Never Be Silent

From the World Food Programme, excerpt:

DUNGU — Dieudonné Nzatala hugged the son he’d given up for dead and wept. Children taken by the LRA are rarely seen again. If children do return, they are often mentally and spiritually damaged. Many are forced to bear arms, rape, loot and kill. The young girls usually come back pregnant. Dieudonné, his wife and their four remaining children held an impromptu funeral for 17-year-old Dagumba.

On Monday, Dieudonné was in the WFP warehouse beside the Dungu airstrip doing some book-keeping. As he prepared to update his numbers, a Ugandan military helicopter landed and a group of soldiers climbed out. They were accompanied by four young people they had freed from the LRA. The three young males were kidnapped months ago to be used as slave labour. The young girl was used as a sex slave.

From AP, excerpt:

KAMPALA, Uganda – A top suspect wanted for orchestrating the killings of thousands of people in Rwanda’s 1994 genocide — including children, hospital patients, priests and even an elderly and revered African queen — has been captured, police said Tuesday.

Former Rwanda Deputy Intelligence Chief Idelphonse Nizeyimana was arrested Monday in Uganda, police said, under an indictment from the Rwanda war crimes tribunal on charges of genocide, complicity in genocide, and direct and public incitement to commit genocide in the systematic slaughter of more than 500,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 100 days in 1994.

Until last week, Nizeyimana was believed to have hidden in the jungles of eastern Congo, where he belonged to a militia called the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, or FDLR, that continues to commit atrocities. The Rwandan militia, made up of Hutus, is accused of having killed at least 1,000 civilians this year, including rampaging through a village and throwing children into a fire, human rights groups said.

The United States had offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Nizeyimana

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon welcomed Nizeyimana’s arrest and called on all countries to continue to cooperate fully with the Rwanda tribunal, U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said.

Gregory Alex, who heads a U.N. team tasked with demobilizing rebels in Congo and repatriating them to Rwanda, told The Associated Press the capture was a major coup.

“He’s important not only for his continuing role in the FDLR in the Congo but also for his role during the genocide in Rwanda,” Alex said. “He is known for having spoken openly of the ‘work’ he conducted during the genocide. He is someone who has actually admitted that he is a genocide organizer and executor.”

A chilling, 23-page indictment from the Rwanda war crimes court alleges Nizeyimana was de facto head of Rwanda’s Senior Military Training College during the 1994 genocide, ordering entire Tutsi families to be slaughtered and giving grenades and transport to militiamen. He ordered roadblocks set up in Rwanda’s province of Butare, where Tutsis and Hutus had lived amicably together and where the genocide started later than in the rest of the country, the indictment said. At the roadblocks, Tutsis were identified by their ID cards and killed.

From the ONE Campaign blog, in its entirety:

I just came across the story of Captain Benjamin A. Sklaver, a 32-year-old Army reservist who was killed while serving in Afghanistan. Benjamin Sklaver was also the founder of a nonprofit called the ClearWater Initiative based out of New Haven, Connecticut.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Captain Sklaver’s family, and I wanted to be sure to make all of our readers aware of the ClearWater Initiative. According to remarks posted on the organization’s website:

A 1999 graduate of Tufts University, [Benjamin Sklaver] went on to obtain a graduate degree in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School, also at Tufts. He took a particular interest in assisting refugees and the poor in Africa. During his studies at the Fletcher School, he volunteered for the Army Reserve and following completion of his degree, he served with the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta in that agency’s International Emergency and Refugee Health Branch.

While on active duty with the army in Africa, Ben spent considerable time in northern Uganda, where he was shocked to learn of the chronic health concerns affecting children, pregnant women, and others in the region’s small villages stemming from the lack of clean water. During his deployment in Uganda, he worked to improve access to safe water and upon his return to the U.S. he founded the non-profit charity Clearwater Initiative in order to continue that work.

Since its establishment just two years ago, ClearWater has provided more than 6,500 people with clean, sustainable drinking water, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what the Initiative plans to accomplish.

Please take a few minutes to read more about the ClearWater Initiative here.

From allAfrica.com, excerpt:

Lagos — More condemnations at the weekend, greeted the recent killing and alleged rape of women by the military in Conakry stadium, Guinea, with a call for an international commission of inquiry to probe the immediate and remote causes of the protest, following allegations that the head of the military junta, Captain Moussa Dais Camara, was planning to contest the presidential election in the country, scheduled for January, 2010.

The protest, which followed repeated assurances by Camara that he would organise the presidential elections, without participating in it, however, led to the condemnation of the actions of the military by the Women Advocates Research and Documentation Centre (WARDC), Lagos, and Justice, Development and Peace Commission (JDPC), Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, in the wake of the protest by Guinean nationals.

In a statement jointly signed by the Executive Director of WARDC, Abiola Afolabi-Akiyode and JDPC Director, Rev. Fr Patrick Ngoyi, “demanded that the capital city and the entire country be demilitarized for peace to reign.”

“We believe that the military junta cannot investigate the murders carried out by his men without being partial. It is unfortunate that this repressive act took place at a time when the international community, human rights institutions and government institutions in Africa are trying to eliminate all forms of discriminations against women and encourage their political participation using instruments such as the Campaign against all Forms of Discriminations Against Women (CEDAW), International Violence Against Women Act (I-VAWA) among others,” the statement stressed.

The two groups further stated that “an international commission of enquiry be set up to examine the evidence of crimes against humanity and other violation of international human laws including rape and murder as well as bringing the perpetrators of the attack on civilians, including sexual violence against women, to justice in trial that meets international standards of fairness.”

I get to share good news! From CNN, an editorial about the initiatives undertaken on the island of Zanzibar to eradicate malaria. Excerpt:

ZANZIBAR, Tanzania — I recently accompanied Margaret Chan, Director General of the WHO, and Ray Chambers, U.N. Special Envoy for Malaria, on a trip to Africa to see firsthand the region’s fight against malaria.

The single most memorable image of the trip was from a pediatric hospital ward on the Tanzanian island of Zanzibar: a dozen beds and not a single patient in them. Imagine that.

I have searing memories of visiting wards much like this elsewhere in the world where there were as many as three children to a bed and more sleeping on the floor, deathly ill with malaria.

Where have all the patients gone? After all, malaria is a big killer in much of the developing world. It is probably the most prevalent disease that mankind has ever suffered.

Each year, there are over 250 million cases and almost one million deaths — most of them young children, and the vast majority in Africa.

But in many countries, malaria is also a success story. Since 2000, the number of reported malaria cases, deaths, or both has declined by at least half in 25 countries. Zanzibar — a relatively small but striking example — has virtually eliminated the disease over the past five years. These successes show what a combination of political will, technical resources, and financial commitment can do when applied to a strategy that works.