Burundi Frees 1,300 Prisoners Under Presidential Pardon

Prisoners released in January 2018.

Burundi on Monday freed some 1,300 prisoners in the first stage of a presidential pardon aimed at emptying overcrowded jails in the East African nation, the country's justice minister said.

Nearly 1,000 prisoners were released from a jail in Bujumbura at a ceremony attended by President Evariste Ndayishimiye, government ministers and foreign ambassadors. Another 331 inmates were discharged in the capital Gitega.

They were the first among some 3,000 detainees the government has promised to imminently release, with another 2,000 receiving sentence cuts that will allow them to walk free in coming weeks.

"This is the first time in our country that nearly 5,000 detainees have benefited from a presidential pardon," said Justice Minister Jeanine Nibizi.

The government announced in March plans to release 5,255 inmates -- a figure amounting to some 40 percent of Burundi's estimated 13,200 prisoners, civil society groups said.

The country's prisons have a capacity of 4,100.

In his presidential decree at the time, Ndayishimiye said he was "convinced that an exceptional measure of clemency is needed to de-congest prisons and improve conditions of detention."

Those convicted of corruption, and prisoners serving sentences of up to five years, were slated for release. Certain exceptions were made, including cases involving participation in an armed group or threatening national security.

"It is a good thing, even if the prisons remain crowded... I only regret that political prisoners have not benefited from this presidential pardon," Pierre Claver Mbonimpa, president of Aprodeh, an organization for the protection of inmates, told AFP.

One foreign diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said it was a "gesture in the right direction" and followed the release of four journalists in December detained for a year on charges rights groups condemned as baseless.

Ndayishimiye was elected in May last year, raising hopes that the iron-fisted and repressive state would open up, which have since been dashed.

He succeeded the late president Pierre Nkurunziza, whose insistence on a third term in office in 2015 plunged the country into a serious and prolonged political crisis marked by summary executions, disappearances, arbitrary arrests and torture of dissidents.

 

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Chad President Idriss Deby has died: Army spokesman

President Idriss Deby, who won a 6th term on Monday, has died of injuries suffered on the frontline, an army spokesman said.

 

The 68-year-old son of a herder was one of the longest-serving leaders in Africa [File: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images]

Chad’s President Idriss Deby has died of injuries suffered on the frontline in the Sahel country’s north, where he had gone to visit soldiers battling rebels, an army spokesman said on Tuesday.

Deby, 68, “has just breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield” over the weekend, army spokesman General Azem Bermandoa Agouna said in a statement read out on state television.

The army said Deby had been commanding his army at the weekend as it battled against rebels who had launched a major incursion into the north of the country on election day.

The army said a military council led by the late president’s 37-year-old son Mahamat Idriss Deby, a four-star general, would replace him. A curfew has been imposed and the country’s borders have been shut in the wake of the sudden death of the president, army said.

The shock announcement came a day after Deby, who came to power in a rebellion in 1990, won a sixth term, as per provisional results released on Monday. Deby took 79.3 percent of the vote in the April 11 presidential election, the results showed.

 

Deby postponed his victory speech to supporters and instead went to visit Chadian soldiers battling rebels, according to his campaign manager.

The rebel group Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), which is based across the northern frontier with Libya, attacked a border post in the provinces of Tibesti and Kanem on election day and then advanced hundreds of kilometres south.

But it suffered a setback over the weekend.

Chad’s military spokesman Agouna told the Reuters news agency that army troops killed more than 300 fighters and captured 150 on Saturday in Kanem province, around 300 kilometres (185 miles) from the capital Ndjamena.

Five government soldiers were killed and 36 were injured, he said.

Relished the military culture

Deby was a herder’s son from the Zaghawa ethnic group who took the classic path to power through the army, and relished the military culture.

His latest election victory had never been in doubt, with a divided opposition, boycott calls, and a campaign in which demonstrations were banned or dispersed.

Deby had campaigned on a promise of bringing peace and security to the region, but his pledges were undermined by the rebel incursion.

 

The army said a military council led by the late president’s 37-year-old son Mahamat Idriss Deby, a four-star general, would replace him [File: Marco Longari/AFP]

The government had sought on Monday to assure concerned residents that the offensive was over.

There had been panic in some areas of Ndjamena on Monday after tanks were deployed along the city’s main roads, an AFP journalist reported. The tanks were later withdrawn apart from a perimeter around the president’s office, which is under heavy security during normal times.

“The establishment of a security deployment in certain areas of the capital seems to have been misunderstood,” government spokesman Cherif Mahamat Zene had said on Twitter on Monday.

“There is no particular threat to fear.”

However, the US embassy in Ndjamena had on Saturday ordered non-essential personnel to leave the country, warning of possible violence in the capital. Britain also urged its nationals to leave.

France’s embassy said in an advisory to its nationals in Chad that the deployment was a precaution and there was no specific threat to the capital.

The group, FACT, has a non-aggression pact with Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman who controls much of Libya’s east.

FACT, a group mainly made up of the Saharan Goran people, said in a statement on Sunday that it had “liberated” the Kanem region. Such claims in remote desert combat zones are difficult to verify.

The Tibesti mountains near the Libyan frontier frequently see fighting between rebels and the army, as well as in the northeast bordering Sudan. France carried out air raids in February 2019 to stop an incursion there.

In February 2008, a rebel assault reached the gates of the presidential palace before being pushed back with French backing.

 

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France ‘enabled’ 1994 Rwanda genocide, report says

Study commissioned by Rwandan gov’t alleges France ‘did nothing’ to prevent ‘foreseeable’ April and May 1994 massacres.

 

An estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in the genocide [File: Baz Ratner/Reuters]

The French government bears “significant” responsibility for “enabling a foreseeable genocide,” a report commissioned by the Rwandan government concludes about France’s role before and during the horror in which an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered in 1994.

The report, which The Associated Press has read, comes amid efforts by Rwanda to document the role of French authorities before, during and after the genocide, part of the steps taken by France’s President Emmanuel Macron to improve relations with the Central African country.

The 600-page report says that France “did nothing to stop” the massacres, in April and May 1994, and in the years after the genocide tried to cover up its role and even offered protection to some perpetrators.

It is to be made public later on Monday after its formal presentation to Rwanda’s Cabinet.

It concludes that in years leading up to the genocide, former French President Francois Mitterrand and his administration had knowledge of preparations for the massacres – yet kept supporting the government of then-Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana despite the “warning signs.”

“The French government was neither blind nor unconscious about the foreseeable genocide,” the authors stress.

The Rwandan report comes less than a month after a French report, commissioned by Macron, concluded that French authorities had been “blind” to the preparations for genocide and then reacted too slowly to appreciate the extent of the killings and to respond to them.

It concluded that France had “heavy and overwhelming responsibilities” by not responding to the drift that led to the slaughter that killed mainly ethnic Tutsis and the moderate Hutus who tried to protect them. Groups of extremist Hutus carried out the killings.

‘A common understanding of the past’

The two reports, with their extensive even if different details, could mark a turning point in relations between the two countries.

Rwanda, a small but strategic country of 13 million people, is “ready” for a “new relationship” with France, Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Vincent Biruta told AP.

“Maybe the most important thing in this process is that those two commissions have analysed the historical facts, have analysed the archives which were made available to them and have come to a common understanding of that past,” he said. “From there we can build this strong relationship.”

The Rwandan report, commissioned in 2017 from the Washington law firm of Levy Firestone Muse, is based on a wide range of documentary sources from governments, non-governmental organisations and academics including diplomatic cables, documentaries, videos and news articles.

The authors also said they interviewed more than 250 witnesses.

In the years before the genocide, “French officials armed, advised, trained, equipped, and protected the Rwandan government, heedless of the Habyarimana regime’s commitment to the dehumanisation and, ultimately, the destruction and death of Tutsi in Rwanda,” the report charges.

French authorities at the time pursued “France’s own interests, in particular the reinforcement and expansion of France’s power and influence in Africa”.

In April and May 1994, at the height of the genocide, French officials “did nothing to stop” the massacres, says the report.

Operation Turquoise, a French-led military intervention backed by the United Nations which started on June 22, 1994, “came too late to save many Tutsi,” the report says.

Authors say they found “no evidence that French officials or personnel participated directly in the killing of Tutsi during that period”.

This finding echoes the conclusion of the French report that cleared France of complicity in the massacres, saying that “nothing in the archives” demonstrates a “willingness to join a genocidal operation”.

French gov’t ‘distorted the truth’

The Rwandan report also addressed the attitude of French authorities after the genocide.

Over the past 27 years, “the French government has covered up its role, distorted the truth, and protected” those who committed the genocide, it says.

The report suggests that French authorities made “little efforts” to send to trial those who committed the genocide. Three Rwandan nationals have been convicted of genocide so far in France.

It also strongly criticises the French government for not making public documents about the genocide.

The government of Rwanda notably submitted three requests for documents in 2019, 2020 and this year that the French government “ignored,” according to the report.

Under French law, documents regarding military and foreign policies can remain classified for decades.

But things may be changing, the Rwandan report says, mentioning “hopeful signs”.

On April 7, the day of commemoration of the genocide, Macron announced the decision to declassify and make accessible to the public the archives from 1990 to 1994 that belong to the French president and prime minister’s offices.

“Recent disclosures of documents in connection with the (French) report … may signal a move toward transparency,” authors of the Rwandan report said.

President Paul Kagame of Rwanda praised the report commissioned by Macron as “a good thing,” welcoming efforts in Paris to “move forward with a good understanding of what happened.”

Félicien Kabuga, a Rwandan long wanted for his alleged role in supplying machetes to the killers, was arrested outside Paris last May.

And in July an appeals court in Paris upheld a decision to end a years-long investigation into the plane crash that killed Habyarimana and set off the genocide.

That probe aggravated Rwanda’s government because it targeted several people close to Kagame for their alleged role, charges they denied.

Last week, a Rwandan priest was arrested in France for his alleged role in the genocide, which he denied.

 

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Religious freedom groups lament rising Nigerian persecution

Seven years after Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a majority Christian school in Chibok, Nigeria, U.S. religious freedom advocates are lamenting escalating religious persecution in the African country.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom noted the growing number of abductions of students and other residents by terrorists and bandits copying Boko Haram’s tactics.

“Nigerians have waited too long for the violence to stop,” Tony Perkins, vice chair of the commission, said April 14. “Seven years since the outrageous abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls, copycats are still popping up all over, taking inspiration from Boko Haram and other extremist groups. It is the Nigerian people who pay the price.”

600 students kidnapped since December

The commission noted the kidnappings of 600 students between December 2020 and March, compounded by “ongoing attacks against Christian communities, Muslim congregations and houses of worship.”

Amnesty International said Wednesday that kidnappings have forced the closure of hundreds of schools because of safety concerns, and that hundreds of children have been “killed, raped, forced into ‘marriages’ or forced to join Boko Haram.”

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom estimates about 10.5 million children between the ages of 5 and 14 are out of school in Nigeria because of the closures and violence.

Various Nigerian government officials are “apathetic and negligent,” Commissioner Frederick A. Davie said.

“Nigerian officials at all levels, from the president (Muhammadu Buhari) and federal officials to local governors, police commissioners and courts need to do more to prevent growing insecurity and hold accountable those who perpetrate violent acts,” Davie said.

He urged the U.S. government to ensure progress in Nigeria by leveraging the U.S. State Department’s December 2020 designation of Nigeria as a country of particular concern.

‘No lessons have been learned from the Chibok tragedy’

Osai Ojigho, director of Amnesty International Nigeria, said the failure of Nigerian authorities “shows that no lessons have been learned from the Chibok tragedy. The authorities’ only response to schoolchildren being targeted by insurgents and gunmen is to close schools, which is increasingly putting the right to education at risk.”

Seven years after the Chibok kidnapping, about 100 of the abducted girls remain missing, although others have escaped or been released. Leah Sharibu, kidnapped from her school in Dapchi in 2018, still is being held for refusing to denounce her Christian faith, although 104 students were released to their families. Five girls were killed in the kidnapping conducted by the Islamic State West Africa Province.

A series of kidnappings early this year in northwest Nigeria, which resulted in the death of Christian student Benjamin Habila, were blamed on loosely organized bandits copying Boko Haram.

But many terrorist groups, including Boko Haram, Boko Haram faction of the Islamic State West Africa Province and militant Fulani herdsmen are active in Nigeria’s northeast and Middle Belt.

Open Doors’ 2021 World Watch List designates Nigeria as the ninth most dangerous country for Christians, compared to its number 12 ranking on the 2020 list. From November 2019 to October 2020, more than 3,530 Nigerian Christians were killed for their faith, Open Doors said in its report.

Christians are abducted and killed while going about their daily lives. In one of the most recent attacks, Christians blame militant Fulani herdsmen for kidnapping eight members of the Redeemed Christian Church of God from the church bus as it traveled from Kaduna to Kafanchan in late March, Morning Star News reported.

 

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Over 7,200 Human Penises Shipped Out of Nigeria: What is Chinese Doing With Nigerian Penises?

Shocking as Chinese authorities seize 7,221 human penises on cargo ship from Nigeria’s Lagos. 

Former Minister of Aviation, Femi Fani-Kayode says a ship from Nigeria has been impounded while it was trying to smuggle 7, 200 penises into the Asian country.

 

A total of 7,221 penises of African origin have been seized by the Chinese customs officers in what has now been tagged the world’s biggest seizure of human organs in history.

The organs which were hidden in a refrigerated freight container were seized when the ship harboured in the Shanghai Port following information from an anonymous informer who alerted the Chinese authorities.

The organs were packed in 36 boxes labelled as ‘plantains’ inside the refrigerated container on a ship which transited from Lagos, Nigeria and ship’s crew consisting of four Nigerians, two Malians and two Cameronese now being detained.

Speaking on the seizure, the spokesman of the Chinese General Administration of Customs, Li Wu, says an increasingly large number of armed groups in Africa use organ trafficking to finance themselves, making such seizures predictable.

“These organs are common commodities now, but they were certainly harvested in unsanitary conditions or contaminated at some point, so we can’t let them out on the Chinese market.”

Mr. Li says the organs were shipped from Lagos in Nigeria but may have only transited through that country and could possibly originate from elsewhere in Africa.

“We know that penises from Lybia and Sudan fetch a higher price than those from other African war zones, but can’t presume of their origin before the end of the investigation.”

Describing the organ’s value as high as illegal drugs, he said that “specimens of this size” usually fetched around $160,000 each on the black market, and its total value was more than US$1.15 billion, adding that similar seizures may become more common over the next few years as armed groups in Africa turn to organ trafficking to finance their military operations.

Human penises were seized in nine cases since 2002, but today’s find represents more than four times the amount seized by customs officers over the past 18 years.

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Nigeria Medical Association apologises to Nigerians, patients over NARD strike

Nigerian Medical Association, NMA

Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) has apologised to Nigerians, especially patients at various government hospitals, over the strike embarked upon by the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD).

Dr Enema Amodu, the Chairman, NMA, Federal Capital Territory (FCT) chapter, made the plea on Sunday in Abuja while addressing newsmen over the NARD strike.

According to him, the association is sorry and wishes to apologise to Nigerians over the action.

The resident doctors embarked on strike on April 1 to press home their demand for upward review of their N5000 hazard allowance, payment of outstanding COVID-19 inducement allowance, among others.

He said “we are not insensitive; we hope that government and those in charge of the discussion with NARD will take it seriously, with a view to settling the issues at stake.

“To our patients, we are very sorry that you have to suffer this epileptic irregular healthcare service delivery; we have taken an oath to take care of you.

“But if a doctor is not in a sound state of mind and is not happy with what he or she is getting from the job, the doctor may not be in right frame of mind to discharge his or her duty right.

“And this will invariably affect you; by the time we get placed properly, renumeration and other welfare matters and facilities that we need to serve you, we will be able to serve you better with productive results,” he said.

He pleaded with all health workers, pharmacist, nurses, among others, to stop the incessant acrimony and disharmony among them.

 

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At Least 90 Dead, Dozens Missing In Indonesia Timor Floods

This handout photo taken on April 5, 2021 and released by Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management (BNPB) shows the aftermath of a flash flood in Lembata, East Flores, as dozens are missing after flash floods and landslides killed more than 70 people in Indonesia and neighbouring East Timor, while thousands fled to shelters after the disaster left them homeless. HANDOUT / Indonesian National Board for Disaster Management (BNPB) / AFP

 

Tropical cyclone Seroja pounded Indonesia and East Timor Monday after torrential rains triggered floods and landslides that have killed at least 91 people and left dozens missing.

Packing heavy winds and rain, the storm heaped more misery on the Southeast Asian nations after Sunday’s disaster turned small communities into wastelands of mud and uprooted trees and forced thousands of people into shelters.

Downpours are expected over the next day as the storm triggers offshore waves as high as six metres (20 feet), Indonesia’s disaster agency said.

The cyclone, which was picking up strength as it moved toward the west coast of Australia, hampered efforts to reach trapped survivors.

 

This handout photo taken on April 5, 2021 and released by the National Search and Rescue Agency (BASARNAS) shows rescuers looking for survivors in Nelemamadike village, East Flores, after torrential rains triggered floods and landslides in Indonesia and East Timor.
HANDOUT / NATIONAL SEARCH AND RESCUE AGENCY / AFP

 

Indonesia’s disaster agency said at least 70 people have been killed, with another 70 missings.

In East Timor, at least 21 people have been killed according to an official in the tiny half-island nation of 1.3 million that lies between Indonesia and Australia.

Many of the deaths were in East Timor’s inundated capital Dili, where the front of the presidential palace was transformed into a mud pit.

In Indonesia’s remote East Flores municipality, torrents of mud washed over homes, bridges, and roads.

Images from Indonesia’s search-and-rescue agency showed workers digging up mud-covered corpses before placing them in body bags.

On Lembata, an island east of Flores, parts of some villages were swept down a mountainside and carried to the shore of the ocean.

Soon after flash floods began tearing into resident Basir Langoday’s district in the early morning, he heard screams for help from a nearby home covered in rubble.

“There were four of them inside. Three survived but the other one didn’t make it,” he told reporters.

Langoday and his friends scrambled to try and save the trapped man before he was crushed to death.

“He said ‘hurry, I can’t hold on any longer,” Langoday added.

Juna Witak, another Lembata resident, joined his family at a local hospital where they wept over the corpse of his mother who was killed in a flash flood Sunday. Her body was found by the seashore.

“There was a rumbling sound and the floods swept away homes, everything,” Witak said.

– ‘Medicine, food, blankets’ –
Indonesian President Joko Widodo expressed “deepest condolences” over the devastation in the southeast end of the archipelago.

“I understand the deep sorrow suffered by our brothers and sisters because of this disaster,” he said in a nationwide address.

The European Union said it was ready to offer assistance to poverty-stricken East Timor, officially known as Timor-Leste.

“The catastrophic floods come at a time when Timor-Leste is working hard to contain the spread of Covid-19 among its population, putting a considerable additional strain both on resources and on the Timorese people,” the EU said.

Across the region, residents have flocked to temporary shelters or taken refuge in what was left of their homes.

“The evacuees are spread out. There are hundreds in each sub-district but many others are staying at home,” said Alfons Hada Bethan, head of the East Flores disaster agency.

“They need medicine, food, blankets.”

Some 2,500 people had been evacuated in East Timor, along with several thousand more in Indonesia.

Pounding rains challenged efforts to find any survivors.

“We suspect many people are buried but it’s not clear how many are missing,” Bethan said.

In Lembata, local officials were forced to deploy heavy equipment to reopen the roads.

Images from the island showed barefoot locals wading through mud and past collapsed houses to evacuate victims on makeshift stretchers.

Fatal landslides and flash floods are common across the Indonesian archipelago during the rainy season.

January saw flash floods hit the Indonesian town of Sumedang in West Java, killing 40 people.

And last September, at least 11 people were killed in landslides on Borneo.

The disaster agency has estimated that 125 million Indonesians — nearly half of the country’s population — live in areas at risk of landslides.

The disasters are often caused by deforestation, according to environmentalists.

 

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