Senegal’s Wade withdraws poll bill as protests rage
DAKAR (Reuters) – Senegal President Abdoulaye Wade backed down on a proposed change to the country’s election rules on Thursday, completely withdrawing a bill that sparked running clashes between riot police and protesters in the capital.
Wade’s rivals said the proposed change would have guaranteed his re-election against a fragmented opposition in a February poll and had threatened a popular uprising over it in a country long seen as an island of stability in West Africa.
Analysts said the reversal also showed how effectively the opposition and civil society groups could mobilize anti-Wade sentiment amid simmering social tensions in the country.
“The president received messages from far afield, especially our religious leaders, and, as a result, he called on me to withdraw the law,” Justice Minister Cheikh Tidiane Sy told the National Assembly.
Wade had earlier withdrawn a proposal to reduce from 50 to 25 percent the minimum score that a candidate would need to win next year’s election in the first round — a level Wade’s rivals said would have virtually assured him a first-round win against his fractured opposition.
But other clauses remained and, despite the concession, protesters and members of the security forces, using tear gas and water cannons, continued to clash in areas around the presidency and parliament.
Rubbish and several vehicles burned in the streets.
Ivorian artist paints as bullets whizz overhead
ABIDJAN (Reuters Life!) – While fighting raged on the streets outside his studio in Abidjan and stray bullets hissed through the air overhead, Ivorian artist Aboudia painted.
Only when the walls of his studio shook from the concussions of nearby explosions did Aboudia, 26, seek shelter in a basement.
“I was so afraid while I was painting all these tableaus,” he said, casting a glance over a collection of work created during the months of political upheaval in the West African nation since a disputed election last November.
“Some work was hard to finish, a lot of the paint is running, dripping. It’s not intentional, but it’s like fear or sweat, or tears — like my soul is crying,” said Aboudia, whose full name is Abdoulaye Diarrasouba.
His work over the past few months provides a haunting interpretation of the uncertainty and violence sweeping the country since incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to cede power after losing an election to his rival Alassane Ouattara.
The deadlock was broken when Gbagbo was arrested two weeks ago after French and United Nations forces attacked his military installations and residence.
U.N. defends role in Ivory Coast Gbagbo ouster
ABIDJAN (Reuters) – Ivory Coast’s Laurent Gbagbo was overthrown by Ivorians, not by foreign powers, the United Nations said on Thursday amid rising criticism of its role in the removal of the former leader.
Gbagbo was captured this week by forces loyal to internationally recognized President Alassane Ouattara — ending a bloody power struggle — but only after French and U.N. forces pounded Gbagbo’s heavy weapons stockpiles.
“The fundamental feeling is that (Gbagbo) failed to win the hearts and minds of the population here,” the U.N. mission chief in Ivory Coast, Y.J. Choi, told reporters in Abidjan. “He underestimated the will of the people, and the credit must go to the Ivorian people.”
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that U.N. peacekeepers had taken sides in the conflict in Ivory Coast and called this a “very dangerous tendency,” adding to criticisms by Gbagbo supporters that Ouattara is a patsy of the West.
France, the former colonial power in Ivory Coast, is also involved in Western military operations to destroy heavy weapons held by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, amid a rebellion there.
Ouattara won 54 percent of the vote in last November’s presidential election, according to U.N.-certified results, but Gbagbo rejected the outcome, claiming fraud in pro-Ouattara constituencies in the north.
Former rebels from the civil war of 2002-03 rallied to Ouattara’s side and swept into the main city Abidjan in late March, triggering more than a week of fierce fighting that turned the city once known as the Paris of West Africa into a war zone.
Hard-won progress seen in key Afghan battleground
KUNJAK, Afghanistan (Reuters) – U.S. Marines were exchanging heavy fire with insurgents during a recent battle in the southern Afghan town of Nabuk when a woman and child suddenly appeared from a Taliban gunner’s position.
“The Taliban were using them as screeners,” said Sergeant Thomas James Brennan, a platoon leader with the U.S. Marines.
“I’m glad we didn’t pull the trigger because I’m pretty sure they didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” he said.
It was one incident among many faced every day by troops in Afghanistan’s violent south as they fight Taliban-led insurgents, incidents which make progress slow even though leaders in Washington and Europe are looking for signs of success.
NATO leaders will gather this week in Lisbon, far from the tiny village of Nabuk, with reconciliation and security transition in Afghanistan at the top of their agenda.
With U.S. President Barack Obama also to review his Afghanistan war strategy next month, U.S. and NATO commanders have been talking up their successes lately, saying they have slowed the Taliban’s momentum in key areas like Helmand province.
But, as Brennan can attest, it has been a hard fight.
Congo on the wire
Finbarr O’Reilly talks to the CBC about his coverage of the Democratic Republic of Congo and his photographic exhibition “Congo on the Wire” that was displayed as part of the Contact Photography Festival in Toronto.
Hardship deepens for South Africa’s Poor Whites
Children walk through a squatter camp for poor white South Africans at Coronation Park in Krugersdorp, March 6, 2010. REUTERS/Finbarr O’Reilly
Sitting in a deck chair at a white South African squatter camp, Ann le Roux, 60, holds a yellowing photo from her daughter’s wedding day.
Taken not long after Nelson Mandela became the country’s first black president in 1994, it shows Le Roux standing with her Afrikaans husband and their daughter outside their home in Melville, an upmarket Johannesburg neighborhood.
Sixteen years later, she lives in a caravan and a tent shared with seven other people, including her daughter and four grandchildren, at a squatter camp for poor white South Africans.
She is one of a growing number of whites living below the poverty line in South Africa who blame affirmative action and the ANC-led elected government for their plight.
Le Roux had to sell her house after her husband died and she lost her job as a secretary at the city planning council — where she had worked for 26 years — after she took time off work to recover from the loss of her husband.
“They wouldn’t take me back because of the political situation,” she says, looking down at the fading photo.
South Africa’s child-rape epidemic
“Don’t ask me to smile, I don’t know how to smile,” says Fumana Ntontlo, as she poses for a portrait, hands folded in her lap, on the bed of her one-room shack in South Africa’s Khayelitsha township.
The walls and roof of her tiny home are made from corrugated metal, insulated on the inside with splintered and stained plywood, from which hangs a faded blue fabric pouch holding several pairs of well-worn shoes. Some yellowed and curling magazine pictures are taped at eye-level and a lace curtain flutters in the breeze of a small window protected by metal burglar bars. A bare bulb hangs from the ceiling by a wire.
Ntontlo is a “survivor” – the word used by health workers to describe victims of sexual violence.
She was eight years old and playing hide-and-seek at a cousin’s house when another distant relative, who was about 15 at the time, convinced her to hide behind the couch with him. He then lay on top of her, pressing down hard on her small frame. He lifted her skirt and entered her, says Ntontlo.
“I was crying, but he slapped me and threatened to beat me more.”
Now 30 years old, Ntontlo was too embarrassed and confused at the time of the incident to tell anyone.
Congo On the Wire exhibition, Bayeux, France
When I first started reporting from Africa eight years ago, it was almost impossible to generate any interest in the Western media for a story about Congo. This was immediately following the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the world was still reeling in the aftermath.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have since dominated our news coverage and resources during the first decade of the millennium.
Even as Democratic Republic of Congo’s war-related death toll rose above a staggering five million, making it the most lethal conflict since World War Two, the war in Central Africa remained largely unnoticed and under-reported.
But lately there has been a slight shift. In October 2008, a fresh upsurge of violence drove some 250,000 people from villages in the country’s eastern Kivu provinces, bringing to more than one million the number of internally displaced Congolese.
Congo’s war victims usually perish far from sight, deep in the bush, the latest ghosts in that country’s turbulent history. But last October, the war was accessible. Foreign journalists descended en masse into Goma, a town bordering Rwanda, and booked into hotels with picturesque views of smouldering volcanoes overlooking Lake Kivu.
The media could enjoy coffee and croissants for breakfast, drive up to the front line fighting or the squalid camps home to hundreds of thousands of displaced Congolese, then return to file stories and pictures in time for dinner and a night at the bar.
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