Chadian rebels fighting a hit-and-run guerrilla war against President Idriss Déby Itno said on Monday that failure to clinch a deal at peace talks in Tripoli would mean a return to all-out hostilities. Libya brokered the talks to try to end an insurgency by a coalition of rebels fighting government forces in eastern Chad.
Child soldiers are still being recruited in at least 13 countries from Afghanistan to Uganda, 10 years after international guidelines were agreed to eradicate their use, a British-based charity said on Monday. Save the Children said hundreds of thousands of under-age soldiers are being forced to fight around the world despite guidelines laid down in the Cape Town Principles in 1997.
Unions in Guinea said they were ready to resume negotiations on Wednesday to end a crippling general strike after days of violent clashes around the West African country in which at least 40 people have been killed. Union chiefs say President Lansana Conte, a reclusive, chain-smoking diabetic in his 70s, is unfit to rule and are demanding he step aside.
More than 20 people were killed in Guinea on Monday in clashes between protesters and security forces who opened fire on the most violent day of a two-week general strike against President Lansana Conte. Authorities arrested union leaders in a bid to break the crippling strike that unions had called against the ageing Conte, saying he was unfit to rule.
Bourama Soumaoro’s pharmacy looks much like any other, packets of pills in glass cabinets and jars of powder to fight everything from toothache to dysentery. But nowhere in the doctor’s small shop in Mali’s capital Bamako is there a chemically manufactured drug.
It seems an unlikely place for Mali’s president to seek advice in times of crisis. A simple family compound in a bustling working class neighbourhood, where barefoot children compete with goats and belching mopeds for space to play on the dusty streets. But this is no ordinary family.
A benign global economy, debt relief and progress with structural reforms give Africa a rare opportunity to accelerate economic growth, the deputy head of the IMF said on Friday. John Lipsky said the continent should seize the opportunity to push through more economic reform.
Researchers in Timbuktu are fighting to preserve tens of thousands of ancient texts which they say prove Africa had a written history at least as old as the European Renaissance. Private and public libraries in the fabled Saharan town in Mali have already collected 150 000 brittle manuscripts, some of them from the 13th century.
