France Cited As Having Great Resposibility For Rwanda Massacre

 

FRANCE

The Stupid Defense

A commission of historians said that France bears “heavy and overwhelming responsibilities” over its role in the 1994 Rwandan genocide but cleared it of complicity in the massacre, the Associated Press reported.

In a report released over the weekend, the commission found in a two-year investigation that the government of then-President Francois Mitterrand reacted too slowly to genocide because it realized too late the extent of the slaughter that killed at least 800,000.

However, it ruled out any “complicity in genocide,” including accusations that France sent weapons to Rwanda after the start of genocide.

President Emmanuel Macron established the commission in May 2019, saying the inquiry is aimed at improving relations with Rwanda and other African nations that have questioned France’s role in the massacre.

It’s unclear to what extent will the report improve relations between the two nations but the Rwandan government hailed the report as “an important step toward a common understanding of France’s role in the genocide.”

There Are Two Congos Now

 

REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

President Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Republic of Congo, sometimes called Congo-Brazzaville to distinguish it from the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, recently purchased an arsenal of weapons from Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic.

The president’s critics fear that the more than 500 tons of weapons that he purchased, including 775 mortar shells and more than 400 cases of truck-mounted rockets, will be used to tighten his grip on power, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project reported. Similar Azerbaijani arms shipments helped him crack down on protesters who argued that he rigged the vote to win reelection in 2016.

They are watching to see if there is a repeat performance.

Citizens of the Republic of Congo head to the polls on March 21 to elect a new president. Sassou-Nguesso, 77, is almost certainly to win office because the vote will be a sham, argued Financial Times columnist Neil Munshi, who noted that the president changed the electoral law in 2015 to remove a 70-year-old age limit on candidates.

Sassou-Nguesso is called the “emperor” because he has held office for a total of 36 years that does not include a period between 1992 and 1997, noted the Africa Report. In those five years, former President Pascal Lissouba, the first democratically elected president of the republic, ruled until Sassou-Nguesso ousted him in a civil war.

Now, many including the Catholic Church have sounded alarm bells with its leaders saying they had “serious reservations” about the elections because of coronavirus prohibitions to stop the spread of the virus as well as questions about the integrity of the election system.

And the weapon purchases likely angered many Congo-Brazzaville voters. As France 24 explained, the country possesses vast resources even as many areas lack power – the country has a vibrant oil industry that includes massive multinational companies reaping billions in profits. Sassou-Nguesso has promised to build a new refinery to satisfy demand, Africa News added. He doesn’t say much about electricity, though.

Unemployment and low pay are other issues plaguing the country.

Meanwhile, overfishing has forced local fishermen to capture sharks to sell to Asian companies that prize shark fins for soup, the BBC wrote. But now fishermen are catching fewer sharks, too, having misused this resource.

These challenges are one reason why opposition leader Mathias Dzon, who was finance minister under Sassou-Nguesso from 1997-2002, believes the country needs change. “Sassou will be sanctioned at the ballot box,” said Dzon in an interview with Deutsche Welle.

That’s not likely, observers say.

Even so, many hope Sassou-Nguesso didn’t order those weapons because he was similarly pessimistic about the vote.

Kidnappings Are "Business As Usual" In Nigeria

 

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Good Morning, today is March 12, 2021.

NEED TO KNOW NIGERIA Suffer the Children Bandits recently released 279 Nigerian girls kidnapped recently from their school in Zamfara, a state in the country’s northwest. The kidnappers had forced the girls to march in the forest, beating them and threatening to shoot them if they stopped, Sky News wrote. “Alhamdulillah! (God be praised!) It gladdens my heart to announce the release of the abducted students,” Zamfara Governor Bello Matawalle wrote on Twitter, the Associated Press reported. “I enjoin all well-meaning Nigerians to rejoice with us as our daughters are now safe.” These children are safe. For now. Others are not. In this case, officials claimed they did not pay ransoms in exchange for the girls’ freedom. The kidnappers do not appear to be connected to Boko Haram, the Islamic State-affiliated militant group that abducted 276 girls from a school in Chibok in 2014. More than 100 of those girls remain missing. Regardless, one would think that Nigerians would be happy the girls are now free. Instead, a riot broke out soon after officials brought the girls to their parents, Reuters reported. Nigerians are sick and tired of such incidents. Three mass kidnappings have occurred in the region since December. Late last year, gunmen took 300 schoolboys. Most are now free, the BBC reported. Last month, at least 27 students were abducted and later released, Reuters reported. Kidnappings are part of Nigerian life. Variety magazine wrote about how the country’s movie industry, called Nollywood, produces films like “The Milkmaid,” which tells the tale of a sister’s search for her missing, kidnapped sibling, for example. Nigeria’s boarding schools in the remote northern section of the West African nation have become lucrative hunting grounds for armed bands, the New York Times explained. The government has paid $18 million in ransoms from mid-2011 to March 2020 to release victims, according to a Nigerian intelligence report cited in the newspaper. Corrupt government officials have skimmed from those payments, too. A cycle of poverty, violence, kidnapping, ransoms and corruption have gripped northern Nigeria, argued Wall Street Journal reporter Joe Parkinson, who wrote a recent book on the Chibok kidnappings, in an interview with National Public Radio. In an op-ed in USA Today, Parkinson and his co-author, Wall Street Journal Reporter Drew Hinshaw, added that foreign drones, special forces and other expensive resources deployed to find the Chibok girls never worked. Kidnapping is a fast-growing part of the Nigerian economy that doesn’t necessarily have a military solution, in other words. Some think developing the region and providing jobs to these would-be abductors who have taken a page from the militants’ playbook might work. Others say a heavy military presence in the region is the solution. Changing the culture of corruption is an idea tossed into the mix. Regardless, most are sure that the latest kidnappings of children in an isolated part of Nigeria are far from the last.

Egypt-5,000 Year Old Beer Factory

 

Funeral Beer

Ancient Egyptians loved beer so much they developed large factories to mass-produce it, according to a recent find.

An American-Egyptian team discovered what could be the world’s oldest known beer factory, dating back about 5,000 years, the BBC reported.

Located in the ancient burial ground of Abydos, the ancient factory had a production capacity of about 5,000 gallons of beer, archeologists believe. It comprised eight large areas, each 65 feet long and each containing about 40 earthenware pots used to heat a mixture of grain and water to make beer.

Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the old brewery dates back to the era of King Narmer, who ruled more than 5,000 years ago.

Narmer was responsible for the unification of Egypt and for founding the First Dynasty.

The ministry said in a statement that the old brewery “may have been built in this place specifically to supply the royal rituals that were taking place inside the funeral facilities of the kings of Egypt.”

While beer was important for funerary and sacrificial rites, it was also the perfect treat – and pay – for the workers that assembled the large pyramids, archeologist Patrick McGovern told Smithsonian Magazine in 2011.

“The pyramids might not have been built if there hadn’t been enough beer,” he said.

Violence In The Democratic Republic Of The Congo

 

DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

Wave of Violence

Italy’s ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and two other people were killed Monday during an attack on a humanitarian convoy, the latest incident in a wave of violence in the country’s east, the New York Times reported.

Ambassador Luca Attanasio and the other two victims were traveling north to a food initiative at a school as part of a United Nations convoy before they were ambushed by unknown gunmen.

The World Food Program said the attack “occurred on a road that had previously been cleared for travel without security escorts.”

Italian officials offered their condolences for the diplomat’s death, and Congo’s government vowed to find the perpetrators.

The killings occurred in the North Kivu province near the border with Rwanda, an area known as a hotbed for violent activity by dozens of armed groups.

The province’s governor, Carly Nzanzu Kasivita, said that initial investigations suggested that the attackers spoke Kinyarwanda, an official language in Rwanda.

Authorities suspect that the attack might have been perpetrated by members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, a rebel group with links to the 1994 genocide in that country.

The attack comes amid a wave of violence in the area in recent weeks, including a deadly attack by a different militia in Virunga National Park that left six people dead last month.

South Africa-Division, Disease, And Doubt

 

SOUTH AFRICA

Division, Disease and Doubts

South Africa was going to launch a massive campaign to inject its citizens with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. But researchers discovered that the vaccine wouldn’t prevent the spread of the country’s variant of the coronavirus. So, as the Associated Press reported, those plans had to be scrapped.

Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine might not be as effective against the South African variant as it is against other versions of the virus either, according to studies cited in a Reuters story. South Africa is therefore pinning its hopes on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, CNN wrote. It’s the first country to approve the use of the drug.

Meanwhile, of course, the pandemic continues to ravage the country, one of the hardest hit on the African continent.

Lee McCabe lost both his parents only a few weeks before the government rolled out the Johnson & Johnson inoculations. He had placed them in a cottage on his property to keep them safe. But they insisted on going home. Somewhere in between they caught COVID-19 and died.

“Maybe if we didn’t let them go home, they’d still be around,” McCabe told CBS News. “If this [a vaccine] arrived a few months earlier, their lives would have been saved. That makes me angry, because I feel that we have delayed so long in getting much needed help to people that need it.”

To many South Africans, there is a discrepancy between wealthy countries that can harness their formidable medical research infrastructure to care for their citizens and others that must scramble to survive the smacks of Apartheid, the racist system of segregation that South Africans overthrew in the early 1990s.

Thabo Cecil Makgoba, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, evoked Apartheid when he spoke to the Intercept to publicly request that President Joe Biden allow South Africans to use the Moderna vaccine by waiving patent protections that now keep the country from administering it.

The legacy of Apartheid is also affecting public health efforts within South Africa. People celebrated when white-minority ruled ended. But governments since then have been corrupt and incompetent. Consider this Maverick piece on an alleged plan to defraud the South African police, for example.

Trust in officials is at a low, Agence France-Presse reported. Many people are skeptical of vaccines and hesitant to take them.

President Cyril Ramaphosa said he hoped South Africa could become self-reliant in manufacturing vaccines, according to Eyewitness News, a local outlet.

Self-reliance would certainly help the country’s efforts to fight the virus. But reaching that milestone is easier said than done.

A Big Kidnapping In Nigeria

 

NIGERIA

A Terrible Routine

Unknown gunmen kidnapped 42 people, including 27 students during an attack on a boarding school in north-central Nigeria Wednesday in what has become a terrible routine for Africa’s most populous nation, Reuters reported.

The attackers stormed the institution in the Kagara district in Niger state overnight, killing one student in the attack.

President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack and sent security chiefs to coordinate rescue operations.

Northern states have been plagued by such kidnappings by armed groups for years, and it remains unclear who perpetrated the latest abduction.

The Islamist Boko Haram group is known for carrying out similar kidnappings in the past, including the 2014 abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok. About 100 kidnapped girls remain missing to this day.

The latest kidnapping comes two months after gunmen abducted nearly 350 boys in the northwestern Katsina state. The boys were later rescued by the security forces.

Buhari’s government has been criticized for its handling of national security amid rising insecurity and kidnappings in the country.

In January, the president appointed a new military high command.