Africa
Islamist insurgents and government forces battled for a second day in the Somali capital after medical officials Thursday said 23 people had already been killed. Insurgents attacking from the north on Wednesday reached within a mile (2 kilometers) of the presidential place in the heart of the city before being beaten back with the help of African Union peacekeepers in tanks, residents said. The exchange of gunfire and mortars made it impossible to get an accurate death toll for Thursday's fighting because ambulances could not get to the wounded and dying….The insurgents, the government and the peacekeepers have all been criticized by human rights groups for indiscriminately firing into and shelling residential neighborhoods – Associated Press
As much as half the food aid sent to Somalia is diverted from needy people to a web of corrupt contractors, radical Islamist militants and local United Nations staff members, according to a new Security Council report. The report, which has not yet been made public but was shown to The New York Times by diplomats, outlines a host of problems so grave that it recommends that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon open an independent investigation into the World Food Program’s Somalia operations. It suggests that the program rebuild the food distribution system — which serves at least 2.5 million people and whose aid was worth about $485 million in 2009 — from scratch to break what it describes as a corrupt cartel of Somali distributors. In addition to the diversion of food aid, regional Somali authorities are collaborating with pirates who hijack ships along the lawless coast, the report says, and Somali government ministers have auctioned off diplomatic visas for trips to Europe to the highest bidders, some of whom may have been pirates or insurgents. Somali officials denied that the visa problem was widespread, and officials for the World Food Program said they had not yet seen the report but would investigate its conclusions once it was presented to the Security Council next Tuesday. – New York Times
Top Egyptian cleric Sheik Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, whose moderate views angered conservative Muslims, died of a heart attack Wednesday during a visit to Saudi Arabia, the state-owned news agency reported. He was 81. Tantawi was the grand sheik of Cairo's Al-Azhar, Sunni Islam's pre-eminent theological institute. Sunni Islam is the faith's mainstream sect, to which the majority of Egypt's 80 million people adhere. Tantawi was a moderate scholar and supporter of women's rights whose views made him a frequent target of criticism from fundamentalist Muslims. Most recently, he infuriated conservatives late last year by barring women from wearing the full face veil known as the niqab at Al-Azhar University. That step was part of the intensifying struggle between the moderate Islam championed by the state and a populace that is turning to a stricter version of the faith. The Middle East News Agency said Tantawi died Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, where he attended a religious ceremony. Saudi officials said he will be buried in the Baqee cemetery in the Saudi holy city of Medina near the shrine of Prophet Muhammad. – Associated Press
The French Navy has captured 35 suspected pirates in three days of operations off the coast of Somalia — the biggest haul in the two years since EU naval ships started patrolling the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean. In operations over the weekend the Nivose, a French frigate, seized four mother ships and six skiffs. In one raid on Sunday, French and EU forces used helicopters and fired warning shots to stop and capture a mother ship and two accompanying vessels. The prisoners are expected to be flown to Kenya, which is already prosecuting about 100 pirates on behalf of Western nations with forces in the area. French naval commanders praised the action by the Nivose. “The pirates are learning that we are not a soft touch,” said a spokesman in Paris. – Times of London
The U.S. government and an international human rights group called Tuesday for Nigeria to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the deaths of more than 200 unarmed people in renewed violence between Christians and Muslims. Human Rights Watch also asked Acting President Goodluck Jonathan to provide police and military protection for those in the small villages surrounding Jos, a central Nigerian city that has become the fault line for religious violence in the region. Those who survived attacks Sunday in three mostly Christian villages to Jos' south said security forces never provided them any guards, even though Jos itself has remained under a dusk-til-dawn curfew since violence in January left more than 300 dead, most of them Muslims. "It's time to draw a line in the sand," Human Rights Watch researcher Corinne Dufka said in a statement Tuesday. "The authorities need to protect these communities, bring the perpetrators to book and address the root causes of violence." – Associated Press
Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria sharply increased the count of the dead after a weekend of vicious ethnic violence, saying Monday that as many as 500 people — many of them women and children — may have been killed near the city of Jos, long a center of tensions between Christians and Muslims. The dead were Christians and members of an ethnic group that had been feuding with the Hausa-Fulani, Muslim herders whom witnesses and police officials identified as the attackers. Officials said the attack was in reprisal for violence in January, when dozens of Muslims were slaughtered in and around Jos, including more than 150 in one village. Early Sunday, the attackers set upon the villagers with machetes, killing women and children in their homes and ensnaring the men who tried to flee in fishnets and animal traps, then massacring them, according to a Nigerian rights group whose investigators went to the area. Some homes were set on fire. The latest attacks were “a sort of vengeance from the Hausa-Fulani,” said the Rev. Emmanuel Joel, of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Jos. After the January attacks, “the military watched over the city, and neglected the villages,” he said…The police said Monday that they had made 95 arrests, including a number of Hausa-Fulani. – New York Times
The United Nations peacekeeping mission in eastern Congo provided food, fuel and logistical support to a Congolese colonel overseeing soldiers accused of gang rapes, massacres and other abuses, months after U.N. human rights investigators included him on a list of the army's most abusive commanders and in further internal warnings. The U.N. decision to support Col. Innocent Zimurinda and other commanders on the list has been part of the mission's backing of Congolese military operations targeting a notorious rebel group. The 10-year-old U.N. peacekeeping mission, deployed to keep an elusive peace following two devastating Congolese wars, is the most expensive in the world and receives a quarter of its budget from the United States. In October, a top U.N. investigator cited "credible evidence" that Zimurinda had led a massacre of civilians that included the gang rape of 10 women, some of whose breasts were hacked off. In November, U.N. officials said the mission would halt support to units implicated in human rights violations, after U.N. lawyers had warned that support of abusive commanders could leave the mission vulnerable to charges of complicity in war crimes. But in rare interviews here, Zimurinda and one of his deputies said they were still receiving supplies in December and January. A U.N. spokesman, Kevin Kennedy, said he could confirm that supplies already "in the pipeline" had continued to flow as the mission waited for legal guidance from U.N. headquarters, and he said of Zimurinda that "there may have been units under his sector command that received support." – Washington Post
A man has been brought to the United States from Nigeria to face charges that he provided money to a Somali terrorist group — and that he received military training from that group. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment on Monday accusing the man, Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, Al Shabab, which has declared its intent to harm the United States. Mr. Ahmed, 35, is also charged with providing that support, conspiring to receive training from a foreign terrorist organization, and receiving the training. Mr. Ahmed was transferred to United States custody by Nigerian authorities on Saturday. He wore dark blue prison clothes during a brief detention hearing on Monday before Debra C. Freeman, a federal magistrate judge in Manhattan. Communicating with the help of an Arabic interpreter, he indicated that he understood the charges against him. He is to be arraigned on Tuesday; a lawyer representing him, Sabrina Shroff, said that he would plead not guilty. – New York Times
Dozens of villagers in central Nigeria were killed early Sunday, victims of apparent reprisal attacks over recent clashes between Christians and Muslims. A government spokesman said there were more than 300 dead, but that figure that could not be independently verified. The killings took place near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north. Hundreds on both sides were killed as recently as January, though the victims this time were Christians, according to the information commissioner for Plateau State, Gregory Yenlong, and a local human rights organization. Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group. Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogona Hauwa. “They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.” - New York Times
Seeking to exploit the Internet’s potential for prying open closed societies, the Obama administration will permit technology companies to export online services like instant messaging, chat and photo sharing to Iran, Cuba and Sudan, a senior administration official said Sunday. On Monday, he said, the Treasury Department will issue a general license for the export of free personal Internet services and software geared toward the populations in all three countries, allowing Microsoft, Yahoo and other providers to get around strict export restrictions. The companies had resisted offering such services for fear of violating existing sanctions. But there have been growing calls in Congress and elsewhere to lift the restrictions, particularly after the postelection protests in Iran illustrated the power of Internet-based services like Facebook and Twitter. “The more people have access to a range of Internet technology and services, the harder it’s going to be for the Iranian government to clamp down on their speech and free expression,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement had not been made yet. – New York Times
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