Africa

January 10, 2016 (JUBA) - South Sudanese President, Salva Kiir, has sacked several top police generals, including inspector general of police two days after his government lost the ministry of interior to the armed opposition faction of the Sudan Peoples' Liberation Movement (SPLM-IO) under the leadership of former vice-president, Riek Machar.

Former Police Inspector General Pieng Deng Kuol (Photo File EPA)

The purged generals included a long serving police inspector general, Pieng Deng Kuol and his deputy, Andrew Kuol Nyuon, and have been replaced with Makur Arol as new inspector general and Biel Ruot as his deputy.

The order was broadcast by the state owned South Sudan Television (SSTV) on Saturday evening and did not elaborate on the motives of the changes at the time the government and armed opposition are expected to form a new transitional government of national unity.

The docket of the ministry of interior, according to the selection of ministerial positions conducted on Thursday will be occupied by the nominee of the opposition faction of SPLM-IO who will recommend a new inspector general to command the police force in the country.

The latest move is also seen as a way to curb the power of influence of some of the officers in the security and police services which have long influenced politics from behind the scene.

General Kuol previously served as deputy chief of general staff for finance and administration in South Sudan's army (SPLA) before being removed from active military service in 2013 and put on reserve list of senior military officers who have been awaiting reassignment.

His former deputy, general Nyuon was one of the longest serving high ranking police officers in different capacities until he was appointed to the capacity of deputy inspector general of police.

Both worked under the overall command and administrative supervision of the former interior minister, general Aleu Ayieu Aleu, an ally of president Kiir, who until he was removed from the interior docket in 2015, had played a role of political king-maker for several years by seeking to influence leadership choices behind the scenes.

Changes in the security sector are closely watched in South Sudan, which has been plagued by the ethnic and political violence since gaining independence from neighbouring Sudan in 2011.

Speculations trying to understand the motives behind the removal of general Kuol in particular, who is seen as a close ally of the army chief of general staff, Paul Malong Awan, another strong military ally of president Kiir, have centred on his possible role in the African Union (AU) report of inquiry.

Remarks attributed to him [Kuol] in the report on the atrocities committed by governor forces in December 2013 have been largely interpreted by military and political allies of president Kiir to mean targeting them.

But some analysts see the changes in the police top command as another sign of the waning influence and trust of the president in some of the officers as opposition forces will infiltrate the police force through the implementation of the peace agreement signed in August between President Kiir and Machar in ending 21 months of war.

Relying on oil by 98 percent of its budget and virtually zero exports in other economic sectors, the youngest state on the African soil has been hit by a drastic oil price fall that has slashed its energy revenues by more than half over the past two years of the conflict which has polarized and classified the country into ethnic cantons.

(ST)

January 10, 2016 (KHARTOUM) - Sudan's foreign minister Ibrahim Ghandour Sunday has handed over a message from president Omer al-Bashir to the Egyptian president Abdel-Fatah al-Sissi pertaining to bilateral relations between the two countries and ways to develop it.

Sudan's FM Ibrahim Ghandour (Photo SUNA)

Egypt's presidential spokesperson Alaa Youssef said that Ghandour conveyed Bashir's greetings to al-Sissi, expressing his country's keenness to promote cooperation between the two nations.

He added the Sudanese top diplomat underscored the deep ties between the two peoples, emphasizing the need for joint coordination at both Arab and African levels.

Youssef added that Ghandour also expressed his country's support for Egypt within the framework of the historic and close ties between the two peoples.

According to Youssef, al-Sissi asked Ghandour to convey his greetings to Bashir and the Sudanese people, pointing to Egypt's appreciation for the strong historic ties between the two countries.

It is noteworthy that Ghandour had arrived in Cairo Friday night, leading a high-level delegation on a two-day official visit, at the invitation of the Egyptian Foreign Minister.

MEETING POLITICAL FIGURES

Meanwhile, Ghandour has met with several Egyptian politicians including the former secretary general of the Arab League Amr Musa, former Prime Minister Isam Sharaf, former presidential advisor Mustafa al-Fiqi and the leader of the al-Wafd party al-Sayed al-Badawi besides several academics and journalists.

Ghandour said during the meeting that the dispute over Halayeb area can't be resolved by “imposing a fait accompli” but through dialogue or by referring the case to the concerned international institutions.

“The promotion of the Egyptian Sudanese relations must not be subjected to the [situation] in Halayeb area,” he said.

The Halayeb triangle overlooks the Red Sea and has been a contentious issue between Egypt and Sudan since 1958, shortly after Sudan gained independence from British-Egyptian rule.

The area has been under Cairo's full military control since the mid-1990's following a Sudanese backed attempt on former Egyptian president Mohamed Hosni Mubarak's life. Egypt brushed aside Sudan's repeated calls for referring the dispute to international arbitration.

Ghandour denied presence of any elements from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in his country, pointing that Sudan was accused in the past of hosting Islamic extremist figures from Algeria, Tunisia and Egypt but the accusations were proven to be incorrect.

“Those [accusations] sought to offend the Sudan while we want our relations with Egypt to go in the right direction,” he said.

The Sudanese top diplomat further pointed to the strong security and military cooperation between Egypt and Sudan.

Ghandour also criticized the low level of trade exchange between the two countries which at $250 million, saying it isn't commensurate with the strong ties and the potential for bilateral cooperation between the two countries.

He expressed hope that the security situation in the two countries allows for the easy flow of people and goods in order to double the volume of trade exchange.

POLITICAL CONSULTATION COMMITTEE

Also, the Sudanese/Egyptian joint political consultation committee Sunday has discussed bilateral relations and ways for promoting it.

The Sudanese side was headed by Ghandour while the Egyptian side was chaired by the minister of foreign affairs Samih Shokri.

Following the meeting, the two ministers held a press conference in which they briefed reporters on the progress of bilateral relations as well as regional and international issues.

(ST)

By Tesfa-Alem Tekle

January10, 2016 (ADDIS ABABA) – Ethiopia says it has finalized preparations to make a new bid to secure a non-permanent seat in the UN Security Council, government officials said on Sunday.

A UN Security Council session in New York (Photo courtesy of the UN)

According to officials at the ministry of foreign affairs, Ethiopia is currently the only candidate from the East African region and has wider chances of becoming a non-permanent member of the United Nations' Security Council (UNSC).

Ethiopia's bid for a non-permanent membership in the Security Council started after Seychelles agreed to leave its candidature for Ethiopia,

Addis Ababa is currently doing lobbying activities and election campaigns by drawing best experiences from member states.

Recently, Ethiopia's Foreign Affairs Minister, Tedros Adhanom, said the country has done fruitful activities at the Arab-Africa and Africa-South America summits held on the sideline of the 70th United Nations General Assembly in New York which would back the country in its efforts to secure seat at UNSC.

At different occasions, Ethiopian officials are expressing confidence that it won't be difficult for Ethiopia to secure two-third vote from the present member states in order to be accepted by the UN influential body.

According to the foreign ministry, Ethiopia has swept 186 votes of the total 190 in elections for UN Human Rights Council membership, saying that is an indication that the country is in “pole position” to become a non-permanent member.

Previously the horn of Africa's country had expressed its position at the ministerial and heads of states meeting held on South Sudan and Burkina Faso at the African Union as well as at the UN peacekeeping mission and UNSC meetings on terrorism.

There are a number of supporting factors that would help Ethiopia in its efforts to attain a non-permanent seat in the Security Council.

One among others - Ethiopia is the seat of the African Union (AU) and it has a significant role in marinating regional peace and security.

Ethiopia is also amongst the leading peace force contributors to the UN peacekeeping missions and has taken part in various peacekeeping missions.

The country has also an experience in serving a non-permanent seat in two occasions in 1967-68 and 1989-90.

The U.N. Security Council includes 10 non-permanent members, with five elected each year.

China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States make up the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council.

(ST)

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Strongly condemning yesterday’s terrorist attack on a security training centre in Zliten, Libya, and in the wake of that deadly incident and the recent attacks on the country’s oil infrastructure, the United Nations Security Council has urged all Libyan parties to joint together to combat terrorist threats by implementing the recent agreement on a unity government.

With nearly 200,000 people in Chad in need of urgent aid – 50,000 of them uprooted by Boko Haram terrorists from Nigeria – the United Nations emergency fund today announced a $7 million grant, the second in five months, and called on international donors to provide much more.

Photo: OpenStreetMap and MapQuest

By Katherine Mackenzie
ROME, Jan 8 2016 (IPS)

The Syrian government says it will allow humanitarian aid into the besieged rebel-held town of Madaya, according to the United Nations, following reports and horrific pictures of residents starving to death. Aid is expected to reach the area by Monday, but for some it is too little and too late.

The plight of Madaya’s citizens only came to the world’s attention when residents somehow managed to get video out to Britain’s independent television network, ITV. The images of skeletal children and babies rocked the world’s conscience. The report said many were reduced to eating dirt and grass. Some, it said, had eaten cats and dogs.

“The people of Syria are on their knees. The economy has collapsed, essential infrastructure like water and power networks are hanging by a thread, and on top of that a very cold winter is bearing down,” said the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). “12 million people inside Syria are in dire need for help.”

The United Nations and ICRC was granted access yesterday but the operation isn’t expected to happen before Sunday or Monday. The ICRC in Syria said details are still being sorted out. The United Nations World Food Programme, WFP, said it expected food convoys to make it to the area by Monday.

The ICRC said its priority, with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, is to bring assistance to 500,000 people living in besieged or difficult to reach areas, such as Madaya, Zabadani, Foua and Kefraya.

“Almost 42,000 people remaining in Madaya are at risk of further hunger and starvation. The UN has received credible reports of people dying from starvation and being killed while trying to leave. On 5 January 2016, a 53- year old man reportedly died of starvation while his family of five continues to suffer from severe malnutrition,” a UN statement said on Thursday.

The UN said it had government permission to access Kefraya and Foah in the north of the country besieged by rebel forces while Madaya and Zabadani are besieged by government forces.

Up to 4.5 million people in Syria live in hard-to-reach areas, including nearly 400,000 people in 15 besieged locations who do not have access to the life-saving aid they urgently need.

Medicins Sans Frontieres, (MSF), called the noose around Madaya, “a total stranglehold siege.” It said, “Around 20,000 residents of the town are facing life-threatening deprivation of the basics for survival, and 23 patients in the health centre supported by MSF have died of starvation since December 1. MSF welcomes reports that the Syrian government will allow food supplies into the area, but urges that an immediate life-saving delivery of medicine across the siege line should also be a priority, and calls for sick patients to be allowed urgent medical evacuation to safe places of treatment.”

Of the 23 people who died, said MSF, six were under one-year old, five were over 60, and the other 12 were between five and 60. It said this shows the situation is affecting all age-groups.

The last aid trucks took in medical and humanitarian supplies to the village in October, and then some people were evacuated in December but there has been no new humanitarian access since despite repeated requests.

“Up to 4.5 million people in Syria live in hard-to-reach areas including nearly 400,000 people in 15 besieged locations who do not have access to the life-saving aid they urgently need,” said the U.N. statement. “The ongoing conflict continues to hamper the humanitarian response and freedom of movement is restricted by the presence of armed actors and landmines.”

The new head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, said on Thursday that with record numbers of refugees and displaced people worldwide there needs to be greater diplomatic effort to find solutions to conflicts and abuses driving people from their homes.

“UNHCR is navigating extraordinarily difficult waters,” said Filippo Grandi at his debut press conference after taking office on January 1. “We owe it first and foremost to the forcibly displaced themselves, but we also owe it to States…States are desperately looking for solutions to situations involving refugees,” he declared, and stressed: “Even under more desperate circumstances we have to think of solving displacement.”

Grandi stressed that countries which host especially large numbers of refugees, such as Lebanon, now home to over one million Syrians, need better help. He also highlighted resettlement, humanitarian visas and family reunification as tools which can allow refugees to find safety in other countries, “not through trafficking but by what we call legal pathways.”

Aid agencies are stretched with no respite in the streams of people leaving conflict areas and seeking assistance. WFP said on Wednesday that it has sufficient funding to provide food assistance to 526,000 vulnerable Syrian refugees in Jordan for the first five months of the current year.

“This is the first time since December 2013 when we managed to receive enough funding to secure assistance over the next five months,” said Shaza Moghraby, WFP’s spokesperson in Jordan.

(End)

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A local small farmer, Rosineide Maciel, watches the road improvement works on highway BR-163, which runs past her house in Itaituba municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
MIRITITUBA, Brazil , Jan 8 2016 (IPS)

The BR-163 highway, an old dream of the Brazilian military to colonise the Amazon jungle, was revived by agroexporters as part of a plan aimed at cutting costs by shipping soy out of river ports. But the improvement of the road has accentuated problems such as deforestation and land tenure, and is fuelling new social conflicts.

The 350-km stretch of road between the cities of Miritituba and Santarem in the northern Brazilian state of Pará look nothing like the popular image of a lush Amazon rainforest, home to some of the greatest biodiversity in the world.

Between the two port terminals – in Santarém, where the Tapajós and Amazon Rivers converge, and in Miritituba on the banks of the Tapajós River – are small scattered groves of trees surrounded by endless fields of soy and pasture.

Cattle grazing peacefully or resting under the few remaining trees, taking shelter from the high temperatures exacerbated by the deforestation, are the only species of mammal in sight.“A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land.” – Mauricio Torres

“When we came here 30 years ago this was all jungle,” local small farmer Rosineide Maciel told IPS as she and her family stood watching a bulldozer flatten a stretch of the BR-163 highway in front of their modest dwelling.

Maciel doesn’t miss the days when, along with thousands of other Brazilian migrants, she was drawn here by the then-military government’s (1964-1985) offer of land, part of a strategy to colonise the Amazon rainforest.

Thanks to the paving of the highway that began in 2009, it takes less time to transport her cassava and rice to the town of Rurópolis, 200 km from her farm.

“It’s been easier since they improved the road,” she said. “In the past, there were so many potholes on the way to Rurópolis, and in the wet season it took us three days because of the mud.”

BR-163, built in the 1970s, had become practically impassable. The road links Cuiabá, the capital of the neighbouring state of Mato Grosso – the country’s main soy and corn producer and exporter – with the river port city of Santarém.

Of the highway’s 1,400 kilometres, where traffic of trucks carrying tons of soy and maize is intense, some 200 km have yet to be paved, and a similar number of kilometres of the road are full of potholes.

Accidents occur on a daily basis, caused in the dry season by the red dust thrown up on the stretches that are still dirt, and in the wet season by the mud.

But compared to how things were in the past, it is a paradise for the truckers who drive the route at least five times a month during harvest time.

Truck driver Pedro Gomes from the north of the state of Mato Grosso told IPS: “When soy began to come to Santarém, three years ago, sometimes the drive took me 10 to 15 days. Today we do it in three days, if there’s no rain.”

The BR-163 highway runs up to the entrance of the port terminal built in Santarém by U.S. commodities giant Cargill, where the company loads soy and other grains to ship down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean, and from there to big markets like China and Europe.

This and other ports built or planned by different companies in Santarém, Miritituba and Barcarena – in Belem, the capital of Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon River – are part of a logistics infrastructure which, along with the paving of the highway, seeks to reduce the costs of land and maritime transport in northern Brazil.

The river ports and the road improvement have nearly cut in half the transport distance for truck traffic from Mato Grosso, which is around 2,000 km from the congested ports in the southeast, such as Santos in the state of São Paulo or Paranaguá in Paraná.

The Mato Grosso Soy Producers Association estimates the transport savings at 40 dollars a ton.

“Shipping out of ports in the north like Santarém has boosted competitiveness,” José de Lima, director of planning for the city of Santarém, told IPS. “BR-163 is a key export corridor that was very much needed by the country and the region.”

But the country’s agroexport model has many critics.

Road works on highway BR-163 in Itaituba municipality in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

With the soy production boom in Pará, illegal occupations of land have expanded and property prices have soared.

“The paving of BR-163 has heated up the land market,” Mauricio Torres, at the Federal University of Western Pará (UFOPA), told IPS. “As this is happening in a region where illegal possession of land is so widespread and where there is no land-use zoning, it generates a series of social and environmental conflicts.”

This, in turn, has driven deforestation.

“Forests are cut down not only for agriculture but to make fraudulent land claims. A common phrase heard in the area along the BR-163 is ‘whoever deforests, owns the land’ – in other words, deforestation has become an illegal instrument for seizing public land,” he said.

In 2006, the government launched a sustainable development plan for BR-163, aimed at reducing the socioenvironmental impacts caused by the paving of the road, by means of self-sustaining projects for local communities.

“But this pretty much just petered out,” UFOPA chancellor Raimunda Nogueira explained to IPS.

“If the communities along BR-163 are not strengthened, they will undergo a radical transformation,” she said. “For example, land prices are skyrocketing and small farmers are selling out, which accentuates the phenomenon of the latifundio (large landed estates).”

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon became more widespread in the 1960s, driven by the expansion of cattle ranching and the timber industry.

However, that did not leave the land completely free of vegetation, according to Nogueira, because subsistence farming “maintained different levels of regeneration of the forest.”

“When the big agricultural producers came in, they cleared all of those areas in the stage of regeneration that maintained a certain equilibrium,” said the chancellor, who estimates that around 120,000 hectares of land have been deforested to make way for soy.

Torres, meanwhile, referred to the emergence of other social problems like prostitution, involving minors as well as adults.

“There are towns in Pará that could turn into huge brothels for truck drivers,” he said.

The residents of Campo Verde, a town of around 6,000 people located 30 km from Miritituba, who depend on the production of palm hearts and on sawmills for a living, have started to feel the effects.

The town is located near the intersection of BR-163 and the 4,000-km Trans-Amazonian highway that cuts across northern Brazil.

“Only soy is going to come through here,” Celeste Ghizone, a community organiser in the town, told IPS. “An average of 1,500 trucks are expected to pass through every day. Just think of how many accidents we’re going to have with all of these truck drivers who drive through like mad men without even slowing down,” he said, adding that he is worried about rising crime and drug abuse rates.

When the improvement of BR-163 – including widening it to a four-lane highway along one major stretch – is completed, an estimated 20 million tons of grains (Mato Grosso currently produces 42 million tons) will be shipped northward to Amazon River ports rather than on the longer routes to ports in the southeast, by 2020.

The dream of agribusiness corporations is to continue expanding the soy corridor, by building a railway to Miritituba.

But Torres complained that “It’s important to stress that a paved BR-163 is not local infrastructure but is for the big soy producers of Mato Grosso. The state of Pará will become merely a transport corridor for soy exports.”

Edited by Verónica Firme/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

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