones before presidential elections due to be held on Sep. 26 and general elections due in December — provided they have not previously held cabinet office or are a serving soldier. Jammeh is expected to quit the army this week.

The deputy director of information at the Commonwealth, Cheryl Borall, described the banning decrees as “a retrograde step”.

“If this means the people of the Gambia are denied their right to elect a government of their choice, the Commonwealth will have to reconsider its position… The secretary- general would be consulting with the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG) on the way forward.”

The CMAG was set up at last November’s Commonwealth summit in New Zealand to press for the restoration of democracy in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Gambia, a former British colony which lies along the river of the same name, creating an enclave inside Senegal.

Successful elections which ended military rule were held in Sierra Leone in February.

Campaigners have also expressed concern over provisions in the Gambia’s new constitution granting total immunity from prosecution for APRC members and appointees guilty of rights violations.

The new constitution also retains the death penalty — reinstated by the APRC in 1995 — and allows fundamental human rights to be removed in a “state of emergency”.

These provisions, according to Amnesty, contradict Gambia’s international treaty obligations and pose a potent threat to human rights in any post-APRC political dispensation.

“Victims will be denied their right to judicial remedy and there will be created a climate where such violations are tolerated,” says Norris.

“And as the criteria for determining a state of public emergency are not specified, it leaves the fundamental human rights of Gambians potentially as vulnerable to the discretion of future governments as they have been under the APRC.”

She added: “We’re calling on Jammeh and any other candidate for the presidency to come forward with their proposals for respect for human rights in the future so that voters can make an informed choice at the elections.”

While she declined to comment on allegations by many in the Gambian community that Britain and the Commonwealth were not doing enough to put pressure on the APRC to respect the basic human rights in the Gambia, Norris maintains that a lot more can be done by “all members of the international community” to force the pace of human rights and democratic reform in the country.

According to Njie, many of his compatriots are not optimistic the Commonwealth will take any serious action against Jammeh and his APRC should they decide to go ahead with their “flawed” elections. “The Commonwealth can’t say that it was they who brought democratic change to Sierra Leone. Things were already moving that way,” he says.

“Just look at Nigeria. What have they done about military rule in that long-suffering country. They are just playing games with the generals there and making a lot of really meaningless noises. The same goes for Britain, which can really put the boot in if they want to.”

Neville Johnson, a spokesperson at the British Foreign Office, said: “We refute allegations that the United Kingdom is not doing enough as far as the political situation in the Gambia is concerned.

“We regret the decree preventing major parties and politicians from contesting the elections and, together with our partners in the European Union and the Commonwealth, we’re considering whether we are going to condemn the APRC.”

New pressure on traditionally secretive Swiss banks to open their books has raised hope that the millions plundered and stashed in their vaults by corrupt African dictators and their bureaucrats could be returned to their home countries.

The new optimism follows the qualified success so far of continuing campaigns with similar objectives, staged by Jewish organisations and the Philippines government.

The Jewish groups seek to force Swiss bankers to detail riches left in their care after the Nazi genocide of European Jewry during World War II and the Philippines government wants to recover billions taken by the late Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

But African activists are determined that any funds recovered from secret Swiss bank accounts should not be used to pay off international debts — and should go direct to poverty alleviation programmes.

“These debts are unrepayable and have given rise to a situation where governments are spending more on debt repayment than on health and education,” says Ann Pettifor, coordinator of the Debt Crisis Network NGO in London. “I believe the funds (in Swiss banks), if they can be got at and confiscated, must be used for investment in human development.

“I have spoken to a lot of influential Africans like former President (Julius) Nyrere of Tanzania and the economist Professor Adebayo Adedeji, who say that the monies must be returned to the respective countries and used for development purposes.”

Pettifor recognises that the task will be herculean, given the reticence of the Swiss authorities, and the reluctance of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to bring their own pressure to bear on the Swiss banking establishment.

The difficulties which African countries are likely to encounter with the Swiss banks are illustrated by the Marcos case. The Philippines government’s claim was officially made in the late 1980s, but it was only a few years ago that the banks even acknowledged the existence of the “Marcos money”.

Then there was the problem of establishing how much exactly Marcos had secreted away to Switzerland — estimates range between a few hundred million dollars to 10 billion dollars in gold bullion and cash. The current, three-way negotiations between the Philippines government, the Swiss authorities and the Marcos family have arrived at a provisional figure of 475 million dollars.

“It has been a long struggle, but at least we are getting somewhere,” says Eduardo Maranan, press attache at the Philippines embassy in London. “The banks have agreed that the money is there and a working figure has been agreed on. We are now in on/off negotiations with the Marcos family, and with the Swiss government, for a settlement. It may take years. Who knows?”

Many analysts contend that claims to the funds — and their accumulated interest —

Millions of dollars worth of cash, gold and property was deposited in Swiss banks by Jews before they were seized and murdered by the Nazis during World War II.

Millions more were placed in the banks by the Nazis themselves, who plundered Jewish homes and businesses across Germany and then occupied Europe, and then put their ill-gotten gains in neutral Switzerland as the defeat loomed.

By now well organised Jewish community groups have been working away on behalf of the surviving families of the dead for half a century. African groups on the other hand, are just starting and will have to work hard to catch up.

“Of course we will work together with our partners in Africa, and also raise the issue with the European parliament,” Helen O’Connell, London spokesperson for the development NGO One World Action. But she thought it would be hard to find a lobby in Africa that could match the heroic efforts of the Jewish community.

Although they support moves to recover funds stolen from Africa, some within the NGO community maintain that it is a side issue and that the funds recovered will only make the barest difference to the wider African economic predicament.

Many fear that the prospect of recovering the fund will provide creditors with another excuse to delay debt relief and some believe that any increased focus on African corruption feeds racism and undermines the credibility of African authorities. Many note that the sums involved are minor compared to fraud in other countries.

“We support any effort to recover funds stolen by Third World leaders, from Africa or any other place,” says Kevin Watkins, senior policy adviser at the British emergency aid NGO Oxfam.

“But what we are concerned about is for it to be used as an excuse for not taking action on debt relief measures, obviously one of the most important issues facing poor African countries.”

Pettifor argues that the whole debate about corruption in Africa as conducted in the West is racist: “Although corruption is big in Nigeria, for Africa as a whole it is small beer, a drop in the ocean, if you look at what goes on in the West and in Russia.

“But you hardly hear about that in the news. In most cases it is these same Western leaders bribing African officials that start the process in the first place.”

The Debt Crisis Network is supporting a campaign by the pressure group Transparency International to get the British government to pass legislation allowing the prosecution of Britons caught bribing officials in other countries, as in the United States.

And according to Pettifor, a case could also be made for prosecuting banks that hold their clients’ ill-gotten gains.

“In many countries you can go to jail for handling or receiving stolen goods, but these banks that collude in the plundering of whole nations don’t have to answer to anyone,” she says.

Lasting peace will only be achieved in war- ravaged Liberia when the issue of human rights abuses against unarmed civilians by various armed factions is addressed in a comprehensive way, campaigners here say.

“Accountability must be the watchword,” says Glenn Calderwood, spokesperson for Britain’s Parliamentary Human Rights Group.

“Making these armed factions answer for their crimes against humanity is a process the people of Liberia have to go through to purge themselves of the past and ensure lasting peace for the future,” hje adds.

And Caroline Norris, of the worldwide human rights organisation Amnesty International, added: “It is essential that any agreement reached includes both mechanisms to ensure that human rights abuses are thoroughly investigated and remedied, and also basic institutional reforms for long-term future protection of human rights.”

Campaigners say the innocent victims of the country’s seven- year civil war have a right to justice. Only by making those responsible for rights abuses accountable for their crimes will a clear message be sent that human rights abuses will not be tolerated under any circumstances.

These thinly-disguised criticims of the latest peace plan for Liberia — unveiled last week at a meeting between West African leaders and assorted Liberian warlords in the Nigeria capital Abuja — has struck a chord with observers of that country’s bloody war.

Under the terms of the new peace plan, the various factions should disarm by the end of the year in readiness for democratic elections by May 1997. A new, democratically-elected government will be sworn into office on or about June 15. It was also agreed that former senator Ruth Perry should replace Wilton Sankawulo as chair of the five-member council of state.

This initiative is essentially a revision of the peace accord brokered in August 1995 by the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) under which combatants would have disarmed by now and elections organised this week.

But it broke down last April after fighting erupted between two rival factions – Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) and Roosevelt Johnson’s United Liberation Movement (Ulimo-J). During the ensuing, two-month-long war, hundreds of civilians were held hostage and arbitrarily killed in cross fire.

Many had hoped that Ecowas leaders would have made good earlier threats at last week’s summit and imposed sanctions on the various factions. Or that steps would have been taken to convene war crimes tribunals to investigate rights abuses with the aim of bringing their perpetrators to book.

What they have done instead is to caution the warlords that breaches of the new accord could lead to their facing war crimes tribunals. And they have threatened sanctions ranging from exclusion from elections, visa restrictions and the expulsion of their families from safe havens in neighbouring countries.

Activists maintain that Ecowas leaders have used the issue of rights violations as a political bargaining chip in their desperate bid to end the spiral of violence in the West African state. It is a gimmick they contend will only serve to postpone an inevitable resumption of hostilities that can only give rise to more suich violations.

“This creates a climate where people think they can literally get away with murder,” says Norris. “Bringing those responsible for abuses to justice is a preventive rather than a vengeful measure. It is essential in breaking the cycle of violence and impunity and ensuring that such horrors do not recur.”

Since the bloody war commenced there have been at least 12 peace accords, none of which has lasted for more than a few months.

Campaigners argue that had the international community given firm indications during the early stages of conflict that human rights abuses would not be condoned, and that their perpetrators would not go scot-free, then previous peace initiatives might have borne fruit and the culture of impunity nipped in the bud.

Janet Fleischman, director of Human rights Watch/Africa, said: “The essential point is that none of the past peace agreements had specific provisions to guard against human rights abuses. Immediate steps need to be taken to put this right. Otherwise the outlook is not very good, I’m afraid.”

Civil war erupted in Liberia in December of 1989 after Charles Taylor launched an offensive from Cote d’Ivoire to topple the late U.S.-backed dictator Samuel Doe. A West African peacekeeping force, Ecomog – the Ecowas Ceasefire Monitoring group — was despatched to the country in the summer of 1990 just as Taylor’s NPFL — then in control of the rest of the country – was on the verge of taking the capital Monrovia.

Some analysts contend that peace would have returned to the country by now had Taylor been allowed to form a government. But Ecomog, supported by the United States, steadfastly prevented this, allowing other factions to form and enter the fray.

Among the latter are Ulimo, which subsequently split into two ethnically-based factions – Alhaji Kromah’s Ulimo-K and the Johnson-led Ulimo-J – and the so-called Liberian Peace Council (LPC). The conflict has claimed the lives of an estimated 150,000 people, wrecked the mineral rich economy and displaced more than half the pre-war population of 2.7 million.

Their reservations about the latest peace plan notwithstanding, rights activists say they welcome any initiative that can provide some respite from the killing. “If this peace plan brings an end to the fighting and temporarily stops abuses, then it would have been helpful,” says Calderwood.

Amnesty International said Friday that the order from Burundi’s new president Pierre Buyoya to sack army chiefs implicated in inter-ethnic massacres was no guarantee that human rights abuses by the army will stop.

“This is the same army we’re talking about here and there are no guarantees that just shuffling a few colonels about is going to put a stop to massacres and other abuses,” says Godfrey Byaruhanga, spokesperson for the worldwide human rights group.

“It is not going to lead to an overnight change in the culture of the army.”

In what is widely perceived as a move to ease international pressure and economic sanctions, Buyoya Tuesday dismissed three senior commanders from the Tutsi minority-led army, among them Colonel Jean Bikomago, the army chief of staff implicated in the 1993 assassination of the country’s first democratically-elected leader, President Melchior Ndadaye, a Hutu.

The sanctions on the land-locked central African state were imposed by Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda immediately after the Jul. 25 coup which replaced the divided civilian government of president Sylvestre Ntibantunganya with a Tutsi-led junta headed by Buyoya, who ruled the country from 1987 to 1993.

On assuming power Buyoya promised negotiations with rebels of the Hutu-led National Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD) and an end to killings by the Tutsi-dominated army.

However, according to Amnesty International, more than 6,000 largely Hutu civilians have been killed in various parts of Burundi in the three weeks since the Buyoya putsch removed the democratically-elected government from office.

As many people have been killed since the coup as in the three months preceding it, undermining Buyoya’s claims that the coup was needed to restore ethnic peace in the country.

Amnesty has reports that at least 4,000 unarmed civilians were extrajudicially-executed between 27 July and 10 August by the army and Tutsi militias in Gitega province. This figure does not include those who may have died from their wounds or drowned in rivers while fleeing.

Most of the victims were reportedly killed when soldiers surrounded their villages to supposedly gather information about rebel movements.

Killings have also been recorded in Bujumbura and the Muramvya, Kayanza and Cibitoke provinces, says Amnesty. On Jul. 29 the wife and four children, one aged three, of Honorata Murishi were executed in the rural provicne of Bujumbura, and 39 more people in Mutimbuzi district.

On Aug. 8, according to Byaruhanga, an affluent Hutu businessman and six members of his family were killed by soldiers, while two days later a group of about 30 peasants working their fields in Gasenyi, near Bujumbura, “disappeared” after a raid by government troops. Five unarmed civilians, including two teachers at Bujumbura’s Higher Technical School and a secretary at the nearby parish church, were reportedly killed by soldiers on Aug. 20.

The Amnesty spokesperson believes that many more such killings would have been unearthed had the army not sealed off tracts of the country. But he adds that Hutu rebels have also committed rights abuses, among them the execution of captured Tutsi combatants.

There are also reports that Rwandan Hutu refugees are being forcibly repatriated to Rwanda and subjected to torture, despite Buyoya’s undertaking to respect international human rights standards in the treatment of refugees.

“The army is making it clear that the same fate awaits the refugees who remain in the camps,” said the spokesman. “It appears that Major Buyoya has either gone back on his word or is not in control of the forces which brought him to power. ”

Ray Wilkinson, London spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), added: “This only confirms our belief that the refugees have not been returning to Rwanda voluntarily. We find this unacceptable and we are calling for firm international action to prevent the spiral of violence continuing or getting worse.”

During his stint as military dictator, Buyoya presided over the massacres of majority Hutu civilians in August 1988 and in November and December of 1991 and early 1992. U.S. intelligence sources say there is evidence to link him to the attempted coup of 1993 which led to President Ndadaye’s assassination and the slaughter of an estimated 100,000 Hutus.

Buyoya’s choice of new commander of the gendarmerie, colonel Georges Mukorako, also headed the gendarmerie during his 1991-92 rule, when it was blamed for massacres of Hutu civilians.

The sanctions include a ban on commercial flights, a blockade of oil shipments — vital to the army’s ‘war effort’ — and the refusal of passage for other consumer essentials and the country’s exports through its neighbours’ territories.

Relief agencies working in the country report that the sanctions have already begun to bite, precipitating steep price hikes for basic consumer items. The agencies say the sanctions could lead to violence against their staff as looters try to get at stockpiled supplies.

“Sanctions are biting bitterly and if they continue, the pressure could increase on the agencies,” said Martin Cottingham, London spokesperson for the British emergency aid agency Christian Aid.

“The sanctions are hitting where it is likely to hurt most, by preventing the army and the powerful Tutsi business community from getting at their main source of finance,” added Ahmed Rajab, the London-based editor of Africa Analysis magazine. “This could help in the efforts at mediation.”

Economic sanctions imposed on Burundi by its neighbours are having a crippling effect on the country, and relief agencies fear they could precipitate violence against their staff as looters try to get at their stockpiled supplies.

Some fear that the grip of the Tutsi-led military junta may weaken in the face of widespread hunger and unrest among the majority Hutu rural population, triggering violent confrontation between Tutsi troops and Hutu protestors.

On Tuesday U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali warned that Burundi could face genocidal massacres, similar to those that occurred in neighbouring Rwanda two years ago, if the country does not receive international help. “Military intervention to save lives might become an inescapable imperative,” he said.

But the international community prefers to keep the pressure up through sanctions, announced at a summit of east and central African states just days after a Jul. 25 putsch returned army Major Paul Buyoya to power.

The sanctions include a ban on commercial flights, oil shipments and essential supplies in and out of the land-locked country.

Regional and international powers are increasingly split on the policy — keen to use sanctions to see the multi-ethnic government of ousted President Sylvestre Ntibantunganya back in power, but also aware that sanctions will raise the temperature of the crisis.

Analysts believe the sanctions will hit hardest in the capital Bujumbura and other large towns — where the Tutsi minority are concentrated and where the majority Hutu community has been reportedly targeted since Ntibantunganya went into hiding after last month’s coup.

Buyoya and his officials have mounted an all out public relations exercise to convince the international community that his takeover is only intended to restore calm, and not just a bid by the privileged Hutu minority community to recover their historic power over the Tutsi majority.

The efforts have had some success, particularly in the United States, but the sanctions pressure is being kept up regardless. The alternatives — to allow Buyoya to carry on in peace or deploy an international peacekeeping force in Burundi — have few supporters.

“Sanctions are biting bitterly,” says Martin Cottingham of the British emergency aid NGO Christian Aid. ” If they continue, the pressure will increase on the agencies, and people hit hard by the sanctions may use violence to take supplies which we had been stocking in the event of an emergency.”

The urban centres — heavily-dependent on food from rural farms worked mostly by Hutus — have been experiencing shortages since the main Hutu rebel group, the Council for the Defence of Democracy (CNDD), called on farmers to stop sending harvests to the towns.

There have been across-the-board price hikes for necessities from salt to bread and cereals.

Rebels have also been attacking trucks transporting coffee and tea, both of which account for 80 percent of the government’s foreign exchange earnings. But even if these crops could somehow find their way to washing stations and processing plants in Bujumbura, the embargoes would stop their export.

The government’s revenue-earning capacity and its war effort have been dealt a severe blow by last month’s destruction by rebels of the Teza tea factory. The factory, say sources, used to provide the army with an estimated 200,000 dollars a month in extra income for the fight against the rebels.

Rebel sabotage against electricity-generating plants has also severely disrupted production at Bujumbura’s Baraudi Brewery and other firms. The brewery alone accounts for over 40 percent of tax receipts, squeezing the salaries of civil servants and the 17,000- strong army.

“The sanctions are hitting where it is likely to hurt most, by preventing the army and the powerful Tutsi business community from getting their main source of finance,” says a London based African journalist. He and others note that sanctions are less costly than military intervention and would reinforce former Tanzanian President Julius Nyrere’s current efforts at mediation.

But Peter Willetts, an expert on terrorism and peacekeeping in Africa at London’s City University, said: “I’m not saying that sanctions are wrong, but they should not be used to push the regime against the wall.

It would be better to use the sanctions as a way of persuading the leadership to invite a peacekeeping force to keep the combatants apart. Then you can begin to work towards a political settlement.”

But support for such a force has been lagging. So far, out of some 80 countries asked by the United Nations to lend support for a possible peacekeeping mission, only three — the African states of Chad, Malawi and Zambia — have offered to send troops, Boutros- Ghali noted in a report to the U.N. Security Council Tuesday.

Three other African states — Tanzania, Ethiopia and Uganda — are ready to send troops as part of a voluntary African force planned in recent weeks, U.N. under-Secretary General Kofi Annan said recently.

But, Annan added, “a voluntary force… simply isn’t going to happen that quickly.” Speedy action is necessary “before everything blows up in our faces,” Annan cautioned.

U.N. officials have noted that no Western country has offered to lead a U.N. force, a move they deem essential for a successful mission. Given Burundi’s terrain and land-locked location, Boutros- Ghali said, major logistical and transport support of the kind only available to Western powers are needed.

“The United Nations is ready to help, within its limited capacity. But I am convinced it is a delusion to think that such an operation could be planned, deployed and commanded by the United Nations as if it were a peace-keeping operation,” Annan said.

Kampala’s battle to stop insurgents crossing over from Sudan and wreaking havoc in northern Uganda could alienate locals caught in the crossfire unless it is promptly followed by with political concessions to the region’s minorities.

Codenamed Operation Clean, the current government push is designed to stop incursions by rebel groups that have claimed the lives of some 400 innocent civilians in the northern capital Gulu alone in the last four months.

But Peter Willetts, an expert in conflict resolution in Africa at London’s City University, says the offensive will only worsen the crisis if northerners continue to feel marginalised by the Kampala establishment.

“A forceful response to the threat posed by these rebels could prove very dangerous, given that they are mainly northerners” he said. “It could serve to generate sympathy for their cause in the north and so drive many more willing recruits their way — but only if northerners feel alienated by the government.”

One insurgent group, the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), last month killed 115 Sudanese refugees in the Achol Pii refugee camp, home to an estimated 160,000 people who have fled the war in Sudan. The LRA blamed these attacks on Colonel John Garang de Moiba’s Sudan People Liberation Army (SPLA), an armed group fighting for self-determination in ‘Arab’-Islamist ruled Sudan.

They claim the SPLA organises raids on refugee camps to ‘punish deserters’, and that Ugandan civilians get caught up in the ‘punishment killings’.

Not so, said human rights watchers. “Our information indicates that the LRA’s denial of responsibility is just not credible”, says Andrew Mawson, of Amnesty International. “These killings were by the LRA and were deliberate. They follow the pattern of extreme and arbitrary violence used by the LRA against unarmed civilians for several years”

According to relief organisations in the area, the ferocity and frequency of LRA attacks force thousands of people from the surrounding villages to seek nightly refuge in Gulu.

Ever since 1986 when President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement took power after toppling the military regime of General Tito Okello, his government — perceived by many in the north as being dominated by southerners — has had to contend with one northern-based armed group or another.

For much of 1995, however, there was a lull in rebel activity and the government came to believe that the shadowy LRA and the smaller, little-known West Nile Bank Front (WNBF) — also accused of attacking civilians — had been effectively neutralised and no more would be heard of them.

While the remaining members of the WNBF have been readily turning themselves in, complaining of lack of support from Sudan, the LRA has proven far more tougher.

Kampala particularly underestimated the resilience of the memory of the mysterious LRA leader, Joseph Kony, a former Catholic church worker often reported but never confirmed killed in action. LRA deserters say he believes that a holy spirit speaks to him and that he wants to impose a Christian theocracy on Uganda based on the biblical Ten Commandments.

The LRA inner circle appear to be made up of remnants of Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement, who wrongly believed that the bullets of ‘unbelievers’ could not harm them and were wiped out by government troops in late 1986. Kony is a cousin of hers.

Kony’s hit and run attacks against civilians has frustrated the government Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF), which according to some sources, have only managed to engage the LRA 10 times in months of trying. Though Operation Clean — led by Museveni’s half- brother, General Salim Saleh — has notched up initial successes, including the destruction of four rebel forward bases in the north, the elusiveness of the rebels remains a major problem.

Ever wider sweeps and interrogations of suspected rebel ‘supporters’ in a bid to nail down the LRA could complicate matters, should the Acholi people of the north then begin to perceive the offensive as a war on the north by the southerners.

“The government must tread carefully, for fear of going against northern sensibilities,” said Willetts. “The best case scenario would have some northern politicians appointed to senior government positions, and even have a northerner appointed as internal affair minister, to lead the push against the rebels.”

Museveni’s new cabinet of 21, formed last month following ‘no- party’ elections won by the president’s faction, contains only four northerners. This, says some observers, is being interpreted by the Acholi and other northerners as punishment for their support for the opposition. Many in the north want a political situation to the conflict and are becoming wary of Operation Clean.

Adollo Odango, a London based analyst who hails from Gulu, says Museveni must do more to get northerners to support the anti-rebel push — and that includes political concessions to the north.

But he is not confident. “All leaders who want to prolong their stay in power tend to marginalise those areas where they lost and consolidate those where they have support.” he says.

“I am afraid that it is not politically opportune for Museveni to do anything about it.”

Museveni’s line will be strengthened by his new alliance with the United States, which has signed a military cooperation agreement with Uganda and other countries in the region aimed at countering what Washington calls Sudan’s policy of destabilisation against its neighbours.

Official Ugandan sources deny the government has marginalised the north. They say there can be no negotiations with ‘bandits’ terrorising innocent and defenceless civilians. “These bandits have no support in the country.” says Donald Nyakairu, first secretary at the Ugandan embassy in London.

“Their only support comes from Sudan, where they are based. Anyone who doesn’t believe this should ask us to show them the weapons we have captured from these bandits. They bear unmistakable Sudanese Arab writing.”

Not unexpectedly, Sudanese officials reject any allegation of involvement in the internal affairs of a neighbouring state. The press counsellor at their London Embassy claims that Museveni believes “in taking power by force” and is himself meddling in Sudanese politics by supporting Garang’s SPLA.

“It is irrelevant to me whether these rebels are getting foreign support,” says Willetts. “What the (Ugandan) government has to do is ensure that it rules justly. When that happens, then it would not matter what kind of support rebels get. They would have no fertile ground on which to grow.”

Africa’s stock as a destination for foreign investment has risen modestly in recent years, but some analysts think enterprises in need of fixed cash capital are being bypassed in the race for a fast buck on Africa’s emerging equity markets.

The vogue among foreign investors to invest in new and lively African stock markets has meant a loss of direct funds for labour- intensive and growth-enhancing industries such as agriculture and manufacturing, say observers.

“Rising activity on African stock exchanges is, of course, a positive development,” says Carolyn Jenkins, a fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies. “However, direct investment in the agricultural and manufacturing industries could be more beneficial in the long-run.”

A number of bourses have opened in Africa since 1993 with a matching increase in the number of Africa-specific investment funds. At least 12 Africa funds with a combined worth of one billion dollars have been founded in the last two years. They include the 250 million dollar Morgan Stanley Africa Investment Fund — by far the largest — GT Management’s 75 million dollar All-Africa Fund and Flemings’ Southern Africa Fund.

With returns from more developed emerging markets in the East and Latin America beginning to level out and fund managers increasingly looking for opportunities to diversify their portfolios, the omens augur well for investment in Africa.

But omens are all they are at the moment — according to World Bank figures released earlier this year Africa’s share of a record 231 billion dollars of foreign investment in developing countries in 1995 was less than one percent, at two billion dollars. Some analysts say the figure is closer to one billion dollars.

Such low start points make the initial figures for Africa sound good — within the past year investors’ outlays in Africa grew 40 percent, according to the London-based Fund Research.

But the amounts are still small in global terms, making it even more important that the effect of the more superficially attractive equity bourses is counterbalanced.

Even if the money going to the bourses is new money, money that would not have been directly invested as fixed capital, Jenkins warns that most of the new activity on African stock markets may eventually prove be a case of paper changing hands, of high-stakes financial players speculating for a fast, easy buck.

By its very nature equity investment is mainly short-termist, with firms more concerned about quick returns for the shareholders than with fostering sustainable development, he argues. Investors in equities are also more prone to sell up and move elsewhere when the going gets tough.

Hence some analysts’ preference for venture capital that goes directly into fixed capital formation in industries such as food processing, mining, brewing, textiles and other manufacturing industry with the potential to not only create jobs, but also serve a domestic market which has become overly dependent on imports.

“Direct investment in agriculture and manufacturing is where the action should be,” says Jenkins. “Jobs will be created, living standards raised and vibrant domestic markets created, which again would attract more foreign direct investment.”

Many fund managers readily agree with Jenkins’s point, but think that it is too early to expect venture capitalists to flock to the region. “Investors are a very cautious breed,” says the Southern Africa Fund’s Rob Fisher. “They are looking for the new political environment in Africa to settle.

“Investment in fixed capital, in creating employment opportunities, is what Africa needs most, but people are not going to start committing funds at the drop of a hat. There are political risks to consider. But you will see things picking up in a few years. People are very confident long-term.”

Ironically, some analysts believe that the major factors inhibiting increased investment in the region are the so-called ‘stabilisation’ programmes required of it by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the West as a whole.

These Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), they say, have led to across-the-board cuts in public spending on health, education and jobs-creation — the combined, cumulative effect of which has been the drastic reduction of domestic demand and the decimation of markets. This lack of a viable domestic market has stifled foreign direct investment.

“They say (structural adjustment) is a miracle cure, but it is not,” says Gill Tudor, Africa analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “It is largely untested and it is unproven. Insisting on these same criteria will aggravate the debt problem and will not help Africa.”

“SAPs have been in place for close on 20 years and during that time successfully led to a depression of domestic demand — so investors don’t feel like investing in Africa,” says Paul Spray, policy director of the British NGO Christian Aid. “The IMF and World Bank said investment would pick up, but it hasn’t. For investment to increase, SAPs must be dumped.”

“These stabilisation programmes have had a damaging effect on investment,” adds Paul Cook, an economist at the Institute for Development Policy and Management, Manchester University. “They have cut down demand and failed to revive domestic and private investment.”

While they do not deny that ‘stabilisation policies’ have had a negative impact on domestic demand in African countries, Bank officials say the policies are needed for the ‘fiscal discipline’ to underpin economic stability.

SAPs have led to increasing investment in “successfully- adjusting countries” like Ghana, Mauritius and Uganda, according to Geoff Lamb, the Bank’s representative in London. Others who stick to the ‘painful medicine’, he adds, could reap similar benefits.

Bank critics never tire to point out that two decades of ‘painful medicine’ should have shown better results by now.

“I don’t say we’ve been very successful,” Lamb says, “but there are places where the policies are working. As for the restriction of demand, if there was more demand then there would be more investment on imports. This will not help at all.”

Angolan rebels are grossly violating the Lusaka peace accords, say campaigners who are calling on Western governments to apply concerted pressure on Jonas Savimbi and his rebel army to abide by the protocols of the 18-month-old truce.

They charge that the main obstacle to lasting peace is the refusal of Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) to honour its pledges under last year’s accord and hand over weapons and encamp its fighters at U.N.-designated sites.

“More pressure on UNITA by the West is the only thing that can force it to honour the principles of the Lusaka accords,” says Ben Jackson, director of London-based Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA).

“They have not handed in weapons and are delaying the quartering of their troops. They are committing these and other gross violations of clauses in the accords with impunity. Peace can only be achieved in Angola when UNITA begins to comply with the Lusaka agreement.”

According to U.N. sources in London, at least half of the estimated 40,000 UNITA ‘fighters’ who have so far been registered at the 11 U.N. quartering sites around the country are not front- line guerrillas.

The U.N. has also confirmed claims by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government that only about a third of them arrived with weapons of any sort, and these were mainly small arms.

“UNITA has not even begun a serious effort towards disarming and demobilising, 18 months after the Lusaka accords,” the U.N. source said. “And there is no sign of any change in their attitudes.”

These perceived “delaying tactics” by the rebel movement have led to doubts as to whether on-going moves to select and incorporate 26,000 UNITA fighters into the Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) – begun in June – will be completed by the end of July, the deadline set by FAA commander General Joao de Matos.

The unified national army had been billed to replace the U.N. military contingent — the upkeep of which is costing over one million dollars a day. To date only about 20 UNITA officers have been inducted into the FAA.

And with the U.N. Security Council itself questioning the commitment of UNITA to the Lusaka accords — many observers maintain it would be irresponsible for the U.N. force to pull out.

Savimbi and his top lieutenants have been frequently accused of scuppering successive peace initiatives in the country’s two- decade-long civil war, notably in October 1992 when, following an 18-month ceasefire, the rebels relaunched the war after losing elections which international monitors ruled free and fair.

For the duration of that ceasefire, as now, Savimbi had dragged his feet over the disarmament and encampment of UNITA fighters.

Some observers believe Savimbi plans to resume hostilities again — if not immediately then sometime in the future — should the peace process unfold in a manner he finds unfavourable.

His steadfast refusal to occupy the vice-presidency in the government is seen as another indication that he is keeping his options open. Ironically he had been very insistent on it during the talks leading to Lusaka.

As Jackson said: “Even in March Savimbi, at the talks in Gabon with (Angola’s President Jose Eduardo) Dos Santos, said he was going to take up the post. Why this change of heart? It makes you wonder.” The MPLA had also offered UNITA several ministerial, ambassadorial and other top positions in government.

Savimbi’s game plan is bound to remain largely hidden until at least August, when UNITA holds its congress at its Bailundo headquarters. The rebel leader said this week that it is then that the decision on whether to join the government will be taken.

Many analysts, including U.N. sources, perceive this as another delaying tactic of Savimbi’s.

Meanwhile, international human rights activists say that rights abuses by both sides are being committed. There are numerous allegations of police brutality and arbitrary arrest in areas controlled by the government, while UNITA has been accused of killings, torture and “disappearances”.

These abuses not only violate universally-accepted principles of human rights, but also contravene the Lusaka accords which require that both sides observe international human rights standards, says Gillian Nezzins, an Amnesty International researcher who returned this week from Angola.

According to Nezzins, UNITA, which was left in control of over half the country after last year’s ceasefire and which operates its own judicial system in the areas it controls, has sanctioned the executions of many so-called ‘anti-social elements’.

“We found instances of torture and cruel and inhuman punishment,” she said. “One favourite punishment is that people are stretched out on logs of wood and beaten with sticks and hosepipes which usually ends in their bones breaking under the pressure.

“People have been sentenced to death and executed under UNITA’s ‘justice system’. This is also a violation of the Lusaka agreement, which states that UNITA must respect Angolan law, which has abolished the death penalty.”

Angola’s conflict started immediately after independence from colonial Portugal in 1975 when Savimbi’s UNITA, funded and armed by the then apartheid state of South Africa and backed by Portugal and the United States, pledged to remove the popular, left wing MPLA government.

All that changed in the ‘Nineties with the ending of the Cold War, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa and the MPLA’s defeat of UNITA in the 1992 elections.

However, despite the current U.N. embargo on the rebel movement, arms and fuel supplies – for which it pays with proceeds from illegal diamond sales – continue to be flown in to UNITA via neighbouring Zaire.

Although there are signs that Washington, London and other Western governments are using diplomatic pressure try to persuade Savimbi to bring an end to his marathon, record-breaking war, campaigners say they are not doing enough.

Britain dismisses this claim. “While we cannot speak for other governments,” says a British Foreign Office spokesman, Clive Thompson, “the British government has kept up pressure on both sides for a more rapid implementation of the Lusaka accords at every opportunity.”

Jackson said: “UNITA will not budge until intense, coherent and concerted pressure is applied by the West. They should start by making the sanctions work and that means taking action on Zaire which is violating U.N. sanctions by allowing supplies to reach UNITA through its soil and airspace.

“When you look at how international sanctions are hitting Iraq and Libya, you can see that the West is not doing enough. When they want sanctions to work, they make them work. There is a lot more they can do force UNITA to respect the Lusaka accords.”

Her hair dishevelled, eye-shadow blackened tears slowly streaming down her face, Baindu Bangura cut a sad figure as she sat quietly with hands folded across a matronly chest. Mourners steadily occupied the chairs around her.

Very soon there was nowhere else to sit. A couple offered to go fetch some more chairs. The news was spreading fast that Baindu’s younger brother — Abu, aged 18 — had been brutally cut down in Sierra Leone’s bloody civil war.

According to news reaching his sister in south London from her home in Bumpeh, eastern Sierra Leone, the youth had died from machete blows to the head sustained during a raid by a group of armed men.

The motive for the attack was not clear, as was the identity of the men who carried it out. Although the incident had been blamed on rebel troops, many people keep an open mind as it took place in an area where renegade members of the Sierra Leone army have carried out attacks in the past.

Baindu was too distraught to talk, but Mamie, a middle-aged woman who described herself as a long-time friend of the Banguras spoke for her and many others.

“They say there is a ceasefire in the war but they still kill our children,” she told IPS. “Did our people elect a new government so that they will continue to be killed like cockroaches? Have our people not suffered enough? When will we be able to rebuild what they have destroyed?”

The killing last week of Abu Bangura is not an isolated case. All around the country, particularly in the east and south, innocent Sierra Leoneans continue to be targeted in random hit-and-run attacks by armed groups who aid agency sources say have all but shattered the fragile truce between the new government and the rebels.

Since April when a ceasefire agreement between the government of President Ahmed Tejan Kabba — elected the preceding month — and rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) came into force, thousands of people in the Bo, Kenema and Moyamba districts have fled their homes following a wave of attacks.

“The attacks are mainly in the eastern and southern provinces and things do not seem to be getting any better,” says Rob Reitemeier, Action Aid’s Africa regional director, in Sierra Leone this month. “We can only hope the peace talks succeed.”

Amnesty International maintains that both sides have committed human rights abuses. The international human rights group has confirmed that the attackers are increasingly resorting to killing, torturing and maiming their victims.

One aid agency source, who prefers to remain anonymous because she fears their Sierra Leone-based staff could suffer “reprisal attacks”, says the perpetrators are often in uniforms, making it difficult to tell whether they are rogue soldiers or RUF rebels.

“It is true that some of these groups are only looking for food, but its seems others are simply attacking civilians just for the fun of it — or to tell the government they are a force to be reckoned with.”

The intensity of the attacks has forced the government to dispatch troops to several villages in the Bo, Kenema and Moyamba districts. Although president Kabba claims the attacks amount to ceasefire violations by the RUF, he not allowed the attacks to disrupt the peace process, which is at a critical stage.

Many analysts contend that peace will only return to the mineral- rich West African nation when the bulk of the rebel army is demobilised and the rest subsumed into the political and military establishments.

However, the negotiations between the government and the RUF, which are taking place in Cote d’Ivoire, have reached an impasse, with the rebel leadership refusing to demobilise their estimated 10,000 fighters until all foreign troops, in particular the South African mercenary army Executive Outcomes, leave Sierra Leone soil.

This is a tall order for the country’s new civilian leadership, who know well that the reason the RUF failed to take the capital Freetown during the five-year civil war was the ‘wall of steel’ set up around the city by West African soldiers and the mercenaries.

“If these foreign troops leave, what is to stop the rebels going for the kill and taking power?” says Professor William Gutteridge, director of the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism in London.

“Which side will back down in order to break this deadlock? The rebels may be calculating that the longer the deadlock, the more the pressure will mount on the government to back down. I think the only way out of this is for both disarmament and the withdrawal of foreign troops to be carried out in tandem.”

The civil war in Sierra Leone — which has claimed at least 50,000 lives and devastated the economy — was launched in March 1991 by RUF leader Foday Sankoh in a bid to end the 23-year, one- party hegemony of the All Peoples Congress government.

A year later incumbent President Saidu Momoh was removed in a military coup by young army officers who, bowing to internal and international pressure, handed over power to a democratically- elected government in March.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has put on hold plans to help the return of some one million refugees — a quarter of the country’s pre-war population — scattered in Guinea, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire.

The government has ordered the agency to stop its operations in the country, claiming that ICRC activities in RUF-held areas in the eastern and southern Sierra Leone were sustaining the rebels. Other aid agencies are concerned the move could affect their operations.

“It is a puzzling move by the government, and certainly anomalous because they have never been proactive like this before,” said Susan Jones, a spokeswoman for the aid NGO Cafod in London, said. “It could have serious implications for us as we also have programmes in Bo and Kenema.”

These concerns are far from Baindu Bangura’s mind. All she wants, she says, is for Abu’s killers to be made to answer for their crime. However, with the government considering a blanket amnesty for war-related rights abuses, there is little, if any, chance her wish will be fulfilled.

Foreign direct investment in Africa could be considerably boosted if the World Bank affiliate responsible for political risk insurance in developing countries increased its portfolio involvement in the region, investors and analysts say.

Since its founding almost a decade ago with a portfolio worth two billion dollars, the main role of the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) has been to provide cover for foreign investors against non-commercial risks such as expropriation and war and civil strife in developing and transition economies.

But the agency is now criticised because of its perceived lack of commitment to Africa at a time when the region is experiencing investment drought — a situation analysts believe could change if more political risk cover was offered to investors.

“Investment is driven by many factors, but there is no doubt that if the underlying economic conditions are present, there will be a sharp rise in investment should MIGA increase its role in Africa,” says Sanjay Lall, the Oxford University economist.

Statistics released recently by the World Bank itself show that Africa’s share of the record 231 billion dollars of foreign investment in developing countries as a whole in 1995 was less than one percent, at about two billion dollars. This figure is disputed by many analysts who say it is closer to one billion dollars.

MIGA’s own figures reveal that investments in Sub-Saharan Africa insured by the agency account for just over one percent (34 million dollars) of its portfolio. In contrast MIGA, as of March 1996, had provided insurance cover of 416 million dollars, 22 percent of its portfolio, for projects in former Soviet bloc countries.

MIGA spokeswoman Shaila Fernandes said this non-commercial risk cover facilitated an estimated one billion dollars of Western investment in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Kazakstan, Kirgizstan, Russia, Poland, Slovakia and Uzbekistan.

Fernandes nevertheless accepts that they need to do more in Africa. “We are very keen to cover more investments to the region and we hope our various marketing efforts will improve things,” she says.

Critics, however, charge that the problem has nothing to do with marketing but with a lack of political will and a bureaucracy which has effectively fettered investment instead of working actively to counter the fears of investors who associate the region with high levels of political risk.

“I would say the ideas behind MIGA are well-meaning, but in practice it has become conservative, long-winded and bureaucratic,” says Michael Power of investment house Barings Asset Management.

“It should do much more in Africa. The bureaucracy is not responsive to the immediacy of the situation facing Africa.”

Power and others say that most macro economic conditions for a rise in investment in Africa — such as lower trade barriers, privatisations and liberal tax regimes — were more or less in place and that the agency must move now move to assure investors their investments would be protected against political risk.

Most institutional investors, with an eye on future relations with MIGA, only agreed to speak about the agency off the record. One said: “They are very uncooperative.” “They should be out there providing cover for wary investors, not wasting people’s time on red tape,” another said.

But Simon Raikes, who works on the Africa desk at Standard Chartered Bank in London said his group’s experience with MIGA was not good. “Our investments in Tanzania are no longer insured by MIGA. We tried it and didn’t like it. There was no dispute involved.”

The World Bank dismisses these criticisms, claiming that the main reason for the agency’s relatively limited role in the region is attributable to the low level of investor interest.

“The number of contracts it (MIGA) can guarantee depends on the amount of interest,” says Geoff Lamb, the Bank’s representative in London. “Investors are interested in Eastern Europe. In Africa there is a much lower level of interest.”

The European Union has been accused of hobbling South Africa’s post-apartheid reconstruction by vacillating on whether or not to remove barriers to products from that country.

At the same time, critics say the EU will gain unfair advantage from a “free trade” agreement it is seeking to negotiate with Pretoria that essentially puts the two countries on the same level economically.

During President Nelson Mandela’s four-day state visit here last week, Ben Jackson, director of Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA), a lobbying group, said EU trade barriers on South African products had stymied the country’s capacity to meet basic-needs targets and create employment for its jobless millions.

ACTSA called on British Prime Minister John Major to help secure a fair deal for South African trade with the EU. By doing so, Britain would be helping to boost Pretoria’s efforts to tackle the socio-economic iniquities which are a legacy of years of white minority rule.

“Over two years after the election of South Africa’s first non- racial, democratic government, Europe treats its products little differently than when it was an international pariah,” Jackson said.

While ACTSA had in the past supported trade boycotts of the country, it now recognised that a fair trade deal would “help build the new South Africa and overcome poverty across Southern Africa”.

According to official South African sources, all previous attempts to persuade Brussels to pull down its trade barriers — including import duties described as “punishing” — have failed. Only last month E.U. trade negotiators refused to give an inch during talks with their South African counterparts.

This has contributed to a situation where – notwithstanding pledges of major economic support at the inauguration of the new South Africa two years ago – the country’s exports are hampered by high tariffs in Europe that are little-changed from those obtaining when South Africa’s unbending white minority government made it an international pariah.

Nearly half of South African exports go to the European Union, which is the country’s most important market. Many of these products are subject to harsh EU barriers. Farm products are particularly affected — fresh and tinned fruit and wine face stiff tariffs averaging about 18 per cent last year.

Comparative studies reveal that the EU actually gives a worse trade deal to the country than that offered to nations like Turkey, Venezuela and Israel which have higher per capita incomes. And this applies even when these countries sell the same products as South Africa.

South Africa pays a tariff of 11 per cent on its melons for example. Turkey, Venezuela and Costa Rica pay nothing. South Africa pays 15 per cent on fresh flowers, Israel two per cent and Colombia nothing. On avocados South Africa pays six per cent while Israel – a major competitor with lower production costs – is excluded from any duty.

On top of this, the EU remains adamant that a list of products making up nearly 40 per cent of the country’s farm exports must be excluded altogether from talks on better market access. This would impact negatively on fruit and vegetable, canning and clothes and textiles — precisely those sectors analysts say have the most potential to generate the most jobs most quickly.

As Jackson said: “Trade in these products is needed to mobilise resources to pay for upgrading the appalling living conditions in which apartheid has left many black South Africans and to achieve the objectives of the economic plan released recently.”

The latter is a reference to the policy blueprint to the year 2000 unveiled by the African National Congress (ANC) government on Jun. 14. Titled “Growth, employment and redistribution: A macro- economic strategy”, it sets as an objeftive a 10 per cent growth of non-gold exports over the period plus a GDP growth rate of six per cent and the creation of 400,000 jobs a year.

Concurrent with its South Africa trade policy, the EU is pushing for the creation of a “free trade” area with the country — confirming the fact that some EU members regard South Africa as a powerful economic competitor.

Some analysts maintain that Brussels must accept that it is imperative that South Africa shield some of its most vulnerable industries, as do other developing countries.

Ron Davies, a Member of the South African Parliameant’s trade committee, who was part of Mandela’s entourage to London, said a free trade deal would lead to the destruction of many of the country’s fledgling industries.

He added: “It is surely an irony that a proposal that purports to be designed to help us, actually seeks to grant the EU five times as much duty-free access to our markets as it would extend to us in their markets. At the same time, it seeks to protect precisely those sectors of the E.U. market where South Africa is most competitive.”

The outcome of the current wrangling over trade will have far- reaching implications for investment in the new South Africa, some analytss argue. They point to a correlation between market access for South African goods and the magnitude of local and foreign direct investment it can hope to attract.

“If South Africa generates the right macroeconomic environment, investment will pick up,” says Dr Carolyn Jenkins, a South African and fellow at Oxford Univertisy’s Centre for the Study of African Economies. “Adequate market access is obviously a major factor in the macroeconomy.”

“China has cheap labour and skilled labour – and a market that is growing very fast, so there is growing investment. So, if South Africa can get the macroeconomics right, and this includes market access for its goods, there will be an investment spin-off and more jobs will be created.”

Institutional investors here sound sanguine about the long-term prospects for investment in South Africa, despite attempts by some rightwing commentators to denigrate the government’s economic achievements.

They contend that the lower-than-expected level of foreign investment in the country since the ANC’s political ascendancy is not surprising, given the propensity of investors to adopt a wait- and-see attitude.

Rob Fisher, an executive at Fleming’s South Africa investment fund, said: “Government incentives for investors are constantly improving and the stock market is performing much better than expected. Last year there was a bull run in the market and, despite a few hiccups, things are improving. Don’t pay mind to the doomsday merchants.”

Guess who’s coming to dinner — and at the Queen’s too? Only a man once dubbed a ‘terrorist’ by the British establishment, who just a few years ago would have been persona non grata in Britain — had he not been imprisoned for all of 27 years.

For the duration of South Africa’s president Nelson Mandela four day state visit to Britain, he will stay at the finest address in the land, Buckingham Palace, London home of the British monarch.

Teas with Queen Elizabeth II aside, Mandela’s itinerary also includes meetings with prime minister John Major, opposition Labour party leader Tony Blair and especially business leaders.

The visit will culminate on Friday with a walkabout in one of London’s Afro-Caribbean quarters, the borough of Brixton in the south of the city, where he will be joined by Prince Charles, heir to the throne. Before that he will be showered with no less than eight honorary degrees by as many British universities.

During his ‘meet-the-people’ tour of Brixton — one of the most deprived areas of London — the charismatic South African leader will thank locals for their support for his country’s liberation struggle against illegal white minority rule, official South African sources said.

“You have yourself provided leadership, and by your willingness to embrace your former captives, have set the course towards national reconciliation and freedom for all the people of South Africa,” the Queen told Mandela before a gathering of august dignitaries Tuesday night.

Mandela’s reply was diplomatic, as ever. “As we approach the twenty-first century, our relationship is one of friendship, fortified on South Africa’s side by a wealth of respect for yourself, for Britain and the Commonwealth.”

But Jabulani Ndlovu, a member of the African National Congress (ANC) who mixed 11 years anti-apartheid campaigning in London with life as a student and cook, was more freely able to consider the irony of this weeks’ literal ‘red carpet’ treatment.

“These are the same people who were blocking international sanctions against the apartheid regime,” he snapped, “the same people who were baying for the blood of Mandela the terrorist, the same people who were giving succour to De Klerk and Buthelezi, the very ones who tried to make institutional racist oppression respectable.”

Throughout the 1980s, when the anti-apartheid struggle was at its height, Britain under Margaret Thatcher stood alone in steadfastly resisting sanctions against the racist enclave.

It was at this time that a MP in Thatcher’s Conservative party, Teddy Taylor, opined that “Mandela should be shot,” but not before Thatcher herself had said: “The ANC is a typical terrorist organisation… Anyone who thinks it is going to run the government in South Africa is living in cloud-cuckoo land.”

“Are you trying to tell me they have changed overnight? Tell me something else, please.” said Ndlovu. “Ndlovu means elephant in my mother tongue, and elephants never forget. Mandela should do away with these foolish things and do what he has really come here to do, that is to meet the business community and encourage them to invest in our country.”

The primary objective of the ANC leader’s visit to Britain is to drum-up British investor interest in the South African economy, hence the top billing given to his address Wednesday to the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

Foreign direct investment in South Africa, despite the ANC government’s efforts to foster peaceful change and create an enabling environment for business, has been much lower than expected. Mandela will call on the captains of British industry to look again at the “enormous opportunities” available.

His message to Britain — by far the largest single investor in the country — is that new International Monetary Fund-inspired measures put in place in June offer investors as good a deal as they could hope to find in any other emerging market.

How successful this rallying cry will be remains to be seen, as the Mandela trip follows upon the heals of stiff criticisms of his government’s economic policies in the pages of Britain’s media.

The London Times and the Telegraph have in recent months suggested that the government was bending to the will of activists seeking ‘revolutionary’ change.

R.W. Johnson, the Times’ South Africa correspondent claimed Mandela’s government was presiding over “a Wild West society it cannot control” and cited ‘observers’ who blame the situation “on ministerial incompetence and affirmative-action appointments”.

But the final word always goes to the business community itself, and they express more confidence than the Times’ Man In Johannesburg.

“Government incentives for investors are constantly improving and the stock market is performing much better than expected,” said Rob Fisher, an executive with investment house Robert Fleming.

“Last year there was a bull run in the market and, despite a few hiccups, things are improving. Don’t pay mind to the doomsday merchants.”

The methods being used by Western govern- ments to pressure Tanzania into intervening to end a protracted political crisis on Zanzibar, were criticised here this week as being ippropriate and likely to fail.

Zanzibari intellectual Dr Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, an exiled former Tanzanian economics minister who teaches at London University, said threats by the West to impose “aid sanctions” on Dar es Salaam represented “imperialism of the worst sort”.

“Aid sanctions against Tanzania by the West is not the right way to solve the crisis in Zanzibar,” he told IPS in an interview.

Rather than lobbying Western countries to force political reforms on the island through denial of “aid” to the Union Government, opposition politicians should mobilise the people of both Zanzibar and mainland Tanzania to press for such intervention.

Babu was among leaders of the 1963 Zanzibar revolution which paved the way for a merger the following year of Zanzibar with Tanganyika to form the United Republic of Tanzania.

He said sustained internal pressure could break the political impasse which erupted immediately after last October’s general elections narrowly won by Dr Salmin Amour and his Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party. Opposition claims that the elections were rigged were supported by international observers.

Located in the Indian Ocean 22 miles from Tanganiyika, Zanzibar and its sister island Pemba have 571,000 people, mainly Moslem with a minority practicing Christianity.

Since the elections, the main opposition Civic United Front (CUF), which many observers believe were the actual winners, has refused to participate in the multi-party parliament. A “campaign of non-co-operation” against President Amour’s Government has all but brought government business to a halt.

“I do not support sanctions, because at the end of the day it is the people who will suffer, not the leaders,” said Babu. “The opposition politicians should raise the awareness of the people so they can solve their own problems. The big powers have no business there.”

CUF has refused to recognise President Amour’s authority. Its leaders have boycotted parliamentary seminars and prevented the setting-up of parliamentary committees. The hamstrung government’s response has been to systematically harass CUF Members of Parliament (MP’s) and supporters, activists say.

Amnesty International says many opposition supporters have been either intimidated or incarcerated on trumped-up charges. They have been accused of “sabotage” and of having “secessionist tendencies”.

CUF officials say Amour is pursuing a scorched-earth policy against its supporters, who are mainly descendants of Arabs based on Pemba. It claims that at least 600 of its supporters have been arrested by security forces while many in Pemba have had their properties burnt down or otherwise destroyed for just having voted for the CUF in the elections.

The clampdown has extended to journalists and human rights activists, many of whom have been harassed by the security forces. One prominent journalists who writes for the international media, Salim Said Salim, has been proscribed from writing from the islands.

Residents found in possession of “Majira”, a newspaper from the mainland, risk instant imprisonment, accroding to reports reaching here.

During a brief stopover in London, while on a mission to lobby European Union (EU) governments, CUF leader Seif Shariff Hamad said it was only a matter of time before “aid” sanctions were imposed to force the mainland CCM government into ending its silence and inaction on the troubles in Zanzibar.

Hamad, who believes he was robbed of the presidency, has already persuaded several European countries — Denmark, Norway and Sweden among them — to cut-off all bilateral aid to Zanzibar until there is an end to human rights abuses and restoration of democratic reforms.

“We have offered two proposals to solve the crisis, and they have been rejected,” said Hamad.

“The first is that Dr Salmin and his government should relinquish power and the real winner installed. The second is that the present government resigns and be replaced by an Interim government, headed by a neutral person, formed by both parties pending fresh elections within four months.”

If the government continues to refuse to take either course, he added, then “aid” sanction must be imposed by the international community on the “senior” CCM government on the mainland. The CUF leader says that such action would not amount to imperialism.

Ahmed Rajab, Zanzibar-born editor of the London-based newsletter Africa Analysis, says only internaitonal pressure of the kind being sought by Hamad could force the intervention of Tanzanian President Benjamin Mkapa.

Many observers are surprised that President Mkapa has allowed this potentially explosive situation to simmer for so long — despite fears it could lead to “the second Zanzibari revolution”.

Mkapa has been praised for his role in healing a rift between President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi which smoothed the path towards the resuscitation of the old East African Community.

However, accodring to Rajab, Mkapa owes his selection as CCM presidential candidate to Amour. “It would be a kind of betrayal to move against his friend,” were he to intervene too vigorously. In recent speeches, the president has lambasted “opposition terrorists” and praised the Amour Government.

Some analysts believe the mainland CCM Government could move against Amour in the summer when President Mkapa is confirmed as CCM Chairman — for which he is the sole candidate. But Rajab is not so sure. He said: “Mkapa may be more confident then, but I think that only sanctions, or threat of sanctions, can do the trick.”

Clive Thompson, a spokesperson for the British Foreign Office, refused to be drawn on the question of whether London and its EU partners were considering anti-Tanzania “aid” sanctions. “Britain has made its concern known to the governments of Zanzibar and Tanzania and we are monitoring developments,” he said.

Diplomatic sources report that the Tanzanian foreign minister, Col. Jakaya Kikwete, who is also on a tour of European capitals, has been warned by the EU that “aid” sanctions could be deployed against his Government if the situation in Zanzibar continues to deteriorate.

The southern African island of Madagascar’s pioneering ‘debt-for-nature’ swops are easing its commercial debt burden and raising resources to help preserve its environment.

Working closely with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Madagascar signed its first debt-for-nature deal with the WWF in 1989. Analysts estimate that the scheme has enabled the country to redeem more than half of its 100 million dollar commercial bank debt.

“There is no loser in these deals,” said Jamie Resor, WWF’s U.S.-based debt-swap expert. “The debtor gets the debts of their books, Madagascar clears some of its debts and gets to strengthen natural resource management and the WWF gets to carry out its work.”

The WWF buys Madagascan debt on the secondary market at a discount and then ‘sells’ it to the government at a higher discount. The money is then lodged into an interest-bearing account which is used to fund programmes to preserve the island’s rich biological diversity.

Secondary market prices for debts vary, depending on the likelihood of the debtor country honouring its obligations. Madagascan debt presently trades at a discount of approximately 50 per cent — so, for instance, one million dollars will buy two million dollars’ worth of debt.

The government also gets to redeem traded debt in local currency — and at a discount of around 60 percent of its original face value. This is a boon for a country in the throes of economic crisis, buckling under debt service obligations and lacking much-needed hard currency.

The scheme has won kudos from governments, environmentalists and the World Bank.

“Madagascar has done a remarkable job,” says Christine Parniere, who works on the African desk at the Paris office of the Dutch bank ING. “When the debt-swap programme started, Madagascar owed over 100 million dollars to commercial banks. They have reduced this debt by at least half.”

Although it is not a complete answer for the country’s debt burden, estimated at over five billion dollars, the debt swaps have provided Madagascar with a means of trying to halt the decline in its unique ecosystems.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) say 90 percent of its 253 reptilian species exclusive to the island, as are its 30 species of lemur, frogs and some 10,000 plants, many of which have medicinal properties.

Several medicinal plants which have been used for centuries in local herbal remedies are now being tested by pharmacological companies and promise to provide not only new and potent medicines but also new chemical structures.

Much of this national heritage is to be found in the country’s lush tropical rainforests, which now cover just 10 percent of the country, a consequence of the deforestation that resulted to the clearing of huge tracts of land to grow cash crops.

The proceeds from the swaps are used to buy large areas of rainforest — held in trust by the government and the WWF — and to train hundreds of Ministry of Water and Forests workers as nature protection agents (NPAs).

NPAs travel all over the island dissuading farmers and villagers from slash-and-burn bush-clearing which the government says destroys 200,000 hectares of forest each year.

Albert Esifosiane, a Madagascan environment ministry spokesman, said: “We’ve received a lot of support in staff training materials and financial input, and we are seeing tangible results in the field.”

Although debt-for-nature swaps are common in Latin America, Madagascar remains the only African country to have signed large scale swop deals of this kind. Other countries in the region have become interested in the scheme and the WWF plan to expand to other countries if they can get the necessary funds.

However, since debt-swaps can only be done with commercial debts — which account for less than 10 percent of the debt of African countries – there is little hope that such arrangements can alleviate the region’s socio-economic crisis.

Thirty percent of Africa’s total debt stock of 300 billion dollars is owed to multilateral creditors such as the IMF and World Bank. Just over 30 percent is owed to Western bilateral creditors. The remainder comprises of principal and interest arrears.

Multilateral debts can not be reduced, rescheduled or traded on the secondary market, and though bilateral debts can be reduced, they cannot be traded. Such creditor inflexibility is a major contributory factor to the region’s economic ills, said Resor.

“If debt swaps were possible with other types of debt, we would be interested,” he added. “The World Bank and IMF should not treat their debts as sacred. I say that multilateral and bilateral debts must be treated in the same way as commercial debt, and then we could see some improvements in the situation.”

— NGOs fear that the gains made by debt-swap deals to preserve the Madagascan ecosystem will be lost if British-based mining giant, Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ), goes ahead with plans for a new titanium mining operation in the country.

Campaigners say the country, rich in mineral sand deposits, will not substantially gain from the mining operation. Since the cost will be further damage to the coastal forests, they maintain, no financial reward can begin to even compensate for the loss.

“Titanium exploration will inevitably lead to gross degradation of the south-east coast of the country and forests further inland, because of the nature of titanium mining,” said Sue Meagher, FOE’s spokeswoman in London. “Many impact assessments have arrived at this conclusion and the RTZ plan must be resisted.”

NGOs cite the damage caused to Sierra Leone’s south-west coastal regions by titanium mining. The mining itself is done by huge sea- borne dredgers which systematically scoop up huge tracts of land in search of the mineral-bearing sand.

As the soil-munching dredgers move inland they leave mini- rivers in their wake. This has turned south-western Sierra Leone, once a thriving agricultural district, into a wasteland crisscrossed by hundred of estuaries.

Local communities have had their lives and livelihood destroyed and say that promised compensation from U.S.-based Nord Resources Inc. — who have Sierra Leone’s titanium-mining concession — have been slow in coming.

Although campaigners are urging the cash-strapped government to back out of the plan, it is generally accepted that the titanium project will commence within three years. Jamie Resor, WWF’s U.S.- based debt-swap expert says the new project, if approved, will destroy their work to help save the Madagascan forests.

A spokesman for RTZ in London said that no final decision had been made on the Madagascan mining project, but said that the company was in the process of carrying out detailed environmental assessment studies. He stressed however that the final decision on whether the project should go ahead rested not with RTZ but with the Madagascan government.

A former African economics minister is calling for an international inquiry to be instituted to decide whether the billions of dollars of African debt owed to international creditors should be repaid at all.

Speaking to IPS after the ‘new’ initiative on African debt announced last weekend by the World Bank, Dr Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu said that both multilateral and bilateral creditors were only interested in “getting their money back”.

“I had decided to give them the benefit of the doubt, hoping that they would come up with something new,” said Babu, a former Tanzanian economics minister and commentator who now teaches at the University of London.

“But what they have come up with is just more of the same,” he said. “This has not come as a surprise because all they really want is to get their money back. The only solution to this debt crisis is to set up an inquiry to establish whether we really have an obligation to pay these debts.”

The so-called new initiative on debt by the World Bank, announced in Washington, also failed to impress many London-based development experts, who variously described it as “grossly insufficient” and as “too little, too late”.

While the Bank acknowledges that African debt, estimated at 300 billion dollars, and those of other severely-indebted countries represent an “unsustainable burden,” its proposals fail to answer the urgent appeals of African governments and sympathetic NGOs.

The Bank says the plan is about debt relief, not cancellation. Debt relief would be available to eligible countries through rescheduling by the Paris Club of bilateral creditors of up to 90 percent of their debt stocks, against the current 67 percent.

In what some analysts read as an attempt to preempt criticism of its failure to address multilateral debt, the Bank has floated the idea of a special trust fund into which multilateral institutions and bilateral creditors would contribute and which would be used to pre-pay or service a portion of countries’ multilateral debts.

Described by the Bank as a “comprehensive approach to the debt problem which takes multilateral, bilateral and commercial debt into consideration,” the plan sets a threshold of debt sustainability of 20-25 percent for the debt service-exports ratio and a debt-exports ratio of between 200 and 250 percent.

The strategy would only apply to countries that strictly abide by the Bank and IMF-imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) over a benchmark six-year period. This would lead to a “comprehensive treatment of its debts,” says the Bank, without defining the word ‘treatment’.

Countries eligible to participate in this “new debt reduction strategy” are Burundi, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Sao Tome-Principe, Sudan, Zaire and Zambia. Others which could qualify are Bolivia, Cameroon, Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Guyana, Madagascar, Myanmar, Niger, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

It is not surprising that the Bank’s proposals have come under such sustained criticism. Analysts say they hardly amount to a dent in the entrenched positions of Africa’s international creditors, whose inflexibility has become legion.

“Though at times it may look as though progress is being made, the fact is that too little is being done,” says Dinesh Dhodia, chief economist at the Commonwealth secretariat in London, “and it is being done too late.”

African governments and international NGOs have long campaigned for the World Bank and the IMF, to forgo their ‘preferred creditor status’ and reduce the debilitating burden of debt servicing and repayments on African governments.

Twenty-five percent of African debt is owed to multilateral creditors and about 30 percent to the Paris Club of bilateral creditors, while just over 15 percent is commercial debt. The rest is made up of principal and interest arrears.

The United Nations maintains that these figures disguise the fact debts to multilateral institutions account for over 40 percent of the debts of at least 24 countries in the region.

Though the proportion owed to bilateral creditors is marginally higher than that owed to multilaterals such as the Bank and the Fund, campaigners say the inflexibility of the latter — it can block access to other sources of credits if their arrears are not cleared — has hobbled the development prospects of Africa.

Under SAPs, African countries are diverting vital resources from health and education to repay Bank and IMF debts, leaving little scope for the development of Africa’s human resources on which the future of the region depends.

The British development NGO Oxfam estimates that the region is presently diverting eight billion dollars of bilateral credits to service debts owed to the multilateral lenders. The latest Bank initiative, argues Kevin Watkins, Oxfam’s senior policy adviser, will only serve to aggravate the problems of the region.

“What the Bank have proposed is grossly insufficient,” said Watkins. “This, I believe, is due to pressure from the IMF, who don’t want to accept that multilateral debt is the main problem, because they want to resist pressure to sell their gold stocks to deal with the problem.”

“This is a shock, in the sense that I had been expecting shame and remorse from people who are contributing to the tragedy that is Africa,” said Baffour Ankoma, deputy editor of the London- based New African magazine. “We will fight them till the end.”

Watkins also condemns the Bank’s attempt to “diminish the scale of the problem” by limiting the number of countries it feels are eligible, or will become eligible, for debt relief. At least 40 countries, he claims, should be eligible for assistance.

But Watkins concedes that it represents a landmark in the sense that for the first time — through its ‘special trust fund’, which remains to be costed — the Bank has accepted that some action is necessary on the multilateral debt front.

The United Nations announced last Friday its own 25 billion dollar initiative for Africa, to go on health, education and other social programmes and also on conflict resolution.

“The reason the U.N. have come up with this plan is because they realise that the response of the World Bank is totally inadequate and that continuing servicing of their debts will leave no resources for health, education and so-called luxuries like conflict prevention”‘ said Babu.

“This is why I believe that we need a public inquiry on the debt. Also all of us know that many of these debts were contracted by unaccountable and corrupt governments. Why did they loan them the money. What is there on the ground to show for these debts?”

The international financial institutions (IFIs) and the Paris Club of bilateral creditors must do more to help Africa out of its debilitating debt crisis, says a senior Commonwealth official.

Recent attempts by its creditors to address Africa’s 300 billion dollar debt — such as rescheduling and the refinancing of old loans with ‘softer’ credits — have been ineffectual at best, says Dinesh Dhodia, Commonwealth Secretariat chief economist.

“Though at times it may look as though progress is being made, the fact is that too little is being done — and it is being done too late,” he said.

Dhodia said that the cavalier way in which Africa’s debt crisis is being treated by the international community contrasts sharply with their attitude to the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s.

Thanks to the U.S.-sponsored Brady Plan — funded by the World Bank, the IMF and Japan to the tune of over 50 billion dollars and including debt and debt service reductions of up to 50 percent — Latin America was pulled from the brink.

Since then, unlike Africa, creditor and investor confidence have returned to the region and modest growth rates are being recorded.

Why was Latin America rescued and Africa left to burn? “These different responses came about because Western governments were looking to their own self-interest,” said Dhodia. “The Latin American crisis was going to have repercussions on the global financial system.

“The ripple effects on Western economies would have been devastating, so they had to come to Latin America’s aid. But Africa’s debt, although unsustainable in the view of African countries, is very small in the global context. This is why the level of commitment, the urgency, is not the same.”

Another reason for these disparate responses to essentially identical problems, say economic observers, is that nearly 90 percent of the African debt is sovereign debt, owed to the IMF, the World Bank and to Western governments, while Latin America’s was almost exclusively private, commercial bank debt.

The IFIs past view that their debt cannot be rescheduled or substantially reduced precludes African countries from benefiting from the Brady strategy. Meanwhile global support for Latin America continues where global economies are threatened, most notably during the Mexican peso crisis two years ago.

Kenneth Kaunda, the former Zambian President and veteran critic of international financial orthodoxy, argues that Africa has been dealt a bad hand in a bent poker game.

“They say we are crying foul,” he said when recently in London, “but is it so easily forgotten that when Mexico was in trouble billions were poured into that country, both by the IMF and World Bank? And when the Soviet Union went out of existence, billions have been poured there by the West.”

Recent debt-reduction strategies, such as the Toronto and Naples terms aimed at addressing bilateral debt, were only “more of the same, no more than “stop-gap initiatives to shore up the problems till a later date”.

Thirty percent of Africa’s total debt stock is owed to the IMF, the World Bank and the African Development Bank. Just over 30 percent is owed to Western bilateral creditors, while about 15 percent is commercial debt. The rest, according to Dhodia, comprises of principal and interest arrears.

Since a major component of debt repayments and servicing is owed to IFIs, a framework for tackling multilateral debt will go a long way towards solving the debt crisis.

In the field of bilateral debt, Dhodia saw some evidence of flexibility. He cited the 1988 decision by the Paris Club to reduce by about one-third the debts owed to them and rescheduled the remainder over 23 years including a six-year maturity period after lobbying by Commonwealth countries.

In 1990 Commonwealth finance ministers meeting in Trinidad called on the Paris Club to further reduce the whole stock of debt owed to them by 67 percent — increasing to 80 percent for the poorest countries, to place a five-year moratorium on interest payments and reschedule the rest over a longer period.

However, it was only in 1994 that the Paris Club accepted the principle of a 67 percent stock reduction without an interest rate moratorium or rescheduling of the remainder of the debt — which they now refer to as the Naples Terms — and even then they have applied a highly strict and selective interpretation of them.

“What this amounts to is that since then only one country in Africa, Uganda, has benefited from the Naples Terms stock reduction, while the situation of other severely-indebted countries in the region remains the same,” says Dhodia.

“But, even in the case of Uganda, the Naples Terms were implemented in a legalistic way which saw post-1981 debt (Uganda first went to the Paris Club in 1981) excluded from the debt- reduction package, with the result that only a quarter of its Paris Club debt was reduced.”

The IFIs have so far remained adamant that they will neither reschedule nor reduce debts owed to them, despite the commitment of African states to socially divisive structural adjustment programmes (SAPs).

Instead of coming up with a comprehensive debt reduction strategy, they have resorted to refinancing old loans to severely- indebted countries with new and softer loans. This however fails to address the main problem.

The world is in the bizarre situation whereby up to eight billion dollars of bilateral credits is used each year by debtor countries to service multilateral debt. The net transfer of resources from “poor” Africa to the “rich” West topped 50 billion dollars between 1970 and 1994.

Africa’s debt overhang may not threaten international financial stability, but it is causing untold hardship and suffering in the region. NGOs link spiralling debt repayment obligations to a dramatic and continuing decline in public spending on education, health and other social welfare programmes.

“An unsustainable debt stock discourages domestic and foreign investment,” said Kevin Watkins, senior policy adviser at Oxfam, “and raises the risks of commercial transactions which commonly carry interest rates higher for Africa than, for example, South- East Asia.”

Some aid agency sources are optimistic that the IMF and World Bank could spring a surprise at their April meeting by unveiling a new multilateral debt-reduction strategy.

But both Kaunda and Watkins argue that economic growth can only be fostered in the region when a comprehensive debt reduction strategy comparable to the Brady Plan, or the Marshall Plan for post-World War II Europe, is implemented in Africa.

Watkins also says that any attempt to address the African debt crisis start by ditching the “defective and discredited” IMF and World Bank SAPs in favour of economic prescriptions shorn of arch- monetarist prescriptions.

More foreign direct investment is not a cure-all for Africa’s socio-economic ills and can not substitute for well-targeted international aid and sound macro-economic policies, argues a leading economist.

According to Carolyn Jenkins, a fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, too much emphasis is being attached to foreign investment when there should be equal, if not more, concern about the decreasing flow of aid and other concessionary credits to the region.

“Investment from abroad can’t be a substitute for aid and sound macro-economic policies,” she says. “Although there are signs that the investment climate in Africa is improving, foreign investment is still very small and can not in the short or medium term cover the gap left by falling aid.”

Recent figures released by the World Bank reveal that despite a record 231 billion dollars of foreign investment in developing countries as a whole in 1995, Africa’s share of that was less than one percent at about two billion dollars– and even that meagre proportion has been disputed by some analysts who believe the true figure to be less than one billion.

Jenkins concedes that while the current level of investment in the region may seem minuscule, it nonetheless represents a positive development from the 1980s when capital flight and negative investment was the norm in Africa.

Though she says improving investment prospects in the region may in part be attributed to ‘reforms’ imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), Jenkins is no fan of so-called Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), which she says heap the burden of ‘adjustment’ on the poor in the form of reduced health and education spending and job losses.

Investment will only pick up, she maintains, when sensible macro- economic policies are implemented. These do not necessarily mean extreme free-market policies, she says.

“I am in favour of reform, but one that is both sensible and gradual,” she says. “It’s no good privatising everything in sight, for example. But at the same time, I don’t see why governments should be involved in hotels or brewing beer.

“Some utilities could be commercialised, instead of privatised, and health and education safeguarded. The primary focus on investment is misplaced. First, you have to get the macro- economics correct. Aid should then be used to cover shortfalls until the policies have had time to deliver the conditions which will attract investment.”

This position is broadly accepted by the World Bank, which has called on Western governments to increase aid to African countries which are unable to replace lost or non-existent development funds with private direct investment.

Official development assistance to Sub-Saharan Africa from the West was cut by 12 per cent in 1993/94, most of it due to falls in bilateral and multilateral concessional flows. Many analysts expect further cuts in Western aid budgets.

There are indications that U.S. bilateral assistance to the region will be cut by 30 percent this year. British aid to Africa is set to fall by five percent in real terms in 1997/97.

But analysts say the reality of falling aid to Africa must not force African governments into unquestioning acceptance of whatever aid is offered. They argue that the region should reject aid that is ineffective, counterproductive or ‘tied’ to donor services.

The London-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) estimates that, for instance, over 60 percent of European Union (EU) aid to Africa is ‘tied’, meaning recipients are prevented from seeking more cost-effective services from countries other than the donors themselves, even when donor nation services are higher.

One French aid package required 45 percent of the funds to be spent on contacts with French companies. A Japanese contribution to part-cover the costs of one aid project allegedly set a percentage on the total cost of the scheme, so the recipients actually returned more than twice the funds Japan gave to Japanese firms.

In 1987 the European Union admitted that 56 percent of its aid to developing countries was tied. Had the recipients been allowed to spend the funds elsewhere, say the ODI, it would have added close to two billion dollars in savings to the value of that aid.

“It is clear that investment is not going to make up for declining aid in a place like Africa, at least not in the short term,” says Ivan Nutbrown, a campaigner with the World Development Movement. “Aid is necessary, but governments must be very guarded and refuse any aid that is tied.”

“Of course, tied aid must be refused,” says Jenkins, “because they are tied to more extensive imports from donors and also because at the end of the day the countries that receive it have to repay it at great cost.”

South Africa, for example, has several times declined World Bank and bilateral aid because of the conditions attached to them, but South Africa, unlike other African states, can afford to do so.

Analysts argue that the best course for African countries is to only accept aid geared towards debt relief and no other, since the debt problem also inhibits investment, both domestic and foreign.

Yet some maintain that foreign direct investment can and will replace aid in the region, and that only more radical economic reform along the lines advocated by the IMF and World Bank can create the conditions necessary for increased investor interest.

“It is difficult medicine, but it can work and it is working,” says Anthony Garnett, an analyst with the all-Africa Simba investment fund. “The rising investment in the area is due to SAPs. I say that all aid should be stopped, more reform undertaken — and then investment will pick up.”

Jenkins disagrees. She says it would take five years for improvements to bear fruit and most of the early funds will go to short-tern schemes and sectors where capital can by quickly shipped out in a crisis. “Even with more radical policies, investment will not just pick up like that.”

Within the next few years sub-Saharan Africa could rank alongside Asia as a major destination for foreign institutional investment, claim fund managers who have bucked the trend and invested heavily in the region.

Michael Power, manager of the all-Africa, 30 million dollar Simba Fund launched in London last year, sees new investor interest in Africa — an estimated 500 million dollars worth of investment in the past five years — as “a sign of things to come”.

“Quite a few fund managers are excited about Africa,” he says, “and I’m one of them. Initially, Africa was a novelty. Today it is a known quantity. Tomorrow it will be regarded as just another investment opportunity, just as south-east Asia.”

Power’s optimism about Africa’s increasing attractiveness as an emerging market is obviously matched by other fund managers which are avidly seeking investment opportunities in the region.

They include the U.S.-based GT Management’s 75 million dollar All- Africa Fund, Foreign and Colonial’s Emerging Markets Fund — which has invested 10 percent of its 237 million dollar portfolio in the region — and the New York listed Morgan Stanley Africa Investment Fund which, with a portfolio worth 250 million dollars, is by far the largest Africa-specific fund.

One side effect of this interest is the speed with which stock markets are being established or consolidated in the region. There are now well over 20 bourses in Africa — many set up within the last four or five years — with a market capitalisation of 260 billion dollars, including the longer-established ones in Botswana, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The Kampala Stock Exchange is expected to begin trading before the end of the year. “There is no doubt that Africa is becoming very interesting indeed, and the growth of local stock exchanges can only help in this dramatic transformation,” says Neil Gregson, manager of Credit Suisse’s South Africa Fund.

But, is the talk of an ‘investment renaissance’ in Africa just hype by self-interested fund managers whose commitments leave them no option but to promote the region?

Rob Fisher, an analyst at Flemings’ Save & Prosper (S&P) give a qualified yes. The region does have potential but it is presently dormant. “I would adopt a wait-and-see attitude,” he says.

“Although it seems things are picking up in Africa, you never know, things may change — there are still risks. South Africa is definitely where the action is.”

A recent survey by London-based Fund Research found that almost 80 percent of new investment in the region is going to South Africa, reflected by the Johannesburg bourse’s market capitalisation of 250 billion dollars.

Cautious S&P, which launched a Southern Africa Fund two years ago, say they are not in a hurry to diversify in the rest of Africa. The fund is producing extremely good returns. Last year alone it was an above-average 58 percent.

However, Fisher’s evaluation of Africa’s prospects are not shared by many in the investment community. Markets are ruled by sentiments and many analysts are not as dismissive of the region as S&P.

Credit Suisse’s Gregson says interest in Africa will last. He says the only reason why their fund is South Africa-specific is because that market was undersubscribed. They have the whole of the region in their sights.

Though new investment is significantly skewed in South Africa’s favour, analysts welcome a distinct broadening of foreign institutional foreign investment. Aside from the bourses in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Botswana, the next best-performing stock exchanges are in Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Kenya, Tanzania and Zambia.

Many reasons are given for the change, among them increasing democratisation, implementation of IMF and World Bank imposed economic ‘reform’ and the determination of political leaders to find alternative funds as Western aid dries up.

But the main reason remains Africa’s enormous potential as producer of mineral and agricultural products and the generational shift from a fiercely nationalist, isolationist political elite to a technocratic, business-oriented outward-looking community.

Power believes that industrialisation in the ‘tiger’ economies of Asia will lead to increasing demand for Africa’s agricultural and mineral products by the powerful Asian economies.

“Yes, I believe that the central reason for this interest in Africa is because Asia is becoming very interested in Africa’s resources,” he adds. “There will come a time when Africa’s resources will be one of the driving forces of the Asian economies.

“So, we are positioning ourselves. We have faith in Africa and we have entered early to capitalise on the opportunities which are obviously there. Of course, there are risks, but all investments carry risks. Investment in African stock exchanges is a way of tapping into growth in the ‘tiger’ economies.”

Since 1985 diamond consumption in Asia has grown six times, with the region accounting for five of the top seven diamond buying nations. Gold consumption has trebled in Asia, where eight of the top 10 markets for gold are located. Their demand for many primary commodities — including tea, cocoa, rice, tobacco, coal, cotton, timber, cement, chromium — is also increasing.

Says Sean Magee, director of corporate relations at London’s Commonwealth Development Corporation, which has nearly a billion dollars invested in over 15 countries in Africa: “Africa’s time has arrived. We knew this would happen and we had been investing there even when it was not fashionable.”

By Lahai J. Samboma
LONDON, Jan 20 1996 (IPS)

Calls to involve NGOs in efforts to increase global food security in the run-up to a major summit in Rome in November come as some analysts are questioning the effectiveness of policies that rely on NGOs to implement them.

Addressing a meeting of NGOs in London this week FAO Director- General Jacques Diouf told a meeting on summit preparations here this week that FAO recognised that partnerships with other groups was ‘indispensable’.

“We want to establish a network of partnerships with each country and between the countries and the international community.” he said. “NGOs, private business, government and multilateral and bilateral development agencies will need to work together and coordinate their actions.”

But some analysts say many programmes aimed at alleviating poverty in developing countries — many focussing on food security schemes — can fail to reach the poorest people.

“Conventional wisdom asserts that NGOs are particularly good at reaching the poorest, but this view has to be challenged in the light of our research,” said Roger Riddell, a senior research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute.

Riddell was speaking at the recent launch of his book ‘Non- Governmental Organisations and Rural Poverty Alleviation’.

The study, which looks at 16 poverty alleviation programmes involving British NGOs in Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Zimbabwe, comes as donor countries and institutions try to evaluate the development impact of NGOs in the poorest countries.

“Most of the projects failed to reach the very poorest, and even in cases where poverty alleviation occurred, improvement in economic status was modest and there was little evidence to suggest that people had escaped permanently from poverty,” Riddell said.

He says that although 12 of the projects broadly achieved their objectives and succeeded in reducing poverty, only one achieved all its goals, and few were able to continue after external funding was withdrawn.

In only five of the 16 projects were the benefits judged to have outweighed the costs of the intervention, while in others very high proportions of aid budgets were taken up by administration costs.

Such programmes could be made more effective only when more preparatory work was done, more funding was provided and when there was greater participation by the recipients, according to Mark Robinson, co-author of the report and a Fellow at Sussex University.

Excerpt:

Mounting speculation that escalating inter- ethnic violence in Burundi would force international relief agencies working in the country to pull out has been dismissed as “baseless” by London-based non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

“Such speculation is baseless. It is not the policy of the Red Cross to halt operations under such circumstances, or to abandon people who need our help to what some would call their fate,” said Juliet Sober, a London spokesperson for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). “We have no intention of pulling out.”

This reassurance follows the recent decision by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to suspend operations in parts of the central African nation after a convoy belonging to French NGO International Action Against Hunger (AICF) was attacked by militiamen.

According to Elizabeth Lee, spokeswoman for the U.N. in London, relief operations in the country “have only been suspended temporarily because of the general security situation and, in particular because of the ambush of the convoy”.

During the attack — suspected to have been carried out by Tutsi militiamen — at least one Burundian aid worker was killed and four were wounded.

Burundi U.N. Ambassador Tharcisse Nkatibirora, however, denies it was the work of the Tutsi forces. Himself a Tutsi, he told an IPS reporter in New York that the north is full of “militia-style activity” — mainly carried out by Hutus from Rwanda’s former militia forces linked to the 1994 genocide in that country.

Burundi’s government, like its six-million population, is made up mainly of Hutus, while the military is predominantly Tutsi. The army has been repeatedly accused by aid workers and human rights groups of invading Hutu suburbs in the capital and killing civilians in its campaign against armed Hutu militias.

Late last week aid workers reported that 30 to 40 displaced Hutus who had sought refuge just outside Bujumbura were killed by mortars fired by the army.

Sober would not be drawn into a discussion of the ethics of the U.N. decision, but said that it could potentially lead other agencies to review their commitments in the country, adding: “However, the presence or absence of the U.N. will not influence the Red Cross.”

Other NGOs based here — including ActionAid, Christian Aid and Oxfam — say that while the security situation in the country may be getting increasingly precarious, they are a long way away from the point where they would consider pulling out, or even suspending operations.

If South Africa is to reap economic benefit from the global goodwill it has earned from hosting the rugby World Cup, analysts here say the Mandela administration must introduce more investor-friendly macroeconomic policies.

The tournament — a sporting event surpassed in global interest only by the Olympic Games and the soccer World Cup — will bring a short, sharp influx of cash into the domestic economy, but long- term rewards may elude the country.

“In the short-term, and we are talking very short-term here, it will boost foreign exchange revenues and boost retail trade,” said Gill Tudor, South Africa specialist at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London.

“But I don’t see it spurring huge or long-term growth in the economy. For that, the new government has to make it their priority to attract more foreign investment and that obviously means putting the right economic policies in place.”

These include a reduction of corporate tax, further lowering of marketable securities tax and secondary tax on businesses, privatisation of parastatals and the easing of barriers to imports. One sector which will benefit in the long-term as a direct consequence of the tournament, says Tudor, is the tourism industry.

Rugby World Cup organisers expect about 100,000 extra foreign visitors will have been brought to South Africa by the time it ends on Jun. 24. Even if indirect earnings from the tourism sector are excluded, the tournament will bring in 150 million dollars in ticket sales, television rights and commercial sponsorship alone.

While the country has one of the most highly-developed tourism- related infrastructures on the continent — from hotels and restaurants to game reserves and scenic landscapes — the years of international isolation during the apartheid era meant that its great potential as a popular holiday destination went unrealised.

This is all bound to change with the country now under democratic rule, especially with the huge amount of international exposure the World Cup has generated. Some analysts believe that, with time, South Africa could become even more popular as a tourist destination for Westerners than Kenya, Tanzania or The Gambia.

“This sort of international exposure is very good for the tourist industry,” said Tudor. “In the long term, it would mean more tourists. But that is only one sector of the economy. The government must at all costs maintain economic growth, because people are only going to invest when the climate is good and they can get something out of it.”

However, some analysts maintain that the new government has already done much to calm initial fears by investors. They cite the fiscally-restrained budget delivered in March by Finance Minister Chris Liebenberg and several new measures to encourage investment.

They argue that while attracting investment must top South Africa’s list of priorities, the government must address the inequalities left by the apartheid era. This can only mean, they say, taxation-funded higher social expenditure.

“There has to be a balancing act between creating a favourable economic climate for domestic business and foreign investors,” says Dr Janine Aron of Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, “while at the same time addressing the political aspirations of the majority.

“The principal positive measures for business were scrapping the import surcharge, lifting the transition levy and removing the non- residents’ shareholder tax of 15 percent on dividends. Corporate tax was left alone and no wealth or capital gains was introduced.”

The abolition of the two-tier exchange rate mechanism — introduced in the 1980s to stem capital flight in the face of anti- apartheid sanctions — is also seen here as a credibility- enhancing measure.

More concessions to big business at the expense of workers or the disadvantaged, Aron submits, is sure to further alienate labour unions already angered by pay awards’ failure to match inflation. Further labour unrest could deter foreign investment.

Ben Jackson, newly-appointed director of the London-based lobby group Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA), holds that the government has to make sure that ‘investor-friendly’ policies do not end by perpetuating the structural imbalances of the apartheid economy.

“This is the path to which the government is committed,” he said. “An integrated process of reconstruction and development, instead of depending on economic growth to make development possible.”

If South Africa’s development policy is to be successful, he argued, the international community must instead focus on ways they can boost South Africa’s economic prosperity through development cooperation and economic aid.

Public health systems in developing countries come under severe strain in countries affected by civil war and need urgent attention, according to a new study compiled by London-based researchers.

“Textbooks on public health pay only cursory attention to the issue, focusing rather on natural and man-made disasters and the likely impact of nuclear war,” write by David Fitzsimons and Alan Whiteside in a just released study “Conflict, War and Public Health”.

The study, published by the Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism (RISCT), aims to alert the world to an impending catastrophe the authors contend is little-appreciated.

“The effects of war in less developed countries are under- reported. Some of the basic principles of public health will apply equally to civil conflict and war and natural disasters such as earthquakes or floods but there are significant differences.”

The researchers link an increased rate of the transmission of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV virus) as a direct consequence of civil conflicts. Carriers of this virus invariably contract AIDS, the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, an often fatal disease marked by severe loss of resistance to infection.

Conflicts gives rise to the breakdown of social routine and norms and the deployment of the uniformed services — soldiers, militia, police and paramilitaries — groups which previous research has demonstrated tend to have higher levels of HIV infection than the general population.

The resulting stress and tension, the report states, lead to greater rates of sexual activity, as evidenced by the rate of pregnancies in countries with such conditions.

In such situations prevention programmes may not be effective owing to lack of security and resources, and even if they did operate, the study stresses, people are less likely to heed the messages as they have more immediate and pressing problems on their minds — such as their basic survival.

As a consequence, the vulnerability of the general population to infection by AIDS increases greatly. AIDS being an “opportunistic” disease, famine, plague, cholera, dysentery, typhoid and other diseases which always accompany war, provide fertile soil for the epidemic to spread, the study said..

The study adds: “Mass movements of people may ensue, with large numbers of refugees presenting immediate health problems and destabilising host societies. AIDS is not the only disease that is spread through conflict but with the traditional public health problems forms an unholy alliance in further attacking the health status of the populace.”

The study is grounded in surveys of conflict situations in various regions of the world ranging from Angola and Sierra Leone to Azerbaijan and Bosnia-Hercegovina.

The deaths late last year of tens of thousands of Rwandans from cholera, dysentery and other diseases in Goma, Zaire, underscores the study’s thesis.

But it is not only in conditions of full-scale war that public health is compromised, according to the study.

For example, the weakening of central power in the former Soviet Union and the subsequent political instability has seen mortality rates rise, life expectancy fall and dramatic increases in cases of diphtheria, tuberculosis, hepatitis and dysentery.

Conflicts, whether by design or intent, can also lead to the destruction of public health and medical facilities such as water treatment plants, sewage works and hospitals, the report says.

Indirect action such as the blowing up of bridges and blockades prevent the distribution of medical supplies, food, fuel and other essentials to besieged populations.

According to the report, while civilians accounted for around half of war-related deaths in the 18th and 19th centuries, today that proportion has shifted dramatically upwards to between 75 and 90 per cent.

If this grave threat to public health is to be successfully tackled, the report submits, concerted national and international initiatives on conflict resolution must be undertaken and the impact of conflict must be incorporated into political thought so that steps are taken to diffuse situations that can lead to disturbances.

“The short and long-term consequences of conflict and civil disobedience for public health, and thus development and social well-being, have never been fully assessed,” the study said.

“Doing this assessment would be an instructive and shocking exercise. The global community of nations, inextricably linked as never before by bonds of trade, communications and development, must face this conclusion and act accordingly.”

Urgent international action is needed to prevent the latest crisis in Angola from degenerating into the kind of fighting seen last year in the war-ravaged African state, say London-based campaigners.

“Many thousands of people have been killed in the (Angolan) central provinces,” said Ian Bray of British charity Oxfam, “and the international community must act now to prevent us witnessing again the tragedy last year, when one thousand a day were dying.”

A ceasefire signed on Nov. 20 is crumbling. The government blame Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) for attacks near the conquered rebel capital of Huambo, in central Angola, and in the Bengo and Benguela coastal provinces.

Last week U.N. special envoy Aluoine Blondin Beye made a personal appeal to front-line fighters to hold their fire after UNITA rockets hit government targets in a wave of attacks on small towns and military posts.

In the town of Cuito UNITA attacks have forced humanitarian groups, including Oxfam, the Red Cross, Save the Children and others, to relocate staff to safer areas.

“They have intensified artillery bombardment of Cuito, and when you move around the town you can see the dead and wounded lying in the streets,” said an Oxfam official. “The town is on fire.”

In 1992 UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi rejected the government’s victory in U.N. monitored free elections and ordered his troops to restart the 19 year old war, until last November’s ceasefire call.

But activists here say Savimbi is deliberately prolonging the fighting. The west and the former apartheid regime in South Africa backed UNITA at the start of the war in 1975, historic links that have tempered western responses to Savimbi’s repudiation of the election verdict, say the activists.

“Since the West has been supporting Savimbi morally and militarily all these years, they have failed to take any decisive action against him,” said Peter Brayshaw, co-chair of the London based Mozambique Angola Committee (MAC)

The country is rich in resources, including gold, diamonds, oil and fertile soil, but much of the continuing fighting is reported in the areas where these resources can be found, notably Cabinda — the oil-rich enclave between Zaire and Congo that provides the Angolans with it primary source of foreign income.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos has written to Savimbi offering to meet anywhere on national territory to discuss what official spokesmen call “unresolved issues which threaten to disrupt the peace process”.

Beye is due to meet Savimbi on Wednesday in the rebel-fortified village of Bailundo, 70 kilometres north of Huambo in central Angola. Beye hopes to persuade Savimbi to meet with dos Santos.

“Even though they (UNITA) lost the elections, the government is still trying to accommodate them, but they refuse to accept the concessions,” said Marga Holness of Angola’s London embassy.

UNITA’s representative in London was unavailable for comment.

Offered concessions reportedly include a seat for Savimbi on the council of state and 11 ministerial and deputy-ministerial portfolios, several governorships of provinces and overseas diplomatic posts for UNITA allies.

Brayshaw said the meagre U.N. sanctions on UNITA are failing to take effect. “The existing arms and fuel embargo against this illegal army, widely flouted by airlifts particularly through Zaire, to Huambo and other UNITA-seized areas, must be fully enforced,” he said. “No more fuel, arms and ammunition should be allowed to reach their war machine.”

He urged countries with satellite and air surveillance aircraft volunteer their use to the United Nations and a second round of sanctions should be imposed on UNITA’s travel, communications and its operations in foreign countries be curtailed.

“UNITA should no longer be permitted to exploit the sanctions’ open-ended nature to prevaricate and keep on shifting the goal posts,” he said.

The U.N. Security Council is due to vote Feb. 8 to give final approval to the 7,000-strong contingent, ten times that which supervised Angola’s failed 1991 peace treaty.

By Lahai J. Samboma
LONDON, Dec 29 1994 (IPS)

Britain’s independent Police Complaints Authority has been forced to launch an investigation into the death of a Nigerian man in police custody following concerted pressure from anti-racist campaigners and the dead man’s relatives.

The 34-year-old Nigerian, Oluwashiji Lapite, was allegedly bludgeoned to death by at least eight police officers in Stoke Newington, north London, when they tries to arrest the builder and decorator on suspicion of carrying the drug crack cocaine.

A spokesperson for New Scotland Yard says that during the early hours of Friday, Dec. 16, two plain clothes officers tried to arrest Lapite after he began “acting suspiciously”.

“As he fled from the police, he was seen to throw a substance away. A struggle broke out between the suspect and the two officers and reinforcements had to be called in. The substance was later found to be 41 grammes of crack cocaine.

“The officers arrested him and rushed him to a London Hospital. He was dead on arrival,” the spokesperson said.

Eyewitnesses have said that the arresting officers — at least eight of them — used excessive force while trying to arrest Lapite, a married man with a daughter aged two and half months who arrived in London from Nigeria just two years ago.

Anti-racist campaigners here charged that his death was racially- motivated and that police would not have been so heavy handed had he been a white person.

Campaigners who have seen Lapite’s body say he had a “deep and large” dent on his forehead, cuts and bruises to his face and lacerated lips. They have ordered a new independent post-mortem.

Said Palma Black of the Anti-Racist Alliance (ARA): “He would be alive today had he been a white man. The police claim he was a drug dealer but will not wash with people like us who know that the police are a racist institution.”

Lapite’s relatives are shocked at police insistence that he was a drug dealer. They say he was an honest and hardworking man who was very devoted to his family.

“This should never have happened to anybody in any country. Human life should not be wasted like this,” his sister, Sinmi Akindele said. “I want justice and to make sure this never happens to anybody again. Everyone is angry.”

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Foreign investors have responded cautiously rather than enthusiastically to the lifting of anti-apartheid sanctions and South Africa’s successful transition to full democracy. But the outlook for future investment is still bright.

In the wake of the April elections many unit trusts were launched — especially in Britain — to cater to the projected demand for investment opportunities in Africa’s largest and most productive economy.

“After the elections, of course expectations were high that would be a lot of investment funds flowing in. But we can now see that many people were being over-optimistic,” says Dr Willem Naude of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, Oxford University.

Credit Suisse — one of the British-based financial houses, who launched their South African Fund in late June — have been so far able to raise only 7.5 million dollars.

According to the company, this is not an insignificant commitment on the part of the investors — both private and institutional — nor has it dented their initial optimism about the country’s potential to attract more investment.

Ian Chimes, managing director of Credit Suisse Investment Funds, points out that at its launch the fund was able to raise a “very encouraging” 3.75 million dollars and that since the fund closed in mid-July people continue to commit funds to it almost every day.

Like the other funds, they have bought stocks and shares in a wide range of sectors, including mining, construction, commodities, beverages and tourism.

“People are showing an interest. If you had invested in the launch period your initial outlay would have by now appreciated by 15 percent. So you see, the potential is there and investors are confident,” he says.

The other main South-African oriented investment funds which have been launched since then are Save and Prosper’s (S and P) Southern Africa Fund and another by The Old Mutual. The S and P have raised 16 million dollars and the latter 62 million dollars.

But despite these impressive-sounding figures, some analysts — who say they do not want to take on the role of spoil sports — maintain that they represent little more than a drop in the ocean of the country’s investment needs.

Since the Republican Party routed Bill Clinton’s democrats and won control of the United States Congress in elections last month there has been virtually no coverage of the likely impact on the Angolan peace process.

This is in spite of the fact that in the wake of the Republican’s Congressional landslide victory sundry commentators and analysts were falling over each other pontificating on its effects on United States domestic and foreign policy.

The analysts have been advocating taxation and welfare cuts to the slashing of the foreign aid budget.

It is a fact that the Republican upsurge in the United States has boosted the confidence of Jonas Savimbi and rebels of his so- called National Union for the Total Dependence of Angola (UNITA) to reject the latest Lusaka peace initiative and to pursue their war of attrition against the Angolan people.

As Mike Terry, the director of the London-based pressure group Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA), says, the signals which have been emanating from Washington since early November are encouraging the rebels to flout the protocols of the peace accord signed Nov. 22 between UNITA and the Angolan government in the Zambian capital Lusaka.

“Thera are clearly powerful elements within UNITA opposed to peace. And it is these people who are being encouraged by Republican Congressmen like Jesse Helms and others to break the ceasefire agreement,” said Terry.

The view is shared by David Coetzee, the Angolan specialist and editor of ‘Southscan’ — the bulletin on southern African affairs — who maintains that the veto which a republican majority congress has on policy bodes ill for war-torn Angola. According to him, Clinton’s lame duck presidency has made Savimbi much more concerned about lobbying Republican support than working towards peace.

Said Coetzee: “I suspected it was only a matter of time before they went back to the Bush. What they have been doing since November is engaging in a massive diplomatic offensive to reactivate their old Republican network — and reactivating Republican support.

“It was possible that UNITA would return to the bush to wage a war of attrition against government forces. This was the situation before the war re-started and when they lost the elections in 1992.”

As the end of the twentieth century approaches the nineteenth century curse of slavery is very much alive and well in the North African state of Mauritania.

The continued existence of the degrading practice in the sparsely populated mainly desert nation is a damning indictment of the Mauritanian government and the international community.

Human rights campaigners say a great deal more pressure would have to has to be placed on the government of President Maawiya Sid’Ahmed Taya to ensure its eventual eradication.

“Slavery never really disappeared in Mauritania, even though it has been officially abolished three times before,” says Salem Mezhoud, programme officer at the London-based human rights group ‘Anti-Slavery International’.

Aside from slavery, campaigners charge that the country’s African population is being subjected to the shocking human rights violations — such as massacre, torture, expulsions, and arbitrary imprisonment — by their white Moor rulers.

“Long before ‘ethnic cleansing’ entered popular international parlance, its effects were painfully apparent in Mautitania,” said British-based organisation Human Rights/ Africa.

Slavery has been in existence in Mauritania for centuries. Traditionally, Africans were brought north into slavery after capture by raiding Arab/Berber tribes. Today slaves are either bought secretly or presented as gifts from one Arab to another.

Not only is their possession considered a status symbol, but they also perform vital economic tasks for their masters. Industries such as agriculture and animal husbandry are still largely dependent on slave labour.

Africans account for two-thirds of the country’s population, about half of whom are known as the Haritan. They are former slaves who either bought their freedom or were granted it after induction into the former French colonial army.

Haritans remain tied poltically and culturally to their former masters, honorary Arabs to all extents and purposes. It is the other African groups, the Halpulaar, Soninke, Bambara and Wolof, who are being systematically persecuted in this arid country.

Tens of thousands of them are considered their masters property, totally subjected to their will, campaigners say.

The dramatic exit from Nigeria of Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka this week, despite the seizure of his passport by the Lagos authorities, will serve to focus attention on the country’s deepening political crisis, say campaigners here.

Poet, playwright, novelist, avowed socialist and Nobel prize laureate, Soyinka, 60, is one of the widest known and most outspoken critic of the military government of General Sani Abacha.

He made his first public appearance in Paris Monday since escaping from what he called the “stone age despots” who rule his native Nigeria in a manner “not unlike apartheid South Africa.”

“Soyinka’s escape is good news,” said John Filani, chairman of the London-based Nigerian Democratic Movement. “Abacha and his cronies know what he stands and were afraid to let him out. Now he will paint the true picture of what his happening in our country.”

Filani doubted that Soyinka would try to seek political asylum in France or elsewhere. “With his high profile and international stature, Soyinka knows it is better for him to stay in the country, where he will be more helpful to the democracy movement.”

Nigerian activists say the writer plans to liaise with human rights and international writers’ organisations and focus the international spotlight on Nigeria.

The current human rights and political crisis is the most serious the country has faced in the past 34 years, said international human rights watchdog Amnesty International.

“This could end in bloody civil war. They don’t want the international community to sit on the fence doing until heads start rolling. his could be another Rwanda,” argues Filani.

Writers are increasingly being targetted by repressive regimes, says Catherine Drucker, campaigns coordinator at Article 19, the international anti-censorship group based in London.

Ken Saro-wiwa, the writer and political activist, is currently detained without trial in Nigeria. The regime confiscated Soyinka’s passport in late September when he tried to travel to a conference of the International Writers’ Parliament in Lisbon.

Drucker recalled a recent incident in Egypt when another Nobel laureate, Naguib Mafouz, narrowly escaped assassination. “No writer wants to leave their homeland, which is their source of inspiration,” she said. “For Soyinka to leave like that is a symptom of how bad repression in Nigeria is.”

When fighting started between the Angolan government and rebel troops in Huambo last year, 12-year-old Maria, orphaned by the two-decade long civil war, was brutally raped by the rebels and became pregnant.

She subsequently escaped from Huambo, undertaking the 200-mile walk to Benguela where a place was found for her in an orphanage. Being of such a tender age, she went into early and difficult labour. The baby survived only a fortnight and Maria herself died a week later — exhausted, sick and undernourished.

The case of Maria is just one of the many documented in ‘Children at War’ — a hard hitting report about the effects of war on children launched this month by the ‘Save the Children Fund’ organisation.

The report documents the distressing and horrific consequences of war on children caught up in the the increasing number of conflict zones around the world from Angola, Cambodia to Mozambique and the former Yugoslavia.

In the last decade, according to the charity, one and a half million children around the world met with violent deaths, while four million sustained agonising and permanently-damaging injuries as a result of bombs, bullets, landmines, chemical weapons and even machete attacks.

Hundred of thousands have been forced to become child soldiers, often kidnapped and trained to kill, while 10,000,000 more carry the emotional scars of wartime experiences.

Although it is impossible to say exactly how many children are currently under arms — it is estimated that during the last decade more than 200,000 children have been forced to become soldiers.

What is beyond doubt is during that period 35 countries have been accused of using child soldiers and that there has been an alarming increase in the phenomenon.

Child soldiers served in conflicts world wide, including El Salvador, Ethiopia, Iran, Kuwait, Namibia, Nicaragua and Uganda. In Mozambique it has been estimated that over 10,000 children, some as young as six, where conscripted by the Renamo rebels in their 16-year war against the government.

The Sierra Leone army presently fighting a war against rebels in the south and east of the country, has conscripted an estimated 400 children — some as young as eight and including girls.

By Lahai J. Samboma
LONDON, Nov 16 1994 (IPS)

Calls by the Rwanda Government for food aid to the internally-displaced inside Rwanda to be cut in order to pressure people to return to their homes has received a mixed response from international relief agencies here.

The calls were made Monday by the prime minister of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)-led government, Faustin Twagiramungu, who said that his government would impress upon the United Nations the imperative of evacuating the camps for the internally displaced in southwestern Rwanda and other areas.

“We need to pressure these refugees into believing there is a government and they can’t stay in the camps,” Twagiramungu said. “Are they going to stay in camps being fed forever.”

Aside from the fact that keeping the camps will serve as a disincentive for the displaced to return home and start re- building their lives and livelihood, the government also fears that the camps, like those in neighbouring Zaire, are providing cover for armed extremists bent on destabilising the government.

“First we have to persuade and convince. Then we have to decrease what we give them. Then we have to cut it off,” the prime minister said.

But aid agencies here say that the situation in Rwanda is more complex than the picture drawn by the government and they do not contemplate stopping aid supplied to the camps.

The people in the camps, they contend have legitimate fears of the consequences awaiting them is they return to their homes and should not be forced to leave.

“Of course, we understand the frustration of the government. But from a humanitarian point of view, we don’t think it is good policy to withhold food supplies from people who really need it. Their survival depends on it,” said Juliet Sober of the British Red Cross.

While the Rwanda Government will not take kindly to their operation in the camps, Sober says, the Red Cross is determined to provide food aid to the camps for as long as there are people there who need it.

She added: “We have to accept the fact that these people are just not going to get up and leave. They are afraid and, if we have the resources, we are not going to starve them into submission.”

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