Day: July 1, 2021

Burkina Faso’s President Roch Kabore has dismissed the country’s defense minister in the wake of widespread protests Saturday against insecurity.

Cherif Sy had been defense minister since the country’s conflict with domestic terror groups started in 2015. His replacement is the president himself, along with a minister delegate, Colonel Major Aimé Simpore, who has been appointed to assist.

At the beginning of June, Burkina Faso saw its worst terrorist attack on civilians since the conflict with armed groups linked to al-Qaida and Islamic State started. At least 138 people were killed in the village of Solhan.

The attack triggered a wave of protests against insecurity that swept the country last weekend. Sy’s departure was one of the protesters’ major demands.

Sy was sacked Wednesday, as was Security Minister Ousséni Compaoré, who was replaced with Maxim Kone, a foreign affairs deputy.

Will changes bring calm?

So what does this reshuffle in leadership mean for the country?Burkinabe analyst and activist Siaka Coulibally said public opinion was mixed, and even if some accepted the ministers’ departures as a concession, it’s dubious as to whether it’s enough to reverse the negative effect of terrorism across the country. Whether the reshuffle will be enough to calm the anger depends on whether there are new attacks, he said.

The fighting in Burkina Faso is at its most intense in the east of the country and in the northern province of Sahel. Izidag Tazoudine, a local official from the tri-border region of Sahel province, where Burkina Faso’s border meets with Mali and Niger, said he was hopeful that things would change after the reshuffle.

Since Sy has been in office, Tazoudine said, there have been attacks and discontent, such as that in the northern communities of Solhan, Markoye and Barsalogho, where insurgents ambushed and killed 11 police officers in late June. That’s why people wanted the president to change the ministers of defense and security. Tazoudine said that because those moves have been made, it’s believed that things will change now.

Smockey, a local hip hop artist and co-founder of Citizen’s Broom, a civil society group that played a central role in ousting the country’s former dictator in 2014 as well as in organizing last weekend’s protests, said the recent actions weren’t enough for virtuous governance. It is necessary, he said, to tackle problems at all levels of the state and not only these two key ministerial posts.

No risk of coup seen

Philippe M. Frowd, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa and an expert on security in the Sahel, was asked whether he thought the protests could escalate into a coup, as happened in neighboring Mali recently.

“I don’t sense a strong similarity with Mali in the sense of fragmentation within the armed forces or very strong inter-elite tensions that would typically be what goes into the recipe for a coup,” he said. “So I don’t think Burkina Faso is immediately in that risk zone.”

Meanwhile, opposition leader Eddie Kombiego said the reshuffle would not be enough to return security to the country. The opposition is determined to push ahead with further protests this weekend.

Source: Voice of America

U.N. aid agencies warn of a looming humanitarian catastrophe in northern Ethiopia’s battle-scarred Tigray region if they are prevented from delivering life-saving assistance to this stricken area.

The Ethiopian government’s tenuous unilateral ceasefire in Tigray after eight months of conflict has not got off to a good start. The U.N. refugee agency reports the electrical power and phone networks in its offices in the capital Mekelle are not functioning, hampering its ability to deliver humanitarian aid.

The U.N. children’s fund has condemned the pillaging of its video equipment Monday by members of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces, warning 140,000 acutely malnourished children were at risk of dying without urgent nutritional treatment.

The World Food Program is demanding full access to Tigray to deliver life-saving food assistance to millions of hungry people. Among them, it says, are half a million children, women and men who face starvation over the coming months.

The World Health Organization reports the region’s health system has collapsed. WHO spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic, says WHO can do little to help the beleaguered population because access to the area is extremely limited.

“We are obviously concerned about potential for cholera, measles, and malaria outbreaks in the region. In addition, Tigray region is also located on the meningitis belt and is at risk of yellow fever outbreaks… People are also at risk of death from lack of access to health services to treat any other diseases that may happen,” he said.

Despite the cease-fire, fighting continues in Tigray. Jasarevic says WHO is taking measures to strengthen the security and wellbeing of its staff. He says efforts to provide essential health care is ongoing where it is possible to do so. However, he adds, what WHO staff can do does not approach the enormity of the needs.

“Now, with hospitals that are barely functioning, people being displaced, and the looming famine, the risk of communicable and vaccine-preventable diseases spreading due to the lack of food, clean water, safe shelter and access to health care is very real. All these factors combined are literally a recipe for larger epidemics,” he said.

WHO reports an estimated 3.5 million people are at risk of cholera. It says six million people are vulnerable to malaria, especially malnourished children. It says they are at particular risk of dying from this deadly vector-borne disease.

An oral cholera vaccine campaign targeting two million people, which began on June 12 was only able to reach 50% of the targeted population. WHO reports this was due to the conflict and difficulty in reaching the region’s widely spread population by road.

The agency reports attacks on health care, the looting and destruction of cold chain — the system used for storing vaccines correctly — and the general dangers posed by the warring parties has had a harmful impact on this life-saving operation.

Source: Voice of America

The Nigerian government’s efforts to reintegrate former Boko Haram militants has seen hundreds of fighters go through rehabilitation. But it also gets pushback from the conflict’s victims, who want the militants to be held accountable. At a conference in the capital, women from the conflict-affected areas are getting support to head up reconciliation between the former terrorists and their communities.

Some 45 women from Nigeria’s northeastern states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe file in for a two-day conference in Abuja.

They’re here to discuss a sensitive subject – the reconciliation and reintegration of ex-Boko Haram fighters into their communities.

The conference is a joint initiative by the non-profit Center for Humanitarian Dialogue in Switzerland, U.N. Women and the International Organization for Migration (IOM). It’s designed to promote women-led community peacekeeping in the northeast, said Millicent Lewis-Ojumu, director at Center for Humanitarian Dialogue.

“We know and from experience have seen that when the women are involved in the conversations, peace building, in helping to resolve issues relating to how to reintegrate and rehabilitate former combatants or person’s associated with Boko Haram, that they are very effective,” said Lewis-Ojumu.

Since launching the safe exit program, “Operation Safe Corridor” for repentant fighters in 2016, authorities say the program has met with resistance from host communities.

The scheme was launched as part of a growing awareness for the use of amnesty to persuade terrorists to lay down their guns. Nearly 1,000 ex-fighters have been rehabilitated under the government’s program.

But very few are successfully living in communities. Most of them eventually rejoin Boko Haram due to rejection.

Hamzatu Alamin is one of the participants at the conference. She started talking about reconciliation 10 years ago when her community was hit hard and young men were coerced into joining Boko Haram.

But she said her efforts attracted some unwanted attention.

“You can be arrested by state actors and accused of being an accomplice. And secondly, the boys (Boko Haram), if you make a mistake, you can be their target,” she said.

Women like Alamin here said they hope to improve their community’s acceptance of former jihadists after the conference.

But attending the conference along with other women also lifts the burden of being negatively labeled with terrorists.

“I have been communicating with them. I am now able to say it freely because I know that even the government is communicating with them. The government and security forces are using many of the boys I communicate with as outlets to get the people they’re rehabilitating,” she said.

Maria Quintero, program manager at IOM Nigeria, said women also need socioeconomic stability if the program is to succeed.

“The Nigerian women are very strong. What we have found as well is that they’re very influential in the decision of the males. Women have a role to play especially when it comes to males coming back to the communities,” said Quintero.

More than 35,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009. Boko Haram, which opposes Western education, has frequently targeted schools.

Source: Voice of America